Völkner and Mokomoko: ‘Symbols of Reconciliation’ in Aotearoa, New Zealand

Abstract

On 2 March 1865, the Revd Carl Sylvius Völkner, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary, was hanged from a willow tree close to his own church and mission station at Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. John Hobbs, who had arrived as a Methodist missionary in New Zealand in 1823, reported on ‘the very barbarous Murder of one of the best Missionaries in New Zealand’ and noted that Völkner’s death marked ‘a New Era in the history of this country’. Völkner was the first European missionary of any denonomination to be killed in New Zealand since missionary work began in 1814.