Hunting Fails
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I'm happy if Russell is to let people share their history fails and wins for as long as they like. The great thing about topics like this is that you the people democratically decide who long their life is by simply stopping posting to, or reading them.
If people also wish to alert others to worthy books or websites or indeed museums (of which we have hundreds, large and very, very small) that they think people should look out for in their travels then it might make for a nice little repository of shared wisdom.
I've not been to Puke Ariki's current exhibition on the the Taranaki Wars but that's as good a reason to get me down there to the 'Naki as any I've seen from a museum in a while.
And as far as museums extending their briefs and organising field trips I'm gutted i can't be there on the 23rd May for a jaunt around with their "in the footsteps of Titokowaru" excursion. Now that's a day out.
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And i really must finish Judith Binney's "Redemption Song, A life of Te Kooti"
Maurice Shadbolt's Season of the Jew was a worthwhile read on this, IMhO, albeit fictional. Have also found Judith Binney's Mihaia fascinating on Rua Kenena as an eerily pertinent backdrop to more modern happenings between 'The Crown' and Tuhoe.
More of this needs to be in our history lessons, as you say.
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I believe it was a Kiwi who introduced Cain Toads to the Sugar Plantations of Queensland.
So if Queensland is the Promised Land
would that make us Canaan enablers? -
Oh, there is a great Gilbert Mair book out for those interested, entitled "Gilbert Mair, Te Kooti's nemesis" by Ron Crosby.
And i really must finish Judith Binney's "Redemption Song, A life of Te Kooti", but it's quite heavy going. That seems to be the way with history book occasionally.
Judith Binney's 5-page version of Te Kooti's life is available on the DNZB site. But Redemption Songs seems to flow well if not rollick along if you know the places and names - the story connects with just about everywhere and everyone through a great band of country across the central North Island, a wonderful book, very much worth the effort.
To my mind the key is to bookmark the maps and use them frequently, to help follow the narrative and keep it grounded. Strange choice of title though - what's he got to do with Bob Marley? And the uninitiated wouldn't immediately think "ah, a historical novel about Te Kooti and so forth" when coming across Maurice Shadbolt's 'Season of the Jew'.
Mair as Te Kooti's nemesis? Only in that degraded modern American version of the word - Te Kooti always eluded Mair.
For historical fail - suggest Captain Reginald Biggs, commander of the militia and Resident Magistrate in Poverty Bay (constitutional niceties were rather blurred in July 1868), in deciding that Te Kooti's group of 300 men women and children had to be apprehended by force when they returned to the mainland from imprisonment/exile in the Chathams. This despite their having served more than twice their informal 12-month sentence (a manifestly unjust one in the case of Te Kooti at least who was never Hauhau), and despite Te Kooti's credible statement known to the officials that he wished them to be left alone to make their way in peace to settle in the interior.
So after the initial small-scale battles, Biggs, his family, and 60 others Maori and Pakeha were killed at Matawhero and nearby, and then hundreds more killed mostly Maori by Maori over three years and a quarter of the North Island. Truly epic fail, still echoing ...
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More of this needs to be in our history lessons, as you say.
...and our comics - Joe Wylie has already mentioned this (way back in November last year) - Jared Lane has his ongoing Kaiapoi Kid in his Progress Comics
Tim Bollinger rates him in a recent Werewolf Cartoons section.
Tim also rates Barry Linton's Pacific tales, as do I...
now if we can only get him to publish them...
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