It is as if history is being erased. For all that we hear about recent record-breaking climate extremes, records that are equally extreme, and sometimes even more so, are ignored.

In January 1896 a savage blast “like a furnace” stretched across Australia from east to west and lasted for weeks. The death toll reached 437 people in the eastern states. Newspaper reports showed that in Bourke the heat approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days (1)(2)(3). The maximumun at or above 102 degrees F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight.

By Tuesday Jan 14, people were reported falling dead in the streets. Unable to sleep, people in Brewarrina walked the streets at night for hours, the thermometer recording 109F at midnight. Overnight, the temperature did not fall below 103°F. On Jan 18 in Wilcannia, five deaths were recorded in one day, the hospitals were overcrowded and reports said that “more deaths are hourly expected”. By January 24, in Bourke, many businesses had shut down (almost everything bar the hotels). Panic stricken Australians were fleeing to the hills in climate refugee trains.  As reported at the time, the government felt the situation was so serious that to save lives and ease the suffering of its citizens they added cheaper train services:

 “The Commissioner of Railways promised a deputation of members of Parliament to run a special train every Friday at holiday excursion rates for the next month to enable settlers resident in the Western part of the colony to reach the mountains to escape the great heat prevailing.”  (Source)

It got hotter and hotter and the crowded trains ran on more days of the week. The area of exodus was extended to allow not only refugees from western NSW to flee to the Blue Mountains but also people to escape via train from the Riverina to the Snowy Mountains. The stories are heartbreaking. “A child sent to the mountains to escape the city heat died at the moment the train arrived.” “Six infants have died at Goulburn since January 1 through the excessive heat.” Towns were losing their esteemed, lamenting the loss of the good reverend, or of their well known miners. Children were orphaned.

“A woman has been brought to the Bulli Hospital in a demented condition, suffering from sunstroke.  She was tramping the roads, with her husband, two days before, when she was prostrated by a sunstroke.  Her husband carried her through all the sweltering heat to Bulli, taking two days over the journey.” (Source).

The Victorian heatwave of 2009 was sold as the worst heat wave in southern Australia for 150 years.

In 1896 the heat was causing people to faint, become demented and was even blamed for driving people mad. “Several women fainted in the streets. A little girl, while walking along Surrey Hills, suddenly became demented through the heat.” In Bendigo “a young man named Edward Swift, hairdresser, was so overcome by the heat that he was unable to work, and in despair shot himself, in the breast. It is a hopeless case.” Longreach“police authorities at Longreach received information that a man who was insane was about fourteen miles out of the town.” “The bodies of people who die of sunstroke decompose very quickly”.  An axe wielding man in Bourke cut down three telegraph poles before he was “secured” by police. Presumably the real cause of the madness was something else, but the heat was the last straw. “Birregurra was stirred from its wanted sleepiness on Saturday evening last by the appearance in the streets of a mad man who caused no small consternation.”  It could be that nuttiness was equally common on other months, or other years. But at the time, people blamed the heat.

With this and people dropping dead in the streets from Perth through Adelaide to Sydney, the heat wave was described as being universal from west to east . It went north into Queensland and south through Victoria.…twice, by which time Australians considered themselves to be “Under Fire”.

Later in 1896, heat waves also occurred in India, Burma, Borneo, America. (It was bad in New York.  Listen here.) There was heat in England, Germany and Spain. 1896 was an example of extreme weather. [It was obviously the fault of the evil power stations, eh? Just 14 years earlier, Edison had built the first coal-fired electric generating station. If only people had understood just how dangerous it was.  – Jo]

Thermometers were non-standardized in 1896. Some of the extraordinary temperatures come from thermometers with descriptions like (“under passion tree vine.”)  There it got to 123 in Ultimo in Sydney on January 14. Though some thought the vine thermometer was actually more accurate “ namely, that what is known as the true shade is the shade afforded at the Observatory by one of the loveliest little summer-houses, almost buried in foliage, but with lattice-work all round, so that the breeze may play upon the thermometers, but where the sun’s rays can by no means be admitted.”.

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/11/extreme-heat-in-1896-panic-stricken-people-fled-the-outback-on-special-trains-as-hundreds-die/

The blatant lie "mainstream media" tried to tell us yesterday! Andrew Bolt exposes the truth about "11000 scientists" wanting action on climate, & also strips the last vestige of credibility from the fake news MSM. They're not journalists but lying partisan imposters #nzpol pic.twitter.com/RgMFlGHNmO

— The Redbaiter (@Redbaiternz) November 6, 2019

This story was originally published by the New Zealand Listener and is republished with permission.

A new book about Europeans kept as slaves by Māori between the 1790s and 1880s challenges the theme of “colonisation and exploitation that is central to postcolonial writing”.

They were nearly home, well within sight of land, when a southerly gale drove the barque Harriet, carrying Elizabeth Guard, her husband, Jacky, and two young children on to the Taranaki coast. Remarkably, everyone on board made it to shore. Their luck, however, was about to run out.

In 1834, the shipwrecked survivors of the Harriet were attacked by a group of Ngāti Ruanui and other Taranaki Māori. A number of crew members were killed, including Guard’s brother. Guard herself, her family and other crew members were taken captive. After two weeks, Jacky and several other men were released on the understanding they would return with a cask of gunpowder as ransom for the rest of the party.

READ MORE:
* Tuia 250: the return of the ‘death ship’
* What’s in a name? How ‘Pākehā’ became corrupted
* Pivotal piece of colonial history explored in moving and sensitive way

Four months later, the man-o’-war Alligator and the schooner Isabella launched a rescue expedition. Confronted by the sheer scale of British firepower, the tribe released eight sailors.

Several days later, Guard and her baby daughter were given up in exchange for the rangatira Oaoiti, who had been captured and brutally treated on board the Alligator.

The capture and eventual release of Guard and her children attracted huge attention. In lurid detail, the Sydney Herald described Guard as being stripped naked and dragged into a hut.

Her husband claimed she had been taken as a “slave wife”, even though other accounts suggest that, after the initial affray, she was treated well and protected by Oaoiti, who took Elizabeth as his wife or lover. Unfortunately, Guard’s version of events is absent, her story reliant on reports by others, including one suggesting she later gave birth to twins fathered by Oaoiti.

The rescue itself was criticised for its excessive use of force against Māori.

Related articles:
* Why we need to open up about past Māori and Pākehā conflict
* Inglorious Dastards: Rangiaowhia raid and the ‘great war for New Zealand’

Guard’s story featured in Tauranga historian Trevor Bentley’s 2004 book, Captured by Maori, a follow-on from his 1999 study of male captives, Pakeha Maori.

It is retold again in his new book, Pakeha Slaves, Maori Masters, the mostly forgotten story, he writes, of the Europeans who lived and sometimes died as slaves in tribal New Zealand between the 1790s and 1880s.

SUPPLIED/LISTENER/BAUER MEDIA

A shadow portrait of Elizabeth Guard, left, and a news cutting of Caroline Perrett, who was recognised after being kidnapped as a child.

“I’ve always had this fascination with people who had crossed cultures,” he says.

“One of my ancestors was a Portuguese sailor, a shipwreck survivor who washed up at my ancestral village in Samoa in the 1700s, so I have had this long-term interest in people who formed new identities and became part of these new cultures.”

In his new book, he walks readers through the short but little-known history of Pākehā taken prisoner or enslaved by Māori. In some cases, this was done as an act of revenge for serious breaches of Māori tikanga.

In 1874, eight-year-old Caroline Perrett was kidnapped by Māori in Taranaki after her father dug up Māori graves and a local Māori child had also been kidnapped by Europeans (Perrett was recognised some 50 years later while working alongside her adopted hapū).

Utu similarly motivated the attack on the London-bound Boyd by Ngāti Pou and Ngāti Uru in 1809. A leading rangatira, accused of stealing pewter spoons, had been flogged and robbed before being sent back naked to his people at Whangaroa. In the ensuing attack, 60 passengers and crew were killed and nine survivors enslaved.

But most Europeans taken captive by Māori were runaway seamen – a motley crew of stowaways, castaways, mutineers and escaped convicts from Australia – or shipwrecked mariners. Some of these would have been killed.

Others would have been put though the “terrifying rituals”, writes Bentley, of whakataurekareka/enslavement such as being stripped, beaten, forcibly tattooed or marched over long distances – rites of passage, says Bentley, in which captives passed from the status of herehere/prisoners to that of taurekareka/slaves.

DIFFERENT TREATMENT

From here, the treatment of those taken captive varied, often depending on their status and usefulness to their captors.

Some, particularly those considered of lowly status or who showed little respect for Māori rangatira or tohunga, were treated harshly, many living under the constant threat of death at the apparent whim of their masters.

Others gradually assimilated into their communities, their identity restored, even their personal names reinstated.

“If you could contribute in some way as an artisan, a fighting man, someone with agricultural knowledge or technical skills, you very quickly acquired status. So, if you had ambition and wanted to improve your conditions, it seems you had the opportunity to do so, but if you were a humble person, you were treated as a slave for life.”

SUPPLIED/LISTENER/BAUER MEDIA

Trevor Bentley.

The mistreatment of enslaved castaways diminished as rangatira realised they could be exchanged for muskets (this was the time of the Musket Wars), gunpowder, axes or hard cash.

When the American schooner Cossack was wrecked near Hokianga in 1823, local Māori provided Captain Dix and his crew with good food and housing before they were escorted through neighbouring rohe and sold to Anglican missionaries and ships’ captains.

Some captives were imprisoned only briefly. Others became bound to iwi through marriage, many gaining respect as interpreters, warriors, trade negotiators or even “Pākehā rangatira”, often enjoying a life far better than the harsh treatment on board ships.

Jack Marmon, who lived with a Te Hikutu hapū on the Kerikeri River between 1817 and 1820, described living quietly with his wives, fishing, hunting, boatbuilding “and when all things failed had my pipe to fall back upon”.

These captives fall into Bentley’s category of “chattel slaves” – they were the personal property of their captors, placed within a hierarchy similar to that used for Māori slaves or war captives.

(As Hazel Petrie wrote in her 2015 book Outcasts of the Gods?, the loose labelling of Māori war captives as “slaves” conflated two quite different institutions “and led to those captives being perceived in much the same way as African slaves in the Americas rather than as the prisoners in intertribal warfare that they almost always were”.)

Others, writes Bentley, were tributary vassals or demi-slaves – the missionaries, shore-based whalers, sealers, sawyers, flax traders and entrepreneurs who were welcomed into Māori communities and, as long as they obeyed Māori law and paid regular tribute, allowed to live on Māori land and use the resources, whether it be timber, whales, seals or people’s souls.

“They were given access to resources and protection and got on very well with Maori – as long as they contributed. If not, then they were plundered.”

THE CONTINUUM OF SLAVERY

So, were they slaves? Bentley agrees slavery/ taurekareka is a slippery term, “But the act of stripping somebody indicates you are enslaved. [For chattel slaves], your identity has been removed, your ship or whaling station has been plundered or your boat confiscated and you are going to be worked hard and, in the case of war captives, put through rituals of whakataurekareka, which could be quite brutal physically and psychologically.”

But whether they lived as chattel slaves within Māori communities or semi-independently as tributary vassals on tribal lands, he writes, is immaterial.

“In New Zealand before the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and in Maori-dominated regions thereafter, they were subject to the control of local rangatira. Dependent upon Maori for protection in return for service or tribute, they all had a place on the Māori continuum of slavery.”

Bishop Selwyn, for example, was one of about 14 missionaries “enslaved” when he was detained and imprisoned in 1861 by Māori in retribution for the killing of family members and the destruction of homes and crops by British and colonial troops.

“Some were stripped and [their possessions] plundered while mission stations were burnt but they don’t mention this in their journals or they skim over it very lightly.”

SUPPLIED/LISTENER/BAUER MEDIA

Bishop Selwyn was “enslaved” in 1861, according to Bentley.

The record is skewed in other ways.

For this book, Bentley researched published histories by hapū and iwi historians and writings by Māori scholars, but the most frequently referenced sources are the journals, letters and logs of ships’ captains, the captivity narratives by returned “slaves” and media accounts of the day.

Many of these veered towards the sensational. Tales of helpless white women in the hands of “savages” were in high demand in the 19th century as British and American readers seized on the often-salacious accounts of captivity and rescue.

Once newspapers got going in Australia and New Zealand, says Bentley, “they retold these stories over and over again”.

Ramping up the drama was useful. Exaggerated tales of torture served the purposes of British and colonial officials, their military forces and land-hungry settlers.

Church missions were often forced to rely on explicit accounts of so-called barbarity to ensure ongoing funding. For those who had been enslaved, especially those forcibly tattooed, recounting their experiences provided a livelihood otherwise denied them.

As Bentley says, it was difficult to live with tā moko in Victorian society. “They were considered white savages, who had slipped down the scale of civilisation.”

Bentley’s book does not hold back on the sort of details written to terrify or titillate a 19th-century reading public. In telling Guard’s story, he quotes extracts from the 1834 journal of Alligator crew member Lieutenant Clarke, including accounts of Māori licking the blood from her wounds and attempting “to made an incision in her neck with a piece of hoop iron in order to drink her blood”.

Many of the reprinted images seem to be aimed at whipping up horror; even the red sticker on the cover, warning of content “that may offend some readers”, can be read as an attempt to ratchet up the shock factor. Bentley says this was done in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings, “when everyone was obsessed with hate speech and offending each other”.

CRITICISM IS GOOD

The purpose of Bentley’s book, however, is not to entertain or to shock. Rather, he says, it is to provide a counter-narrative “that challenges the entrenched myth of Europeans as sole oppressors and exploiters in 19th-century New Zealand while reminding us that slavery is a human problem, not a race problem”.

In revealing the extent of white slavery in New Zealand, and exposing a period when Māori had power and Pākehā were powerless, Bentley sets out to cast light on a part of our history that does not fit into “the general theme of European conquest, colonisation and exploitation that is central to postcolonial writing”.

In doing so, he says, Pakeha Slaves, Maori Masters follows overseas publications such as White Slaves, African Masters, an anthology of Barbary captivity narratives edited by Paul Baepler, and Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters by American historian Robert Davis.

But Davis’ comments that “white slavery had been minimised or ignored because academics preferred to treat Europeans as evil colonialists rather than as victims” have proved controversial. In this book, the lack of macrons, unfortunate references to “Pakeha roastees” and “Maori gourmands”, even his mention of “Negroes” – in the context of the times, he hastens to explain – may well prove equally contentious.

So, might there be some fightback, particularly from Māori academics? Bentley, who is working on an anthology of 20 first-hand accounts by 16 men and four women captured by Māori, says there could well be – after all, he says, it took 14 attempts to find a publisher for this book.

“But I’m looking forward to that. Criticism is good. That is how we move forward.”

PAKEHA SLAVES, MAORI MASTERS: The Forgotten Story of New Zealand’s White Slaves, by Trevor Bentley (New Holland, $39.99)

A reader drew my attention to an interesting point of view about Ihumatao that she read on a Facebook page yesterday.

It had the headline: Two sides to every story.

I whakapapa to the Whenua at Ihumatao. I have whanau living in the papakainga, and whanau buried in the urupa. My grandfather’s photo and those of many more tupuna hang in Makarau Marae.

I do not support SOUL.

I support the kaumatua who have spent decades fighting for iwi rights to that land and those waterways and fighting to protect wahi tapu. Kaumatua who have done so tirelessly, not through garnering limelight in social & other media, but through the court and post treaty negotiations framework and through clear and measurable opposition to foreshore and seabed issues. Who when after being knocked back again and again by the legal system in this country in their opposition to urban development on the Wallace Block, have achieved an absolute watershed agreement where the legal owners of the land are returning 1/4 of that land to Maori, along with houses within the other 3/4 that will allow iwi to live on that land, to own homes at a value preferential to purchasing elsewhere on the Auckland market, whanau who have never had the opportunity to own homes before let alone the opportunity to live in the local papakainga where the home sites are available to the lucky few.

So please read that again people, LAND THAT WAS HISTORICALLY CONFISCATED FROM MANA WHENUA BY THE CROWN IN THE 1860s IS GOING TO BE RETURNED TO MANA WHENUA. And yes – a quarter is not ALL the land. But under the legal framework that like it or not has been agreed to, anyone who has ever been involved in any post treaty settlement will tell you, we are not going to get everything back.

There has to be a point at which we as a people stop perpetuating the victim mentalityand instead put our energies & focus into doing what we can with what is NOW in our power.

I do not support those that have been putting their energies into perpetuating Maori as continuing to be oppressed on that Whenua, who have presented a slick, emotive and captivating campaign, so alluring that people are blindly liking and sharing in their droves, changing their Facebook and Instagram profiles like moths to a flame, spurring people to seek petition support without seeking out all the information. A campaign so well woven visually and lyrically that it would have the untrained eye and ear think that houses are going to be built on w?hi tapu sites on land that is now council-owned, rather than the actual site on neighbouring farmland that is flanked by factories.

A campaign so misleading that it has left my babies, tamariki who whakapapa to that whenua, confused and questioning why their 13 and 15-year-old friends are changing their social media profiles like it’s some cool group to be a part of. A campaign so fashionable that it’s trending on Twitter, spoon-feeding people misinformation.

A campaign so click-baitable that various groups and political parties are using it as a soap-box to promote their own agendas. What have these people been doing in the last 150 years whilst the whenua has been farmland and the kaumatua have been neck-deep in struggle with the legal system and post treaty negotiations reality?

Then there are those motivated to go to the land to support the cause, to “stand”. But I challenge those people to truly question, what are they standing for? And yes, people have a right to freedom of speech and peaceful protest, but the problem is when a one-sided message goes out to the misinformed masses, there’s always a risk a renegade person or subgroup of supporters will push the boundaries of peace. To me that’s deliberately running the risk of innocent people getting hurt. And it puts at risk whanau who live in that papakainga that don’t subscribe to SOUL’s campaign.

And yes, those whanau do exist. And honestly, if I see another selfie of someone posing with a line of police behind them doing their jobs, well… talk about turning this into utter modern era self-promotion ridiculousness!

So contrary to what the majority of mass media to this point, widespread social media and the SOUL group would have people believe, this isn’t a generalised dispute open to the public. This isn’t something the Crown should get involved in. This is a dispute between two interested parties that have gone different ways about achieving ultimately the same thing. One who after turning over all other avenues has achieved legal return of confiscated lands in perpetuity, vs another who is pushing up against a legal brick wall… for what?

• To have the land purchased for all New Zealand?
• To be kept as farmland or to be turned into a tourism venture?
• To try to establish a dangerous precedent enabling access and forcing sale on other pieces of privately owned land within New Zealand?
• To derail the work and progress that has been put in place on treaty claims already settled and pending raupatu claims?

Seriously people, think about this very carefully. […]

• Ihumatao is not Bastion Point
• Ihumatao is not Standing Rock
• Ihumatao is not Mauna Kea
• Ihumatao is a whenua for transformation through compromise.

Yes, this will go down in history and I for one will be educating my children so they don’t carry myths into generations to come.