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Captured By Maori – White Female Captives, Sex and Racism on the Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Frontier, Trevor Bentley
Penguin
Reviewed by Chris Hick (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

I must start with a confession. My knowledge of New Zealand history is like a George Bush speech – superficial, very selective and lacking any real depth. However, as a recent migrant (five years) to this green and pleasant land I try to enlighten myself as often as possible on the history of all things Kiwi.

Having recently endured the "great TV race debate" and heard the petulant remarks on cannibalism I was drawn to Trevor Bentley's rather long-windedly entitled book, Captured By Maori – White Female Captives, Sex and Racism on the Nineteenth-century New Zealand Frontier.

The book is packed with detailed aspects of Maori custom and culture (and, yes, cannibalism). It is a book about frontier hardships, friendships and conflicts. It is a brutal depiction of the European settlement of New Zealand.

Bentley's premise is that the reported accounts from the surviving women is at odds with the reality of their experiences. These experiences (to the reader sitting in peaceful and cosseted comfort 150 years after the event) are quite horrific as Bentley vividly describes them. However, frontier life at best, particularly for women, was harsher than most of us today could imagine, but for several of the captive women their status as convicts or fugitives made their burden inconceivable. It is within this context that Bentley presents his evidence.

His argument is compelling. The reported accounts from the surviving women were at odds with the reality of their experiences because their ordeals were manipulated to both denigrate and perpetuate Maori as savages. Writers and reporters were "the advance scouts for colonialism", whose writings described and classified the new people, commodities and lands for occupation and "... were part of the succession of visitors who often constructed images of Maori as treacherous, and white female captives as passive and vulnerable victims".

Fuelling European patriarchy and racism, "these images mobilised two powerful military expeditions to attack Maori ... ostensibly to recover captive females but in fact asserting European hierarchies of gender and race in the new land".

A couple of gripes I have with the book are that the 254 pages are based on very scant primary source material. As Bentley acknowledges, his argument is based on the experiences of only seven captured women and two girls. This tends to make his argument somewhat repetitive and lapse occasionally into sociological verbiage.

Nevertheless, it is a valid contribution of events past, helping achieve a better understanding of events present.