1860s: Did ANZACs Fight The Waikato War?
April 26, 2022
By AHNZ
Scott Hamilton could probably run circles around anyone when it comes to Waikato War knowledge. It’s all he seems to ever write about and here we go again.
In this article he hangs his theme on the idea that there was an Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) in the 1860s. This is anachronistic and ridiculous, reducing the concept of ANZAC to anything an Australian and a New Zealander do together.
“the origins of the Anzac tradition in the Waikato War are almost never acknowledged by either our defence forces or our Returned Services Association. This reticence is part of a larger silence…the men commemorated by that monument were the first Anzacs…One Anzac knelt,…along the road to Drury, the Anzacs had lost nine men.” – The first, forgotten Anzacs, more than 50 years before Gallipoli, Hamilton, The Spinoff (April 2022)
The man has truly lost the plot! Thinks there’s some guilty unacknowledged silent reticence repression going on here. The fact of the matter is that the ANZAC is a phenomena of World War One. It has its own historical moment and generation and context even though, it’s true, it’s big enough that we adorn it to remember other conflicts too. We even re-purpose Great War monuments by tagging on bits like ‘And WW2 as well’ and ‘And the same goes for Korea too..’
It’s not just that the word ANZAC wasn’t invented or that the concept didn’t exist in the 1860s it’s that it simply doesn’t apply. There was no Edwardian sensibility or technology or energy two or three generations prior to the Edwardian era. Hamilton is totally reductionalist in thinking ANZAC simply means that people A and people NZ are collaborating in something that involves camping and guns.
It’s like saying that some Ancient Babylonian who ate chicken for dinner once upon a time is an unacknowledged and forgotten part of the history of Kentucky Fried Chicken!
Talk about your historical bracket creep.
There is no evidence colonial troops had fired on women and children at Rangiaowhia at all. Why do people keep saying it happened? Historian Jock Philips has had to back-peddle his claim to: ‘aggrieved Maori “certainly believe so.”‘ Yet he’s still calling one old man allegedly being shot “appalling genocide.” – 1864: Rangiaohia
It’s fitting that The Spinoff picked images of Rangiaohia to illustrate Hamilton’s article. Over the weekend I followed the history trail there where revisionist historians have hammered a new narrative into the ground based on hearsay. There is even a monument to “atrocities suffered” that have been plucked out of pure imagination. Perhaps if Hamilton plays his cards right he will be able to successfully insist that ANZAC monuments are placed around the old Colonial battlesites? Perhaps a giant ANZAC biscuit similar to the Springfield doughnut with a WW1 Lemon Squeezer hat on top should be placed in the field above. I know that wouldn’t make sense. But so long as sense is out the window why not go all the way?
—
Image ref. Fight at Rangiaohia (aka Rangiaowhia;) Colourised a bit by AHNZ 2019; Alexander Turnbull Library; NZ History.gov
Image ref. 2014 Rangiaohia monument to atrocities dreamed up by some revisionist historians; AHNZ Archives (2022)
Like Comment Share
