Difficult Histories: The New Zealand Wars

How do New Zealanders remember and forget difficult events in the colonial past? Why are some conflicts publicly remembered while others are forgotten or overlooked? And who decides? 


This is the channel for our Marsden Fund project 'He Taonga Te Wareware? Remembering and Forgetting Difficult Histories in Aotearoa/New Zealand', led by Professor Joanna Kidman and Dr Vincent O'Malley. Here we share videos from our fieldwork visiting sites connected to the New Zealand Wars and reflecting on this history, along with other relevant resources. 

This project takes us directly into some of the tribal communities at the epicentre of large-scale military invasions during the 1860s. In parallel with these accounts, we look at how the nation’s violent colonial past was transformed in public memory; how official state accounts of these events changed over time and why some episodes were collectively forgotten or overlooked.