Diary

There’s​ a Northern Irish joke about an Englishman who finds himself in Protestant Belfast on 12 July, the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Puzzled by what he sees, the man accosts a local:

‘I say, what’s going on here?’

‘It’s the Twalth!’

‘I beg your pardon … The twelfth?’

‘Ay, the Twalth.’

‘I’m sorry: the twelfth what?’

‘The Twalth of Julay.’

‘I see, the twelfth of July. But what does that mean?’

‘Ah, go home and read your Babel!’

It’s a joke about religion, but also about history, about a quarrel that seems to have existed time out of mind; and so, too, a joke about people so obsessed with the past that they are incapable of thinking rationally about it.

I grew up in Northern Ireland and went to school in the South. The Ireland I knew was peaceful: my father was an officer in the Irish Fusiliers, a regiment in the British army, many of whose recruits were Catholics from across the border. My prep school was a relic of the Protestant Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, an institution whose most famous old boys – the nationalist playwright J.M. Synge and the republican rebel Roger Casement – had been expunged from memory. Then, in 1954, my father’s barracks in Armagh were raided by the IRA. Disguised as territorial soldiers, they entered the guardhouse, overpowered the guards and made off with the contents of the armoury – rifles and bren-guns, which they are said to have stored overnight in the crypt of the Catholic cathedral – before heading south across the border. It was a carefully planned exercise and no one was injured, but it convinced my father that he had ‘had enough of soldiering’ and that he no longer wished to live in Ireland, the home of his ancestors. Instead, we would return to New Zealand, to which his grandfather had emigrated in the 1860s.

I was twelve years old at the time. The country in which we arrived seemed almost entirely free of the divisions I had learned to recognise in Ireland (although when my mother asked about the best dentist in Dunedin, she was told, to her dismay: ‘Mr Toomey – provided you don’t mind he’s a Catholic’). New Zealand, as its name suggests, was oriented towards the future, a ‘little land with no history’, as Katherine Mansfield put it. We learned only British history at school and university. In Ireland, I had been given a book called Our Empire Story as a prize: unlike Ireland, New Zealand was allowed a small place in that story, but only in a section that celebrated the colonial government’s victories over the Māori. They were described as ‘a savage and ignorant people, [though] brave and warlike … cannibals’. These warring tribes, it said, had been rescued through the efforts of missionaries, who transformed them into ‘Children of the Great White Queen’.

Though I didn’t know it then, H.E. Marshall’s tropes of Māori savagery echoed the descriptions of the ‘land of Ire’ in 16th and 17th-century English propaganda. The Irish were ‘savage’, ‘irregular and wild’, ‘little better than Cannibals, who do hunt one another; and he that hath the most strength and swiftness, doth eat and devour all his fellows’. The rhetorical resemblances weren’t accidental. Two centuries before New Zealand’s Land Wars, the Catholic inhabitants of Ulster had been stripped of their land by Scottish Protestant settlers, establishing the ethno-religious divide that continues to this day. Since New Zealand was a product of the same imperial history, it isn’t surprising that one of its most successful governors, Sir George Grey, learned his trade in Ireland; nor that in 1879 the Māori MP Hone Mohi should have declared: ‘I am an Irishman.’ Perhaps it was inevitable that New Zealand would experience something of Northern Ireland’s internecine violence.

I am thinking of the long decade that began with Whina Cooper’s 1975 hikoi to Parliament to protest against the loss of Māori land. The march was followed by the Ngāti Whātua land rights occupation of Bastion Point/Takaparawhau in 1977, which was brought to an end after 506 days by a huge police invasion. This period of resistance culminated in the police violence that marked the 1981 Springboks Tour; the Muldoon government’s efforts to suppress peaceful protest against the (apartheid) South African rugby team brought the country close to civil war. By then, however, many New Zealanders, especially younger urban Māori, had begun to examine the racist practices and assumptions that shaped their own postcolonial history.

Among the radical Indigenous groups formed during this period was Ahi Kaa, which sought to challenge what its members saw as the continuing oppression of Māori by the ruling Pākeha majority. ‘The Chinese run China, therefore it follows that the Māori must run Aotearoa,’ Atareta Poananga, a prominent member of the group, declared. ‘We should control and shape our own destiny – politically, socially, culturally and economically. In the end our goal is Māori control of Aotearoa.’ In traditional Māori lore, ‘Ahi Kaa’ (‘burning fire’) stands for proof of possession, making a claim to your own land. But resistance, as it turned out, involved other kinds of fire.

Although I had some involvement with activist politics and was married to a Māori woman, I didn’t hear about Ahi Kaa until the mid-1980s. Sebastian Black, a colleague of mine at the University of Auckland, had moved in next door with his long-time partner, the historian Judith Binney. In September 1986, Sebastian told me that Judith was warned by one of her Māori students that a group called Ahi Kaa was planning to take action against her. The decision had apparently been prompted by a rumour that she was preparing a history of the 19th-century prophet Te Kooti. This wasn’t true – she was at work on an oral history of eight Māori women – but it was plausible enough. The group had sworn, she was told, that no Pākeha historian would be allowed to write such a book.

Not long after, on 29 September, as they were leaving for a ceremony at the university to honour a leading Ngāpuhi elder, Sebastian asked us to keep an eye on the house: ‘It would be terrible if we got firebombed,’ he said. I scoffed. But shortly after midnight, I heard a crash from the back of our house. It must be that bloody teenager, I thought: my wife’s nephew was staying with us. But in the hallway there was a strange flickering light. I looked into the sitting room to see one end of it ablaze. We heard shouts and knocking at the front door: my wife opened it to find an anxious-looking Pasifika man. He said he had seen something being thrown at our bay window. I never found out his name, but he saved the day by helping us create a bucket chain to throw water on the flames.

I had once seen a blaze incinerate a nearby villa, so I knew how quickly these old wooden houses could burn. In our case, the situation was exacerbated by the polyurethane foam cushions on the window-seat where the Molotov cocktail had landed. Polyurethane superheats when ignited, forming a column of flame and emitting a cloud of toxic gas: as a result it was difficult to get close enough to the heart of the fire to put it out. But after twenty minutes – well before any fire engine arrived – the blaze was more or less extinguished.

Things calmed down after the firemen took charge. The man who had helped put out the fire told us that he’d seen the perpetrator – a burly Māori guy, he said. The obvious conclusion was that the firebomb had been intended for our neighbours. We could think of no reason why anyone would want to attack us in this way. We told the police what we knew and I believe that they conducted an investigation of Ahi Kaa, but nothing came of it. ‘If you ever feel like committing a crime,’ a cop told me, ‘arson’s the one – all the evidence gets burned.’

Sebastian and Judith were very upset, of course. But since nobody had been hurt, and the damage to our house was covered by insurance, their main concern was with what they understandably saw as an attack on themselves and a threat to Judith’s work. Worrying that any publicity might damage her relations with Māori, Sebastian swore us to silence: beyond any information we were obliged to give to the police, we were to speak to no one. I’m not sure they ever recognised the effect the firebombing had on my own family. It could have killed our two-year-old son, Tuataroa, who often fell asleep on one of those window cushions. He had done so that night: we had moved him to his cot just fifteen minutes before the attack.

Having no way to vent my feelings, I began to feel angry and resentful. One night at dinner with friends, I listened to a left-wing clergyman singing the praises of Titewhai Harawira, one of the co-founders of Ahi Kaa. It was all I could do to leave the table and step outside. Some time later, I rang Pat Hohepa, a professor of Māori studies and a member of Ahi Kaa, and asked if we could meet. He was collegial enough to agree, but the encounter was difficult. I tried to make it clear that I had no desire to see anyone punished: I simply needed someone to face up, to offer some sort of apology. Hohepa insisted he knew nothing about it, then, towards the end of a fruitless conversation, he said: ‘I think I should tell you that there is a great deal of anger in Ngāpuhi about what is being said.’ I told him that my two-year-old son was Ngāpuhi; and that if the attack had occurred a little earlier he would have died in that fire. He didn’t reply.

Not long afterwards, there were rumours that Hohepa and Atareta Poananga had visited Libya, which was seen by many at that time as a bulwark of anti-colonial struggle. The visit was taken as a sign of possible terrorist intent; police raids on houses in the Hokianga connected with the pair were said to have followed, but no illegal arms were found. These events marked the end of the period in which Auckland, or even the country at large, looked like it might find itself in the grip of a violent conflict over Indigenous rights. Robert Muldoon’s reactionary government had been voted out of office in 1984, and the incoming Labour administration of David Lange did at least begin to take the Crown’s obligations under the Te Tiriti (the 1840 treaty between the British and the Māori) seriously. The Waitangi Tribunal, through its major 1986 report on the preservation of Te Reo (the Māori language), had also begun to play a significant constitutional role in the country. In 2007, the police conducted a raid on the Urewera region, home of the Tūhoe people, hunting for paramilitary training camps supposedly established by Tame Iti and other Tūhoe activists. It bore a striking resemblance to the 1916 government operation against the prophet Rua Kenana, described in Binney’s book Mihaia. This time, however, the actions of the police worked against them. In 2014, they were made to offer a formal apology to their victims. Tame Iti plays himself in Muru, a movie based on the 2007 raid.

This year Hohepa accepted a knighthood for ‘services to Māori’ from the same Crown he once opposed – a further example of the way things have changed in recent decades. Other members of Ahi Kaa have also achieved prominence: Titewhai Harawira has become the kuia (female elder) who sometimes confronts prime ministers at Waitangi, and sometimes ushers them onto the Treaty grounds; Atareta Poananga had a notable legal career as ‘a champion of Māori sovereignty’ before her death in 2020.

After Judith Binney died in 2011, some of her friends attempted to have Edenvale Park, which sits behind our two houses, renamed to honour her work as a historian of colonisation. The renaming seemed all the more appropriate because she had played a leading role in the movement to establish this piece of land as a public park – a movement that itself began after a developer’s ruthless eviction of our longtime Māori neighbours from the house where the park entrance now stands. The park’s proposed name, Te Tōmairangi o te Aroha (The Dew of Love), had been ‘gifted’ to Judith by the Tūhoe in recognition of her mahi (work), in helping to preserve their history, and her insistence that her books belonged, in the deepest sense, not to her but to the iwi (tribe) itself. The proposal has twice failed, opposed by one of the seventeen iwi and hapu who claim mana whenua (land rights) on the Auckland isthmus. I am told that the group resented the idea of a Tūhoe name being placed on their land, though Judith’s books and her work on key submissions to the Waitangi Tribunal have significance for all Māori seeking redress for the injustices of colonisation.

There are things it is hard to forget – even if, looking back on the events of 1986, I now see them a little differently. I recognise that there are moments in anti-colonial struggle when violence can come to seem unavoidable. I can see that those involved in the firebombing might have believed that such a time had come, though I think they were profoundly wrong in their choice of enemy. What I struggle to accept is their refusal to admit what they did, or to offer any apology. Perhaps it is time we talked.

On 15 August 1998, a bomb exploded in Lower Market Street, Omagh, killing 29 people and injuring at least 220 others. Set off after a botched warning (both inadequate and misleading) by the so-called Real IRA, the explosion was intended as a protest against the Good Friday Agreement. It was planted in what had been a largely peaceful town, and the carnage was so brutally indiscriminate that it served to bolster, rather than undermine, support for the newly signed accord.

Omagh was my first childhood home in Ireland. The year after the bombing, I returned to the North for the first time since the mid-1950s. To my surprise, it still felt like home. It had seemed an alien place when viewed from afar, the scene of endless news reports of murder and betrayal, nearly all of them tinged with a weary contempt for people so helplessly in thrall to their own past. But the country I found had begun to change in ways that once seemed impossible, and I was struck by the warmth and receptiveness of the people I met, Catholic and Protestant alike. Boris Johnson’s absurd mishandling of Brexit and his criminal indifference to Irish matters may have laid the ground for a united Ireland, something I never imagined I’d see in my lifetime. Perhaps it will be a country where difference is no longer a source of conflict, but something to be accepted, even celebrated – the kind of country that Aotearoa/New Zealand is slowly becoming, a place of kotahitanga (togetherness) whose people remember the dark past of colonialism, but are learning to escape its shadow.