Peter Walker (3)
Author of The Courier's Tale
For other authors named Peter Walker, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Peter Walker is a New Zealander who has lived in London since 1986. He worked for seven years on the Independent and for three on the Independent on Sunday where he was Foreign Editor. He has also written for the Financial Times and Granta
Image credit: Peter Walker. Photo by Simon Birkenfeld (Manatū Taonga).
Works by Peter Walker
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This month's choice for #AYearofNZLit is an historical memoir from expat New Zealand author Peter Walker. I came across it over a decade ago when I read on Beattie's (now inactive) Book Blog that Walker had been appointed Writer in Residence at Wellington’s Randell Cottage for 2011.
'Book of the moment'? That intrigued me and I bought it. Almost a quarter of century after its first publication The Fox Boy is now one of many excursions into the global colonial past, but I suspect that it is still as confronting for New Zealanders as it was when it was written. Kiwis, as we discovered on our trip to NZ in 2019, have a forthright tendency to take the moral high ground with Australians, not least because they had a treaty with the Māori as early as 1840, and that Treaty of Waitangi conferred on the Māori the Rights of British Subjects.
Which included the right to be recognised in the courts of law which were busy dealing with rapacious land acquisitions by the Pākehā. Which did not prevent the 1845-72 New Zealand Wars — which began with localised disputed land purchases, but escalated from 1860 onward because the government feared united Māori resistance to further land sales and a refusal to acknowledge Crown sovereignty. They implemented a punitive land confiscation policy against any 'rebels' trying to defend their land which only exacerbated the conflict.
Walker's book explores the fallout of those wars, triggered by his discovery of a postcard. That little boy on the front cover of the book is Ngātau Omahuru, who witnessed the murder of two other children during the 1868 battle of The Beak of the Bird but was rescued by a man called Pirimona, who passed him onto a man called Herewini, who carried him on his back during the fighting. But after the battle he became a trophy, adopted by the politician Sir William Fox, renamed and remade in his own image. Sir William was #understatement not a nice man, and his motives were suspect, but his wife Sarah loved the little waif, and he came to love her when he was taken to live with her after three years in a Māori hostelry in Wellington.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/06/29/the-fox-boy-2001-by-peter-walker/ show less
Peter Walker works as a journalist in London, and is the author of the historical memoir The Fox Boy (Bloomsbury 2001) set in Taranaki and dubbed ‘book of the moment’ by The Daily Telegraph, and anshow more
historical novel The Couriers Tale (Bloomsbury 2010).
'Book of the moment'? That intrigued me and I bought it. Almost a quarter of century after its first publication The Fox Boy is now one of many excursions into the global colonial past, but I suspect that it is still as confronting for New Zealanders as it was when it was written. Kiwis, as we discovered on our trip to NZ in 2019, have a forthright tendency to take the moral high ground with Australians, not least because they had a treaty with the Māori as early as 1840, and that Treaty of Waitangi conferred on the Māori the Rights of British Subjects.
Which included the right to be recognised in the courts of law which were busy dealing with rapacious land acquisitions by the Pākehā. Which did not prevent the 1845-72 New Zealand Wars — which began with localised disputed land purchases, but escalated from 1860 onward because the government feared united Māori resistance to further land sales and a refusal to acknowledge Crown sovereignty. They implemented a punitive land confiscation policy against any 'rebels' trying to defend their land which only exacerbated the conflict.
Walker's book explores the fallout of those wars, triggered by his discovery of a postcard. That little boy on the front cover of the book is Ngātau Omahuru, who witnessed the murder of two other children during the 1868 battle of The Beak of the Bird but was rescued by a man called Pirimona, who passed him onto a man called Herewini, who carried him on his back during the fighting. But after the battle he became a trophy, adopted by the politician Sir William Fox, renamed and remade in his own image. Sir William was #understatement not a nice man, and his motives were suspect, but his wife Sarah loved the little waif, and he came to love her when he was taken to live with her after three years in a Māori hostelry in Wellington.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/06/29/the-fox-boy-2001-by-peter-walker/ show less
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