Wellington Pt II

Now comes the really difficult part for me, because this is where history suddenly becomes far more complex and layered. We are talking about He Tohu, the exhibition in the Wellington Library, or rather in the Gallery temporarily housed there, directly across from Parliament. So if you are not in the mood for history, women’s rights, colonization, and constitutional questions, this might be the point to stop reading. For me, though, this was exactly my thing: a day in the library and on the internet, one filled with research, one filled with history, one filled with exactly the kind of material I simply enjoy.

But let us start in the morning. After coffee and breakfast with Martin, my Austrian roommate, I headed out on my own while he was stuck on laundry duty. In hindsight, a laundromat would probably have been the smarter choice, because the dryer in our washer-dryer combo did its job more in theory than in practice. Air drying, then. Anyway. I rushed out early, because I wanted to actually do something that day, and found myself right at the Cable Car, which took me up one of Wellington’s countless hills for the bargain price of 6.50 dollars. A lovely ride, slightly overdone as an “attraction,” even though it really does not need to be.

At the top stood two scouts with their fundraising signs. Naturally I went over, having once been one myself. The scout leaders and kids tried to sell me lemonade, I slapped a 50-dollar bill on the table and kept walking.

What times those were. I spent my twelfth birthday in Greece because of the scouts, and thanks to embezzled travel funds and the failing brakes of some half-dead bus, I got to sleep for three days on the station square in Thessaloniki with fifty other scouts, until the British consul, also a scout, took pity on us and arranged a more modern bus to bring us home through Yugoslavia, countries that do not even exist anymore. Thinking back on it, that was probably when I discovered my love for independent travel.

Back to the present. From the hilltop I walked through the Botanical Garden, past the rose garden and an old cemetery, until I found myself standing right in front of Parliament. And after taking one photo, or twenty-five, I was already inside the library, or rather the temporarily relocated National Gallery. After a bit of searching I finally found the exhibition. It is not large, but refined and extremely well done, absolutely to the point.

In He Tohu there is an interactive relief or map table, a topographical 3D map onto which programmed content is projected. You see New Zealand as a raised physical landscape model, overlaid with stories and historical connections. Twenty years ago we still dreamed of things like this and wondered whether they could even be realized, and here it is. It is first class. Not just the table itself, but also the content projected onto it: He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni, the Declaration of Independence of the United Tribes of New Zealand from 1835. Te Tiriti o Waitangi / The Treaty of Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 between the British Crown and Māori. And The Women’s Suffrage Petition / Te Petihana Whakamana Pōti Wahine, the women’s suffrage petition of 1893. New Zealand history, not merely displayed, but made understandable.

And with that, to the history itself.

Around 1250 to 1300, the first Polynesian settlers reached New Zealand, and from them the Māori developed, which is actually relatively late in historical terms. On the Wellington waterfront stands the Kupe statue, commemorating the legendary explorer Kupe, his wife Hine Te Apārangi, and the tohunga Pekahourangi, making Māori origins, navigation, and founding narratives visible in public space. The first Māori came from Eastern Polynesia, probably from the region of the southern Cook Islands and the Society Islands.

In 1642, Abel Tasman became the first known European to reach New Zealand. Today there is still a Great Walk named after him, but those first encounters were not exactly peaceful. The first contact ended violently, four of Tasman’s men were killed, and shots were fired from the ships at Māori waka in return. That is why Tasman later called the bay “Murderers’ Bay.” A rather clear difference from Australian colonization, is it not? A rather combative people.

Around 1769, James Cook reached New Zealand and began the detailed charting of its coasts. At that time, the Māori population is estimated to have been around 100,000 people. More conflict-ridden encounters followed. The most significant armed clash came in 1772 in the Bay of Islands during the expedition of the French navigator Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne. Friendly at first, then deadly. Marion du Fresne and 24 of his men were killed, and the surviving French retaliated brutally against Māori, destroying villages and killing or wounding many, perhaps hundreds, of people.

And then the white man did what he did best: he sold weapons to hostile local groups and let things take their course. This time largely without alcohol as a catalyst, because Māori traditionally did not drink alcohol. From around 1807, reaching a peak between 1818 and the early 1830s, the Musket Wars began. According to common estimates, around 20,000 Māori died, directly or indirectly. Many more were enslaved, displaced, or turned into refugees. For a society of perhaps only 100,000 people at the time, this was a catastrophe of enormous scale. On top of that came introduced diseases. By the 1890s, the Māori population had fallen to around 40 percent of its pre-contact level, with introduced diseases regarded as the main cause.

To understand this better, one has to know how Māori society was organized. Traditionally, they were not structured as a centralized state, but through whānau, hapū, and iwi. The whānau was the extended family, several whānau formed a hapū, and several related hapū belonged to an iwi. Before the arrival of Europeans, the hapū was above all the real political core unit. There was originally no single “Māori king” for all; instead, each group had its own rangatira, local leaders with authority. Trade, land use, and alliances were all deeply tied to these kinship structures. Their system of justice was not based on a written legal code, but on tikanga, a complex system of customary law, values, and proper ways of doing things. Important principles included utu, meaning balance and reciprocity, and muru, a form of compensation or collective redress after wrongdoing.

The Māori also recognized very quickly how useful it could be to have their language written down. As early as 1814, missionaries began recording te reo Māori, and by 1820 the written language was being systematized more carefully with the help of Māori figures such as Hongi Hika and Waikato. What had initially been introduced from the outside was quickly turned into their own tool, because reading and writing meant not only education, but also political communication, exchange, and the ability to preserve their world in a new form. In a time of profound upheaval, written Māori became far more than a simple translation aid. It became a means of self-assertion.

That is the background. And now we come to what He Tohu is really about.

He Whakaputanga of 1835 is New Zealand’s Declaration of Independence. At its core, it states that mana and decision-making authority in New Zealand lie with Māori, more precisely with the rangatira of the United Tribes, and that no foreign power should simply impose laws on the land. At the same time, it is one of the earliest documents in which Māori are politically articulated as a collective entity beyond individual iwi and hapū. He Whakaputanga was signed on 28 October 1835 at Waitangi by 34 northern rangatira. By 1839, 18 more chiefs had added their names.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi / The Treaty of Waitangi of February 1840, by contrast, is not simply another declaration of independence, but a political agreement between the British Crown and Māori. At its core it deals with government, or kawanatanga, the protection of rangatiratanga over land and taonga, and the rights of Māori as British subjects or citizens. And this is exactly where the historical conflict lies, because the Māori and English versions do not say the same thing and are still interpreted differently today.

The differences are not minor, but fundamental. In the English text, Article 1 says that Māori cede “sovereignty” to the Crown. In the Māori text, however, the word is “kawanatanga,” meaning something closer to government or governorship. In Article 2, the English text guarantees Māori possession of their lands, forests, fisheries, and other properties, while the Māori text guarantees “tino rangatiratanga” over land, villages, and taonga, something much closer to the full exercise of their own authority or chieftainship. Article 3 is the most closely aligned: protection by the Crown and the rights of British subjects.

The core conflict is therefore brutally simple: most Māori signed a text they did not understand as a full surrender of sovereignty, while the Crown very quickly acted as if that was exactly what had happened. This ultimately resulted in the New Zealand Wars from 1845 to 1872, wars between the Crown and colonial troops on one side and Māori on the other. Yet the true long-term consequence was not only the killing, but the massive loss of land. After the wars, more than four million acres of Māori land were confiscated, condemning many iwi to poverty, uprooting, and lasting loss of power. The death toll itself was also severe. Around 2,000 Māori, mostly young men, were killed, at a time when the total Māori population may have been only around 60,000. A staggering number.

Māori resistance did not disappear after the wars. It shifted over time from armed conflict into political protest, cultural self-assertion, and legal struggle. Particularly important were the Māori Land March of 1975 led by Whina Cooper against further land loss, the occupation of Bastion Point from 1977 to 1978, the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, and the Te Reo Claim of 1985, which helped lead to te reo Māori becoming an official language in 1987. Step by step, Māori fought their way to greater visibility, greater political participation, and stronger recognition of their rights as Treaty partners, even if that struggle is by no means over. Today, Māori make up almost one fifth of Aotearoa’s population.

Another document in the exhibition is the Women’s Suffrage Petition of 1893, and its sheer physical presence is striking. The main petition consisted of more than 500 separate sheets, joined into a roll over 270 meters long, containing the names and addresses of around 24,000 women. Together with additional smaller petitions, the total came to nearly 32,000 signatures. It shows very clearly that women’s suffrage in New Zealand was not simply benevolently granted from above, but was the result of organization, persistence, and massive public pressure. That very same year, on 19 September 1893, the new electoral law was signed, and New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world in which women could vote in national elections.

Women’s suffrage, however, is still far from meaning equality for women, let that be said. But compared with our Swiss neighbors, New Zealand was still almost eight decades earlier, since Switzerland only followed at the federal level in 1971. And one thing should be said plainly: Māori women received the vote at exactly the same time, so there was no separate discrimination here, and Māori men had already gained voting rights in 1867/68. When one considers that political participation is still far from being self-evident everywhere in the world, and that a large part of humanity still lives in states that are only partly free or not free at all, that is remarkable. Whether it is women who cannot vote, or nobody at all.

And one more personal note on that: women’s suffrage does not mean full equality. That begins not at the ballot box, but where protection, opportunity, income, family life, and everyday reality are actually regulated and enforced equally for women and men. Equality for women has advanced almost everywhere compared with a hundred years ago, but it remains unfinished. On paper, many countries now have equal rights. In reality, things still break down around pay, career opportunities, political representation, protection from violence, and the unequal distribution of unpaid care work. It becomes especially visible where equality meets the limits of daily life: women remain underrepresented in politics, still carry the larger share of unpaid care work, and almost one in three women worldwide experiences physical or sexual violence at some point in her life.

I also read a great deal that day, about democracy, constitutions, and the very different political systems that exist, and it was only then that I really understood how unusual the German Basic Law actually is. A constitution beginning with human dignity, placing it at the foundation of state and law, is very much the exception rather than the rule. Compared to that, the British system feels almost like the opposite model: no single, closed constitution, but a historically grown framework of Parliament, case law, conventions, and old statutes, carried above all by the idea of parliamentary sovereignty. Modern human rights protection there only really arrived with the Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the rights of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. It only came into force in 2000, and it does not stand above Parliament in the way the German Basic Law does.

And perhaps that explains, at least in part, how colonization, land seizure, and the later reinterpretation of the Treaty of 1840 were possible at all. Because if a political system thinks more in terms of rule, legislation, and the exercise of power than in terms of untouchable, higher-ranking rights, then treaties with indigenous peoples can be bent much more easily the moment they stand in the way of imperial interests. In the case of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the tragedy lies precisely in the fact that many rangatira did not understand it as a full surrender of their sovereignty, while the Crown very soon acted as if that was exactly what it had received. A contradiction that eventually led to war. The Waitangi Tribunal later explicitly concluded that the signatories of February 1840 had not ceded their sovereignty.

And why did I read so much? Because the rugby match was actually rather boring. The Hurricanes casually dismantled the Queensland idiots from Brisbane and sent them home with thoroughly blistered backsides. 52 to 14. Tomorrow the journey continues, but not in Wellington. In that spirit.