OPINION: Old victors don’t rest easy, old trophies become dull, old injuries atrophy: the long silence of time is where corrosion sets in. A few years back, wandering around Lower Hutt I came across a monument to something called The Battle of Boulcott Farm. Concrete, rocks, and marble plaques
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Hongi Hika did not go to Britain just to work on a Maori dictionary. He went to learn about guns and to see the King. He tours the Tower of London (his favourite place), reviews soldiers and armaments, and meets King George IV who presents him with a suit of
British Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel is regarded as the father of modern policing. His Metropolitan Police Act received royal assent in 1829, and the Metropolitan Police Service in London was formed in September of that year. The first modern and professional Police force in the world, its founding was
It should have been routine. A police caution for a broken tail light. A ‘get off the road and get it fixed’ situation. Until something went very wrong. The I-phone 11 didn’t appear and start filming until Lee Ropata was on the ground bleeding from a blow to the
I first read about the Passenger Pigeon when I was but a boy. Then, as now, it was a staple of the eco-doom narrative kick-started by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. And, like Carson’s book, it’s a severely flawed narrative which overlooks key facts. The Passenger Pigeon was
The next white turnips to wander into this wild, lawless mix of Maori, muskets, traders, sealers, whalers, ex-convicts from Australia, and “adventurers” from all over the world; are missionaries. The saviour of souls. Samuel Marsden is an Anglican missionary sent from Britain to be a convict chaplain in Australia. On
After Cook’s last trip (1777), there are no more foreign visitors to New Zealand for some time. The fierce reputation of the Maori has spread and put off tourists (especially the people-eating part); and the major exploring nations of the world at this time (Britain, France, Spain), have other
A little mystery rippled across Wellington last week. Some public-spirited soul attached a stainless-steel plaque to an Aro St retaining wall commemorating the incident from 1974 when senior public servant and Soviet spy Bill Sutch was apprehended while passing a dossier of documents to KGB officer Dimitri Razgovorov. The plaque
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For four years now, we’ve had to endure the media elite’s incessant shrieking that President Donald Trump is “literally Hitler”. This is a failure of both English language usage and historical awareness. By definition, Trump cannot be literally Hitler – only Hitler was or ever will be literally Hitler.
IINZ History israelinstitute.nz Kia ora, Talofa lava, and greetings to you all. I have a question, – Can we know who the Jewish people are and where they come from? The answer is, Yes we can. In almost every language, other than English and French, Jews are referred to as,
History is said to be written by the victors – war history no less than others. So it’s often surprising to read loser’s accounts of famous military events. Through German Eyes, Christopher Duffy’s history of the Somme from the German side, reveals, among other things, just how close
At Cape Runaway Cook sees for the first time the large double-hulled Maori war canoes who he has to fire on and run away from as they are decidedly not friendly. In the Bay of Plenty (which Cook thought looked fertile, cultivated and well-populated), the mood of the people is
