Voices From The New Zealand Wars | He Reo Nō Ngā Pakanga O Aotearoa

The New Zealand Wars profoundly shaped the course and direction of our nation's story. A new book by acclaimed historian Vincent O'Malley takes us into the heart of these conflicts through the voices of the people who lived through them.

Drawn from memoirs, letters, journals and diaries, newspaper reports, official accounts and more, Voices from the New Zealand Wars | He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa brings together the accounts of multiple Māori and Pākehā men and women who either fought in or witnessed the conflicts that ravaged New Zealand between 1845 and 1872.

Expertly introduced and contextualised, and accompanied by more than 150 illustrations, this collection offers a uniquely immersive account of the wars in which the historical record speaks to us vividly through many voices.

The book includes several new accounts drawn from private collections that have not previously been published, including remarkable and little-known narratives of Parihaka and Rangiaowhia.

From wahine toa Heni Te Kiri Karamu's recollection of her remarkable exploits, through to accounts from the field by figures from all sides including prominent figures such as Hone Heke, Riwha Titokowaru, George Whitmore and other lesser-known individuals, we learn about the wars at a human level.

Vividly evoking extreme emotions – fear, horror, pity and courage – some extracts make for difficult reading, but Dr O'Malley says they are all the more important for this. 'Being brutally honest as a nation about our history sometimes involves learning about the discomforting and downright deplorable acts committed in the colonial period.

There is, however, another aspect to this collection, namely glimpses into moments of connection and real empathy between the opposing sides. 'Sometimes', says O'Malley, 'in their search for answers to the big questions, historians miss these more intimate episodes buried in the archives. This book seeks to shed a light on them.

Voices from the New Zealand Wars is a richly engaging companion to O'Malley's bestselling The New Zealand Wars | Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa and The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000, nationally significant books that have played a central role in the surge of interest in New Zealand history.

As Mihingarangi Forbes has written, 'I believe Vincent O'Malley's research will be the single most important historical body of work produced in my lifetime.'

Vincent O'Malley is the author of a number of acclaimed books on New Zealand history including bestselling works The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000 (BWB, 2016) and The New Zealand War | Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa (BWB, 2019). With Professor Joanna Kidman, he leads the Marsden Fund project 'He Taonga te Wareware? Remembering and Forgetting Difficult Histories in Aotearoa/New Zealand', a three-year study into how the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars have helped shape memory, identity and history. He is a founding partner of HistoryWorks, a group of historians specialising in Treaty of Waitangi research.

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