"Fouling the nest" : the conflict between the 'church party' and settler society during the New Zealand Wars, 1860-1865

Abstract

In New Zealand in the 1860s, wars were fought between Maori and Pakeha over issues of land rights and sovereignty. The traditional historiography of the period has concentrated on this inter-cultural conflict and written its accounts out of what can be termed official sources and a predominantly secular viewpoint. Yet to do so is to ignore another conflict that was fought concurrently over issues of the extent of secularization, over notions of sovereignty and of Pakeha colonial identity. It is this conflict between what can be termed the 'Church party' and colonial Pakeha society that is the subject of this thesis.

It is argued that this conflict has been marginalized and almost completely ignored by later New Zealand historians because it is not only a conflict involving issues of religion which conflict with the secular historiographical focus of this period, but also because the primary sources for understanding the scope and extent of this conflict are the distinctly unofficial ones of the colonial newspaper and the colonial memoir journal.

This thesis is informed and underwritten by postcolonial and postmodern theory which stresses the need to recover and include those voices and narratives previously lost and discounted by the Modernist Grand Narrative. It is out of this theoretical analysis and approach that there has been the recovery of the marginalized narratives of the conflict between 'Church party' and settler which formed a bitterly contested, widespread and influential second-tier conflict to the prevailing Maori-Pakeha conflict of the 1860s.

This second-tier conflict is read as an expression of both competing Pakeha sub-cultures and as another version of the colonial Pakeha experience and situating of otherness that occurred within colonial Pakeha society. This conflict was led, promoted and most often fought within the pages of the colonial newspaper throughtout the whole of the colony on the years 1860-1865. It resulted in vehement expressions of anti-clericalism, in calls for the exclusion of clerics from influence in issues of politics and raised questions over notions of what being "British', 'civilized' and a 'colonist' were thought to entail.

It is out of this context that this thesis argues that the prevailing historiographical accounts of this 1860-1865 period have ignored a conflict that is to be found in the existence of competing narratives of 'Church Party' and settler as predominantly expressed in the colonial press that are crucial for understanding colonial Pakeha society at this time. This exclusion has reduced a complex period to the relative simplicities of an intercultural conflict to the detriment of the important 'second-tier' issues and debates of the nature and future of colonial Pakeha society and identity. It is these concerns that are the focus of this thesis which is a re-reading of the period located primarily in the unofficial sources and informed by postcolonial and mostmodern theory. The result is a new understanding of the conflicts that occurred within the colonial Pakeha society of the early 1860s and which have been excluded from the historiography of the period until now.