Many Deaths of Mary Dobie

"'Dreadful murder at Opunake', said the Taranaki Herald, 'Shocking outrage', the Evening Post in Wellington when they learned in November 1880 that a young woman called Mary Dobie had been found lying under a flax bush near aOpunake on the Taranaki coast with her throat cut so deep her head was almost severed. In the midst of tensions between Maaori and Paakehaa, the murder ignited questions: Paakehaa feared it was an act of political terrorism in response to the state's determination to take the land of the tribes in the region. Maaori thought it would be the cue for the state to use force against them, especially the pacifist settlement at Parihaka. Was it rape or robbery, was the killer Maaori or Paakehaa? In this book, David Hastings takes us back to that lonely road on the Taranaki coast in nineteenth-century New Zealand to unravels the many deaths of Mary Dobie - the murder, the social tensions in Taranaki, the hunt for the killer and the lessons that Maaori and Paakehaa learnt about the murder and about themselves."--Publisher information.