Te Kooti attacks Matawhero

Te Kooti and his followers killed approximately 60 people – roughly equal numbers of Māori and Pākehā – in the Matawhero ‘massacre’. The attack was utu (revenge) for Te Kooti’s treatment after his capture at Waerenga-a-hika three years earlier.

Just before midnight on 9 November 1868, around 100 men, 60 of them on horseback, forded the Waipāoa River near Pātūtahi on the Poverty Bay flats. They moved quietly towards the nearby Pākehā settlement of Matawhero. By dawn they had killed about 60 people in Matawhero and the adjacent kāinga (Māori village) and torched their homes. The victims ranged from babies to the elderly. Some were shot, but most were despatched with bayonets, tomahawks or patu to avoid alerting their neighbours. Those who escaped the slaughter ran across the fields or along the beach to Tūranganui (Gisborne), 6 km away, crossed the river and sought safety in a redoubt. Half a dozen families fled south towards Māhia. Hundreds of local Māori were taken prisoner or joined the war party with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

The violence was savage, but not random. The leader of the war party, Te Kooti Rikirangi of Rongowhakaata, was exacting utu for the indignities heaped upon him since he had been accused of aiding Pai Mārire adherents during the 1865 siege of Waerenga-a-hika. Exiled to the Chatham Islands, he developed the religious movement which was to become known as Ringatū. In July 1868 he led a revolt and brought 300 men, women and children back to Poverty Bay in a captured schooner. His request for safe passage to Waikato was rejected by the local magistrate, Major Reginald Biggs – the man who had sent Te Kooti to the Chathams. Biggs and his family were among those killed at Matawhero.

Image: Te Kooti (Alexander Turnbull Library)