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Gavin Bishop, autor of Patu: The New Zealand Wars, and Ataria Sharman (Image: Archi Banal)
Gavin Bishop, autor of Patu: The New Zealand Wars, and Ataria Sharman (Image: Archi Banal)

BooksOctober 26, 2023

The extraordinary circumstances that led to writing Patu: The New Zealand Wars

Gavin Bishop, autor of Patu: The New Zealand Wars, and Ataria Sharman (Image: Archi Banal)
Gavin Bishop, autor of Patu: The New Zealand Wars, and Ataria Sharman (Image: Archi Banal)

Ataria Sharman talks with acclaimed children’s book author and illustrator Gavin Bishop about his latest book.

I’ve long hungered for more on the New Zealand Wars. Growing up in 1990s Aotearoa, I learnt about the Industrial Revolution and other Eurocentric topics at high school, with a few washed-out classes on the Treaty of Waitangi. It wasn’t until university classes in Māori studies I realised how much I didn’t know, what I hadn’t been taught.

Finally, in 2023, New Zealand history (including the New Zealand Wars) is now compulsory in schools. We can’t move forward without acknowledging our past. Patu: The New Zealand Wars is a new book by children’s author and illustrator Gavin Bishop (Tainui, Ngāti Awa) – a resource for homes, kura, schools and libraries ready to take on the challenge of teaching something so integral to our history and long brushed under the covers.

To open Patu is to be greeted by the vibrant and painstakingly crafted illustrations Bishop is renowned for. Unlike the digital files many illustrators use today, Bishop still paints on paper. He makes the portraits using the scratchboard technique, where sheets are prepared with white chalk or clay beneath black ink, scratching through the ink to uncover the white base.

What amazed me most about Patu, other than the full-bodied and powerful art, was learning about Bishop’s tūpuna – his great-grandparents, Irihāpeti Te Paea Hahau Te Wherowhero, eldest daughter of King Te Wherowhero of Waikato, and John Horton McKay – and the impact of the wars on them and their descendants.

As I soon discovered, it was a series of remarkable circumstances that began the career of Bishop and the uncovering of his whakapapa and, later on, his latest book, Patu.

Ataria Sharman: Where did your journey in writing and illustration begin?

Gavin Bishop: I studied painting at the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University. I thought I would be a painter, but soon found it impossible to live as one, so I became a secondary school art teacher. I taught art for 30 years before becoming a full-time writer and illustrator.

The writing began in 1978. I had no idea what I was doing. There was a chance comment from someone I was talking to; they asked, “Have you ever thought about writing a book for children?” In my reply, I told them it was odd that they asked that, but it’s one of the things I like the idea of.

Oxford University Press was still here in Aotearoa; they’re gone now. I contacted them and they said they wanted to see something with a strong New Zealand perspective. I thought, well, I’ll write about something local, which got me thinking about the sheep farms in Canterbury. So, I wrote a picture book about a sheep called Bidibidi.

I sent my draft to them with a few illustrations – posted by the way, as there was no internet. They said, “Oh, we like this, but it needs a lot of work.” It was a nice way of saying it was pretty amateurish, but we’ll work with you. My editor, Wendy Harrex, the first thing she said was, “It’s too long. There’s too much text for a picture book. Reduce it.”

I didn’t know how to do that. Wendy told me to take one page at a time, rewrite and reduce it by half by chopping the extra words and descriptors. I went through the book page by page and would post Wendy something on a Monday after working on it at the weekend.

In the meantime, I got an idea for another book set in Christchurch: Mrs McGinty and the Bizarre Plant. I knew more about how to write succinctly and keep the words simple, allowing the pictures to be the most critical part of the book. I sent that to them and they said this is good, much better, we can publish this. That’s why it was published before Bidibidi.

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— Wellington editor

What about your interest in Māori history?

It’s something I’ve always been interested in. It was tricky back then because my granddad came from the Waikato, but it was so long ago that, as a family, we lost all connection with people there who were his close relatives. So, In the late 1980s, my brother and I decided to take a trip up north to find out about our whakapapa.

My mother’s middle names, Irihāpeti and Hinepau, were our only clues. My brother thought we’d start in Whakatāne because we knew Whakatāne was a link to our past, but we had no idea where to go and nobody to meet. So we went to the museum.

The guy behind the desk could see we were searching for something. We told him, and he asked if we had any names. We said, “Mum. Her name was Irihāpeti Hinepau.” He knew there was a lot of Hinepau around, so he sent us to Poroporo, the Ngāti Pūkeko marae and told us that in the house nearby, there was an elderly woman. We went to visit her.

When we arrived, we met Ena Chamberlain. She asked how she could help us, and we said we were trying to find family. She knew our granddad Benjamin McKay but thought he’d died without issue, meaning he’d died without having children. But he’d had five children, and the youngest was our mother. Ena was also short for Hinepau; her grandmother and our grandfather were brother and sister – a whole week of discoveries just like that.

Then we caught the bus to Turangawaewae Marae at Ngaruawāhia to the Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu celebrations. We went quietly alone and stood outside and waited. As we sat quietly, people came over to ask us who we were. We told them we were Benjamin McKay’s grandchildren; they knew the family. McKay was one of 12 children, and descendants of all those 12 were at the marae for that occasion. A kaumātua, Rua Cooper, took us to his caravan (he’d travelled from Auckland) and formally adopted the two of us into the whānau. It was incredibly moving.

On the last day, we caught the bus back up to Auckland for the flight home. I told my brother there was one more place we needed to go, Te Whare Kahurangi, The Archives of the Diocese of Auckland. We knew my granddad and his family were staunch Anglicans. So we went and asked if they had anything about Waikato and Port Waikato, and the lady there found us an old book. In it were handwritten records of baptisms in the Waikato in the 1860s, with my grandad and his siblings’ names listed on one page. It was utterly amazing.

We got on our plane and flew home. A few years later, my brother helped those we’d found on that trip organise a big family reunion for the descendants of Irihāpeti Hahau in the 1990s. Eventually, my brother moved to Hamilton, lectured in Māori Education at Waikato University, and got in touch with many whānau. We stay in touch; we know who to contact if we need to. It has inspired me to keep thinking about it.

Inside Patu, by Gavin Bishop

Patu interweaves your family history, highlighted in the whakapapa at the back of the book. Can you share your experience of bringing their stories into this book?

Most of the information at the end of Patu came to light at that reunion in the early 1990s. A big tent was set up, and you were encouraged to bring photographs, written material, birthdates and names from your family, which were scanned and returned to you to take home. Then they put together this enormous book, a vast volume containing all the material from my great-grandmother’s family.

I bought a copy each for my kids and one for myself. That book was invaluable when it came to writing those fragments at the back of the book. I kept the focus on my granddad and grandmother to show how ordinary families were affected by the events of the times.

We knew we had whakapapa Māori, but my granddad never told my mother anything other than giving her the tūpuna names Irihāpeti and Hinepau. He never explained the meaning of those names; she never knew. Later, my brother and I realised that those names were the key to discovering our whakapapa. 

My granddad spoke Māori fluently, as did his sister. Mum would tell us how she remembered them sitting outside on the verandah, speaking te reo to one another. They never taught the children because you were punished for speaking te reo at school. They were very cautious and played the Māori connection down. He married a Pākehā woman; some members of her family were so angry they never spoke to her again.

Even though my great-grandmother got some land back on the lower slopes of the Taupiri mountain after the raupatu (confiscation of land). With her close connection to the Kīngitanga, she managed to get that land returned within her lifetime; she fought long and hard to get it. As far as I know, she is buried at Taupiri Mountain with her other brothers and sisters, including King Tāwhiao.

With New Zealand’s history being taught in schools starting in 2023, Patu is a valuable resource. Why are we now bringing these historical narratives, like the New Zealand Wars, into the light after all these years?

We were taught mainly British propaganda when I was at school in the 1950s and 60s. I still remember writing “Good Governor Grey” as a heading in my social studies book. The Māori were the baddies, they did all these terrible things, and the British were these fine, upstanding people. There was no mention of taking land; we didn’t learn what raupatu was.

That’s the information we were fed as kids. They were lies, they were to make the British seem to be correct. That’s another thing that keeps me going and doing more to address that balance. To make people stop, think and look at it.

Your previous works, such as The House that Jack Built, skilfully explore the complex narratives of colonisation in New Zealand. What motivates you to tell the dual perspectives of Māori and Pākehā, and how did it inform your approach to Patu?

I couldn’t write about the New Zealand Wars without looking at both sides, although I think what the British did was awful. In Patu, at the end, I make the point that the British won the war, not because of their technology or fighting techniques but by sheer numbers. So many Pākehā came and settled they swamped tangata whenua and put legislation in place.

These laws affected my family: The Native Lands Act of 1862, The Native Schools Act of 1867, the Public Works Act of 1864 and many others. They were set up to disenfranchise Māori. To discourage them from speaking their language. That’s what I wanted to show, that Māori were punished for standing up for their rights.

In saying that, I didn’t want to use a sledgehammer to tell the story. I wanted it to be strong and slightly emotional, so I chose to finish the book with my granddad and mother to bring it back to ordinary people. Thousands of people across Aotearoa will have a similar story to theirs.

Patu: The New Zealand wars by Gavin Bishop ($40, Puffin) can be purchased from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

Keep going!
Why are there so few indigenous texts being taught in high schools? 
 (Image: Archi Banal)?
Why are there so few indigenous texts being taught in high schools? (Image: Archi Banal)?

BooksOctober 25, 2023

99 Problems – text choice ain’t one 

Why are there so few indigenous texts being taught in high schools? 
 (Image: Archi Banal)?
Why are there so few indigenous texts being taught in high schools? (Image: Archi Banal)?

English teacher and wahine Māori, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, responds to last month’s investigation into what books are being taught in Aotearoa classrooms.

Last month The Spinoff published a piece called The English department reading lists of Aotearoa, investigated and reviewed. The list is full of classic novels, many of which were published far before my own parents were even born – shockingly, only one text from the list was written in this millennium. How many of the texts are from Aotearoa? To quote the great local poet  and prophet Scribe, “not many, if any”. In fact, there wasn’t a single text on the list by a local writer, not a single novel written by Māori or Pasifika writers and only two by women.

While the initial investigative piece offered some hints as to why the extended texts our students are reading are so pale and stale (and mostly male), there’s a big brown elephant in the room that needs addressing. As a wahine Māori who is also an English teacher, I’d like to debunk some excuses and offer some thoughts as to why our students should be studying How To Loiter In a Turf War by Coco Solid and Mutuwhenua by Patricia Grace over Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies. 

Money ain’t a thang 

You have to understand that English departments, at their best, are collaborative, full of critical thinking and student centred. At their worst, they are highly political, competitive hierarchical hellscapes, particularly if you’re a new and/or minority teacher.

It can be very difficult to have new ideas accepted by a more experienced department. I have worked in a handful of schools in my decade of teaching, across a range of deciles. Each school presents unique obstacles in terms of implementing change. Budget, while still an important factor, has not once been the biggest hurdle, even at lower decile schools. If a stalwart in your department has been eyeing up a new text for their Y13’s, and you’re fresh out of training and want to experiment with a new text they’ve never heard of, you’re not going to win that budget battle. More often than not, this is more about power than it is about money.

This could be why the initial list explains that there is more diversity in the text choices for short stories and poetry, where the only hits are against the photocopy allocation, not egos. 

Until the end of time 

There’s that ancient Pākehā whakatauākī that goes, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”. If what you’ve always got by teaching texts like The Great Gatsby has been decent exam results, then why mess with a winning plan? Especially if a new plan is going to take hours and hours to prepare. 

One answer is that even classic texts can age poorly. I once was really proud to teach To Kill a Mockingbird and The Help and Freedom Writers. Now when I see a teacher suggest these on the English Teacher’s Facebook page, I cringe. Texts that I used to think of as being great vehicles for discussion on racism are now so obviously dripping with white saviourism, I feel embarrassed. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimised by the teaching of The Blindside in an English classroom? I want to apologise to my past black and brown students for the harm I’ve caused them. You should not have had to sit through lessons in my classroom where a white protagonist was celebrated for quite simply not being a super shit human being. Aroha atu ki a koutou kātoa. Continuing to teach texts where white people are championed for not being racist reinforces the values of white supremacy. As English teachers we need to carefully consider why we continue to teach some of these texts and further to that, who is benefitting from us doing what we’ve always done? A text does not need to have performed well in past exams, to perform well for the first time. The safeguard against the fear of texts not performing well is in fact – in the teaching (surprise!). 

I have worked with teachers who are teaching the exact same texts that I was taught 20 years ago. When I teach the same thing year in, year out, I’m doing it because I think that they are solid choices. If I’m being completely honest, I’m also teaching those same texts because in the thick of a teaching term I don’t always have gas in the tank to prepare new units of work and resources. You don’t have to work too hard to imagine the wealth of learning resources that are available online for a book written in the 1920s. You can also imagine the amount of “model essays” also available to our students for these text choices. Now with the very real threat of robots writing our kids’ essays for them, I can’t think of a better time to diversify and localise our text choices. 

You can see how some teachers get caught peddling the same thing over and over, especially when the results look safe. Teachers are under-valued, under-paid and overworked across the board. We aren’t supposed to be in the business of making sure students pass exams, we are in the classroom for teaching and learning. So what are we teaching our students about trying new things and taking calculated risks when we teach the same thing over and over? 

The 2023 Ockham Book Awards longlist (Image: Archi Banal)

Empire state of mind 

I am a huge fan of our local lit scene: it is thriving. Whatever measures you use to count success, we have it here in Aotearoa in abundance. We have fantastic writers doing big, fancy things too, like winning competitions across the globe, being accepted to international writer’s residencies and being published by The New Yorker. Half of the titles on the 2023 Ockhams longlist were written by Māori. Despite these successes, many classrooms are still confining their local texts to short forms, like short stories and poetry, and are ignoring the novel. What message does this send to students about how much we value Māori and Pasifika writers?

I refuse to accept that Aotearoa has not produced any novels in the last 20 years that can stand up to those on the list. So, what is the blockage here?

One reason why Māori and Pasifika writing is often confined to short text choices lies in prejudiced attitudes. A teacher based in Pōneke explained to me how “shocking” it was to her when older, Pākehā teachers would make comments regarding the lack of quality in New Zealand literature. They heard one teacher in particular state that, “younger writers don’t write properly” and when faced with writing by non-Pākehā poets, even went as far to profess, “that’s not a proper poem”. In our education system, designed by and for non-Māori, it is too easy for Pākehā teachers to consider themselves the gatekeepers of what counts as quality. 

When I spoke  to some English teachers about this kaupapa, issues of both invalidation and avoidance were raised. One English HOD, based in Te Waipounamu, commented that she found it to be an interesting conundrum when Pākehā teachers made comments about feeling that they “are not in a position of knowledge to teach Māori texts”. These same teachers have no issue teaching texts by other ethnic groups and minorities with presumably less knowledge. 

No doubt, there will be English teachers all over the country with painfully similar anecdotes. These anecdotes highlight the influence of white guilt on our text choices by our Pākehādominated teacher workforce. It can be easy for teachers to be critical about other oppressive systems in other countries when we are further removed. It is much harder to confront ideas of racism when they come from the lived experiences of our neighbours and students, and when we as teachers are often beneficiaries of the oppressive system upon the page.

When we keep racism “over there” as something that happens in other countries and between other cultures – through prejudiced beliefs, withdrawing or avoiding – we keep ourselves comfortably blind to the harm we contribute. How is it that we are leaders on the world stage in so many ways, yet we have normalised colonial hierarchies, to the extent that it seems acceptable to only choose extended texts that prop up western ways of thinking and being?

Nice for what 

It’s widely accepted that Taika Waititi is one of our best filmmakers, and who am I to argue with the Academy? With this in mind, you can imagine the shock I got when starting at a new school, where 50% of the students were Māori, when I was told I could not teach the film Boy. I wanted to teach it to my low level (yes, they streamed) Year 12 class, but my Pākehā Head of Department told me that it wasn’t sophisticated enough. 

For some, Boy is a comical story about a drop-kick dad and Boy’s struggle to decide whether to follow in his absent father’s footsteps or not. Others will see the complex layers in the characters of Boy. I’ve read stunning essays by students on the responsibility of being a mataamua, the fragility of childhood innocence, the power of healing as a whānau and the intergenerational effects of trauma on our men. I shudder to think about what my Pākehā Head of Department made from Once Were Warriors, when she went on to teach it to our only Year 13 English class later in the year. 

I saw a similar attitude mirrored in an essay I once marked, written by a Māori student at a different school, who had been taught that the main themes of Boy were about making better choices to avoid poverty. It broke my Māori heart. This teacher had not only missed an opportunity to look through that Māori lens we hear so much about in education, but they had unknowingly weaponised a Māori text to perpetuate negative stereotypes of Māori people, simply because they could not meet the work culturally. 

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— Editor-at-large

Perhaps our teachers are choosing such old, white texts because they don’t have the necessary know-how to do indigenous texts justice? I wholeheartedly think we should be teaching more indigenous texts. Do I want those texts taught by people who have not yet undertaken the necessary decolonisation mahi? Absolutely not. Improving the cultural competency of our teachers is vital and the buck stops with every English curriculum leader in the country, to ensure our ākonga experience the richness and vitality of indigenous literature.

It isn’t just about choosing any text by Māori either. We need to be more mindful about choosing texts which speak to the breadth of tangata whenua experience, from hāngī to tangi, maunga to moana, and protest to performance. The forthcoming changes to the curriculum support teaching a range of Māori voices in our texts, so very soon it is not going to be acceptable to teach a single poem with its “nice” imagery and “pleasant” vibes (or only Once Were Warriors). These “nice” text choices contribute to what Dr Liana MacDonald describes as an epistemology of ignorance, which underpins our education system. Teachers feel comfortable selecting texts by Māori writers which are “lovely” and don’t demand any critique of the system many of us benefit from. Choosing such texts reinforces a narrative that our bicultural identity is harmonious and always has been. These ways of thinking can get in the bin, alongside comments you may have overheard during professional development workshops, like “I treat all my students exactly the same” and “we are all one race”. 

There is power in our words, and if we are only choosing to teach the words that don’t make some of us uncomfortable we are invalidating not just indigenous writing, but ideas and cultural values too. While many teachers would not admit to this behaviour, we must confront it as an act of silencing. Teachers may feel good (even heroic) about teaching Māori and other minority voices in short texts, but they don’t seem so confident in the same voices to teach a novel. If indigenous writers are writing their lived experiences, we need to ensure our ākonga have the opportunity to read and examine them without a silent insistence on reinforcing settler colonial ideals. 

Changes 

Aotearoa Histories is about to become prescribed across the Social Sciences Curriculum. The curriculum has always allowed History Departments and their teachers the autonomy to choose to teach Aotearoa Histories. Either the knowledge base wasn’t there, or the willingness has been lacking and now we have to prescribe its inclusion. On reading the list of most popular exam texts, many would argue it is time we do the same for English. Changes to NCEA are just around the corner. Units will need to be revised, some will be scrapped completely in favour of fresher content. Kua tae te wā, kaiako mā. 

There are so many novels written by a vast range of people who call Aotearoa home. For most of our teaching workforce, the Māori lens is something you can pick up and look through when considering what and how to teach, but we cannot forget that for our Māori students, there is no taking those tino rangatiratanga tinted glasses off. For our Māori students, there is no lens at all, just a Māori way of being. Each day, we provide these students a 9am-3pm window into what the world thinks of them. What do you want them to see?

Let’s do the mahi now and ensure that we are giving our students the opportunities to read indigenous stories, to know that they are valid, of a high quality and to be empowered by novels that they might be able to see themselves in.

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