2019: “Difficult Histories: The New Zealand Wars”
May 13, 2019
By AHNZ
“Difficult Histories” is a new website and Facebook page est (c.Feb 2019.) It has been created by mainstream academics on a mission to think about how others think about¹ ‘The New Zealand Wars’.
“Our Marsden Fund project traces shifting historical perspectives of the New Zealand Wars, a series of devastating nineteenth-century clashes involving Māori and the Crown. It investigates how different groups have commemorated these conflicts over time..” – About page
Vincent O’Malley and his team were granted $859,000 about 10 months (Sep 2018) ago by The State to pursue this purpose. So far these very well resourced historians have used their platform to lobby for more Government spending toward forced education about ‘The New Zealand Wars’. Check O‘Malley’s interviews on RadioNZ and TVNZ.
Unless they’re paying the Marsden Fund money back, I thought they were supposed to be exploring the historiographic territories of different groups? That is, investigate how different groups understand and accept the ‘New Zealand Was’ history. As such, we could expect them to give an equal hearing to those of us who still refer to ‘The Maori Wars’ rather than the 1990s Belich revisionist ‘New Zealand Wars’.
The inherent bias in calling the investigation team ‘New Zealand Wars‘ and how the team have comported themselves in their first year of existence gives cause for concern. For one thing, a key member of the team, O’Malley, has just released his new book The New Zealand Wars Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa (May 2019.) How can O’Malley be an unbiased researcher with such a conflict of interest? He is New Zealand’s leading exponent of one revisionist narrative but has been put in charge of impartially gathering and presenting the diversity of understandings? Perhaps he should step down.
Mr O’Malley ought to be the object of this research, not the one conducting it. His views ought to get equal air time to other different contemporary groups such as One New Zealand and Hobson’s Pledge. If not, isn’t this c.million dollar grant simply going toward a particular political agenda and lobbying for the compulsory education thereof?
Well, let’s see what their second year will bring. Perhaps they’re just interviewing themselves first and bringing in the diversity aspect later. Hey! Maybe they’ll include the Anarchist History of New Zealand in their study. That’s pretty diverse.
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1 I told you. They’re accademics
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