Thomas Bracken: Not Understood

Thomas Bracken wrote NZ's national anthem and coined 'God's Own Country.' He died in poverty, buried in a pauper's grave. His satire was so perfect that 126 years later, we still don't realize we're singing a protest song. The ultimate 'Not Understood.'

  On Waitangi Day this year, I took friends on a tour of Dunedin’s Northern Cemetery. Outside the entrance stood a recent monument to Thomas Bracken, complete with his verses to the national anthem in both English and Māori. Inside, we followed signs to Bracken’s grave itself—originally a pauper’s grave, but transformed in 1940 into something altogether grander: a monument like a steeple, adorned with his famous poem Not Understood, which he wrote while in retreat at William Larnach’s castle on the Otago Peninsula.

  The irony was almost too perfect. Here lay New Zealand’s greatest satirist, a man whose subtlety was so profound that even his epitaph proclaims his failure to be understood. Strangely, Bracken died in 1898 after a long period of ill health while working in Parliament—the same year William Larnach shot himself in the same building. Both now have the largest monuments in the cemetery: Larnach built a scale model of First Church for his wife; Bracken’s followers built his.

  The following day, I bumped into New Zealand’s most recognized contemporary satirist at a bar in Lower Stuart Street. He was down from Auckland helping his daughter move into her first student flat. When I mentioned that I’d just visited the grave of New Zealand’s greatest satirist on Waitangi Day, he looked at me blankly. He had never heard of Thomas Bracken.

The forgotten genius

  It instantly dawned on me that many aspects of New Zealand history are so subtle that even satirists and historians have missed the point. The very fact that Not Understood adorns Bracken’s grave is the ultimate meta-commentary. He understood what was happening in colonial New Zealand with a clarity that would take historians another century to fully appreciate—and even then, they would celebrate the outcomes for all the wrong reasons.

  Thomas Bracken was primarily a satirist, though few recognized it then and fewer remember it now. He arrived in Dunedin in 1869 and observed the local idiosyncrasies of a gold boom town evolving in a different dimension from the rest of the country. He heard of the wars in the North Island, but only first witnessed their cruelty when the Parihaka prisoners appeared in Dunedin in 1879. That’s when he realized what was really going on.

The demographic chess game

  Bracken saw what modern historians often gloss over: a cynical game of demographic warfare between North and South Island settler interests. The local Member of Parliament in Waitotara, John Bryce, was also the Native Minister, and his seat was threatened by boundary changes that would include the colony’s largest Māori settlement: Parihaka. With the South Island population exerting its dominance in Parliament, North Island property speculators felt genuinely threatened. They were desperate to settle confiscated land—both to counter the population imbalance and to pay soldiers with Māori land.

  Consider the numbers. In 1881, when Bracken was first elected to Parliament, the South Island held sixty percent of the seats—55 electorates to the North Island’s 36. The South Island population had peaked at 297,212 compared to the North’s 192,414. This was the high-water mark of southern political dominance, achieved through gold rushes while the North Island was embroiled in land wars.

  But Bracken could see the tide turning. The 1881 election was also the first held under universal male suffrage—a strategic move that would reshape New Zealand politics. What followed was a carefully orchestrated series of reforms that historians would later celebrate as progressive enlightenment, but which Bracken understood as calculated political strategy:

  First, Māori voters were marginalized into just four electorates, despite representing a population that should have commanded fifteen or more seats. This diluted Māori political power at the exact moment when North Island interests needed to maximize settler representation.

  Second, the 1881 introduction of ‘one man, one vote’ eliminated plural voting by property owners—but conveniently also happened to benefit regions with more working-class voters relative to property owners.

  Third, the Liberal Government embarked on a crusade to break up the great South Island estates and redistribute land to small settlers. This wasn’t just social reform—it was voter creation. Each new small landowner was a new voter loyal to the Liberal Party that gave them land.

  Fourth, and most brilliantly, South Island women campaigned for—and won—the right to vote in 1893. Why? Because the South Island had a more balanced gender ratio than the frontier North Island, where male settlers predominated. Women’s suffrage wasn’t just progressive ideology; it was demographic mathematics.

  By 1901, the North Island population had surpassed the South for the first time in forty years: 390,571 to 381,661. By 1905, electoral seats were equal at 38 each. By 1911, the North held 42 seats to the South’s 34. The Liberal Party’s voter-creation strategy had worked, but it couldn’t ultimately reverse demographic destiny.

Year	Total Māori	Total Settler	Total NI Settler	Total SI Settler	NI Male Settler	NI Female Settler	SI Male Settler	SI Female Settler	NI Gen Seats	SI Gen Seats	Māori Seats	NI Voters Male	NI Voters Female	SI Voters Male	SI Voters Female	Māori Voters
1853	60,000	31,247	17,211	14,036	9,400	7,811	7,600	6,436	18	19	0	~1,400	—	~1,000	—	~100
1858	56,049	59,328	34,094	25,234	19,301	14,793	14,484	10,750	23	18	0	4,281	—	7,000	—	—
1861	50,000	98,915	41,435	57,480	23,281	18,154	43,103	14,377	22	31	0	~1,900	—	~2,900	—	—
1866	48,000	204,087	79,733	124,354	43,266	36,467	78,573	45,781	31	39	0	8,143	—	14,000	—	—
1871	46,000	256,420	96,780	159,640	56,128	40,652	94,527	65,113	32	42	4	~10,000	—	~13,000	—	~4,000
1876	46,000	376,660	137,116	239,544	77,543	59,573	134,801	104,743	34	50	4	20,273	—	35,000	—	~5,100
1881	46,141	489,911	192,414	297,497	105,444	86,970	163,222	134,275	33	54	4	27,000	—	41,000	—	~6,000
1887	44,000	590,200	256,900	333,300	138,500	118,400	181,200	152,100	34	57	4	49,200	—	62,300	—	~7,200
1891	41,993	611,626	281,883	329,743	151,332	130,551	175,066	154,677	31	39	4	59,000	—	70,540	—	~8,000
1893	42,000	686,010	344,359	341,651	183,115	161,244	180,489	161,162	31	39	4	62,400	47,917	62,039	48,489	11,269
1896	42,113	772,232	390,571	381,661	208,614	181,957	201,114	180,547	34	36	4	69,140	60,400	65,146	62,640	13,037
1902	43,143	888,400	464,100	424,300	247,100	217,000	221,200	203,100	39	37	4	114,300	94,000	108,100	98,100	14,200
1911	52,723	1,007,849	563,729	444,120	301,745	261,984	234,312	209,808	43	33	4	148,000	127,000	115,334	104,349	~12,000
1922	56,000	1,218,000	819,700	493,300	421,400	398,300	255,100	238,200	47	29	4	215,400	204,100	144,300	142,100	19,400
1935	82,326	1,555,000	1,005,600	549,400	514,242	491,358	281,673	267,727	47	29	4	282,166	262,000	152,000	145,294	25,502

Protest hymns in plain sight

  Thomas Bracken saw all of this and predicted it. His genius lay in how he responded: he cleverly crafted his prose as protest songs, hiding his critique in plain sight. Just as Bruce Springsteen would later write Born in the USA with an upbeat, anthemic sound masking dark, cynical lyrics to protest war, Bracken wrote God Defend New Zealand to protest the corruption and racism of settler politics.

  Read his second verse—the one that should be sung at Olympic ceremonies if there were genuine commitment to racial recognition:

Men of every creed and race,

Gather here before Thy face,

Asking Thee to bless this place,

God defend our free land.

From dissension, envy, hate,

And corruption guard our state,

Make our country good and great,

God defend New Zealand.

  ‘From dissension, envy, hate, and corruption guard our state.’ These aren’t the words of a naive patriot. They’re the plea of a man who saw exactly what his country was becoming. The reference to ‘Pacific’s triple star’ has been interpreted as the three main islands, but Bracken likely intended it as support for the Māori prophets—Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki, Chief Te Peehi Turoa, and the leaders Te Paerangi and Te Paekinga—protecting them ‘from the shafts of strife and war.’

  Behind the graceful subtlety lies a prophetic vision as prescient as Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’—except Bracken’s audience never realized they were being warned.

The translation that displaced truth

  But here’s where Bracken’s fate becomes truly Kafkaesque. Today, when the national anthem is sung at major events, the first verse is performed in Māori—not Bracken’s original English. This might seem like progress, a gesture toward biculturalism. Except the Māori translation was created by an English-born Māori Land Court judge, Thomas Henry Smith, in 1878. And the Māori Land Court, during Bracken’s lifetime, was the primary legal mechanism for dispossessing Māori of their land.

  The system was brilliantly cynical. The Māori Land Court was structured so that Māori living in rural and isolated areas had to travel to urban centres to have their land claims heard. Once in town, they encountered ‘considerable delays’—weeks or months of waiting. They had to pay for accommodation and living costs while the court ground through its processes. By the time their case was heard, many Māori had accumulated such debts that they were forced to settle by selling the very land they had come to town to protect.

  Thomas Henry Smith was a judge in this system. His job, functionally, was to facilitate the legal theft of Māori land. And it was his translation of Bracken’s anthem that has become the default version sung at international sporting events and Olympic medal ceremonies.

  Compare the depth of meaning. Here is Smith’s Māori translation, rendered back into English:

O Lord, God,

Of all people

Listen to us,

Cherish us

May goodness flourish,

May your blessings flow

Defend us New Zealand.

  It’s pleasant. It’s harmless. It’s utterly generic—the kind of civic prayer that could apply to any nation at any time. Now compare it to Bracken’s actual second verse, with its specific plea against ‘dissension, envy, hate, and corruption,’ its vision of ‘men of every creed and race’ gathering together. Bracken wrote a genuinely anti-racist anthem, a call for unity that acknowledged New Zealand’s diversity and corruption. Smith’s translation is Sunday school theology.

  At Olympic medal ceremonies, only one verse is permitted. New Zealand sings the Māori Land Court judge’s translation. Bracken’s actual anti-racist message—his call for men of every creed and race to gather before God, his prayer to guard the state from corruption—remains unsung. The poet who protested the dispossession of Māori has been displaced by the legal architect of that dispossession. The irony would be funny if it weren’t so perfectly tragic.

Satire so subtle it was mistaken for praise

  Bracken’s masterwork of satire came in 1881, during his first year in Parliament, when he addressed the invasion of Parihaka. John Bryce, the Native Minister, had orchestrated the raid as an election stunt. In the prelude to that disgraceful event, Bryce held a parade where he rode a white charger down the main street of Whanganui, supported by his militia, claiming he would ‘tame the savages’ that threatened his electoral tenure.

  In Parliament, Bracken delivered this speech:

“I shall pass no opinion as to the justice or otherwise of their action in bringing about that memorable event, the siege of Parihaka. The Government may, for anything I know to the contrary, have acted with the wisdom in mustering the Volunteers of New Zealand and making a grand warlike display under our antipodean Napoleon, the Native Minister. The presence of that gentleman, mounted on a white charger, and surrounded by all the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, must have had an awe-inspiring effect, and may have served to quell an impending insurrection.”

  Bracken was so subtle that Bryce and his supporters took that speech as a compliment. It was recorded in Hansard without qualification. Only those with ears to hear understood the savage mockery: calling Bryce ‘our antipodean Napoleon’ while describing the massacre of peaceful resisters as quelling an ‘impending insurrection.’ This was Jonathan Swift transported to the South Pacific.

The fatal flaw: being too clever

  Perhaps Bracken’s greatest flaw was the very subtlety that made him brilliant. He was too good at what he did. His satire was so deft that John Bryce thought himself praised. His national anthem was so beautifully crafted that generations would sing it without understanding its protest. His political insights were so prescient that historians would arrive at the same conclusions a century later and think themselves original.

  Bracken’s turn of phrase was as deft as Shakespeare’s, and just as capable of embedding itself in the vernacular. His coinage “God’s Own Country” became so popular that Richard Seddon—the colony’s longest-serving Premier and Bracken’s ally in the Liberal government—adopted it as his personal slogan. Seddon wielded the phrase with earnest patriotic pride, apparently never realizing that his friend meant it as bitter satire. When Bracken called New Zealand “God’s Own Country,” he meant God had abandoned it to its own devices. 

Source: National Library.

Bracken's subtlety and cynicism rivalled Sir Keith Holyoake, who used to pour praise opponents who bombed speeches with, "Great speech! Great speech! Do it again!"

  During his era, Bracken was New Zealand’s Mark Twain. In successive eras, he might be compared to Will Rogers, George Orwell, Bob Dylan, or Bruce Springsteen—artists who embedded critique so deeply in popular culture that it became invisible. But unlike those figures, Bracken never achieved wealth or lasting recognition. He died in Dunedin Hospital on 16 February 1898, aged just 54, in humble circumstances after years of financial struggle and failing health.

  He was buried in a pauper’s grave. The man who wrote the national anthem couldn’t afford a proper monument.

Belated understanding

  It took forty-two years for Dunedin to recognize what it had lost. In 1940, on the centenary of the Treaty of Waitangi—that document whose breaches Bracken had spent his career protesting—local supporters erected the monument that now marks his grave. The timing was hardly coincidental. By 1940, New Zealand was beginning to reckon with its colonial history, though it would be decades more before that reckoning became serious.

  They chose to inscribe his most famous poem, Not Understood, on the monument. Whether they understood the layers of irony in this choice is unclear. Here was a man who had been supremely understood by history—his anthem became the national song, his poetry was taught in schools—yet his meaning remained utterly missed. He was famous and forgotten simultaneously.

The perfect epitaph

  Standing in the Northern Cemetery on Waitangi Day, watching tourists photograph the monument without reading the words, I was struck by how perfectly Not Understood captures not just Bracken’s life, but New Zealand’s entire colonial history. We celebrate 1893 as the year women gained the vote without examining why the campaign succeeded in the South Island first. We sing a Māori Land Court judge’s translation of ‘God Defend New Zealand’ and call it progress, while Bracken’s actual anti-racist message goes unsung. We commemorate Waitangi Day without reckoning with Parihaka.

  The layers of irony are almost too perfect. A poet who protested the dispossession of Māori has been displaced at international events by the translation of a judge whose job was to dispossess Māori. An anthem calling for protection from ‘corruption’ is administered by institutions that exemplify it. A plea for ‘men of every creed and race’ to gather together is replaced with generic civic theology that says nothing and offends no one.

  The fact that New Zealand’s most recognized contemporary satirist has never heard of Thomas Bracken is not an indictment of him—it’s proof that Bracken’s epitaph was earned. The subtlety of nineteenth-century New Zealand’s political machinations has been so thoroughly lost that even those whose job it is to see through artifice cannot see it.

  Perhaps that’s the final irony: Bracken’s greatest success was his greatest failure. He crafted satire so perfect, protest so beautiful, and critique so subtle that it became indistinguishable from celebration. His national anthem is sung at every major event—well, a bowdlerized translation of it is—his poems are quoted, his monument visited. And almost no one understands what he was really saying.

Oh God! that men would see a little clearer,

Or judge less harshly where they cannot see;

Oh God! that men would draw a little nearer

To one another, they’d be nearer Thee,

And understood.

  In 1940, Bracken’s grave received the recognition it deserved. In 2026, he remains not understood. Perhaps he always will be. And perhaps, given the nature of his genius, that’s exactly as it should be.