George Henry Wilson

Wilson wrote a novel set in Pukerua that was published in London in 1874!

Pukerua was the setting for a full-length novel published in London in 1874. Ena or The Ancient Maori was written by George Henry Wilson.

Wilson arrived in Wellington on 30 March 1857 aboard the 432 ton barque Ann Wilson. In March 1868, while a storekeeper at Pāuatahanui, he walked up the Horokiwi Valley, down to Paekākāriki and along the coast to Pukerua, which he called “Pukarua.” Here he saw the remains of three large waka on the beach. He climbed from the beach up what he called “Church Hill” where there were a few planks from a church which he believed had last been used at least fourteen years before. This was the church that Nopera Te Ngiha mentioned in an 1871 Native Land Court hearing in Wellington: “When Hadfield came the church was built at Pukerua; we were baptised; that house was on a steep slope.” (Ballara, 1998)

In the hills around Pukerua there were “wild cattle and wild pigs in abundance.” To the west he was able to make out the remnants of Wairaka “war pah.” Wilson seemed to be quite smitten by Pukerua. He wrote: “A place of great and charming loveliness is this Pukarua” and “we are now fairly in Pukarua a right noble and grand place it is.” This journey undoubtably became the inspiration for Wilson’s novel. He wrote in the preface: “The following pages were written among the hills, ravines, and forest wilds of a portion of the writer’s adopted country.”

The central character in the story is eighteen year old Mary Morven, an American whose father owned a trading ship wrecked at Pukerua. Mary was washed ashore, the only survivor. Here she met Ena, daughter of a Māori chief.

Wilson’s description of Pukerua as he saw it in the 1860s gives us a shadowy glimpse of a land in transition from the Māori to European era:

crossing a deep gully of easy passage, the ridge is ascended and the crest is gained, whereon a few years since stood the ruin of an extensive war-pah; the principal timbers had been burnt down or removed, only the posts of black tree-fern remained which had formed part of the principal wharis in the enclosure: the double lines of palisades with their ditches were not discernible, yet sufficient existed to prove to the inquirer that the position was one well chosen for a look-out, being of great strength and extremely difficult either to invest or surprise.

The cattle of the settler are now folded on the site of the ancient war-pah, and only a few hazy traditions linger among the farmers as to whom those lands originally belonged; a stone flax-beater or a flint adze-head is perchance picked up by the solitary shepherd; but the uses of the decaying posts that beacon the hills are almost unknown, and the terraced hill fronts are unnoticed, the practical pursuits of the colonist leaving him neither time nor inclination to indulge in romance.

Several dismantled canoes were lying on the beaches below the foot of the steep, rocky precipices; and, scattered under some remarkably fine ngaio trees (the only remains of the primeval forest), were a few elaborately-carved stern-posts of the most ancient form of the war-canoe.

While Wilson’s extensive scholarship and knowledge of Māori were acknowledged, and he was even favourably compared to Governor Sir George Grey in a report on a Native Land Court sitting, the reviews of Ena as a novel were not flattering. E. H. McCormick in Letters and Art in New Zealand called it “ineffably dreary.” Elsdon Best wrote “The style of writing in this work appeals not to most readers; in fact, it is an excellent work to leave unpurchased.” Joan Stevens in The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965 referred to it as “unbelievably stuffy in a Victorian way.”

In 1869 Wilson published Ekino and other poems which he dedicated to Lady Bowen, wife of the Governor Sir George Bowen. The poems are almost all based on Māori legends and most reviews were unflattering. Wilson gave a copy of the book to Sir George Grey who, in a letter thanking the author, said he had read the book, “with great pleasure.” The letter was shown by Wilson to the editor of the Wellington Independent who commented on it in the Local and General News column. Wilson achieved minor recognition as a translator of laments following Māori deaths and he was for a short time editor of the Māori language newspaper Waka Maori.

If you really want to read Ena or The Ancient Maori it is available online thanks to Victoria University’s New Zealand Electronic Text Collection at http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-WilEna-t1-front-d5.html