‘Murder Will Out’: Intimacy, Violence, and the Snow Family in Early Colonial New Zealand

Harman, Kristyn

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76231-9_8

Kristyn Harman⁵

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

The Snow family murders in Auckland in 1847 are still recalled as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most sensational crimes. In this chapter, the murder of the settler colonial family becomes a focal point through which the intimate, complex, and changing cross-cultural relationships between Māori and Pākehā in mid nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand are explored. Revealing issues of class, race, politics, gender, and identity, the wider set of circumstances within which the Snow family was murdered speaks directly to the ambiguities of a frontier society at once both socioeconomically and physically intimate and yet inherently unstable and sometimes violent. This particularly brutal crime, which resulted in Auckland’s first public hanging, serves as a touchstone for the dark history of early colonial society. While present in histories of this event, until now Māori have largely served as side characters, tangential to the main story of the Snows, Burns, and Reardon. Specifically concentrating on Māori within the story, however, reorients the case to connect micro- and macro-relations within frontier Aotearoa New Zealand.

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Notes

1.
‘Horrible Murder’, Daily Southern Cross, 30 October 1847, 2.
2.
Terry Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice: The True Story of Margaret Reardon and the Snow Family Murders (Auckland: Alibi Press, 2016), 9.
3.
Kristyn Harman, Cleansing the Colony: Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2017).
4.
New Zealander, 27 October 1847, 2.
5.
Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 56.
6.
Vincent O’Malley, The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012), 8.
7.
Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 15.
8.
Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 15.
9.
Hazel Petrie, Chiefs of Industry: Māori Tribal Enterprise in Early Colonial New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006), 22.
10.
Ben Schrader, The Big Smoke: New Zealand Cities 1840–1920 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2016), 173.
11.
Schrader, The Big Smoke, 173.
12.
Petrie, Chiefs of Industry, 227.
13.
Petrie, Chiefs of Industry, 186.
14.
Petrie, Chiefs of Industry, 164.
15.
Petrie, Chiefs of Industry, 226.
16.
Petrie, Chiefs of Industry, 189.
17.
Schrader, The Big Smoke, 190.
18.
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global: 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 71.
19.
See, for example, Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent, and Tiffany Shellam, eds. Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015); Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi, and Allison Cadzow, eds. Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2016).
20.
Angela Ballara, ‘Patuone, Eruera Maihi’, first published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 1, 1990, and updated online in November 2010. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed 25 June 2017, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/1p12/patuone-eruera-maihi
21.
Steven Oliver, ‘Te Wherowhero, Potatau’, first published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 1, 1990. Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed 25 June 2017, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t88/te-wherowhero-potatau
22.
Petrie, Chiefs of Industry, 30.
23.
Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the Question of the Body (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014), 3–4.
24.
Ballara, ‘Patuone, Eruera Maihi’.
25.
Ballara, ‘Patuone, Eruera Maihi’.
26.
Ballara, ‘Patuone, Eruera Maihi’.
27.
Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla, He Reo Wahine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017), 3.
28.
Miranda Johnson, ‘Chiefly Women: Queen Victoria, Meri Mangakahia, and the Maori Parliament’, in Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds, ed. Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 239.
29.
Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2014), 86.
30.
Ballara, ‘Patuone, Eruera Maihi’.
31.
Grace Karskens, ‘Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin: Aboriginal Men and Clothing in Early New South Wales’, Aboriginal History 35 (2011), 22.
32.
New Zealander, 27 October 1847, 2.
33.
Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 28.
34.
New Zealander, 27 October 1847, 2.
35.
‘Horrible Murder’, Daily Southern Cross, 30 October 1847, 2.
36.
Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 29.
37.
New Zealander, 27 October 1847, 2.
38.
Daily Southern Cross, 30 October 1847, 2.
39.
Jennifer Ashton, At the Margin of Empire: John Webster and Hokianga, 1841–1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2015), 58.
40.
New Zealander, 3 November 1847, 2.
41.
New Zealander, 6 November 1847, 2.
42.
Daily Southern Cross, 11 December 1847, 2; Daily Southern Cross, 25 December 1847, 2; ‘Auckland’, New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian, 15 January 1848, 3; Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 31.
43.
Angela Wanhalla, Matters of the Heart: A History of Inter-racial Marriage in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013), 49.
44.
Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 32.
45.
Kristyn Harman, Cleansing the Colony: Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2017), 164, 174–175.
46.
Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), 1.
47.
Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 34.
48.
McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, 13.
49.
Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 34.
50.
Barbara Brookes, A History of New Zealand Women (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2016), 60.
51.
Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 34.
52.
Carson, The Axeman’s Accomplice, 33.
53.
Harman, Cleansing the Colony, 164–165.
54.
New Zealander, 11 March 1848, 2.
55.
New Zealander, 4 March 1848, 2.
56.
Harman, Cleansing the Colony, 167–169.
57.
Harman, Cleansing the Colony, 169–171.
58.
‘A Murder by Law’, Daily Southern Cross, 17 June 1848, 2.
59.
Anglo-Maori Warder, 6 June 1848, 2.

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University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia
Kristyn Harman

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Kristyn Harman
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School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Penelope Edmonds
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Amanda Nettelbeck

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Harman, K. (2018). ‘Murder Will Out’: Intimacy, Violence, and the Snow Family in Early Colonial New Zealand. In: Edmonds, P., Nettelbeck, A. (eds) Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76231-9_8

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76231-9_8
Published: 26 May 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76230-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76231-9
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