Voices from the New Zealand Wars | He Reo no nga Pakanga o Aotearoa

Description

Welcome to our story, this history. Wherever in the world the bones of your ancestors lie, wherever their ashes may have been dispersed, here you will find traces of them, and of yourself....It is, of course, a story of colonisation and resistance and a history that has never stopped repeating. Arama Rata The New Zealand Wars of the mid-nineteenth century profoundly shaped the course and direction of our nation's history. This book takes us to the heart of these conflicts with a series of first-hand accounts from Maori and Pakeha who either fought in or witnessed the wars that ravaged New Zealand between 1845 and 1872. From Heni Te Kiri Karamu's narrative of her remarkable exploits as a wahine toa, through to accounts from the field by British soldiers and powerful reports by observers on both sides, we learn about the wars at a human level. The often fragmentary, sometimes hastily written accounts that make up Voices from the New Zealand Wars vividly evoke the extreme emotions fear, horror, pity and courage experienced during the most turbulent time in our country's history. Each account is expertly introduced and contextualised, so that the historical record speaks to us vividly through many voices. Winner of the General Non-Fiction Award at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Vincent O'Malley is the author of a number of acclaimed books on New Zealand history including bestselling works 'The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000' (BWB, 2016) and 'The New Zealand Wars/Nga Pakanga o Aotearoa (BWB, 2019). With Professor Joanna Kidman, he leads the Marsden Fund project 'He Taonga te Wareware? Remembering and Forgetting Difficult Histories in Aotearoa/New Zealand', a three-year study into how the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars have helped shape memory, identity and history. He is a founding partner of History Works, a group of historians specialising in Treaty of Waitangi research.