The attack at Matawhero

Matawhero, a small settlement in Poverty Bay near Tūranga (Gisborne), was personal for Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki. While he was held without trial on Wharekauri (Chatham Island), his land there had been occupied by Major Reginald Biggs, the resident magistrate who had sent him into exile. The trader George Read had also taken land in the settlement. After the escape of July 1868 (see Te Kooti escapes from Rēkohu), Te Kooti waited at Puketapu pā, near Lake Waikaremoana, for answers to letters asking Tūhoe and the Māori King, Tāwhiao, to let him into their territories. On 29 October he received Tāwhiao's refusal, and Tūhoe would not fully commit to him. With nowhere else to go, he turned back towards Poverty Bay, declaring that 'God would give the Tūranganui country, and all the best places of the Europeans, back to him and his people'. He wrote to his kin in Tūranga telling them to stay outwardly loyal to the government while gathering arms for his return.

Shortly before midnight on 9 November 1868 Te Kooti and about 100 men moved on Matawhero. NZHistory says he was precise about who was to die: Biggs and Captain James Wilson, whom he called 'Pharaoh's overseers', and those who occupied Read's claim or were living on Māori land. Biggs was dragged from his house and beaten to death with his wife Emily, their infant son and his nurse. Some victims were shot, but most were killed with bayonets, tomahawks or patu (clubs) so as not to alert their neighbours. Judith Binney's biography of Te Kooti records that he also ordered the execution of some prisoners, including women and children, followed by the singing of Psalm 63. Houses were set on fire, and those who escaped ran across the fields or along the beach to Tūranga, 8 km away.

The toll is uncertain. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography gives about 54 dead, more than 20 of them Māori. NZHistory's account of the war says nearly 60, in roughly equal numbers of Māori and Pākehā, and Te Ara gives about 60, including about 30 Māori. NZHistory's biography of Te Kooti and its Matawhero memorial page say about 70, and the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand gives 33 Europeans and 37 Māori. The killing continued over the following days. Te Kooti seized Pātūtahi and took about 300 Māori prisoners. On 12 November, at Ōweta pā, he had the chief Paratene Pototi (Tūrangi) executed, with five other chiefs according to NZHistory or six according to Binney. Paratene was said to have mocked Te Kooti when he was exiled, with the words 'Go on t' boat'. Binney calls these deaths, and Biggs's, Te Kooti's utu (revenge) for his betrayal, but adds that some deaths had a religious inspiration: a Māori survivor heard him say, 'God has told me to kill women & children, now fire on them.' The executions earned him powerful Māori enemies, but fear also brought him followers. On 17 November he began to withdraw towards Ngātapa.

Eight months later many of the European dead were exhumed from scattered graves and reburied on 2 July 1869 in riverside land set aside as a cemetery at Makaraka, near Gisborne. A memorial there, unveiled on 10 November 1872, four years to the day after the attack, records the names and ages of 33 European victims, 28 of them buried nearby, and is inscribed 'To the memory of those massacred by Te Kooti'. Many contemporaries called the attack 'one of the darkest days of New Zealand's history'. Later historians also weighed Te Kooti's grievances. The 1966 Encyclopaedia saw the attack as partly utu and partly a warning to the government that he 'was not to be trifled with'. Binney, writing in 1990, concluded that 'the well-springs of the war were his unjust imprisonment and bitter pursuit'.