Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T01:06:10.332Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

One - When Worlds Collide: Māori and Immigration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Jessica Terruhn
Affiliation:
University of Waikato, New Zealand
Shemana Cassim
Affiliation:
Massey University, Auckland
Get access

Summary

Introduction

On 5 June 1863, amid spiralling conflict between Māori and settlers in Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island), Arthur Samuel Atkinson, White supremacist and immigrant to Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa) from County Durham in England, wrote in his journal that ‘I find one lies in wait to shoot Maoris without any approach to an angry feeling – it is a sort of scientific duty’ (Atkinson 1863, 49). Five years later, in November 1868, John Bryce, White supremacist, politician and immigrant from Glasgow, Scotland, led a patrol of volunteer settler cavalry on the Nukumaru flats in south Taranaki. Bryce and his troops chanced upon a group of unarmed Māori children who were chasing pigs and geese near William Handley's woolshed. The soldiers charged at the children killing two young boys and wounding others (Riseborough [1993] 2022). Bryce was henceforth known to local Māori as Bryce Kōhuru or Bryce the murderer, a reputation that can only have been strengthened after he led the invasion of the pacifist settlement at Parihaka (Ray 2018; Riseborough [1993] 2022).

This wave of White-supremacist vitriol and violence carried to Aotearoa by European migrants was not limited to the nineteenth century, nor were Māori the only victims of it. On 24 September 1905, John Terry, White supremacist and recent immigrant from Kent, England, shot and killed an elderly Chinese man, Joe Kum Yung, on Haining Street in Wellington. Terry, who was fervently racist to the point of obsession, committed the murder in hope of raising the profile of his book of White-supremacist verse The Shadow (Ray 2019; Tod 1996). Some years later, on 3 January 1921, White supremacist and immigrant from Limavady, Northern Ireland, then-Prime Minister William F. Massey penned a New Year's message to the people of Aotearoa. In it, Massey wrote that ‘Nature intended New Zealand to be a white man's country, and it must be kept as such. The strain of Polynesian will be no detriment’ (Massey 1921, 5). Massey also spoke openly of his aversion to Chinese people, telling the House: ‘I am not a lover or admirer of the Chinese race … I should be one of the very first to insist on very drastic legislation to prevent them coming here in any numbers’ (Massey 1910, 402).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×