‘Dreadful murder at Opunake’, said the Taranaki Herald, ‘Shocking outrage’, cried 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 Opunake on the Taranaki coast with her throat cut so deep her head was almost severed. In the midst of tensions between Maori and Pakeha in 1880, the murder ignited questions: Pakeha 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. Maori 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 Maori or Pakeha? 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 Maori and Pakeha learnt about the murder and about themselves.

David Hastings’ career in journalism spans more than four decades. He has worked for the Melbourne Sun, AAP and the ABC in radio and television. He was day editor at ABC TV news in Melbourne before joining the New Zealand Herald in the late 1980s where he was foreign editor, news editor, deputy editor and editor of the Weekend Herald. He has an MA (Hons) in history from Auckland University and has written two history books, Over the Mountains of the Sea and Extra! Extra! How the people made the news. He left the Herald in January 2013 to pursue his interest in writing history.