Murdering Beach mystery remains...
There is a place which once had a bloody name. At this place, men died; blood shed in the name of fierce, uncompromising retribution, but very few people know who the victims were. JOANNA NORRIS looks at the violet history of the beach formerly known as Murdering.
Murdering Beach. The name conjures a thousand images, yet the truth is harder to find.
There is some contention about how this bloody name came to be bestowed an the tiny, now peaceful cove near Port Chalmers, a few kilometres west of the entrance to Otago Harbour. However, such ponderings are likely, to be confined to academic realms following the name change, which obscures the beach's gory past.
The New Zealand Geographic Board, in consultation with local iwi, Ngai Tahu, has changed back to the original Maori name, Whareakeake, meaning, "whare made of the bush akeake": pleasant, simple and descriptive.
But what of the old name? Descriptive, yes. Pleasant, no.
There are two main versions of this tale. The first is told by one of the key protagonists, a colonial sea captain of some standing in Antipodean history, and the second by historians, who argue the good captain simply got it wrong.
Version one:
Captain James Kelly, aboard the sealing brig Sophia, anchored at Whareakeake (which he called Small Bay) in December 1817.
Kelly and a party, including sealer William Tucker, went ashore at Small Bay to trade with Maori, only to be attacked, according to a description of events published in the Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter in 1818.
In the bloody fight that followed, Tucker and two others were killed, but Kelly escaped and returned to his ship.
He found several Maori on board, but, according to the report, took no revenge. The motive for this unexpected attack (the Europeans were so confident of the friendly nature of the Maori, they had left their firearms on their ship): the "recollection of two or more of their people being shot by Europeans".
Version two is a little more involved.
Historians argue the trading of Maori artefacts, including tattooed heads, forced a decline in the relationship between Maori and European sealers which resulted in a bloody conflict at Whareakeake.
A letter published in the Sydney Gazette in January 1820 appears evidence that Tucker was involved in the grim trade.
"The first of these heads that l remember to have been brought up was by a wild fellow of the name of Tucker in 1811, who got it by plunder; and so tenacious were the natives at that time of these heads, that a whole boat's crew were nearly cut off for the crime of this villain. The crew had, an hour before the sacrilege committed by Tucker, been upon the most friendly footing with the natives; when suddenly an alarm burst out and had the vessel not got immediately away, a hundred war canoes would have boarded her at once.
The same letter writer, who used the name Candor, said sealers "committed every species of depredation upon natives for the purpose of obtaining curiosities".
"It is little wonder then that vessels calling occasionally at native settlements along the Otago coast were received in the spirit of hostility", A,H. McLintock writes in History of Otago (1949).
The motive for the attack against Kelly and his men, therefore, is presumed to be the presence of Tucker, the man who had stolen a sacred tattooed head from Riverton some years before. Utu, or revenge, was exacted against Tucker and, according to the law of utu, his associates.
It is what happened next that is most contentious. Dunedin historian Enk Olssen, in A History of Otago (1984), and McLintock agree Kelly then carried out his own murderous retribution by burning a village of up to 600 houses. They are not clear which village was the target and question the scale of destruction.
Reports of the size which would make the destroyed village one of the largest in the country, came from the Hobart Town Courier in 1858, when Kelly was still alive, which were claimed to have been written from Kelly's logs. The report was reprinted in the Otago Witness the same year
Local historian and writer Peter Entwisle argues that the village burned was not Whareakeake, but a village where Otakou now stands. He said the sealers were likely to have panicked, viewing all Maori as hostile threats, after the unexpected attack at Whareakeake.
The incident was part of a wider conflict, he said, going so far to suggest it was just one incident in a minor Maori war. The theory and evidence of this are outlined in his book about the European occupation of Dunedin, Behold the Moon (1998).
Tucker was attacked at Murdering Beach because he had stolen the head. If Kelly had not been an associate of Tucker he would not have been attacked, he said when interviewed.
The theft of the head resulted in several attacks on European sealers by Maori. All were post-1810 and all involved associates of Tucker.
By my tally, 155 people were dead by 1823. Some of these are Maori and some are Pakeha. There was an otherwise forgotten war between Maori and Pakeha in the south,"said Mr Entwistle.
"Awful events did happen there and it's important that we don't gloss over it. We've managed to airbrush this whole thing out of our consciousness and its important that we remember that something bad happened here long ago. At the start of it, it was the Maori who were the victims".
Nowadays, no-one lives at Whareakeake. Three cribs set back off the beach are closed up for much of the year and the beach is more likely to be visited by oyster-catchers and shags than people who have braved the difficult road.
Driftwood litters the beach like the bleached bones Of those who died here, but now the only hostilities are likely to be bickering siblings fighting over the last sandwich in the family picnic basket.
Article from the Otago Daily Times, February 11, 2002