The Waikato mission schools of Reverend Robert Maunsell: Conflict and co-operation

Robert Maunsell was a missionary who rapidly made his mark on the area where he chose to establish his mission station and a man who made very many converts to Christianity in a very short time. Yet he was also subtly challenged by the very people among whom he chose to spread his gospel, and by the volatility of the political upheavals of the 'crucial decades' of the 1840-1865 period. While the missionaries and the Maori people struggled over the syncretic responses to the mission, both were marginalised by the emerging political strength of the Settler Representatives, so much so that by the late 1860s the world views offered by both these former groups had been dominated by the latter.