The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000

This monumental book explores New Zealand’s most uncomfortable, and therefore forgotten, war on New Zealand soil, a war fought between British forces, settlers, and the Waikato tribes. Its closest comparator in Australian history is Van Diemen’s Land’s Black War. Yet this discombobulating conflict also inspired New Zealand’s first film, Rewi’s Last Stand, a silent movie in 1925 that was remade as a talkie in 1940. This Kiwi culture classic was based on the battle of Orakau of 1864, the best known episode in the Waikato War, which O’Malley argues spurred the belief that New Zealand enjoyed the best race relations in the world. From the 1970s, with the Māori revival, the Pakeha version of Orakau could no longer be sustained, as James Belich also demonstrated in his revisionist history of the New Zealand Wars (1986).