By Rhonda Bartle

Nigel Ogle has been living with a dead man for more than 20 years, but if things go to plan he will bring him to life again soon. The dead man is Kimble Bent, a soldier from the 57th Regiment, who deserted during the South Taranaki wars of the 1860's to live amongst Maori for 16 years.  Ogle is hoping to produce a book about Bent's life for school children.

Ogle is the visionary behind the Tawhiti Museum, one of the few privately owned museums in the country, and what sets him apart is not just his amazing three dimensional dioramas but his passion for bringing history to life. 

His motivation is as complex as it is simple to understand; a love of old things, a love of social history and community, a love of art and the creative process.

Among the cast of characters on display at Tawhiti is Kimble Bent, whose roaring tale was plucked from the lips of the old Pakeha-Maori himself by historian James Cowan for The Adventures of Kimble Bent: A Story of Wild Life in the New Zealand Bush.

Written in Boy's Own Prose, Ogle says, 'the title says it all.'

'I discovered the book back in 1973, in my last year at teacher's training college and it just knocked me out completely.' 

Raised on a farm just a couple of kilometres from Turuturu Mokai, Ogle was stunned to find a history book containing the names of places he knew well.

'As kids we spent a lot of time there, it was a big playground, and I thought, My God, all this happened in my own backyard.  '

Kimble Bent, who hailed from Maine, USA, and claimed he was half red Indian, 'took to the blanket' in 1865, after being sent with his regiment to Manawapou, near Hawera, to help quell the Hauhau uprising.

Bent decided he wasn't cut out to be a soldier - he didn't like taking orders for a start - and after 25 lashes and a stint in jail, went bush. When found by a Hauhau warrior, he said he wanted to live with the Māori and make them his people.

For the next 16 years, in the company of the prophet Te Ua Haumene and later Titokowaru, Kimble Bent watched Taranaki history unfold from the wrong side of the history books. The novel Monday's Warriors by the late Maurice Shadbolt was loosely based on those experiences.

For Ogle, it seemed hard to believe Cowan's book wasn't fiction.  'And I think that was the appeal, the story was real.'

Nothing came close to it in terms of uniqueness.

'We are just so lucky to have it. No other account gives us that view. All the other accounts of the war are official, or have originated from official military sources, and after a while they all seem to read very similarly, really. But this one has a far more personal touch and has been expressed in a European way, through European eyes but from a Maori perspective.'

No European was meant to witness the things Bent did, yet his account turned the main players of the wars into real people.

'Bent sat down with Te Ua Haumene, the prophet who, in official accounts is totally demonised, and ate with him. We meet them as real people, rather than seeing them from a military point of view, or reading about them in the emotive language Europeans used all the time.' 

The same kind of language, Ogle says, that is employed to describe the Iraqi war today, like terrorists, blood thirsty, butchers...

'All the phrases you can imagine used to describe those on the other side.  Kimble Bent didn't use any of that kind of language. These were people he lived with and ate his pork and potatoes with.'

 After finishing at training college, Ogle found himself posted back to familiar soil.  The first thing he did was join the Hawera Historical Society. The second thing he did was start asking about the book.

 'I thought, as you do when you find these things, that I was the first person in the world to discover it. At one of the first meetings I went, 'I've got this book!' And they all went, 'Yes, yes, we've got that.' They knew about it, but at the time the land wars were still very much a subject that was spoken about quietly. I saw some concern about bringing this sort of thing out. 'It's not really necessary, Nigel...' some of them said.'

But it was not just Bent's memoirs that took Ogle over, it was treaty issues. When he read both volumes of Cowan's The New Zealand Wars and the Pioneering Period that the Government commissioned him to write, there was no turning back. After reading James Belich's thesis on Titokowaru, which would one day form the basis of I Shall Not Die, he was hooked.

'And Belich, of course questioned everything Cowan had said, especially the motivation for the attack on Turuturu Mokai, which again, that's my patch. I thought, hey, hold on, you're talking about a piece of land that's very dear to me here.'

 Belich, many years down the track from Cowan, and with the benefit of hindsight, had looked at the overall picture and seen something quite new. 'He was just like a breath of fresh air. Here was someone obviously with brains and some study behind him and he looked at the whole campaign and the rise of Titokowaru just so differently.' 

Around 1980, Ogle had just begun putting together something of his museum when he decided to produce a book about the land wars for school children. He met with Tim Ryan of Wellington who, along with Bill Parham, published The Colonial New Zealand Wars.

Nigel Ogle's Tawiti Museum

'Tim said he would come up and see me and he brought some models up. For the first time I saw someone actually trying to model New Zealand history, like Heke meeting the Government at the Bay of Islands. Wonderful little scaled scenes. I looked at these and thought that it was the greatest way of selling history to kids. So my idea of the book got put on the back burner while I pursued the modelling thing.'

Ogle knows his display on Kimble Bent works well on many levels but says it doesn't go far enough. People who come knocking on his door can't be expected to take in the whole story in one hit.

While the Cowan book is available from Southern Reprints, it's quite gory in places and a difficult read for kids. 'Though probably if they started into it, they'd love it.'

He is hoping the Hawera Historical Society will gain TSB funding to publish a different kind of book, one that immediately captures interest and sustains it using glossy paper, rich quotes and modern text.

Nigel Ogle and one of his museum models

'The hard work has been done, building the models and cutting down the wealth of info into digestible chunks, so why not put it into book form, with photos of the dioramas and the artefacts?

 'It's time, surely, for a book that can go out to schools, so the kids can say, 'Hey, these places still exist. This is where Kimble Bent walked'.'