Sacred Soil: Images and Stories of the New Zealand Wars

By: Neil Finlay

Published by: Random House, Auckland. 1998. A First Edition. Black and white photographs 160 pages

This title can be hard to find.

Neil Finlay is a musician, a traveller and an adventurer. He is also a photographer and, inspired by the works of some of the great photographers such as Robin Morrison, he left his guitar at home and explored this country with a couple of cameras …From Northland to the Waikato, from Taranaki to the Bay of Plenty and Poverty Bay, he discovered the sites and pieced together the events that took place there. At the same time, he researched everything he could about the New Zealand Wars and talked to the people who lived near the sites. His passion about this period in our history permeates this book.

The New Zealand Wars of the 1840s and the 1860s-70s were an extraordinary period of the history of this country. ‘Sacred Soil’ tells the stories, in words and images, of the battles, of new developments in trench warfare, and of the people, the politics, and the respect of each side for the other. It also serves as a reminder that the legacy of those events is still very much with us.

Contents are broken down into areas –

• Northland
• The First Taranaki War
• Waikato
• Arawa Victory over East Coast Tribes
• Volkner
• Omaranui
• Te Kooti (this includes a section on the Chatham Islands)
• South Taranaki
• Bastion Point

A good copy