NZ Wars - Maori (4)

 

Here we have the final 4 Maori figures that I painted recently, all from Empress Miniatures pack NZ14, "Maoris with shotguns".  I painted them exactly the same way as with previous Maori.  A note on the skin colour: yes, I know that it is not quite right.  Maori would be darker than this.  I explained on TMP that the reasons for my colour choice are: (1) practical ease – the Foundry palette I'm using is there, available and seems the best of the bunch, and I don't like mixing my own colours, to be honest; (2) I tend to use lighter-than-life colours on 25mm anyway; (3) a lighter flesh tone shows off the tattoos more clearly and that to me is the thing that distinguishes these figures as Maori; and (4) I remember seeing an exhibition of Gottfried Lindauer portraits in Auckland a few years ago and I was surprised at how light he'd painted the maori skin on some of his maori portraits.  An example is below - it was pointed out on TMP that Lindauer may have painted what he wanted to see, or thought he'd seen, which could well be right.   Lindauer was born in Bohemia in 1839 and moved to New Zealand in 1874, apparently to avoid being conscripted into the Austrian army.  He settled near Wellington and become well known for his portraits.

 

 

Anyway, that's the reasoning behind the decision. It's not a perfect colour, but at least I've rationalised it in my own mind!I didn't add much in the way of skirt decoration, as I wanted these figures to have clothing that was less ornate than that worn by the chiefs I painted earlier.

That's it for the NZ Wars for a while.  I have a couple of packs left to do - some more militia and the RN 24-pounder and crew, but I'll wait until I pick of the other new-ish packs from Empress and paint the lot together.  I still have a backlog of painted units to post about - 3 AWI regiments of American infantry, some French Napoleonics, First Carlist War Isabelinos and a couple of other things.  I'm hoping to have all those posted up over the next couple of weeks - it's just a question of finishing all the basing and then taking photos.  On the workbench are, amongst other things, the last few figures for the 2nd South Carolina Regiment and some more 1815 stuff to celebrate the bicentenary.   This year I've been trying very hard to reduce my leadp/plastic pile and not buy anything new.  So far, I've bought about 5 packs' worth of figures, and acquired a free box of Warlord plastic 1815 British infantry from my Wargames Illustrated subscription.  I'm determined to make a conscious effort to run down those piles this year.  I feel I should be painting lots of Napoleonics and I still have plenty sitting at home.     

4 figures. Painted March 2015.

 

 

And a couple of group shots with some of the figures I painted a few years ago:

Rotorua - Flora and fauna

After I returned from my last trip to New Zealand, over Christmas 2013/2014, I posted about the Maori buildings and other bits and bobs at Rotorua (see here).  We also visited Paradise Valley Springs wildlife park, which despite its rather cheesy-sounding name is a beautiful place with plenty of birds, animals and trout to admire and a rather spectacular "treetops canopy walk".  It was during that walk that I took some time to look at the forest to try to work out how the NZ bush might be modelled - with extreme difficulty is probably the answer, but I thought I'd post some photos and a couple of observations.  While the trees come in all shapes and sizes, it is of course the ferns that make the landscape distinctively New Zealand (at least to English eyes), and naturally there are many different types of ferns. 

I think these are black tree ferns, which are NZ's highest and can grow to a height of 20 metres.  

 

 

 

I think this a "Wheki Ponga" or tree fern, which grows up to about 6-8 metres.  The trucks are very thick and are used for building materials.  The fonds are quite symmetrical and look a bit like a shuttlecock:

Low-growing ferns are "Kiokio" or palm-leaf ferns:

 

 

Then you have all sorts of other trees, fuchsias, white pines and bushes alongside the ferns:

I thought these little prickly-looking flowers were interesting, although I didn't catch their name:

And here are just a couple of more panoramic shots, including what a path through the forest might look like (with Hugo doing his best Haka impression)

 

 

 

 

I forget to take photos of the new Maori figures I painted recently so those will appear at the weekend.  I'm just finishing off a new Continental Regiment using Perry plastic figures, and I'm half way through the 2nd South Carolina Regiment (plastics again).  Also on the painting table are 1815 French infantry and a couple of vignettes.   

NZ Wars - 58th Foot (2)

 
I meant to keep on posting daily over the bank holiday weekend, but it proved to be very busy and so apologies.  What we have here are 6 further figures for the 58th Foot, who I previously wrote about here.  The 58th arrived in New Zealand in March 1845 after spending a couple of years on garrison duty in New South Wales as part of a large reinforcement desatched from Australia in response to the sacking of Kororareka (modern Russell in the Bay of Islands, north of Auckland).  Other troops were sent from the 96th and 99th regiments of foot and the Royal Marines.   The 58th fought in the south of North Island as well as in the Bay of Islands.  Apparently, when the battalion returned to the UK in 1858 some 300 of its number who were due for discharge decided to remain in New Zealand. I also gather that the 58th has the distinction of being the last British infantry regiment that carried its colours into battle, in 1881 at Laing's Nek during the First Boer War.  35% of the battalion's strength was lost during that battle, including 5 officers who successively carried the colours.

These figures are from 2 Empress Miniatures packs, a command pack and then a "British regular officers and skirmishers" pack.  Personally, I'd like to see a full pack of skirmishers - I can see a need for several of the chaps lying down but less such need for the officer and sergeant figures that go with them.  As I noted before, these figures also work for the British Auxiliary Legion in the First Carlist War so I expect I'll pick up another couple of packs in due course to bulk out my BAL command stands when I get around to doing them.  In fact, the reason why I didn't paint the command figures back in 2011 was that originally I was intending to use them for the FCW.  The trousers on these figures were painted in a similar way as for the Royal Navy, so "Foundry palette "British Royal Blue 74" and then an extra highlight of "Deep Blue 20B".

Six figures, painted March 2015.

 

The other figures in the unit were feeling a bit left out, so here's a team photo:

 

 

NZ Wars - the Royal Navy (2)

I had intended to post some more maori today, but I realised I'd only photographed half the pack, so those will have to wait until the weekend.  So time for some Brits instead!  Empress have released several packs of Royal Navy types for the New Zealand Wars.  I painted up a rocket crew last year (and some Indian Mutiny types I used as stand-ins) and have now finished the 3 packs of tars on foot, one of which is a command/characters pack (see left).   These are crisp figures, pretty easy to paint.  Information readily available in print or on the internet as to  the precise uniform of the RN in the 1840s seemed pretty thin.  There's some useful information in the old Osprey MAA "The Royal Navy" and Roly Hermans has a lot of good stuff here.  Unlike Roly, I chickened out of the light blue collars and decided to add some variety to the colour of the scarves as well.  I suspect that the scarves were black, but I wanted to have a non-uniform "been out on campaign for years" look and so gave some figures red and light blue scarves.  A couple of the sailors also have off-grey shirts to add more variety.  The lieutenant and petty officers are in regulation dress, though - black scarves all round.   The blue used is the Foundry "British Royal Blue 74" palette.  Once varnished, this goes quite dark and the highlights becomes pretty subtle, which works well for RN uniforms.

These are useful figures.  I'm sure they could be used for the First Carlist War, which saw British sailors deployed on land several times, and probably most periods from 1820 to the late 1850s.   In the 1840s NZ Wars, sailors hauled cannon off their ships to be used in sieges of pas, but they also fought as infantry (in effect), particularly in the defence of Kororareka and the attack on Ruapekapeka.  The latter battle involved some 340 men drawn from four Royal Navy ships and one vessel from the East India Company's fleet.

Twelve figures. Painted March 2015

 

NZ Wars - Maori (3)

It's New Zealand week again! Just over 4 years ago I did a series of posts on the New Zealand Wars of the 1840s - see here.  It's taken me a good while to return to the period, but over the next few days I'm going to do another series of posts on more Empress Miniatures figrues that I have painted recently.  My earlier series of posts described the history of the war of 1844-45 and I won't repeat that.  Instead, I'll concentrate on a few uniform and painting notes and I'll add some more factual snippets from my last couple of visits to New Zealand.

First up are some Maori chiefs that for some reason I didn't get around to painting last time.  These figures are from a chieftains pack (together with a Hone Heke personality figure) apart from the chap at the end on the right, who is from a characters pack.  Lovely figures in good, dramatic poses and, as always from Empress, very clean sculpts.  The illustrations I have seen show Maori cloaks and clothes from this period as being largely brown and beige in colour with limited woven geometric patterning.  I added some coloured borders to the cloaks to reflect the status of these men (taniko is the word in Maori, apparently).  Zig-zags and chevrons seem to have popular patterns and these are pretty easy to paint.  There are various words for the weapons used by the Moari.  The two greenstone weapons here are probably kotiate rather than mere clubs, and the former were usually made of wood or bone rather than jade or greenstone.  However, again I wanted to make these leaders distinctive and so decided to paint them green (using the Foundry "Bright Green 2"5 palette).  The long club that the chap on the left is brandishing is a tewhatewha, and it was customary for those weapons to be decorated with bird feathers.  Rifle stocks often had carved decorations and I have tried to reflect that as well.       

As explained in my earlier posts, I paint Maori skin with the Foundry palette "South American Flesh 119".  That may be a bit light, but it is suitably distinctive to my European colour scheme.  Anything darker and the tattoos would be less noticeable.  Those I paint with a dark blue colour rather than black (Foundry "French Blue 65A").  I have seen portraits and photos of old Maori whose faces are covered in tattoos.  With these figures I have tried to add a few more tattoos than I do with "rank and file", but still adhering to a "less is more" approach.

More Maori tomorrow, then the Royal Navy and British infantry.

Four figures. Painted March 2015.

 

 

Rotorua - Maoriana

I've been very busy at work again, hence the lack of posts.  It's no excuse, though - plenty of other busy people manage to update their blogs on a regular basis (and in the case of Jim Purky run a miniatures company as well!).  But the truth is I've picked up a paintbrush just once during the past 3 weeks; and that's pretty unprecedented for me.  I have some units reasonably close to completion, but they are likely to take a while.  So in the meantime, I'm going to post some pics from my recent trip to New Zealand which may be of use to anyone else who's dabbled in the Maori/NZ/Land Wars of the mid 19th century.

I'm going to have two posts about the days we spent in Rotorua.  This is a city about 2.5 hours drive south of Auckland, near the Bay of Plenty on the east coast of North Island.  It is famous for its lakes, volcanoes and "geothermal activity" - the small of sulphur rather hangs over the place.  One of the area's volcanoes, Mount Tarawera, erupted in 1886, destroying the Maori village of Te Wairoa and a pair of natural wonders called the Pink and White Terraces, and killing over 100 people.  There are still bubbling hot springs and geysers all over the place.  Rotorua has always been a Maori-populated area and its tourist attractions are centred on geothermal parks and Maori culture.  In this post I want to discuss some Maori items and the next post will look at Kiwi fauna and flora.  The idea is that these posts might be informative for modelling terrain for the NZ Wars.

The thermal springs park we visited was Whakarewarewa, which is the site of the Maori pa of Te Puia.  Maori first inhabited this site in the 14th century and the fortress of Te Puia was apparently never captured in battle.  The park has some replica Maori homes which are shown below.  These should be pretty easy to model, I'd have thought, also the carvings could be tricky.  

 

 

 

To protect food supplies from marauding animals (and, presumably, marauding humans), Maori kept them in raised hutches like this one.

Food availability was a problem for Maori.  Fish, eels and suchlike were reasonably abundant in the country's lakes and surrounding seas, but otherwise the remote islands of New Zealand had none of the foodstuffs that we take for granted.  Things like livestock and potatoes only arrived with the first Europeans.  The Maori are thought to have hunted the flightless moa birds to extinction, and once that supply of meat was gone the Maori were in trouble.  One theory behind Maori ritual cannibalism, in which victors in battle ate the vanquished (and kept prisoners as future meat supplies), is that such behaviour was the natural consequence of the Maori literally having nothing to eat. 

Birds were also on the menu, and the Maori would ensnare them using wooden troughs which were filled with water to tempt thirsty birds.  A couple of examples are shown below.  The kaka parrot was another important food source and the Maori had an ingenious way of trapping them.  Pet kaka would be taken into forest and used as lures, as their cries would attract other kaka.  Maori would place snares and artificial perches into the tree canopies so that when the wild parrots arrived their legs would be caught in the snares.

Finally, in the Domain Museum in Auckland I found a model of a Maori pa that's worth showing here.  I'm afraid I failed to take notes, but the rather rudimentary defences suggest it's a pre-1820s.  It has a vegetable garden - I believe these were quite common and if you're modelling a pa it would be a nice tough to include an allotment nearby.

NZ Wars - Auckland Militia

After the battle of Ruapekepeka, both sides appear to have wanted peace. Kawiti and Heke considered that they had worsted the British whilst the British, in the form of Governor Grey, liked to boast that the evacuation of a pa again indicated British victory. In reality, both sides were over-egging their positions, and the economic and physical cost of the conflict led them to broker a peace. Arguably, the most important factor in driving the Maori to cease hostilities was the effect of pro-government Maori attacks on Kawiti's and Heke's territory. British authority was maintained in theory, but it was the loyal Maori chiefs who acted as a buffer against the (unconquered) forces of Kawiti and Heke. One suspects that both sides knew that the end of the war signified a truce and not a peace, a fact perhaps demonstrated by Heke marching a large force into Russell at the end of 1846 - he removed the remains of the men killed in the attack on 11 March 1845 and then retired. Perhaps his aim was to demonstrate that he could go where he chose - hardly an indication of a British victory. Furthermore, the flagstaff at Russell remained broken and had been left where it lay when Heke cut it down on 11 March 1845. The Maori were far from defeated and this, arguably, made further conflict inevitable.


The figures shown here represent the Auckland Militia. I understand that they wore military clothing provided by the British regulars, so I have painted the trousers in the same way as the 58th Foot and given them blue-grey army shirts. Of the Empress Miniatures first release I still have some Maori chiefs to paint - when I have finished those I will add some information about the Taranaki and Wellington campaigns of 1846-47 (i.e. the fighting at the middle/bottom of North Island).


I hope readers have enjoyed this series of posts as much as I have enjoyed writing them. For me, this has been an opportunity to read up about this period and think again about areas of NZ that I have visited. Those who have little interest in this conflict may like to know that there are more 1815 and AWI posts on the horizon, specifically those French Old Guard I finished ages ago and Court Pulaski for the AWI. On the workbench are some Eureka Miniatures civilians and lost of AWI French. Oh, and I'm looking forward to painting my first 15mm figures in about 12 years...

NZ Wars - Maori (2)

Grey, the new governor, was ambitious and young. Aged only 33 (in contrast to Colonel Despard, who was 60), Grey was determined to bring the colony to heel and issued an ultimatum to Heke and Kawiti which they could never accept. Grey then marshalled the forces available throughout the country and received reinforcements that had been sent from as far afield as India. His army grew to some 800 regular infantry, a naval brigade of 400, 450 friendly Maori and a dozen cannon of various calibres. He ordered Despard to attack the new pa at Ruapekapeka. Dragging heavy artillery through the bush required a huge effort and the force took 3 weeks to reach the pa. The bombardment began on New Year's Eve, 1845. At some stage Heke managed to sneak into the pa with 60 warriors.

By 10 January 1846 the guns had created a breach in the pa's outer palisade. The next day, Despard's Maori scouts reported that the pa had been abandoned and British troops moved to take possession. Whilst Kawiti and a dozen warriors were still in the pa, the majority were outside and the British were attacked by Maori firing from the bush (it's unclear whether this was a pre-meditated ambush, or whether the garrison were outside at prayer) and after a 3-hour fire-fight both sides withdrew. The abandonment by the Maori of Ruapekapeka again led the British to claim a substantial victory. But Grey knew that again a convincing military success had again eluded the British, and it appears that Maori casualties were lower than those of the British (which were about 45). Moreover, Heke and Kawiti were still at large. Belich believes that the Maori plan was to lure the British into an ambush, where hidden Maori could catch their enemy in the open. This is interesting given the slaughter of the attack on Ohaeawai, but the Maori strategy may have been to wear down the British by making them attack inland pas in difficult terrain. Captain Collinson of the Royal Engineers wrote: "1100 men were occupied a full month in advancing 15 miles and in getting possession of a pa from which the enemy escaped at the last moment, and escaped with the satisfaction to him of a drawn battle. The question is, was it worthwhile to go through all that laborious march to obtain such a result?" (Nowadays, driving through West Auckland prompts much the same feeling.)

The figures shown here are further Maori sculpts from Empress Miniatures, plus Heke again. Unfortunately, there will be a gap in posts until Saturday as work requires me to leave London for a couple of days.