In her classic New Zealand novel The Captive Wife, Fiona Kidman’s character Jacky experiences an Apocalypse within an Apocalypse – that is, a Revelation against a Revelation. Against the backdrop of colonial expansion by British imperial interests, Jacky is placed – first by circumstance, then by desire – “in a liminal space with a Māori chief”, momentarily being forced to consider the rapid advance of settler-colonialism from the point of view of the colonised Indigenous population. Concluding her tale, she simply states: “I am forever changed by it,” a brief summary of what was, to her, a Revelation of change defining an Apocalyptic experience against the backdrop of a larger colonial process of transformation.[1]
It is impossible to document the literary and environmental history of Aotearoa without acknowledging the Apocalyptic forces that have shaped the archipelago. Against the usual assertion that “Apocalypses imply that humans have no control over what will happen,” the changes wrought by colonialism were imposed by people upon others, and, by extension, their environments.[2] The country’s environment, in particular, serves as a reminder of the intensity of the programme of “systematic colonisation” employed by the British Crown in its mission to exploit the natural resources under their occupation. One example is that of Wellington, first colonised by the imperialist New Zealand Company in 1839. The region consists of a series of valleys and hills, once mostly covered in forest, swamps, and temperate grassland. With the arrival of European colonists, these environments would be appropriated and irreversibly altered, pushing Māori to the wayside as their land was acquired and exploited. As historians Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla described, “Māori had the land that Pakeha wanted, not just for the economic aspects of settlement, but also as a means to realise Crown sovereignty and to gain effective control.”[3]
Over the two decades following Wellington’s initial colonisation, these aspects would prove to be Apocalyptically impactful; however, whereas colonial men impacted their environments in deliberate destruction of landforms, flora, and fauna, colonial women were forced to engage critically in different roles. Likewise, Māori women were pushed by these forces into roles of environmental protection and land tenure management, impacting their society, culture, and their own conceptions of what a woman could achieve. These two groups are split by classical ideas of Apocalypse; Dutch journalist Beracha Meijer has described, for example, “the male gaze that is inherent in the dualism of Revelation, in which women are identified as either ‘the good woman’ or ‘the whore’” depending on their level of resistance to the invariably masculinised forces changing their world.[4]
This piece explores both aspects through a careful analysis of the primary literary genre produced in the colony at the time: letter-writing. European women’s views on Wellington’s ecological Apocalypse are captured through the letters of Charlotte Godley, a “colonial mistress” exemplary of settler-colonial domestic experiences; Māori experiences, meanwhile, are captured through the extensive network of letters and testimonies produced in direct resistance to the destruction of their land, forms within which the mana of wāhine Māori tended to flourish in appearance. This analysis leads to the conclusion that “these lives departed demonstrably from the ideals of womanhood” of the Victorian era of British hegemony, and that the immense impact of ecological collapse and environmental destruction led these women into a true Revelation that the colony’s landscapes and landforms, as well as their own societies, were being changed irrevocably.[5]
Observation and Exoticism: Charlotte Godley and the Revelation of Change
Settler women formed a crucial part of the European literary corpus in Aotearoa throughout this early period of colonisation. Though heavily disenfranchised, colonist women became powerful instruments by which domestic landscapes could be shaped throughout this period. These experiences also allowed them to observe settler environments, and document their destruction; moreover, they could accurately capture colonial attitudes toward this intensive regime of change through their writings.
Charlotte Godley, a Welsh settler and traveller, was among the most prominent of colonial letter-writers during this period, though her writings would only gain attention following her death five decades later. Godley arrived in Wellington in the winter of 1850, a time wherein settlers were continuing initiatives to convert the land into European-styled cultivations, homesteads, and stations.[6] Within this framework, European women were generally tasked with establishing familial gardens near their homesteads; described by Charlotte Macdonald and Frances Porter, Godley’s mission, as defined by this patriarchally-enforced occupation, was to create “havens of serenity and retreat” in recontextualising colonial landscapes and households.[7] This granted Godley a unique perspective: she was able to directly observe the changes wrought on her local environment as settlement progressed, creating vignettes of ecological Apocalypse through her letters to her family in Wales.
Apocalypse, in Wellington Province settler society, did not present women as an instrument of “compensation, critique, and change” of environments on a major scale. Due in part to patriarchal conceptions of gender, and, perhaps underlying this, the association of women with environmental growth and maintenance, settlers’ wives were excluded from enacting this change, reducing them to observers of this utopian Apocalypse.[8] As Porter and Macdonald have described, Charlotte Godley “provided a dummy in the shape of a woman … of a standard befitting the company of a lady,” defining her time in the colony with domestic activities in the interests of her husband’s “civilising mission”.[9] Godley consistently reinforces, throughout her letters, this sense of inconsequentiality within her interactions with her immediate environment. Exemplifying this learned passivity, Godley refers to certain events as inevitable: “I must own that I look forward with some fear and trembling to these civilities,” she recounts, regarding a dinner service mandated by her husband; expressing an underlying boredom at her situation, she recalls collecting as many newspapers as possible, “more than I can read in a week, which is delightful … I have nothing from home.”[10] Godley would even express a desire to rebel against her reduction to domesticity, in one letter reciting a poem: “I hope I may never be tempted to roam / From England, dear England, my own native home.”[11] Colonial life represented, for Godley, a remnant of domestic European society, wherein “injustice was a proper topic of conversation, [yet] it was never challenged … a web of ideas and practices that assumed the absolute primacy of men in all things,” as Beryl Fletcher states in her feminist critique of New Zealand colonialism.[12] Even an Apocalypse would not, in her conception, change Godley’s quotidian life by a great amount; women had become regarded as passive objects against the patriarchal advances of larger-scale environmental modification.
Godley, first and foremost, was an observer of environments and their destruction under the Crown’s rigidly patriarchal colonial regime. Resource gathering by settlers in the province was exploitative and generally indiscriminate. On the 9thof July, Godley wrote that her husband had been sent “up the coast to the north, for the destruction of teal, ducks, and pukakos [sic] innumerable,” an outright statement of colonial intentions to clear the indigenous environment entirely.[13]The following week, Godley would write another account of settler land clearance, passively commenting that “the valley with all its new clearing and half-burnt stumps left in the ground requires sun in the winter to make it look happy.” Later, she would remark again on the visual appearance of the clearing projects:
Their clearings have been very artistically done, and a good deal of bush left, in patches, so that it does not look so bare as most places about, and their grand pride is a lawn … which is to be real English grass, and which is already nearly free from stumps; at present the great disfigurement of the Hutt, for the bush, there, has been all cleared with fire, so that when trees are cut down … a black and very unsightly root is left.[14]
Here, Godley recognises the apocalyptic magnitude of the environmental change that predominantly male colonists were causing to the natural ecosystems of the province. Nonetheless, the “unsightly” nature of this destruction is understood within a context of colonial discourse, a necessary contribution to “androcentric conceptions” of “a promise of justice and liberation,” as Beracha Meijer states, offered by engaging with the settler-colonial establishment.[15] While observing the potential horrors of this Apocalypse, Godley appears as a self-described “ordinary mortal,” powerless to resist these patriarchal forces against nature; to offer resistance would imply opposition to the new colonial order imposed on the land, regardless of one’s opinions.[16]
Nonetheless, Godley regarded herself, within the confines of this oppressive colonial idea of womanhood, a potential instrument of change within her immediately local environment. Godley engaged extensively in colonial cottage gardening, even in her temporary accommodation in Wellington; she specifically requested, for example, European seeds to plant in order to modify this environment for the sake of familiarity, a minor contribution to the colonial Apocalypse. Godley explained:
It is very good of Aunt Charlotte to think of us and our seeds; those she has sent will be most valuable … It is, I suppose, rather characteristic, in an English colony, that the gardens here are full of English plants and trees. We have in this garden (e.g.) quantities of fuchsias, roses (which don’t seem to do very well) … very few native things … [this] will be invaluable in making the house … look a little green and verdant.[17]
Godley describes a small section of colonial life wherein she can contribute to the patriarchal, utopian Apocalypse being imposed on the environment by her male counterparts, a “literary depiction of ‘life in the bedroom’” in which she “suggested a … journey to somewhere else” through minor contributions to ecological change, a theme prevalent in early New Zealand women’s literature.[18] In furnishing the cottage with ornamental plants, Godley’s supposed beautification of her new environment contributes to the colonial establishment through transforming it, much as clearing spaces for construction would. Her desires to establish a European-styled status quo in tandem with men’s efforts to transfigure the province are further reinforced in her expressions of appreciation for “a ‘good park’” and her “antipathy to the black slugs with which the garden swarms,” an enmity toward native environments that would socially contribute to the colonial Apocalypse of environmental transformation if nothing else.[19] Familiarising the landscape of her domestic environment, Godley became an instrument of the patriarchal settler establishment in playing a decidedly feminine role within “the confines of domesticity.”[20]
Further observing this apocalyptic Revelation of colonial change, Godley re-contextualised her local environments by exoticising and othering native ecologies, seeking to modify normality to fit a European settler perspective of idealism. In her letters home, Godley expressed a strong desire to change the alien environment of the province to something more familiar, even outside of furnishing her cottage garden. She most commonly explained this through emphasising the foreignness of the plants she observed: pohutukawa, a common tree, is described as “very different … I am afraid it does not like cultivation and white people, for I do not see it in any of the gardens.” Conifers, likewise, are portrayed as alien and unfamiliar: “it is not of the sombre colour that our evergreens are at home.” The “unusual” environment is exoticised, both its changeable aspects – which will likely be destroyed or transformed by the incumbent Apocalypse – and its immutable aspects.[21] The inversion of the seasons relative to the Northern Hemisphere, for example, was a particularly confusing aspect of the colony to Godley: “How curious it will seem too, to have a very hot Christmas day, if we live to see it, and the windows ornamented with flowers something like lilac laburnums.” She summarised that, from her perspective, “so many things seem turned upside down … I often come to a standstill. Sun in the north!”[22] Rather than describing what, to the environment, must change, Godley here expresses her experience of a different type of Apocalypse; the climate itself “reveal[s] an alternative reality within this world,” a jarring experience of Revelation that, to her, was a barrier to the construction of a colonial utopia in the province.[23]
In operating within the domestic confines of a highly patriarchal and enforced order, Godley was forced toward the ideology of changing alien environments to suit settlers’ needs, regardless of how it would affect her. A strong desire to transform her local environment is, here, representative of her desire to become involved with the creation of the Apocalypse by colonial men; furthermore, this illustrates Godley’s need to be recognised as part of settler society and to invert the “injustice” that women have been confined to – that is, to become equal in bringing forth the utopian Revelation of settler-colonialism by the destruction of the environment. Nonetheless, the power structures at play define Godley’s existence within Wellington Province as observational and minor in scope. Godley’s letters, then, are vignettes of a patriarchal society wherein gender is used as a tool to divide the exploitation of a foreign environment, delegating aspects of an ecological Apocalypse between men and women for expansionist ends.
Inheritance and Embodiment: Wāhine Māori and the Apocalypse
Observations of this Revelation of change, from the perspective of wāhine Māori, were generally far removed from the notes taken by European settlers. Instead of embodying change as the notation of “unusual” ecologies and the familiarisation of that which was once alien, Māori women would be led to write of this apparent Revelation as one of oppression and destruction, represented through the taking of land and the imposition of exotic new laws and ideals. These documents would take more ephemeral forms, often being told second or third hand through court testimony or the letters and journals kept by Crown negotiators or missionaries. As Paterson and Wanhalla state, “the way in which land was purchased means that women’s voices at these meetings were less likely to be heard, or at least recorded. It is in the written correspondence that their views are made known.”[24] These forms, too, reveal a different type of Apocalypse than that experienced by European settlers.
By the time Charlotte Godley began to write letters from Wellington Province, a settler economy had become established in its outlying district of Wairarapa, though on a largely unofficial basis. Structures of subsistence landholding among Māori endured for decades afterward; these systems were employed by women of mana as a means of consolidating ownership among whanau and hapū. However, encroaching upon these structures were the forces of official European settler-colonialism, including the ever-present and increasing threat of land seizure and forced sale by Māori, alienating them from their environments. The sporadic European settlement of the district would quickly give way to forces of ecological collapse and imperial conquest, wherein Māori women were compelled to change themselves, their conceptions of gender, and their deep-rooted cultural ideas of power within patriarchy.
During this period, wāhine Māori were determined to continue systems that had endured before the ‘Revelation’ of colonialism, and would resist this apparent Apocalypse through a strict continuation of “everything that’s established and regarded as normal.” A member of the Ngāti Moe hapū of Palliser Bay described, in Land Court testimony, the movement of their hapū following an 1846 land lease at the coastal kainga of Te Kopi. In this description, the custody of the land between Hiripi Stream and Waipipi Hill was transferred to Te Peehi Tupepakihirangi to fulfil strategic political objectives and continue a line of familial ownership of that land, with a woman at the centre of this negotiation:
Wī Kingi [Tutepakihirangi] married Kate Ruia, the granddaughter of Hamahona; this is why Hamahona gave ownership to Tutepakihirangi, firstly because of Wī Kingi’s ability to control Te Peehi, and secondly to return the deed to Te Peehi. Wī Kingi also has an ancestral connection to this land.[25]
This particular type of land management became common in Wairarapa during this period, and indicative of a general change within seasonal migration practices among hapū along the Ruamahanga River.[26] Women had traditionally been a major part of land transfer agreements, but became increasingly important to them following wider efforts to preserve forest and river resources within Māori groups rather than selling or leasing. Kate Ruia’s specific involvement as a woman of mana indicates that the systems within Ngāti Moe were being subjected to the ‘Revelation of change’ heralded in earlier texts. At the centre of this change, a woman was entrusted with the continued existence of her ancestors’ forest land, despite this apparently inevitable and quickly impending Apocalypse. Furthering this change, a related testimony implies that timber harvesting and forest land use by Rangitāne during this period had become limited to family or small hapūgroups and based on smaller-scale landholdings, differing from the almost entirely communal use among larger groups that Rangitāne saw before the arrival of Europeans in the district.[27] Some change had certainly occurred, either as a response to or in conjunction with the Revelation of settler-colonialism. Patriarchal ideologies of ownership and inheritance were slowly changing due to women’s interactions with their environments, and desires to reclaim these ecologies by any cultural means necessary.
Soon after this transfer of land, Te Aitu-o-te-Rangi Jury, Ngati Moe wāhine of mana, was transferred land along the Ruamahanga at Waka-a-Paua, where Jury and her family would proceed to engage in traditional cultivation alongside timber harvesting.[28] In an 1868 testimony by Jury’s son Te Whatahoro, he describes:
[Te Aitu-o-te-Rangi] had a joint interest in the land as a Ngāti Muratu [sic] but it became wholly hers … my mother and I cult[ivated] at Ngā Taira after the gift. At Pakihiroa also – and at Ngaki-a-tōtara also – I lived there and my father’s fence was there – The timber was taken from the bush and some out of the bush that had been given to Te Waka. I also cult[ivated] at Ngara-a-anui.[29]
It is significant, moreover, that the land at Waka-a-Paua was transferred specifically to Te Aitu and not her husband, a European settler; this seems to have been a deliberate decision by Wī Kingi, who “disputed” the land transfer before granting it to her.[30] This may reflect a desire to keep land within the tribal group rather than transferring ownership of valuable forested land – and its resources – into European hands, though the land was eventually sold to the Crown in 1856.[31] In a sense, this would indicate that women were being centred as instruments for opposing European land tenure as an increasingly relevant force. Though not a blatant or explicit move toward nullifying this Apocalypse, these methods of land transfer reveal “‘whisperings’ and ‘Revelations’” that underlay more prudent anti-imperialist sentiments, protecting their timber, bush, and forest resources through inverting patriarchal systems of inheritance.[32] Here, the Apocalypse constructed a society wherein women began “achieving a greater degree of emancipation and self-determination beyond what was possible in the old world,” though not in the typical Eurocentric sense by which this notion is usually applied.[33]
Patriarchal systems such as inheritance, ownership, and economics continued to be inverted as the settler-colonial establishment became increasingly entrenched in Aotearoa. Women would continue to play a major role in navigating their hapū through the growing threat of land alienation, becoming the unofficial and undeclared defenders of their environments through rhetoric and defiance. In this, the oppression and destruction that so defined their Apocalypse could be re-stated “outside the patriarchal zone,” wherein their distance from the “influences” of the past and future would aid them in preserving their wilderness, either in memory or in form.[34]
By 1850, Land Purchase Commissioner Donald McLean was directed by the Crown to negotiate purchases throughout the Wairarapa and its environs. To the north, in the forest district of Te Taperenui-a-Whatonga, two areas of significance were stewarded by women. One, Queen Hine-i-paketia, was described by McLean as the “Principal person of the whole District.”[35] She also occupied a position far senior to her male consort Puhara, in spite of her gender.[36] Hine-i-paketia experienced the colonial Apocalypse as a leader rather than as an observer, much as her predecessors on the Palliser Bay coast had; in land sale negotiations, she was forced to the front and centre in opposing settlers’ encroachment on her territory. Nonetheless, Māori within Wairarapa were swiftly being affected by similarly apocalyptic forces of poverty, illness, and the indirect effects of European settlement; food was generally becoming scarce as ecosystems and environments collapsed in favour of colonial land clearance and doctrines of tenure. Under these apocalyptic forces of change, European land purchase authorities “would not solicit, but merely await, an offer from a tribal group,” an almost siege-like mentality contingent on settler-colonial environmental depletion.[37] While Hine-i-paketia “ha[d] great influence,” her outlook on environmental preservation would be greatly affected by these factors, and she would move to sell her landholdings.[38] Nonetheless, she would also express resistance in doing so. In her final letter to him, Hine-i-paketia sent McLean a demand for immense sums of compensation for the various blocks that she had surrendered. In articulating these high costs, Hine-i-paketia wrote one singular message of resistance: “Do not be annoyed by this statement.”[39] Through the period of change effected by this new Apocalypse, Hine-i-paketia was able to significantly subvert and resist the encroachment of imperialist patriarchy; though she would lose access to the whenua held by her ancestors, she remained relatively untouched, as a woman, by the passing waves that would amount to “a true change in power structures” throughout the region.[40]
Ani Matenga Te Patukaikino, a “principal chief,” also controlled land in the region. McLean wrote in his diary that she “spoke firmly … as they were now waste [lands], the birds and usual food that rendered the land valuable have disappeared and let us have Europeans to enrich our country and bring goods for all old and young.”[41] Ani’s speech served as a reminder to colonists that their destruction of the environment had manifested itself in creating what, to settlers, would have constituted useless land; moreover, Ani’s presence in negotiations would have effected the Revelation that the power structures of gender were being subverted through ecological change. Ani continued this pointed argument in a following letter: “I do not have anything to say to you … you should perhaps be quick,” she wrote soon afterwards, probably regarding the same land sale.[42] Another letter simply states that McLean “had departed from [his] original intentions” of preserving Māori-stewarded environments.[43] Another letter calls into focus the explicitly gendered component of her environmental resistance, threatening McLean’s perceived masculinity: “I find that all castrated dogs are good dogs”.[44] Ani’s resistance against the further advancement of the colonial establishment is exemplary of an attitude toward the Apocalypse that would come to promote the environment not merely as a resource, but as a place with connections to its people, as Māori had traditionally viewed it. Moreover, this collection of correspondences would indicate that resistance to this Apocalypse was “interpreted as a tool of empowerment,” in that Ani “does not seem to look towards Apocalypse as a goal” but as a method by which these power structures could be subverted and exploited, a “solution to … abuse of power”.[45] Ani, in essence, presented the imperial establishment with the statement that imperial forces, in a gendered context, had already led to environmental collapse, drawing clear connections between settler capitalism, patriarchy, and Apocalyptic ecological downturn.
In other documents, women occupied a similar niche in standing against the impending colonial Apocalypse. Contemporary court hearings and letters reveal a wealth of information regarding women as centring the environment, whether in person or in folk literature. Such an attitude indicates that forested land – and the gathering of food, such as birds and the natural productions of trees – remained an important part of life within Wairarapa Māori societies, and that women were often at the forefront of navigating these structures throughout the incoming period of change. A collective of Ngāti Kahungunu landholders at Ahiaruhe, constituting a mixed-gender group, stated the following in an 1853 missive to McLean:
The only place that will be given to you is Wairarapa, Te Ahiaruhe won’t be given to you. That is our own land. And this is our intention, that the gardens will not be given away, never, never, never at all. Don’t let someone come and be given your money for that, because that land belongs to many… moreover, it is a small part that we are retaining and, after all, we have descendants; it would not be right [for our descendants] to have to fly up into the foliage of a tree to live.[46]
This letter reflects the aims of Wairarapa landholders more explicitly; while the land surrounding the area, which the surveyor Charles Pelichet had assessed as “generally poor, barren, and very broken,” did not directly concern Māori living in Ahiaruhe, the prospect of European settlers purchasing the land “covered with fine timber” comprising their cultivations, gardens, and forests important for kai gathering was a major source of disquiet.[47] The authors of this letter also make it clear that forested land at Ahiaruhe is a concept that cannot be divorced from the ideas of ancestral ownership and the descent of hapū, which they give as another reason that the block cannot readily be sold.[48] Even the name Ahiaruhe – directly translated as “burning bracken” – recalls a more lush and vibrant time period prior to any Apocalypse in the past or present, a symbolic and significant name also serving as a form of subversive resistance through language. As an Apocalypse, colonialism had evidently changed some power structures within Ahiaruhe; “broken” land became connected inextricably to its residents and their descendants, and women were able to subvert some patriarchal structures for the sake of cultural survival. The group addressing McLean was not simply a group of high-ranking officials by means of being male; instead, women had fought to be included in the process of resistance, leading to a Revelation of change within their community and, by extension, the rohe. In opposing colonial advances, Māori women and their environments had become deeply linked.
Conclusion
The stories told in this piece illustrate the historic role of women as observers, chroniclers, and resistors. Charlotte Godley’s experiences display the imperative role of women under a highly patriarchal colonist society, wherein she documented the transformation and Apocalyptic reconfiguration of the land around her while occupying a domestic role in the context of repressive gendered ideals. Women like Ani Matenga Te Patukaikino and Hine-i-paketia, meanwhile, documented their experiences refusing to simply be labelled as victims of imperial expansion, wherein they took on different roles to adapt and thrive against a landscape of resource exploitation. All of these accounts display the complexity of the transfiguration of gender, ecologies, and societies undergone by peoples and communities within Wellington in the nineteenth century.
As Aotearoa’s climate continues to change, these Apocalyptic shifts will continue to proliferate within its societies. Observing and documenting environmental destruction, too, will continue, likely propelled by the same forces that encouraged women to do so throughout history. These Revelations will continue – and, undoubtedly, so will women’s adaptations to these shifting, transformative changes. We see this in Māori women’s efforts to reclaim their culture, in their moves beyond reductive outlooks on environmental loss, and in the continued resistance of mana whenua to the seizure and alienation of their land. If there is a post-Apocalypse in which this society can thrive, it will certainly be thanks to the efforts of women like these.
[1] Anna Leclercq, “Fiona Kidman, Writer: A Feminist Critique of New Zealand Society” (MA thesis, Massey University, 2012), 92; Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife (Auckland: Random House, 2005), 346.
[2] Beracha Meijer, “Women’s Apocalypses: Apocalypse, Utopia, and Feminist Dystopian Fiction” (BA thesis, Utrecht, 2018), 12-13.
[3] Lachy Patterson and Angela Wanhalla, He Reo Wahine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017), 3.
[4] Meijer, “Apocalypses,” 12.
[5] Frances Porter and Charlotte Macdonald, eds., ‘My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates’ (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1996), 5.
[6] John R. Godley, ed., Letters from Early New Zealand by Charlotte Godley, 1850-1853 (Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1951), 57.
[7] Peter Holland & Jim Williams, “Pioneer Settlers Recognizing and Responding to the Climatic Challenges of Southern New Zealand,” in Climate, Science, and Colonization, ed. James Beattie (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 81-82; Porter and Macdonald, ‘My Hand Will Write,‘ 5.
[8] Meijer, “Apocalypses,” 12-13.
[9] Porter and Macdonald, ‘My Hand Will Write,’ 5.
[10] Godley, Letters, 66, 75.
[11] Godley, Letters, 65.
[12] Beryl Fletcher, The House at Karamu (Melbourne: Spinifex, 2003), 155.
[13] Godley, Letters, 67.
[14] Godley, Letters, 67-70.
[15] Meijer, “Apocalypses,” 13.
[16] Godley, Letters, 81.
[17] Godley, Letters, 80.
[18] Leclercq, “Kidman,” 92.
[19] Godley, Letters, 75, 82.
[20] Leclercq, “Kidman,” 21.
[21] Godley, Letters, 58, 64.
[22] Godley, Letters, 64-65.
[23] Meijer, “Apocalypses,” 26.
[24] Patterson and Wanhalla, He Reo Wahine, 1-9.
[25] Māori Land Court Assessor’s Book, c. 1870-1915, MSY-4817, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand.
[26] “Miscellaneous Maori notebook,” unpublished notes, MS-0198, ATL.
[27] White, “Jury,” 13-14.
[28] White, “Jury,” 13.
[29] White, “Jury,” 13.
[30] White, “Jury,” 14.
[31] H. McCracken, Land Alienation in the Wairarapa District undertaken by the Crown and the Wellington Provincial Council 1854-c.1870s (Wellington: Crown Forest Rental Trust, 2001), 42.
[32] Meijer, “Apocalypses,” 22.
[33] Porter and Macdonald, ‘My Hand Will Write,’ 5.
[34] Leclercq, “Kidman,” 92.
[35] Donald McLean, diary entries dated December 14, 1850 to February 12, 1851, 25, MCLEAN-1008793, ATL.
[36] Angela Ballara, “Wāhine Rangatira: Māori Women of Rank and their Role in the Women’s Kotahitanga Movement of the 1890s,” New Zealand Journal of History 27, no. 2, 1993, 131.
[37] Patterson and Wanhalla, He Reo Wahine, 1-9.
[38] Donald McLean, diary entries dated December 14, 1850 to February 12, 1851, 25, MCLEAN-1008793, ATL.
[39] Hine-i-paketia and Te Hapuku to Donald McLean, June 4, 1851, MCLEAN-1031700, ATL.
[40] Meijer, “Apocalypses,” 30.
[41] Donald McLean, diary entries dated December 14, 1850 to February 12, 1851, 25, MCLEAN-1008793, ATL.
[42] Patterson and Wanhalla, He Reo Wahine, 7.
[43] McLean, 1851, 25.
[44] Ani Matenga to Donald McLean, April 21, 1851, MCLEAN-1030318, ATL.
[45] Meijer, “Apocalypses,” 31.
[46] Wairarapa Māori to Donald McLean, 19 September 1853, MS-Papers-0032-0677B, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand
[47] Charles H. Louis Pelichet to Donald McLean, 28 April 1852, MS-Papers-0032-0499, ATL.
[48] Pelichet to McLean, 28 April 1852.
