Captain Gilbert Mair and Arawa Contingent at Kaiterikia Pa at Lake Rotokakahi, 1870

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 Michael Fitzgerald and Rebecca Rice.

The men in the photograph are identified as (from left to right): Captain Mair, NZC; Sergeant-Major Robert Gregory; Sergeant Aporo Apiata (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Whaoa); Corporal Henare Werahiko (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Whaoa); Sergeant Manahi Tumutahi (Ngāti Pikiao); Corporal Ngahaua (Ngāti Whakaue); Lance-Corporal Pauro te Waiewe (Ngāti Awa te Pahipoto); Rewi Rangiamio (Ngāti Manawa); Tahae-te-kati; Rukarei (Chief of Hawke’s Bay, Ngāti Manawa); Wī Hapi Rangiheuea (Tūhourangi); Ngamahirau (Tūhoe); Pareka Waikorine (Te Whakatōhea); Hona te Ngatete (Ngāti Tu); Piripi Hikairo (Ngāti Rangiwewehi); Komene Rawaru (Ngāti Awa).1

The Arawa Contingent, later known as the Arawa Flying Column, was one of the government’s most successful units in its war against Te Kooti. The column was made up of about 100 Te Arawa men recruited for their knowledge of the landscape and how to navigate it. Trained and commanded by Captain Gilbert Mair, they were stationed at Kaiteriria on the south-west tip of Lake Rotokākahi between 1870 and 1872.

A flying column is defined as ‘a force of troops equipped and organised to move swiftly and independently of a principal unit to which it is attached’.2 Employing indigenous soldiers to support professional colonising armies was a practice of empires all over the world, from the time of the Romans. The British and French, for instance, both employed Native American fighters to support their regular armies in North America during the eighteenth century.3

During the New Zealand Wars, local press described these locally recruited forces as ‘native allies’, which suggests attitudes reflecting an equitable relationship between Māori and Pākehā fighting for the Crown, especially in the later phases of the wars, when Māori were doing most of the fighting and were often heartily acknowledged for their actions in the press. The Arawa Flying Column was considered so effective that a case has recently been made that it can be regarded as a forerunner of the modern New Zealand army’s elite SAS force.4

 [This photograph] by English photographer Daniel Mundy was taken on 7 February 1870, following a particularly eventful day. In August 1913, the Otago Daily Times published an article by historian James Cowan that describes it in full:

[T]he other day I received from an East Coast correspondent a curious old historical photograph, taken on the shores of Lake Roto-Kakahi, in the Rotorua district, in 1870. He shows a fortified camp, and a line of Maoris, all trouserless and waist-shawled, and armed with short carbines, and at their head a bearded white officer, wearing a military jacket and forage-cap, but attired Maori-fashion as to his nether limbs, for from waist to knee he was girt in an embroidered Maori flax mat. Behind him stood another white officer; these were the only two pakehas in the warlike parade. In the picture also was seen a Maori war-flag. This scene . . . was the work of Mr Mundy, who travelled the Hot Lakes territory with his camera at the height of the Hauhau troubles when Te Kooti and his murderous caterans [marauders] were raiding in the immediate vicinity of Rotorua. The war-party shown was a portion of a column of Arawa Maoris fighting on the Government side, and their officer was Lieutenant (now Captain) Gilbert Mair, an uncommonly energetic and smart, as well as particularly courageous, young colonial soldier, and the photo was taken at an exceedingly interesting time – the evening of the very day on which the column defeated Te Kooti’s force in a gallant running fight extending over many miles of country. For that day’s work, full of wonderfully plucky actions on the part of the small Government column, Gilbert Mair received his captaincy and the decoration of the New Zealand Cross. It was only one of many lively fights in which he distinguished himself and justified the Maori name by which he had been known throughout the Native country for the past 50 years. ‘Taua’ is his Maori name, and a well-fitting one too, for it means ‘war party.’

According to ‘Taua’, or Mair, ‘Mr Mundy was so impressed with the picturesque appearance of my force winding its way down the fern-clad valley to Roto-Kākahi (the lake which Europeans now call the ‘Green Lake’, on the road to Lake Tarawera) that he begged me to halt the column (a hundred men) while he snapped them’.5

Daniel Mundy spent around nine years in New Zealand, making numerous expeditions into remote parts of the country. Seeing the Arawa Flying Column in front of a quietly majestic landscape would have appealed to Mundy’s interests in both landscape and picturing Māori people.6

1 See JC Andersen and GC Petersen, The Mair Family (AH & AW Reed, Wellington, 1956) and DM Stafford, Te Arawa: A history of the Arawa people [1967] (Reed Books, Auckland, 1991), pp. 446–47. 
2 Dictionary.com (dictionary.com/browse/flying-column, accessed 1 August 2023). 
3 Sibylle Scheipers, ‘Irregular auxiliaries after 1945’, International History Review, vol. 39, no. 1 (2017), pp. 14–29. 
4 Ron Crosby, ‘The Arawa Flying Columns – an early use of special forces in New Zealand’, in J Crawford and I McGibbon (eds), Tutu te Puehu – New Perspectives on the New Zealand Wars (Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2016), pp. 358–86. 
5 ‘“Taua’s” Adventures’, Otago Daily Times, 4 August 1913, p. 8. 
6 See Lissa Mitchell, ‘Promotional landscapes: DL Mundy’s “Photographic experiences in New Zealand”’, Tuhinga, no. 20 (2009), pp. 67–80.