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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
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).
This extract was authored by Rebecca Rice.
In New Zealand, flags could move between iwi (from ‘friendly’ Māori to ‘rebel’ Māori and vice versa), or were more often captured by the British and colonial forces. Ultimately many were ‘recaptured’ by public institutions, displayed as trophies in international exhibitions and colonial museums. As flags moved between different contexts, meanings shifted and changed. The ‘Aotearoa’ flag, drawn by WF Gordon after the original flag in Auckland Museum, highlights the changing meanings these charged objects could hold. The caption to the drawing reads:
This handsome flag was captured by the Forest Rangers under Major Jackson on Dec 13th 1863 in an engagement about 5 miles north of Paparata. It is very neatly made of crimson silk, white calico & black luster. The maker was a young half-caste Jane Russell now Mrs Jane Foley of Rotorua.
This is an exceptional example in that the maker, circumstances of capture and subsequent history of the flag are all known . . .
This flag was captured by the Forest Rangers in a raid on a secluded Māori camp near Ararimu in the Upper Wairoa district on 13 December 1863.1 According to New Zealand Wars veteran and historian Thomas Gudgeon, 20 minutes after the charge, which was considered a success by the British, a Māori returned to the camp and took a tin box from a whare.2 He was shot in the arm by a sentry and dropped the box, which was quickly rushed upon by the Rangers and found to contain three flags, one of which was the Aotearoa flag. The flags had been entrusted to the man’s care, but in the suddenness and surprise of the attack he had left them behind, then risked his life in attempting to recover them. Flags were entrusted only to the bravest and most resourceful of men; this toa was clearly one such man.
Another European tradition was that flags captured in battle could be returned to their original owners as a mark of friendship. The Aotearoa flag taken by Major Jackson was drawn by Gordon years later, when it was in the possession of Jackson’s widow. Fifty years after the capture of the flag, on 13 December 1913, Jackson’s descendants and the surviving members of the Rangers presented it to the City of Auckland as ‘an historic memento and token of friendship between the two races’.3
1 The exact location is annotated on William Francis Gordon’s ‘Map with inscriptions showing locality of where Captain Jackson captured Kingitanga flag’, c.1900, annotated map. Te Papa, CA000162/001/0014/0004.
2 Thomas Wayth Gudgeon, The Defenders of New Zealand (H Brett, Auckland, 1887), p. 106.
3 Quoted from the plaque accompanying the presentation of the flag to the City of Auckland Public Library, correspondence from City of Auckland Public Library to Herbert Roth, ‘Notes on New Zealand flags’, Alexander Turnbull Library.