Studies and Research Take a Hip History Trip Personal Profiles |
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STUDIES AND RESEARCH
Writing in progress ..
The purpose of Studies and Research is to compile a record of research underway in the New Zealand Wars field. Our hope is to gather information about where the New Zealand Wars is being taught, research underway plus seminars, conferences, short-courses, publications and so on, given that the New Zealand Wars has generated (and will continue to generate) a reasonably large literature.
The New Zealand Land Wars
Class of 2001, Taranaki field trip: Te Arei Pa, Waitara Richard is top
row, far right; and Hazel is middle (jumbled) row, about 3-4 in from left.
Mr Hip Fenton (centre) with Major Mike Ruki, New Zealand Army (left),
and Malcolm Clewitt, Driver, New Zealand Army. Malcolm drove our bus
for about 8 years in a row; and came to know the terrible Taranaki back
roads particularly well.
This paper is currently taught at Massey University, Palmerston North.
Until the end of 2004, it was taught by Dr Danny Keenan, with Dr Hazel Riseborough and Major Richard Taylor assisting. Richard's focus was the campaigns history. Hazel's interest was the post-war consequences of prolonged conflict upon Maori people.
Teaching the paper was a great pleasure for us. One of the best aspects was the two-day field trip around South and North Taranaki, visiting the battle sites. Responses from students who took part was always memorable.
The site tours were made possible by the New Zealand Army who provided the bus (a good number of the students were from the Officer Corps - the NZ Wars paper was a mandatory part of their Defence Studies degree).
Until recently, students were accompanied on these site visits by local Te Atiawa kaumatua, Mr Hip Fenton. Hip was a local Waitara historian who possessed a huge knowledge of the North Taranaki campaigns and landscape. Hip used to run fascinating and popular tours of local sites - Hip's History Trips, as he used to call them. See Take a Hip History Trip (top left of this page) for more information about Hip, who sadly passed away on 13 August 2005.
Te Arei Pa, Upper Waitara River
Quite a deserted place but wonderful to visit and look around
For each site tour, each year, we used to prepare a fairly basic programme and itinerary. At the end of the itinerary, by way of conclusion, we inserted the following, by way of 'epigraph' (it was a paraphrase of Thomas Gray, of course) but unhappily no-one ever noticed ..
" The students homeward plod their weary way
And leave the sites to darkness, and to history."