Rēwena and Rabbit Stew: the Rural Kitchen in Aotearoa, 1800-1940
by Katie Cooper

As children growing up in rural North Canterbury, my brothers and I could never be sure what the filling of our mother’s pies might be. She’d watch us eat before revealing that what we thought was chicken was the rabbit she’d shot in the back paddock that afternoon.

This was the 1990s, well outside the purview of Katie Cooper’s authoritative text, Rēwena and Rabbit Stew: the Rural Kitchen in Aotearoa, 1800-1940, and yet the skilled siting of the domestic into a larger historical picture has offered me ways to see my childhood beyond mere outrage at my mother’s surprise substitutions. Through the comparison of kitchens from Māori kātua to the open fires of early colonial homes, from the hangi pit to the camp oven, Cooper uses the kitchen as a vehicle to explore the people and politics of early rural New Zealand.

Cooper is a historical curator for Te Papa, and her blog posts reveal a writer who uses items from the Christmas tree to jam to bring ordinary people and ordinary lives from early colonial New Zealand to life. She’s brought this same keen eye, this same delight in the everyday, to her investigation of kitchens. Rēwena and Rabbit Stew peers through the kitchen windows of the past and into the lives of those represented there, allowing us to witness the ‘quiet moments of love and friendship – intimate scenes that testify to the beauty, pain, monotony and unpredictability of daily life.’ 

Drawing together firsthand testimony, historical accounts and academic analysis, Cooper offers a comprehensive view into kitchens of the past. Never is this more poignant than through the remarkable selection of images which, true to cliché, offer us more than words can.

Preparing dinner. Maud Adkin preparing vegetables, Hastings, 28 December 1913. Leslie Adkin photograph, Gift of G. L. Adkin family estate, 1964, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, A.008597.

The contrast of Maud Atkin peeling potatoes alone at her kitchen table in 1913 to the image several pages later of a group of Māori women at the same task outside a kāuta at Parihaka in 1900 gives a more immediate sense of the different worlds these women inhabit than is possible with text. Cooper knows when to let the images speak for themselves, and here Maud is solitary, focussed on her work, relaxed at the presence of the photographer. The women at Parihaka stand, interrupted, oddly formal as they meet the gaze of the camera. These images invite us in, ask us to read their expressions, to empathise, to recognise, to connect. Cooper’s inclusion of them tenderises the text but her deft touch means that they are never sentimentalised.

A group outside a kāuta at Parihaka, c. 1900. One woman is holding buckets; others are holding poi. A woman in the foreground is scraping potatoes with a shell.

It is the people and the personal that rises most readily from the pages of Rēwena and Rabbit Stew. The judicious and extensive use of first-person sources allows Cooper to take the larger political imperatives of the time and give them voice, for instance in her examination of the kitchen as a place of security and love. For many Pākehā, the kitchen is the centre of the home, ‘a shelter that facilitates domestic life’, or as Cooper describes it, ‘the focal point for family life.’ Physically, the one- and two-room homes of early colonial settlers were dominated by the cooking hearth and the kitchen table, and even as architecture developed to allow for more space, the kitchen with its source of heat and food is the intrinsic centre of a Pākehā home. Even now, my mother’s rural kitchen is one built around the fire, where piled heaps of dogs and children bask in the warmth. Kitchens feed us, physically and often socially, as expressed by one source, Judith Campbell, whose childhood was ‘centred on our kitchen’, ‘with always the security of Mother, in the kitchen, the centre of our lives.’

Interior of the Curtis family’s one-room raupō house, sketched by Joseph Merrett in 1851–52. The all-purpose table in the centre dominates the space, leaving little room for the couch, which has been tucked away behind a screen. A kettle or pot is hanging above the fire at the far end of the room. George and Eliza Curtis arrived in New Zealand in 1849 and settled in Ōmata, Taranaki.

The connection of women to the kitchen is hard to escape, even as that work goes unseen. Cooper does not shy away from this, allowing women to describe their own experience of the work kitchens entail, such as by the unknown contributor to Home and Country in 1930, who noted, ‘They talk about the woman’s sphere as if it had a limit’. Māori women in particular are liable to be ‘invisible’, and Cooper explains that historical observers ‘imposed their own understandings of the place of women, and in doing so, diminished the mana of wāhine Māori’. Māori researchers ‘reject these Western interpretations of women’s roles’, and point to the communal nature of Māori society, and the significance of whakapapa, rather than gender.

For Māori, the kitchen remains a site not just for the love and security that comes from food, but also for the assimilation and struggles that came with colonisation. Missionaries brought with them ‘housing designs and domestic goods already heavy with cultural baggage’ as well as a Western understanding of what ‘home’ meant, and already these notions were connected to the kitchen. Cooper writes that ‘to be “at home” – in the sense of being in the place where you felt you belonged – meant, for Pākehā, being in your own house, and the kitchen was imbued with those feelings.’ For Māori, with ‘perceptions of home have multiple facets that are both spatial and metaphysical, centred on whenua and whakapapa’, the notion of a kitchen inside a living space disregarded the concepts of tapu and noa.

Despite this, early town planning requirements forced Māori to abandon traditional kitchens such as kātua and wharekai, separate cooking houses, as seen in the background of this image of Rawinia Rikihan and Avarura Love in Waikanae, and introduced western ideas of housing such as those in this barren image of houses in Paeroa built under the Native Housing Act of 1938.

Native houses built under the Native Housing Amendment Act 1938, such as these houses erected near Paeroa, were generally constructed by the Public Works Department to a standard plan.
‘Native Land Development and the Provision of Houses for Maoris, including Employment Promotion, Report on – By Board of Native Affairs’, AJHR, I, 1939, G-10, p. 79.

The division of land and destruction of traditional kai sites also forced new relationships with food. Wetland mahinga kai, important breeding grounds for fish and birds were described by one settler as ‘fertile only in miasma’, before noting they could be converted to farmland, resulting in the loss ‘described by one [Waitangi Tribunal] claimant for Ngāti Koata as “soul food”.’ Alongside these physical and spiritual losses, Cooper makes personal the social pressures to conform to Western ideals. Mihipeka Edwards, a Māori child assimilating into a Pākehā school in the 1920s, comes to understand that her kuia has put aside her culture and learned to cook Pākehā food for Mihipeka so she was not embarrassed to eat in front of the children at school. ‘She had always understood my feelings. I go over, put my arms around her, hold her silently for a while, tears running down my face.’

The divisions between Māori and Pākehā, women and men, and the differing experiences these divisions created run throughout the text. Cooper, however, provides us with the unifying vision of food, and her quotation of Doreen Massey offers us the kitchen as a central node point for ‘intersecting social relations, net of which have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with each other, decayed and renewed.’ These nets of social reliance and connection have through history been essential to the survival of rural communities, and are a central concern of the text.

The grand sweep of history and globalisation forces aside the domestic and the familiar, but Rēwena and Rabbit Stew provides proof that to allow this impoverishes our understanding of both past and present: certainly, my mother’s pies have taken on a new resonance. Despite the differences of time, culture and economic imperatives, the kitchens – and lives – that Cooper explores are united by ‘the presence of food, but more than that they all share a connection to the land around them; they demonstrate the importance of food and they show the power of mealtimes to draw people together or to divide them.’  Each kitchen was essential to the lives and relationships of those who used them, and more than anything else, this is a book about those people.