Bastion Point, Hikoi ki Waitangi

This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024) on pages 382-383.
This extract was authored by Athol McCredie.

John Miller (Ngāpuhi) has been photographing political activism ever since his first images of anti–Vietnam War demonstrations as a school student in the late 1960s. He has covered the 1975 Māori Land March, protests against nuclear warship visits, demonstrations against sporting contacts with South Africa (including the 1981 Springbok rugby tour), political conferences, and decades of Waitangi Day events, building up an unparalleled archive of public dissent over the last half-century.

Māori protests around the annual Treaty of Waitangi commemorations at Waitangi began in the 1970s, at first with claims that the Treaty was a fraud. In the 1980s the emphasis shifted to demands that the Treaty be honoured and the wrongs of colonialism righted. Waitangi Day protests became an annual ritual in which police blocked protesters from disrupting events on the Treaty House grounds. Undiscouraged, however, protesters only grew in number each year. In 1984, the Kīngitanga and Te Kotahitanga movements united with the Māori Women’s Welfare League, the New Zealand Māori Council and the Waitangi Action Committee to mount the Hīkoi ki Waitangi, a protest march from Ngāruawāhia to Waitangi. The march united Māori across iwi and was supported by both conservatives and radicals as well as by Pākehā and Pasifika. Four thousand people arrived in Waitangi, only to be obstructed by police yet again and prevented from taking up an offer to meet with the governor general.

Before reaching Waitangi, the Hīkoi was hosted in Auckland by Ngāti Whātua at Takaparawhā Bastion Point, site of the protest occupation in 1977 and 1978 that became a rallying point for the Māori land rights movement. John Miller was there, and shot a triptych of people holding flags. In the left-hand frame, shown here, is the flag developed during the Ngāti Whātua occupation that depicts a stylised mangōpare, a symbol of tenacity. The presence of the flag during the hīkoi underlined Ngāti Whātua’s claim to the land.