History's haunted houses

How did we get here? How do we move forward?

You had to be very adventurous, or just reckless, I reckon, to migrate from England to New Zealand in 1840. But a married couple from Tipton, Staffordshire, did just that. They were Joseph Jones (21) and Elizabeth Jones (née Hughes) (19), with their infant son. If the record I’ve seen is correct, they sailed from Gravesend on the 621-ton Martha Ridgeway on 5 July 1840, never to see their home country again. They arrived in Port Nicholson (Wellington) on 14 November – after four months at sea, along with over 200 other emigrants, and an unwelcome outbreak of smallpox.

Allowing such a young couple (with infant) to emigrate permanently to the other side of the planet, risking death at sea, with no clear idea of what awaited them, seems (to my present-day values) insanely irresponsible, unless they were truly desperate.

Once ashore, they would’ve found nowhere to settle. The New Zealand Co. had made misleading claims about land acquisition. There’s no record of how the young couple felt about that, but there was no going home.

In any case, they soon moved on to the Company’s other settlement at Whanganui. The ship had registered Joseph Jones as Gardener & Agricultural Labourer, but in later Whanganui records he was Carpenter.

Their son Daniel Jones was born in 1852 in Whanganui. In 1895, he married Jane (or Janie) Adamson Crichton, a settler from Dunbartonshire, Scotland. Jane signed the 1893 petition for women’s suffrage. She gave birth to a girl named Winifred in 1901.

On Winifred’s birth certificate, Daniel is registered as Farmer. He was raised on a farm, but had worked for the Wanganui Chronicle until 1888, and then took up dairy farming in Springvale. He died in 1931. If you’re in Whanganui, I believe Daniel owned 30 Liverpool St, at which address a house was built by his brother. I’ll bet it’s haunted.

Winifred Clift (née Jones) was my maternal grandmother. Her husband, Charles W. Clift, a grandson of Pehr Ferdinand Holm, served in No. 1 N.Z. Field Ambulance 1917–19.

These were mostly ordinary folk about whom little is remembered outside of their descendants. Without them I wouldn’t exist, but they can’t advise me about the future. With a bit of imagination, we could refashion their life-stories into a movie script, either about resilient pioneers or about rapacious colonisers. The latter is the marketable genre at the moment. A more careful reading of history, however, makes things more complex than either. And luckily we have in-depth accounts to show us some finer textures.

It’s been a while since New Zealand had a new comprehensive history. So it was good to see Michael Belgrave’s Becoming Aotearoa hit the bookshops. Indeed it’s very timely, as we can anticipate close examination of the country’s history, especially around 1840, over the coming months while people debate David Seymour’s principles of the Treaty of Waitangi bill.

I haven’t read the whole of Michael’s book yet, so this isn’t a review. I’m only up to the 1850s. But it’s reminded me that the concerns and debates around the Treaty didn’t reduce simply to two sides: agents of the British monarch on one and chiefs of indigenous peoples on the other. People and events were more complex than that. European settlers were diverse, and not all of them welcomed the prospect of a governor applying British law. Some were busy making a quid and acquiring land, and didn’t want their dealings scrutinised. Others were wary of colonisation for humanitarian reasons.

Many of the chiefs spoke against the Treaty on the grounds that they wouldn’t be subject to any newcomer. Perhaps Captain Hobson should get on his boat and sail back to Sydney. In the end, most (not all) chiefs signed up. It often made sense to attract settlers for the economic opportunities and status that they brought. But things could also turn nasty. Fighting broke out in Whanganui, for instance, in 1847 and after. The tribes fought among themselves, as well as for or against the settlers.

Getting back to the Treaty and its three articles, which provided for kawanatanga (government), tino rangatiratanga (supreme chieftainship) and tikanga (rights), Belgrave summarises:

“Hobson’s instructions from Lord Normanby, the secretary of state for the colonies, were … that Māori needed to be protected by the Queen’s law, while retaining their tribal autonomy. … Māori were very clear that chiefly authority was to be retained by them and protected by the Crown. More significantly, they went away from the Treaty signings believing that the governor would be part of their world and they would be part of his.” (p. 98).

What could be clearer?

It only took a few years for the Treaty to begin to be revised and re-interpreted, however. In particular, people quibbled over Article Two’s requirement for Crown pre-emption of land transactions – words that are now overlooked even by the purists. It’s a living document that continues to be interpreted and re-interpreted.

The Treaty of Waitangi, if I may venture an opinion, is what it says it is: a treaty. Drafted and translated on site, it was debated al fresco between and among leaders, some of whom were actual or potential adversaries. The Treaty has a founding historical role in the evolving constitution of New Zealand, and it’s been incorporated into domestic law, but it’s not in itself a Constitution. It’s not as if the signing of the Treaty gave Hobson any authority to govern, let alone the lawful institutional means to do so.

More needed to be done to set up a system of government. Official documents were exchanged between London, Sydney and Auckland. Letters Patent (or orders in the name of the Queen) issued on 16 November, and Royal Instructions dated 5 December 1840 instituted an Executive Council and a Legislative Council for a colonial government. Moreover, New Zealand had to be separated administratively from the colony of New South Wales.

As Belgrave reminds us, “New Zealand became a separate Crown colony on 3 May 1841, with Hobson as its governor” (pp. 100–01). Even then, the governor’s writ didn’t run far, as he wasn’t able to enforce law across the entire colony.

There were no elections for an assembly of representatives until 1853, and none of the members of that first parliament was actually born in Aotearoa New Zealand. It took a lot more time and effort, then, to develop the system of government that Kiwis love to hate today, and their “unwritten” constitution is still a work in progress. There are various proposals for further reform.

Knowing constitutional history is essential for understanding how and why the political system evolved, for better or worse. To what degree, though, can the future of a constitution be shaped by our views (even our best-informed views) about its origins?