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Man of Iron
The Extraordinary Story of New Zealand WWI Hero Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone
By Jock Vennell Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2015 Jock Vennell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-501-4
CHAPTER 1
Carved from the Bush
'Those who arrive in the colony without capital will, if they enjoy good health, are sober and economical in their personal expenses, and are able and willing to work at any one trade, as farm servants, boatmen, shepherds or house servants, soon realize a sufficient capital to invest in land, cattle or sheep, and thus to render themselves and their children independent.' — New Zealand Settlers Guide, 1857
On 12 August 1880, a 21-year-old city-bred boy stepped ashore in Wellington after a twelve-week voyage from England in the immigrant ship Western Monarch. The Monarch was an iron-hulled, three-masted barque of 1315 tons, 'splendidly equipped for the convenience and comfort of passengers'. It was not equipped, however, for the comfort of young William Malone. As an assisted immigrant, he travelled steerage class, the cheapest and most basic accommodation aboard ship.
How the new immigrant occupied himself for the next eight months is unknown, but on 28 March 1881 he arrived by ship at the port of New Plymouth. Always correct, he turned to the lighterman who had rowed him and his luggage ashore and offered him sixpence as a tip. The man looked at the coin for a moment and then handed it back. 'You'll be needing this,' he said. In class-divided England, one only tipped 'inferiors' — coach-drivers, servants, tradesmen and others. Here in the colonies a different set of rules applied and Malone was given an early lesson in the egalitarian spirit of the frontier.
The Malone brothers were part of a wave of assisted immigrants, mostly from the British Isles, that began in the mid-1870s under the settlement schemes fostered by the government of Sir William Fox and Sir Julius Vogel. Malone's earliest impressions of his new country are unknown, but it would have been clear that much was different. Crown and private land purchases, railways, roads and bridges dominated the politics of the new colony. Provinces competed to attract public money and by modern standards there were 'quite unacceptable' links between business and politics.
Taranaki itself was an isolated and undeveloped region that only eight years before had put behind it the worst of the wars with Maori over land. The coastal area of the province had been settled in the 1840s, but the remainder was still covered, as one early settler put it, by 'thick primeval rainforest, almost impenetrable except to a torpedo-shaped wild pig'.
Within a month of his arrival Malone had joined the Armed Constabulary, in which his brother Austin had been serving since 1878. The paramilitary constabulary was the colony's first national police force and had been the mainstay of its defences during the last years of the land wars. When not engaged in active soldiering, it spent much of its time cutting roads, bridging rivers and helping to lay telephone lines.
The force had operated successfully in the rugged bush country of the central North Island, but not without its share of reverses. A contingent was with Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas McDonnell when his force was ambushed at Te Ngutu and its colourful divisional commander, Major Gustavus Von Tempsky, killed. Two months later, the constabulary was part of the force commanded by Colonel George Whitmore that attacked Titokowaru's camp at Moturoa but was repulsed with heavy losses.
For a decade or more after the land wars, the blue-uniformed constabulary protected the borders of European-occupied territory where tensions between Maori and settlers were still high. At the time the Malones joined the force, it was manning redoubts and blockhouses at Opunake, Pungarehu, Manaia, Rahotu and Normanby in Taranaki. In the upper Waikato, it guarded the border between settlers and the hostile Kingite tribes. Everywhere across the frontier its ensigns flew and 'Pakeha law kept watch on the still glowering natives'.
Malone would soon see active service with the Armed Constabulary. In Taranaki, around 500,000 hectares of Maori land had been confiscated during the war of the 1860s. The land west of the confiscation line was compulsorily purchased in blocks for roads, railways and European settlement. East of the line the tribes were free to sell or not as they chose. In this arrangement lay the seeds of future conflict.
By the late 1870s land-hungry settlers were taking an increasing interest in the Waimate Plains region of south Taranaki — land that had already been confiscated from the Taranaki tribes. In 1879, the government began surveying 6500 hectares of the plains without informing local Maori that land would also be set aside for tribal reserves.
Te Whiti and his people had settled at nearby Parihaka and were determined to resist, albeit by peaceful means, any encroachment on what they still saw as their land. Tensions rose as Maori from Parihaka pulled up the surveyors' pegs and ploughed up settler farms from White Cliffs in the north to Hawera in the south.
Fearing that this show of resistance was a prelude to armed conflict, the government accelerated the construction of a road stretching from New Plymouth south to Wanganui and across the North Island to Napier. Its purpose was to link isolated bush settlements across the centre of the island and create strategically important new ones, specifically on the 65-kilometre section that ran through untouched virgin forest behind Mt Taranaki.
By these means, the government aimed to isolate Te Whiti and his followers in western Taranaki and stop any reinforcements from other tribal areas in the North Island reaching Parihaka. A secondary aim was to prevent Te Whiti and his warriors escaping into the forests to the east where they could carry on guerrilla warfare of the type recently engaged in by Te Kooti on the North Island's east coast.
Meanwhile, arms and ammunition were shipped in and volunteer militia units set up in all the new settlements. In Stratford, the military commander for north Taranaki, Major Charles Stapp, enrolled 33 volunteers in the Stratford Rangers Defence Volunteers. Captain T.M. Smith was appointed its commander and Sergeant William Malone its drill instructor.
The Curtis brothers' general store in Stratford was loopholed and lined with iron plates to stop attackers setting fire to the building. A deep trench was dug around the store and a breastwork built up, behind which the defenders could shelter and fire. Provisions to last 50 men for six months were laid in and the railway station converted into a stockade to protect Stratford families, including the Malones, should hostilities break out.
In October 1881, the government moved to put an end to Te Whiti's defiance at Parihaka. By now the settlement was New Zealand's largest Maori community, a place of cultural and spiritual regeneration, a gathering place for Maori worried about the future of their race and lands. Delegations from North Island tribes who looked to Te Whiti as their counsellor and saviour were also living there.
On 5 November, a force of 1600 volunteer militia and Armed Constabulary, led by Native Minister John Bryce and including Constable William Malone, surrounded Parihaka. The advance party that entered the village was met not by armed warriors but by a group of singing, skipping children and a thousand Maori adults sitting peacefully on the marae.
Te Whiti urged his people not to resist and surrendered himself peacefully to the constabulary. Houses were then ransacked in a search for weapons and some were pulled down. Maori from outside tribes were dispersed to their homelands, and Te Whiti and other Maori leaders were charged with sedition and jailed.
In a travesty of Pakeha justice, Te Whiti spent two years in jail without being brought to trial. The government's purpose was clear: to destroy Parihaka as a place where Maori could pose a threat to settler security and to smooth the way for European occupation of the Waimate Plains.
By December, many of the Maori expelled from Parihaka were facing starvation. Bryce offered them a humiliating option — road-making and fencing work in preparation for the subdivision of their land. The government then decreed that 5000 acres (2000 hectares) of the land set aside as reserves for Parihaka Maori would be withheld as compensation for 'the loss sustained by the government in suppressing the Parihaka sedition'. As historian Keith Sinclair put it, 'Te Whiti was locked up, and after inadequate reserves had been made, his lands were unlocked.'
Malone's thoughts about this shabby affair are unknown, but he was young and as a member of the constabulary probably spoiling for a fight. Like most Taranaki settlers at the time, he was unlikely to have had much sympathy for those who were occupying confiscated land, holding up the advance of European settlement and defying Pakeha law. Ironically, if it had not been for Te Whiti's passive resistance to European incursions into what was once tribal land, the North Island frontier would inevitably have erupted again into war.
In April 1882, Malone resigned from the Armed Constabulary and with his brother Austin took a job crewing the government surf boats that ferried passengers and cargo to and from the ships anchored off Opunake Beach. It was a job for risk-takers, requiring skill, judgement and good teamwork. For two city-bred boys from London, it would have been a useful preparation for the physical challenges ahead.
Meanwhile, forest had been cleared for the new settlements of Inglewood, Stratford and Midhirst, and new immigrants encouraged to take up land in and around them. In 1882, the Malones' widowed mother and their two sisters, Agnes and Louisa, followed the brothers to New Zealand. Together the family purchased a small block of Crown-owned forest land five kilometres outside Stratford on the Opunake road. The land was bought on the deferred payment system, which allowed settlers with limited capital to occupy and develop their selections until they were in a position to buy them outright.
For families of limited means, as the Malones almost certainly were, Taranaki bush land was a better proposition than open country elsewhere in the North Island. It could often be bought for a quarter of the price and required only an axe, saw, slasher and some grass seed to get a first crop under way. The forest provided all the materials needed for a home, farm buildings, fences and furniture, plus unlimited fuel for fires.
The Stratford the Malones came to was a raw frontier village sited on forest land that the settler government had confiscated from the Maori tribes during the land wars of the 1860s. Once the site had been established, the surveyors and bush-felling gangs moved in. Flames from the massive burn-offs that followed were reported to have risen over 30 metres into the air and great columns of smoke from what was once dense virgin forest could be seen as far away as New Plymouth.
By the time the Malones arrived, the village had taken root. Amongst the stumps and fallen logs squatted a general store, a butchery and bakery, a post office, a police station, and a hotel selling 'spirituous liquors' where hundreds of men from the railway and roading gangs brawled and drank. Over the settlement brooded fire-blackened rata trees, left standing after the bush had been burnt off and new grass sown. Stratford, like the other forest settlements along the mountain road, was forged in fire.
Close to the Malones' bush selection ran the strategic road connecting New Plymouth in the north of the province to Hawera in the south. Driven by gangs of newly arrived immigrants in the early 1870s, it roughly followed the old Whaka-ahurangi track, which in pre-European times had linked the tribes of northern and southern Taranaki. During the Taranaki campaign of 1866, General Chute and his force of British regulars, Forest Rangers, and 'friendly' Maori had made a gruelling ten-day march across the track from Waitotara to New Plymouth, destroying Maori villages, fortified pa and crops as they went.
By the late 1870s, the track had been transformed into a mostly passable road — at least in dry weather — taking cattle north from Patea to the river port of Waitara, and a new wave of settlers, including the Malones, south to their bush farms under the mountain. In 1879, Charles Chavannes drove his coach from Inglewood to Hawera in ten hours, uncoupling his horses at steep cuttings while road gangs lowered the coach, minus its passengers, on ropes.
Having taken up their selection, the Malones began the work of converting virgin forest into productive farmland. Like most of Taranaki's earlier settlers, they first cleared enough land for a small cottage of ponga logs with a tramped-earth floor, a large garden, perhaps an orchard, and a few cows to provide milk, home-made butter and cheese. Wooden fences were built to protect the garden and keep in the livestock. Bread was made in a camp oven and wild cattle, pigs and native pigeons were hunted for meat.
Used to a comfortable middle-class life in suburban London, the Malone brothers would have had little in the way of farming knowledge or hunting skills. In the early years at least, they would have had to rely heavily on the know-how of neighbouring farmers, carpenters and bushmen, many of them former rural labourers from England with several years of frontier experience now behind them.
Over the next year, a home of pit-sawn timber was built while more of the forest on their land was cleared, burnt off and grass seed sown in the ashes. The stumps of trees were steadily cleared with axes, timber jacks and blasting powder — a long and tedious job. A year later, the Hawera & Normanby Star reported, with no hint of mockery, that Messrs Malone had completed 'one of the handsomest dwellings in the district'.
Two years later, the Malones bought a larger bush farm, also on the Opunake road, and shifted the house they had built to it, piece by piece, by bullock wagon. Progress on their new selection in the following years, however, was not quick enough for the authorities. They were reprimanded by the Lands Board for not clearing the forest felled on their land and sowing it in grass seed within the time required by their licence-to-occupy. As defaulters, they were required to show why their small holding should not now be forfeited — a serious threat that had to be countered and obviously was.
The Malones had not timed their arrival in New Zealand well. The colony was in the grip of a long depression and times were tough. Most settlers who had taken up land in Taranaki were reduced to little more than subsistence farming, their only income coming from local sales of grass seed, butter and 'Taranaki wool' — the edible fungus that grew on the stumps of fallen logs. Many were working on road and railway gangs to earn enough to pay off their loans and leases and develop their small holdings.
All of this was to change with the introduction of refrigerated shipping in 1882, which dramatically improved the economics of colonial farming. Meat and dairy products could now be produced efficiently on small holdings and shipped halfway across the world to the British market. Other new technology and infrastructure in the form of cooperative dairy factories, freezing works and coolstores transformed farming in Taranaki in the 1880s and 1890s as it did elsewhere in the country.
By 1891, the Malones had combined with twenty other dairy farmers in the Cardiff district to build a small dairy factory, along with a school and a Methodist church. For these families, and others across the province, the raw subsistence farming of the 1880s was steadily giving way to farming for profit. In 1891, the Malones sent 44 sacks of potatoes by ship to Auckland in company with 40 cattle, 3000 feet of timber, 7 kegs of butter, 35 animal hides, 40 sacks of bran and 5 tons of scrap iron.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Man of Iron by Jock Vennell. Copyright © 2015 Jock Vennell. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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