Maori rebel flag: Aotearoa

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In 1916 James Allan Thomson, director of the Dominion Museum, purchased the ‘Gordon collection’ for £100. The collection consisted of ‘portraits, maps, diagrams, &c., relating to the Maori wars of the “sixties”, gathered during many years with loving care by Mr WF Gordon, of New Plymouth’.1 Included in this purchase were forty drawings, collectively titled ‘Copies of some Hauhau and other rebel flags, many of which were captured or surrendered during the Maori wars’.

The collector and artist William Francis Gordon arrived in New Zealand in 1867, well after the main events of the New Zealand Wars. Nonetheless, the way in which he spent the remainder of his life compiling information relating to the wars seems evidence of a colonist coming to terms with his circumstances in New Zealand. The flags he recorded, with assistance from Charles Kingsford Jeffs and P Reveirs, were powerful symbols for the various identity-forging movements of Māori in the mid-nineteenth century and had also doubled as fighting flags in battle.

The Aotearoa flag was made by Jane Foley, or Hēni Te Kirikaramu Pore. Trained in the missionary schools, she was fluent in Māori, English and French, and was as capable with the shotgun as the needle. The flag was captured by Major Jackson of the Forest Rangers in a raid on a Māori camp in the Upper Wairoa district on 13 December 1863.

Gordon drew the flag in November 1913, when it was still in the possession of Mrs Jackson. One month later and exactly fifty years after its capture, the descendants of Jackson and the survivors of the Rangers presented the flag to the city of Auckland. The Aotearoa flag was displayed for many years in the Auckland Public Library, and was described in its accompanying plaque as ‘an historic memento and token of friendship between the two races’.

Just as the flag has been recontextualised throughout its history — from its origins as a symbol of a newly forged Māori identity, to a war trophy, to an emblem of friendship between Māori and Pākehā — so too has Gordon’s drawing. It invites consideration of the complex histories of exchange, acculturation and appropriation both within Māori culture and between Māori and Pākehā.

1. JA Thomson, ‘Report of the Director of the Dominion Museum 1915–16’, extract from report of the Department of Internal Affairs, Annual to the Journals of the House of Representatives, H-33, 1916, p. 4.

Rebecca Rice