As a nod to the Government's desire for more world history in the new social studies/history curriculum we thought we'd take a brief detour from Aotearoa New Zealand's history to talk about history's great walks.
We cover ten Historical (Land Based) Political Walks and 1 Flotilla Protest because, apparently, the Whanganui River Journey is on the Great Walks list and only slightly wetter than the Milford Track.
Our coverage is, as always, as perfunctory as a politician’s apology. The form is there; the substance has gone AWOL. With that, let's begin.
Walk 1 - Te Hīkoi ki Waitangi (The Māori Land March)
Aotearoa New Zealand, 1975 — Te Hapua to Wellington
Great because it’s NZ.
Dame Whina Cooper was 79 years old when she led a march the length of the North Island to protest the steady, relentless loss of Māori land that had been going on since roughly 1840. The hīkoi began in Te Hapua in September and arrived in Wellington in October, having collected thousands of marchers, a petition signed by 60,000 people, and the full attention of a government that had been hoping everyone would stop noticing. The land wasn't immediately returned, because that would have been far too sensible, but the march is widely credited with shifting the entire conversation about the Treaty of Waitangi toward where it needed to go.
Result: Morally Decisive. Practically ongoing. The Waitangi Tribunal. A Great March.
Walk 2 - The Long March
China, 1934–35 — 9,000+ km across multiple provinces
Great because of its significance in the 20th Century and into this century.
Not so much a protest as a strategic retreat that has been marketed ever since as something more triumphant. The Chinese Communist Party, pursued by Nationalist forces (now resident in Taiwan) who were determined to eliminate them, marched approximately 9,000 kilometres through some of the most punishing terrain on earth, crossing rivers, scaling mountains, and generally doing things that historians can barely describe without needing a lie-down. Of the roughly 100,000 who set out, perhaps 8,000 arrived. Mao Zedong, who did survive, subsequently made the Long March the founding myth of the People's Republic, which suggests that what you call a thing is sometimes as important as what the thing was.
Result: Complicated. Enormously famous. Possibly the most physically demanding entry on this list. The March was not visible from space.
Walk 3 - Gandhi's Salt March
India, 1930 — 388 km from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi
Great because it’s an exemplar of non-violent protest and hastened the collapse of Empire.
In which a small, bespectacled man in a loincloth decided the most devastating thing he could do to the British Empire was walk 388 kilometres to the sea and pick up some salt. The British, who had taxed salt, which is to say they had taxed the ocean, found this bewildering and then extremely alarming. Gandhi set off with 78 followers and arrived at the coast three weeks later trailing roughly 50,000 people, the world's press, and the nagging sensation that perhaps taxing salt had been a tactical error. He bent down, picked up a handful of muddy brine, and the Empire wobbled. The genius of it was that everyone understood salt. Everyone needed it. Everyone was furious.
Result: Mostly Good, though Britain took another 17 years to take the hint.
Walk 4 - The Selma to Montgomery Marches
USA, 1965 — Alabama, 87 km
Great because civil rights are important.
Three attempts were made to march 87 kilometres from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital Montgomery to demand voting rights. The first attempt, on what became known as Bloody Sunday, ended on the Edmund Pettus Bridge when state troopers and a sheriff's posse attacked peaceful marchers with clubs and tear gas while television cameras rolled. The footage, broadcast that evening, caused a national revulsion so immediate and powerful that it essentially wrote the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by itself. The third march, completed under federal protection, arrived in Montgomery with 25,000 people. Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act five months later. It remains one of the most consequential walks in American history, which given the circumstances of the first attempt, is saying something.
Result: Decisive, at considerable cost, and producing one of the great pieces of civil rights legislation.
Walk 5 - The March of the Plebs to the Sacred Mount
Roman Republic — the Mons Sacer, outside Rome
Great because we wanted a broad historical spread and this was BC.
In what is arguably the world's first recorded general strike combined with a protest march, the plebeians of Rome simply left. They were tired of debt slavery, conscription into wars that enriched everyone except them, and a legal system administered entirely by patricians who found the legal system very convenient. They packed up and walked out of Rome to the Sacred Mount, three miles away, and sat there. Rome, which needed plebeians to function (fight its wars, grow its food, do essentially everything), found this alarming. The Senate sent a delegation. The plebeians sent it back. Eventually the patricians agreed to create the office of Tribune of the Plebs, who could veto any law, and the plebeians walked home. It was, in terms of leverage-to-distance ratio, one of the most efficient protests in recorded history but poor if you’re trying to get in your 10,000 daily steps.
Result: Excellent. The Tribune of the Plebs became one of the most powerful offices in Rome.
Walk 6 - Wat Tyler's March to London
England — Kent and Essex to London 1381
Great because it spoke truth to power and exploitation
A poll tax is a flat rate levied on every head regardless of whether that head is attached to someone who has any money. When King Richard II imposed a poll tax for the third time in four years, the people of Kent and Essex decided this was enough. They marched to London to say so, in very large numbers, with considerable force of feeling, and a list of demands that included the abolition of serfdom. Wat Tyler led the Kentish contingent; the marchers took the Tower of London, opened the prisons, and burned the Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt, a particularly enthusiastic supporter of the tax. Richard II, fifteen years old, rode out to meet them and seemed genuinely to agree with most of their demands. Then the Mayor of London stabbed Tyler at a parley. The king told the assembled rebels that he was now their leader, rode them away from London, and had the ringleaders dealt to. The poll tax was, however, abolished.
Result: Mixed. Tax gone. Serfdom persisted. Tyler decidedly dead.
Walk 7 - Prestes Column - The Longest March
Brazil — São Paulo state, and the Prestes Column (1925–27)
Brazil's most legendary protest march came in the Prestes Column of 1925–27 — an armed rebel column led by Luís Carlos Prestes that marched 25,000 kilometres through the Brazilian interior over two years, covering more ground than any protest movement in history, visiting towns and villages the federal government had never bothered with, and announcing that things should be different. They were never defeated in battle. They simply ran out of country to walk through. Prestes eventually went into exile in Bolivia. The march achieved nothing immediately and everything eventually — it defined a generation of Brazilian left politics, made Prestes a legend, and demonstrated that Brazil's interior was vast, its inequality was vaster, and its government had very little idea what was happening in either.
Result: Nothing immediate. A foundational myth. 25,000 km of walking is its own argument.
Walk 8 - Schoolchildren in SOWETO
SOWETO, South Africa, started small but grew and became violent.
On the morning of 16 June 1976, in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, thousands of schoolchildren set off for what they thought was a march and discovered it was history instead. They were protesting a government decision that required them to be taught in Afrikaans, a language associated less with algebra and more with authority. Armed with placards, courage, and a belief that adults might listen, the students met police who had brought neither listening ears nor subtlety. When shots were fired, the illusion that apartheid could muddle on unchanged collapsed. The death of young Hector Pieterson became an image the world could not unsee. What followed were days of protest, violence, grief, and extraordinary bravery, spreading far beyond Soweto.
Result: The uprising did not end apartheid—history is rarely that tidy—but it announced, loudly and irrevocably, that the system was morally bankrupt and living on borrowed time, although almost 20 years is a lot of borrowed time.
Walk 9 - The Global Anti-Iraq War Marches
Global — Rome, London, Sydney, New York, 600+ cities
On 15 February 2003, between six and ten million people marched in 600 cities around the world — the largest coordinated protest in recorded history — to oppose the impending invasion of Iraq. In Rome, three million people marched, which remains the largest anti-war demonstration ever recorded in a single city. In London, a million people walked through Hyde Park. The march was described in some media as 'the world's second superpower' ie public opinion. President George Bush described the protesters as 'a focus group.' The invasion proceeded on schedule. Iraq was invaded. The weapons of mass destruction that had justified the war were not found, because they were not there. Tony Blair maintained for years that history would vindicate him. History has been quite slow to get around to this.
Result: Ignored. The largest protest in human history produced no immediate policy change. An important data point.
Walk 10 - The Women's March on Versailles
France — Les Halles market, Paris, to the Palace of Versailles, 21 km
On the morning of 5 October 1789, the market women of Paris — the fishwives, the laundresses, the stall-holders of Les Halles, who understood the price of bread with an intimacy that no minister of the crown had ever troubled himself to acquire — had had enough. Bread was scarce, expensive, and the court at Versailles was continuing to exist in its customary fashion, which was to say magnificently while eating cake. A crowd of several thousand women marched twenty-one kilometres through rain to the Palace of Versailles. They were not subtle about their intentions. They invaded the National Assembly. They stormed the royal apartments. They put the heads of two royal bodyguards on pikes and paraded them. Louis XVI agreed to return to Paris, and was escorted back the following day, accompanied by the crowd, the heads, and a wagon of flour (no historical record of cake mix) from the royal stores. The march is widely considered the moment the Revolution became irreversible — a turning point brought about not by philosophers or generals, but by women who needed to feed their children and had walked twenty-one kilometres in the rain to make the point. Allons enfants. Marchons, marchons!
Result: Decisive. The king returned to Paris. The Revolution continued. The women have been somewhat undercredited ever since which is pretty typical of male historians.
Walk 11 - Marching on Boats
Pacific — Nuclear Free Pacific flotilla
Not strictly a march in exactly the same way navigating the Whanganui River Journey Great Walk is not strictly a walk - except perhaps for Jesus.
In 1973, New Zealand did something that small countries rarely do: it sailed half its navy (the warship Otago) along with a flotilla of private yachts directly at France's nuclear testing programme and essentially said, firmly and with maritime flags, “Stop That!” The HMNZS Otago left Auckland with 242 crew, one government minister, and the quiet determination of a nation that had decided the Pacific belonged to the people living in it rather than to whoever happened to have the largest bombs. France, after initially ignoring everyone, moved its explosions underground in 1974, and New Zealand made itself officially nuclear-free in 1987. It had taken fourteen years of persistent civilian badgering to get there, which by the standards of governments responding to public opinion is practically instantaneous.
Result: France eventually stopped testing above ground and then stopped testing in the Pacific altogether but not before indulging in terrorism in Waitematā Harbour.