Australian and New Zealand History / Studies

 

Bryan McClure

Department of History, Western University

Marking the entrance of Jubilee Park in the town of Te Puke in Bay of Plenty, Aotearoa (New Zealand) stands a twelve-foot tall marble arch. Writing on the pillars in English and Te Rao identifies it as a war memorial to Hera Takuira, a young Māori woman who died in 1918. Erected to commemorate one person, the memorial demonstrates the struggles of the Māori to gain recognition from settler communities as their attempts to showcase loyal service did not translate into meaningful action.

Hera was a teenager during the war, the daughter of

The JD Stout Lecture 2014

Vincent O’Malley

JD Stout Fellow 2014

will present

The Waikato War: Myth, History and the ‘Art of Forgetting’

Collective memories, like individual ones, can be selective. We sometimes choose what we remember. And those choices are often instructive. But as scholars have also noted, there is an art to forgetting. It can be more than simply the absence of memory. This talk surveys how the Waikato War has been remembered, or forgotten, historically and asks what this reveals about New Zealand’s foundational myths and narratives.

Date:               Wednesday 24 September