Rachel Buchanan and Lucy Mackintosh decolonising histories of place and taonga in Aotearoa

These two lavishly illustrated, imaginative books centring M aori histories of place, dispossession, and reclamation register the decolonial turn in history-writing in Aotearoa. They are both written for diverse public audiences. M aori readers are explicitly addressed and the books tune in to specific ethical expectations these audiences might have. The authors are careful to explain their relationships to knowledge-holders of Indigenous communities and, in Lucy Mackintosh’s book, with others too. The now two-decades-old injunctive to decolonise methodologies has involved a lot of ‘should-ing’. These authors have done the work. The benefit of years-long engagement with individuals, communities, and collections is clear in the depth of local knowledge that lies behind the crisp prose and carefully selected, plentiful images, including artwork, landscape photography and portraiture, as well as maps and images of archival documents. Mackintosh’s ‘deep histories’ of T amaki Makaurau (Auckland) examines places often overlooked in a city that has ‘erased much of its history’ (1). Such erasures are not complete. At the edges of the city, for instance, in the Otuataua Stonefields, now close to Auckland airport on the Manukau Harbour and location of a high-profile land occupation over the past few years, arrangements of volcanic stones tell histories of human efforts to tame, claim, and contest land over generations. Even in what is now the centre of the city, at Pukekawa or Auckland Domain – the location of the Auckland War Memorial Museum – unexpected stories can be excavated from the colonial and oral historical record. Mackintosh rebuilds a story of a cottage built for the Waikato rangatira P otatau Te Wherowhero now no longer extant but locatable on early colonial maps. The land was originally offered to Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson by the Ng ati Wh atua in 1840, an inducement to establish the seat of the colonial government there. On the ‘in-between’ space of the Domain, then at the edge of the garrison town, Governor Fitzroy ordered a European style cottage for Te Wherowhero – whose iwi already had established diplomatic