Black Sheep

Why do some historians think an NZ-born traitor was "instrumental" in the Japanese victory in Singapore during WWII? And why is there such a mystery surrounding the Reefton boy who seemingly spied for the Japanese?Why do some historians think an NZ-born traitor was "instrumental" to the Japanese victory in Singapore during WWII? In part 1 we heard how Patrick Heenan, a NZ-born captain in the British Army, came to despise his comrades and eventually decided to act as a spy for the Japanese. In this episode Black Sheep uncovers the mystery surrounding that treason, allegations of a cover-up, and the "watery grave" which ends Patrick Heenan's story.The SpyOnce he arrived in Malaya Patrick Heenan got a job as an intelligence officer, working as a liaison between the Army and the Air ForceAlmost from the moment that transfer was approved, he began to act suspiciously. His commanding officer, Major France, wrote a memoir outlining some of his dodgy behaviour."I had discovered that during my absence had done two outrageous things:Firstly he had taken a party of my troops on ground exercises and on these he had taken photographs of all the junctions and crossroads into Thailand, whilst the signposts were still in position. These would of course have been removed in event of a war.Secondly, whilst I was away he had gone to the Station Commander and persuaded him that he had my permission to see my documents - highly secret and kept in my Command safe." - Major France, Odd Man Out: The Story Of The Singapore TraitorActually, Major France said Heenan tried to get into his safe and access those secret documents not once, but twice.Professor Brian Farrell says that's totally astonishing. "You do this and you're some sort of fast-talking charmer who has the gift of the gab and you maybe get away with it once ... but twice? You have to ask what was going on here.""Why didn't as a measure of sheer prudence have this guy behind bars right away? You're not in a position to take chances, you're in the middle of a war which is going very badly!"To give Major France some credit, he did try to get to the bottom of Captain Heenan's suspicious behaviour by searching his room…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

What drove a boy from Reefton to turn against his comrades in World War Two? How was a former boxing and swimming champion recruited as an agent of Imperial Japan? It's a story still shrouded in mystery more than 70 years later.What drove a boy from Reefton to turn against his comrades in World War Two? How was a former boxing and swimming champion recruited as an agent of Imperial Japan? Did the British military conceal the true extent of the damage he did to the Allied war effort? And how did he meet his end in what a mysterious postcard described as a "watery grave"?These questions, and many more, surround the murky mystery of Captain Patrick Heenan, one of the least understood traitors of the Second World War.The Reefton BastardWhen Heenan was born, Reefton was a dilapidated place. It was 1910 and the gold rush days were over. Patrick was illegitimate, nobody knows who his real father was. He was named after an Irish Catholic called George Heenan who his mother, Annie, married shortly after his birth.The family emigrated to Burma (Myanmar) in 1912 and shortly after arriving, George died. Annie was left to raise Patrick alone for the next ten years.Maybe it was in these years that Heenan first started to develop a hatred for the British Empire. Colonial Burma was a deeply racist and repressive place, the famous author George Orwell worked as a policeman in Burma at the same time Heenan lived there and drew on that experience for one of his books."You hear your Oriental friends called 'greasy little babus', and you admit, dutifully, that they are greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood." - George Orwell, Burmese DaysWhen Heenan turned 12 he and his mother relocated to England where Annie paid for her son to attend the prestigious Cheltenham College.Heenan's school years were deeply unhappy. Old school-mates said he was both a bully himself and a victim of bullying." didn't want to fall down that socio-economic ladder," explains Brian Farrell, a military historian at Singapore National University. "So there was some scrimping and saving to send him to schools that she really couldn't afford. As a result he was always the kid with the oldest, tattiest, most out of date shoes and clothes. got teased about it a lot."Racism In The RanksHeenan's social isolation continued after he left school and joined the British Indian Army as a junior office…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Amy Bock was a criminal "supreme in her cleverness". Her most famous con saw her pose as a man for 15 weeks and marry the daughter of her landlord. Nobody has ever been able to explain what motivated her lifetime of fraud and scams.Detective Henry Hunt knocks on the door of Percy Redwood, a wealthy sheep farmer on an extended holiday at Nugget Point on the Catlins Coast.Over the last few months, Percy had made a lot of friends in town, in fact, he just recently married a local woman called Agnes Ottaway.The door opens. Percy, a very short man, told his friends he used to be a jockey in his younger days. But that was a lie, pretty much everything Percy told his friends was a lie."The game is up, Amy," said Detective Hunt.Percy's shoulders slump. "I see you know it all," he said... or rather, she said.Percy was not really a wealthy sheep farmer and former jockey. He was a persona invented by Amy Bock, the most prolific con-artist in New Zealand history."A Woman Bridegroom, Exploits Of An Adventuress, An Extraordinary Story""In Man's Attire, A Woman's Escapade""A Marvellous Masquerade, A Woman Dressed As A Man Marries A Port Molyneax Girl.""The Champion Crook of the Century"This is just a small sample of the scandalised headlines which filled the national newspapers after Amy's scam was revealed. The papers delved into her old court records, they interviewed her childhood friends and trawled through older newspaper clippings.What they uncover is a lifetime of scams, frauds and lies going all the way back to Amy's childhood in the rural Australian town of Sale, a few hundred kilometres east of Melbourne."It's In My Blood"Amy came from a respectable family in Sale, her father ran a successful photography business which helped him make connections with the movers and shakers in town.But there was a tragedy at the heart of the Bock family. Amy's mother suffered from a serious mental illness." would have very manic episodes and then episodes of melancholia. So probably what we would think of now as manic-depressive ," said Dr Jenny Coleman, author of Mad or Bad: the life and exploits of Amy Bock.When Amy was ten years old her mother was locked up in a lunatic asylum. Amy never saw her again. She died three years later.It was around this point people started to have concerns about Amy's mental health. She began telling stories and acting out in bizarre ways. One time she bought a load of books under her father's name and just gave them away to random people in town…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

The story of Horatio Robley continues... How did a man once dubbed a "predator of culture" for his collection of preserved Māori heads become better known as a "friend of the Māori"?In Part 1 of this story, we heard how Horatio Robley came to New Zealand as a young officer in the British Army and witnessed the devastating British defeat at Gate Pā. In Part 2, we hear how the Tauranga War ended, and how Robley became famous as a collector of Mokomokai, preserved Māori heads.A few months after Gate Pā, Māori and British came to blows again at Battle of Te Ranga. This time the British caught Tauranga Māori before they could finish building their Pā, and the half-dug trenches became a mass grave for 108 warriors.Within weeks a peace was negotiated, but Robley and his fellow soldiers stayed on in Tauranga for several more months. In those months, Robley had a chance to become much more intimately involved in Māori culture ...and with one Māori woman in particular.Horatio Te RopereWith the spectre of war lifted, Robley doubled down on his artwork. He painted spectacular watercolours of Tauranga landscapes and took portraits of prominent Māori in the region, including some leaders of the Ngāi Te Rangi tribe who had participated in the Battle for Gate Pā.Tauranga Māori clearly respected Robley's skill as an artist and eventually they allowed him to sketch some incredibly intimate and sacred moments."There was a gradual building of rapport," explains Tim Walker, pointing out a painting Robley did at a tangi (Māori funeral rite). "Astonishing for a Pākeha to be sitting in that context."Somewhere in the middle of this, Robley formed a relationship with a Māori woman - and not just any woman: Herete Mauao, daughter of one of the highest ranking chiefs in the entire Bay of Plenty region."Some kaumātua have told me she was presented to Robley as an act of respect for his mana," Walker says. "It seems hard to understand in one way because he was only an itinerant soldier who's part of a colonising force."However it began, Robley and Herete's relationship became serious very quickly. Herete gave birth to a son, named Hamiora Tu Ropere after his father.But Robley didn't stay with his family for long. After just 20 months, the 68th regiment were redeployed away from New Zealand. Robley would never see Herete or Hamiora ever again.However, he maintained a deep and sometimes deeply problematic connection with Aotearoa for the rest of his life.Headhunter…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Horatio Robley witnessed the most famous battle of the New Zealand Wars, he fathered a child with the daughter of a sworn enemy, his sketching helped end a war, his book helped save the art of Maori tattooing... But mostly he's famous for his grotesque collection of nearly 40 human heads.Horatio Robley witnessed the most famous battle of the New Zealand Wars, he fathered a child with the daughter of a sworn enemy, his sketching helped end a war and his book helped save the art of Māori tattooing.But mostly he's famous for his grotesque collection of nearly 40 human heads.A Wall of HeadsIf you type Horatio Robley's name into a search engine you'll find a seriously disturbing image (a censored version appears above).In the foreground is Robley, dressed in a fancy suit and sporting an enormous handlebar moustache. In one hand he holds a mere (Māori club) and behind him... 35 mokomokai - preserved Māori heads.The heads are in various states. Some are well preserved; you can still clearly make out their facial features and the beautiful curved lines of their tā moko (facial tattoos). Others are harder to look at; the lips are drawn back from the teeth, mummified skin clings to the shape of the skull.Most disturbingly, one head in the bottom right corner of the photo clearly belongs to a very young child, maybe even a baby.For the better part of a century this image has defined Horatio Robley. It's hard to look at a white guy sitting in front of a wall of Māori heads and see anything other than a monster."When were younger he was described as a macabre predator of culture," says Haami Piripi, a senior member of the mokomokai repatriation team for Te Papa museum.But there's a twist in this story."Over time, as we've got to know him more and understand his motivation, we see that he really became a friend of the Māori."So how do we go from a headhunting "predator of culture" to a "friend of the Māori"? That's a fascinating story in of itself. It's mostly been driven by the research of Tim Walker, a former curator at Te Papa who wrote his thesis on Robley in the 1980s."That's the image that people have of him," says Walker, gesturing to the gruesome black and white photo of Robley posing with his collection. "I think what we see generally is people's projections of their own sense of what was going on onto that image."In Walker's words, Robley was a man "out of time". His motives were often misunderstood in his own day and are even more difficult to decipher from the perspective of 21st century Aotearoa.Disaster at Gate Pā…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Pākehā settlers in Taranaki knew John Bryce as "Honest John" but Taranaki Māori called him "Bryce Kōhuru" - Bryce the Murderer. Black Sheep investigates the life of the infamous Native Affairs Minister who led the assault on Parihaka.Pākehā settlers in Taranaki knew John Bryce as "Honest John" but Taranaki Māori had another nickname. They called him "Bryce Kōhuru" - Bryce the Murderer. In this episode of Black Sheep William Ray investigates the life of the infamous Native Affairs Minister.John Bryce has gone down in history as an arrogant sometimes brutal man, with harsh attitudes towards Māori, even for his time.But nobody is born racist, so where did it come from? The earliest hint comes when Bryce was just six years old, living in Glasgow in 1839.John Bryce's mother had recently died from tuberculosis and his father decided to take the family from their home in Scotland to New Zealand. While they were waiting to depart on their ship this poem by Poet Laureate, Robert Southey was read:On Zealand's hills, where tigers steal along,And the dread Indian chants a dismal song,Where human fiends on midnight errands walk,And bathe in brains the murderous tomahawk.Along with that slightly bloodcurdling poem, six-year old John Bryce would have heard the passengers and crew telling stories of the Boyd massacre, where around 60 Europeans were killed and eaten by Māori at Whangaroa.Bryce and his fellow passengers were among the very first colonists to settle in the Wellington region at Pito-one (now called Petone) under the protection of a local rangatira, Puakawa. But, just three weeks after the settlers arrived in Petone, Puakawa was killed in a raid by followers of Te Rauparaha from the Kapiti Coast.When he turned 13 John Bryce had another foundation experience of Māori. 1846 saw the outbreak of the Hutt War, between Māori and Pākehā in the Wellington region. 50 years later John Bryce related the story of Bugler William Allen a young man who, according to popular legend, spotted a raid and continued to sound the alarm despite axe wounds to both arms. The story goes that he held the bugle between his knees and kept blowing until he was struck in the head and killed.This incident "made a lasting impression on Bryce," says historian Moyra Cooke, who researched John Bryce for her masters thesis.A few years after the end of the Hutt War John and his older brother went to Australia to become diggers in the Victorian gold rush. They must have struck a good lode because when they returned they were rich enough to buy land for farming at Brunswick, near Whanganui…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Roy Courlander was a New Zealand soldier who joined Nazi Germany's infamous SS during WWII. He participated in propaganda efforts trying to turn more allied soldiers to the Nazi cause. So why did he decide to turn traitor?On ANZAC day New Zealanders remember the heroism and sacrifice of those killed in war, but not all soldiers have legacies worth celebrating. Case in point: Roy Courlander, a NZ Army Private who volunteered to join Nazi Germany's infamous Waffen SS.Roy Courlander's early years are hard to trace. He was born in London in 1914 and was raised by his mother, Edith Carter and his stepfather, Leonard Courlander. He never knew his biological father.In his late teens Courlander went to work on his stepfather's plantations in Vanuatu. He then came to New Zealand in 1938 and got a job with the Inland Revenue Department."Then in mid-1939 he's in trouble because in Napier he's arrested after a burglary," says New Zealand Defence Force Historian John Crawford.This burglary was quite a serious incident. A young woman came home to find three men, including Courlander, inside her house. They assaulted her but she screamed and neighbours came to her rescue. The men were all caught and prosecuted."Courlander and two other men were eventually caught and prosecuted for their parts in this crime," John says.Roy Courlander was still on probation for the robbery on September 3rd, 1939 when war was declared by Britain and by extension New Zealand, on Nazi Germany.He signed up with the Second NZ Expeditionary Force and was assigned to 18th Infantry Battalion. He was deployed to Egypt where he volunteered to serve with battalion intelligence and began teaching himself German.In 1941 Roy Courlander was one of thousands of British and Commonwealth troops swept up in the disastrous Greek campaign.He was separated from his unit and eventually captured in Kalamata. When on a train bound for a prisoner of war camp in Yugoslavia, he and a fellow soldier saw a chance for escape. After the war ended he wrote this account of what happened:"On the night of June 1941, I and Private Kedsell succeeded in escaping through the window of the cattle truck that was taking us to Germany. The train stopped and the Germans started firing at us as we ran amongst the bushes along the railway track. Private Kedsell was hit and I was recaptured early the next morning. I received a beating up, was trussed up with barbed wire and taken to Germany." - Roy CourlanderThis account is backed up by witnesses and is generally considered reliable. But John Crawford doubts Courlander really was "trussed up with barbed wire"…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Kimble Bent was one of a tiny handful of Europeans who switched sides during the New Zealand Wars, who deserted the British army to join Māori "rebels" in Taranaki and reportedly witnessed a famous incident of kai tangata (cannibalism) in the wake of a battle against colonial forces.It's reasonably common knowledge that large numbers of Māori fought on the side of the government during the New Zealand Wars. We even have a name for them, kūpapa Māori.A less well-known story is the handful of Europeans who went in the other direction - Pākehā soldiers who deserted the British army and joined the cause of Māori "rebels".Most of these people are poorly documented, but there is one exception: Kimble Bent.June, 1865. A Ngāti Ruanui chief, Tito Hanataua, was riding his horse along a track near the bank of the Tangahoe river. He was there to scout a nearby British army fort.To his astonishment he came face-to-face with a soldier wearing a dripping wet scarlet uniform. That soldier was a 25-year-old American, Kimble Bent.Decades later, Bent recalled the conversation that followed to historian James Cowan, who published it in a book, The Adventures of Kimble Bent.Tito Hanataua: "Here you Pākehā! Go back quick! Haere atu, haere atu! Go away back to the soldiers. I shoot you suppose you no go! Hoki atu!Kimble Bent: Shoot away, I won't go back. I'm running away from the soldiers. I want to go to the Māoris. Take me with you!Tito Hanataua: You tangata kuware! You Pākehā fool, go back! The Māori kill you, my word! You look out!Kimble Bent: I don't care if they do, I tell you I want to live with the hauhaus.Tito Hanataua: E pai ana (it is well). All right, you come along. But you look out for my tribe - they kill you.- The Adventures of Kimble BentThe events which led Kimble Bent to that life-changing meeting with Tito Hanataua began five years earlier, when he travelled from his home in Eastport, Maine, to the United Kingdom.He quickly burned through the money which had been given to him by his father for the trip, and was left stranded with no way to return to the United States.While he was drowning his sorrows at a pub, Bent's eye was drawn to the smart uniform of a British Army recruiting sergeant. Bent had formerly served in the United States Navy as a teen, and he decided to sign up.It was the worst decision of his life."The discipline and parade ground drilling was a far cry from the rather more relaxed US Navy way of doing things. Floggings were common," said Chris Grosz, who wrote a graphic novel on Bent's story: Kimble Bent Malcontent…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

A cottage burns down, three mutilated bodies are found inside and there are fears the whole city of Auckland could be at risk. In this episode of Black Sheep, William Ray investigates the story of the first European to be judicially executed in New Zealand history. October 10th, 1847. The brutal murder of a Devonport family leaves Auckland fearing an invasion of vengeful Māori. But when that threat fails to materialise the police are left trying to solve New Zealand's first ever whodunnit...It began just after midnight, when lookouts on the HMS Dido spot flames rising from the house of Lieutenant Robert Snow.The sailors rush ashore and extinguish the blaze but after, find the badly mutilated bodies of Lt. Robert Snow, his wife Hannah and their four year old daughter, Mary.Pieces of flesh had been cut from all three bodies. The sailors know what that means... Cannibalism.The New Zealander (one of Aotearoa's very first newspapers) is quick to lay blame for the murder of the Snow family:"There can be no doubt that the natives were perpetrators of this foul deed. Our native police pronounced the wounds to be Maori handiwork at once. The mutilation of the bodies, from all three of which large pieces of flesh had been cut by knives, and the parts from whence they were cut, is conclusive evidence."The only controversy is whether the Māori killers were motivated by personal revenge against Snow, or if this is a precursor to a wider attack on Auckland itself.As The New Zealander put it: "If the matter be political, this act, according to Maori custom, is a declaration of war."Most of the prominent Māori chiefs who live near Auckland are equally convinced the murders were committed by Māori and are even more anxious than the European colonists to find the perpetrators."Chief Patuone over on the North Shore was very friendly towards Pakeha and chief Te Whero Whero in the Northern Waikato was also" says Terry Carson, author of The Axeman's Accomplice - a book about the Snow family murders. "They were quite keen that nothing interfere with the relationship" he explains.Māori leaders assure the colonists that they will track down the person responsible and at first they have some success. A few weeks after the murders a group of prominent chiefs from Ngāti Maru and Waikato-Tainui arrive in Auckland with a prisoner; a man called Mamuku, who they say killed the Snows.Mamuku is publicly interrogated on the veranda of Government House, but the questioning quickly reveals he knows nothing about the murders.Police and Māori are stumped. But then, a break; the killers give themselves away…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

In 1981 Dunedin teenager Chris Lewis tried to shoot Queen Elizabeth. Then, at least according to some, authorities tried to cover it up. In this collaboration with Stuff.co.nz journalist Hamish McNeilly, Black Sheep looks into Chris Lewis's bizarre life story. On October 14th, 1981 Dunedin teenager Chris Lewis tried to shoot Queen Elizabeth. Then (at least according to some) the authorities tried to cover it up. In this collaboration with Stuff.co.nz journalist Hamish McNeilly, RNZ's Black Sheep podcast looks into Lewis's bizarre life story.For more on Chris Lewis you can read Hamish McNeilly's series The Snowman and the Queen.Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details