One has to wonder why the Otorohanga student is so keen for a special holiday to be put in place to ‘commemorate' the Land Wars to the extent that he not only presented a petition, but organised a part-Maori march on Parliament.

Is this a sincere desire to remember the dead on both sides, or to open up old wounds which time ought to have healed as we move forward? Already I have read letters with allegations of ‘land-grabbing colonists' so perhaps the time has come to set out a few facts. Only 4.5 per cent of the entire land mass of NZ was confiscated and a large part was handed back to tribes before 1873.

The rest was legitimately sold by Maori, sometimes several times over. Since then even more land has been handed back or millions upon millions of taxpayers' money paid in compensation - which does not appear to trickle down to the majority of Maori. When some tribes rebelled and broke the Treaty covenants, Governor Gray warned them that land would be confiscated to pay for the cost of quelling the rebellion and to reimburse settlers for destroyed property.

The fact is land-owner Maori sold NZ to colonists in hundreds of transactions recorded in the Turton's Deeds posted for all to see on the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre of the Victoria University website.

M Brooks, Tauranga South.