Untitled [Scene from the New Zealand (Māori) Pioneer Battalion 'Hui Aroha', Gisborne]

In May 1919, a 'Hui Aroha' was held in Gisborne for East Coast members of the New Zealand (Māori) Pioneer Battalion returning from World War I.

Ethnologists Elsdon Best, James McDonald and Johannes Andersen attended the hui to record aspects of Maori culture for the Dominion Museum. This photograph, which shows the soldiers, their families and supporters sharing a meal at the Gisborne Racecourse (where the Hui Aroha was held), was taken by McDonald.

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This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).

In 1919, James McDonald travelled to Gisborne to photograph a hui to welcome home the surviving East Coast members of the New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion from the battlefields of the First World War. In this shot, the Dominion Museum photographer has gained the attention of many but not all of the crowd, capturing a wonderfully evocative mix of focused attention and distraction. The war marked the first time that Māori and Pākehā had fought together on foreign soil; both suffered severe losses at Gallipoli. The Poverty Bay Herald called the event a ‘day of thanksgiving and a day of rejoicing’, in which ‘the Pakeha section of the community joined heartily with the Maori people in according the returning braves a fitting “welcome home” . . . Amidst all the cheers and all the excitement of rejoicing no one with a sympathetic heart could fail to be touched by the lamentations of the elders for those brave boys who will never return.’1

1 ‘Hui aroha’, Poverty Bay Herald, 9 April 1919, p.5.