Te Rangi Hiroa - Sir Peter Buck (c.1877-1951)

The Urenui Knight: Te Rangi Hiroa

If the depiction on cereal cards can be taken as an indication of New Zealand renown, then Te Rangi Hiroa, with at least three between 1942 and 1972, as well as a 1990 postage stamp, must surely be one of the most famed Kiwis.

Thrusting seaward from the grey-green bush-clad slopes of Okoki pa, north of Urenui township, is the red and white concrete canoe prow marking the resting place of one of Taranaki's most famous sons, doctor, politician and anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Henry Buck) and his wife Margaret.

A kilometre or so to the northwest, among the neatly manicured greens of the Urenui Golf Club, is the granite-mounted plaque marking the opposite end of Peter Buck's life - his birth at the kainga (village) of Maruwehi about 1877.

The son of Irish/English fortune seeker William Buck, and Rina of North Taranaki's Ngati Mutunga iwi, the young Peter was brought up by his stepmother, Ngarongo, and her mother, Kapuakore. Growing up only a few short years after the destruction and land alienation of the Taranaki Wars, Peter was well schooled through an expanding Government education system.

Buck was granted entrance to the prestigious Hawkes Bay Māori college, Te Aute, in 1896. That generation of Te Aute scholars was to shake the foundations of New Zealand society - Apirana Ngata, Maui Pomare and Te Rangi Hiroa were a trio who publicly resurrected what was then supposed to be a "dying race".

Buck's three years at Te Aute ended with the gaining of a medical preliminary and a prominence in sport, including cricket 1st XI and athletics captaincies.

By 1904, he had graduated from Otago medical school and a few years later gained an M.D. with a thesis on Māori health.

His wife Margaret Wilson, who he married in 1905, was also of Irish descent. She became the driving force behind the easygoing academic who forsook the 'Varsity cloisters and established himself as a practising doctor among the Māori communities of the North Island. A brief political career as the M.P. for Northern Māori between 1909 and 1914 witnessed the usual Buck ability to gain illustrious positions with his entrance to Cabinet in 1912.

On the outbreak of World War I Buck headed to the Middle East with a Māori volunteer contingent as a medical officer. He subsequently served at Gallipoli and on the Western Front where he received a DSO and two MIDs (Mentioned in Dispatches). It was during the conflict that he seriously began his anthropological studies and first met fellow expatriate, economist John (Jack) B. Condliffe. They were to become firm friends, two Kiwis whose paths crossed in Hawaii and at Yale, and in 1971 Condliffe was to publish a biography of his old friend and colleague. Anthropological studies increasingly began to dominate Buck's attention during the 1920s. Several of his early publications, now classics in ethnography, were published by the New Plymouth-based Polynesian Society with its local doyens, William Henry Skinner, Stephenson Percy Smith and Percy White. Many were printed by the New Plymouth firm of Thomas Avery & Sons. 

Peter's most fervent dreams were realized with his appointment in 1927 as ethnologist at the prestigious Bishop Museum in Hawaii, followed by a professorship at Yale University in the United States and then the pinnacle, the directorship of the Bishop in 1936. In these hallowed halls, his forté for Polynesian history and tradition was nurtured well and found its final full flowering. A constant stream of erudite scientific articles, still highly regarded, appeared from his pens, as one of the first Polynesians to look at themselves, he forged new fields in Pacific history.

It was to be his incomparable 1938 book, Vikings of the Sunrise, that established Peter Buck as a popular author and swiftly raised him from respected academician to near-cult popularity. This was followed by the equally popular The Coming of the Maori in 1949. Here, indeed, was the local lad from Urenui who made good and could foot it well and fast with the most distinguished historians the world could provide. Cereal card fame had arrived! Fame that was finally and securely cemented in his homeland by the New Zealand publication of Vikings in 1954 after a hiatus of 16 years due to the Second World War.

A stream of awards and honours followed: Doctorates of Science from several universities and US, Swedish, New Zealand and British fellowships and honours culminating in his receipt of a K.C.M.G. in the King's Birthday honours in 1946.

A year later an operation for cancer heralded the beginning of his valiant but ultimately unsuccessful battle with the disease.

His final and tearfully fond farewells were conveyed to his marae at Urenui and the house of his childhood, Mahi Tamariki, in March 1949. Working to the end, Te Rangi Hiroa/Sir Peter Buck collapsed and soon after died in his second home, Hawaii, on 1 December 1951.

Two years later, on 8 August 1954, a Taranakian from Okato, the Hon. E. B. Corbett, Minister of Maori Affairs, conveyed the ashes of this most illustrious son of Taranaki to his final resting place among the titoki trees of Okoki.

Lady Margaret Buck died in Honolulu in May 1958 and her ashes were laid to rest in the vault alongside her husband on 6 July of that year.