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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 10 (January 1, 1935)

[introduction]

Captain George Augustus Preece, one of the last of the gallant little band of New Zealand Cross wearers, was in his day the perfect frontier soldier, one of the native-born who knew the bush as well as any Maori and who made the most successful of leaders of Native Contingents. New Zealand will not see his like again, for the conditions which produced him and his fellow-fighters and scouts, have passed forever. He had an arduous and danger-filled part in the work of making the wild regions fit for peaceful settlement. He was diplomat and peacemaker as well as guerilla soldier, and he served his country well as magistrate. Such men as Porter, the Mair brothers, Northcroft, Gudgeon and Preece live in our history as Colonial leaders who were peculiarly fitted for the exceptional work of bush-fighting, in which methods of warfare had to be modelled on Maori tactics rather than those of the Pakeha army.

Captain G. A. Preece, N.Z.C.

Captain G. A. Preece, N.Z.C.

CaptainPreece saw life in many phases in his useful and well-rounded career. He came of a pioneer missionary family, his earliest memories were those of the Urewera Country and the all encompassing bush; he was clerk in a Magistrate's Court in a Pakeha-Maori district when the call for men who could handle Maoris sent him on the soldiering trail, he was a leader of native troops during the most critical era of the Hau-hau campaigns; and after a long period as Resident Magistrate on the East Coast he retired only to begin another period of activity, the business of land agent, which he carried on until his death at Palmerston North. He could have written a great book of the real adventure had he been inclined that way. As it was, he was one of the very few men who served in the thick of the Maori wars who systematically kept a diary. A typed copy of this diary he gave me a few years before his death. It is a most useful source of reference for dates and events. So many incidents that were not recorded in the scant official despatches occurred in the bush warfare of 1869–72 that such a diary as Preece's is exceedingly valuable for fixing the facts of happenings that otherwise would have had to be dredged up from failing memories.

The diary reveals the man's methodical mind, his punctilious attention to details of his military command, the cares and worries of a leader of Maoris; and many an entry reveals the little difficulties which inevitably arose when a superior officer sitting comfortably at headquarters far away failed to understand the urgent problems which confronted the soldier in the field or the bush camp.