This cache highlights the story of the William Handley's Wool Shed attack.
I learned of this story from Difficult Histories: The New Zealand Wars.
The attached 1868 map shows that the cache is placed close to the site of William Handley's Wool Shed.
The 1868 attack:
Source: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/classroom/conversations/te-tangata-k%C5%8Dhuru-murderous-man
John Bryce, a local farmer, was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Kai Iwi Volunteers. An official report published in a Whanganui newspaper said that on 27 November 1868, Bryce and his volunteers came upon a group of Māori at William Handley’s wool shed at Nukumaru (near Whanganui), and killed eight ‘Hauhaus’ with ‘sabre, revolver, or carbine’.
In reality, the Kai Iwi Volunteers attacked a group of unarmed Māori children aged between six and 12. James Belich gives an account of this attack in ‘I shall not die’: Tītokowaru’s War New Zealand 1868–1869. He describes the brutal killing of a 10-year-old Ngā Ruahine boy, Kingi Takatua, whose head was cut in half in the attack. Another young boy, Akuhata Herewini, was also killed. According to Vincent O’Malley (2019) the other children were seriously injured. Belich maintains that the Kai Iwi cavalry admitted later they could see they were going after children ‘and charged in for the kill, not despite the fact that their quarry were unarmed children, but because of it’.
It is understood that the nearby town of Maxwell is named after Sergeant G. Maxwell who was one of the Volunteers.
Modern day:
Sadly, there is no memorial to this sad event.
So, many thanks to 2 Bulbars for agreeing to lay and maintain this cache so that geocachers at least may be aware, and perhaps pass the story on.
The attached Google Earth screenshot, with the help of the traces of the two old fence lines, shows a modern day view of where the wool shed used to be. Here: S 39° 49.767' E 174° 46.896' West of Lake Waikato.