The Economic Impoverishment

of Hauraki Maori

Through Colonisation

1830 -1930

THE HAURAKI TREATY CLAIMS

VOLUME 11

Hauraki Maori Trust Board

FOREWORD

The Hauraki Treaty Claims project has examined the nature and extent of the interaction of Maori with the Crown in the Hauraki tribal territory during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The claims, together with the research and supporting evidence, are set out in eleven volumes. These are presented to the Waitangi Tribunal to support the Hauraki case.

The history of colonisation in Hauraki—the deliberate policies of the Crown leading to the social and economic deprivation endured by those who have gone before us and their years of responsible protest—has not been told before. These volumes, the foundation of the Hauraki case, will forever rewrite our nation's history books, contributing, only now, a Maori perspective to the history of this region.

We began this project four years ago with a multi-disciplinary team approach. Professor Stone was part of this team, contributing the perspective of an economic historian to examine the condition of Maori through colonisation by European settlers.

Professor Stone's The Economic Impoverishment of Hauraki Maori Through Colonisation, 1830-1930 examines the destruction of the pre-European economy by colonial economic processes, aided and abetted by government officials, creating a situation whereby Maori became paupers in their own land. The resulting economic distress and deprivation has lasted for generations.

The Hauraki treaty claims are a consequence of the Crown's actions after it signed the Treaty of Waitangi. Professor Stone's report will significantly support the Hauraki case in the debate that will inevitably surround the Hauraki claims. I take this opportunity to thank Professor Stone for his contribution to this project.

No reira, noho ora koutou.

T J Mc Enteer

Claims Manager

Hauraki Maori Trust Board

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

My name is Russell Cyril James Stone, Emeritus Professor of history of the University of Auckland. I was born and educated in Auckland. I hold an MA degree (first-class honours) from the University of New Zealand and a PhD from the University of Auckland awarded on a thesis dealing with Auckland's nineteenth-century business community.

Between 1964 and 1989 I worked as a full-time teacher in the history department of the University of Auckland. Since my academic retirement I have worked as a full-time history consultant. In the last eight years I have had three book-length monographs published; I have also written two reports on Maori lands issues: the first, in conjunction with Professor Alan Ward, on the railways lands of inner Auckland, commissioned by the Crown/Congress Joint Working Party (1992); and the second, on the sale by Ngati Whatua of the Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill block, commissioned by the Cornwall Park Trust Board (1995).

I have worked extensively and continuously on the economic and social history of the Auckland province and the metropolitan area since 1958. In all, I have written seven books on aspects of Auckland's economic, business and social history. Three of these books, Makers of Fortune (1973), Young Logan Campbell (1982), and James Dilworth (1995) have substantial sections on the European purchase of Maori lands and the pressures of the Auckland business community on the Crown to facilitate the process. Four of my 15 journal articles also relate precisely to that issue.

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SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT

This report attempts to trace the economic and social impoverishment of the Hauraki people resulting from the colonisation of their lands. The term 'colonisation', as used here, embraces the following:

•   the subordination of the indigenous people by unilateral lawmaking or regulation by Crown agencies: the governor, the provincial or central ('colonial') legislatures or other executives, or officials acting under their instructions;

•   the military subjugation of the 1860s as an adjunct to the Waikato and Bay of Plenty campaigns, a process continued under the subsequent policy of 'pacification' which is here regarded as war carried on by other means;

•   the progressive imposition from 1865 onwards of European laws of (land) conveyance, facilitated by the substitution of individualised titles for customary communal titles.

Hauraki people were extraordinarily vulnerable to this process of colonisation because of their closeness to Auckland. They had a propinquity to that major pioneer settlement that mere miles on a map do not disclose. In nineteenth-century provincial Auckland, the main mode of transport was water transport: the province's 'mosquito fleet' became a proverb. The great bulk of the Hauraki hapu, their habitations adjacent to the inland sea, the Firth and the island-barrier protected gulf, were a brief steam-journey away from the capital (until 1865), and the colony's commercial centre for many of the years following. Consequently the full weight of Auckland influence fell on Hauraki iwi with an intensity and to an extent that should not be forgotten. Because of this propinquity the Hauraki people were peculiarly vulnerable, and the Crown had a considerable fiduciary obligation to protect them. This responsibility was not shouldered.

How far were the Hauraki people impoverished, economically and socially by this Crown neglect? To understand this one must first look at the pre-European economy of Hauraki so that later changes can be measured.

The traditional economy

The pre-European economy was stable but not in a condition of stasis. In response mainly to population pressures on limited resources it was evolving to technically higher levels of food gathering and cultivation. There was a constant factor, however: regardless of technological changes in production, the economy interlocked with the social order and was in equilibrium with it. Maori production was communitarian and co-operative; demands for labour were met by kinship obligations; and the activities were subject to chiefly co-ordination. This mode of production carried through to the next phase, the time of Hauraki's early interaction with the European economy, here called 'the phase of co-existence'.

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The phase of co-existence, c.1830-60

The Hauraki region had early contact with the European economy. Its natural resources, above all its kauri timber, were much sought after by pre-1840 traders. The relationship continued and intensified when nearby Auckland became the capital in 1840. Local tribes became quickly aware that desirable consumer goods beyond the reach of their current technology were at hand, above all iron goods and textiles; these soon became `necessaries'. Production was stimulated to provide a medium of exchange. Although a demand was also created for goods which were inessential, if not positively deleterious (alcohol, guns, processed foods), this phase of cohabitation of two unlike even antagonistic economies was mutually advantageous. The social order of Hauraki for time out of mind remained intact as tribes earned the wherewithal to satisfy their consumer demands by recourse to the traditional, co-operative methods of work to produce foods—vegetables, fruit, pigs and poultry—and to act as timber millers and gatherers of flax, firewood, timber, and (later) kauri gum.

The phase of exploitation, c.1860 onwards

This later phase which destroyed the mutuality of benefit coincided with the discovery of gold on the Coromandel Peninsula, the Waikato land war and its associated blockade of the Gulf, the exploitation of mines and of forests by European labour and capital—particularly joint stock companies. Invariably, when a decision was to be made by the Crown as to whose interests should prevail: those of the resident Hauraki tribes or those of the settler community, primacy was always accorded to European-settler need.

As a result Hauraki Maori were forced to support themselves by means that denied them the opportunity to adapt, in their own way, their traditional modes of production so that they could incorporate themselves, in time, in the new market economy without violence to their society. Instead, they were obliged to earn income in ways that corroded the whole social structure:

•   through the bypassing of co-operative labour;

•   through the failure of Crown agents to recognise traditional rights of ownership, the benefits resulting from miners' rights, rents (in mining settlements), and land sales (within Hauraki rohe) were distributed in a way that overlooked the interests of legitimate parties;

•   by increasing dependence on unearned income from rents, miners' rights etc, the Crown brought about the neglect of cultivations;

•   advance payments and provision of rations, by Crown agents like Mackay no less than private buyers, inflamed the tendency of sellers within hapu to part with lands, and in the case of certain chiefs to indulge in wasteful emulation.

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A true trustee, in what this report has predicated was a region of exceptional vulnerability, would have ensured the two preconditions of Hauraki survival:

•   the need for Hauraki people to be provided with an opportunity to work within the new economy in a way that did not destroy their old social order;

•   the requirement that a sufficient portion of the peoples' land be retained so that they

developed modern farming within the context of their traditional hapu structures

participated in the great capital gains from rising land values in the region since 1865

became major leaseholders so that a constant annual income was available for causes such as education

used land as collateral for banking advances when venture capital was needed.

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PART 1

INTRODUCTION

1841-1901: An Economy Transformed

During the last 60 years of the nineteenth century, life in the lands bordering the Hauraki Gulf was transformed.

In March 1841 when the governor took up residence in Auckland, the Hauraki-Tamaki region, in the midst of which was his new capital, encompassed two Maori domains. Over the first, Tamaki-makau-rau, the Orakei branch of Ngati Whatua held the mana whenua. The second, and much larger, area was made up of the littoral lands of the Firth of Thames and of the Hauraki Gulf, extending from as far north as Warkworth, taking in most of the islands of the gulf as well and the Coromandel peninsula including its eastern coastline as far south as the northern shore of Tauranga harbour. These were the lands of the Hauraki iwi, of which the dominant element were the four member tribes of the Murutuahu federation. The European community in the region—at the time Hobson first settled there, about 1000 in number1 —had the barest of footholds, being, in a manner of speaking, grace and favour residents.

It was the Maori presence alone which gave the region its economic viability. Until the first Crown land sales in 1841, the Pakeha administration was able to support itself only by drawing on an imprest account provided by the New South Wales government. The settlers were equally dependent, though in a quite different way; they relied heavily on Maori for food, housing, labour, a trading income, and much else. Where the traditional Maori economy had been modified by Pakeha contact at that time this was in ways that Maori had chosen that it should be; tree-felling or growing cash crops, for instance, had been deliberately undertaken to provide an income that would allow valued western goods to be acquired.

By 1901 the situation had changed utterly. With a population of 67,226, Auckland was the largest city in New Zealand and the most rapidly growing one.2 Possessing an infrastructure of commercial buildings, industries, transport facilities, wharves, financial institutions and the like, it was well on the way to establishing itself as the main entrepot and commercial centre of New Zealand. Thames, though fallen away from its 1874 population peak (which had been exceeded only by the four main cities at that time),3 was still, according to the 1901 census, the tenth largest borough in the colony, and it continued to make up, with the counties of Waihi and Coromandel, the great centre of quartz mining in the colony.4 Conversely, Hauraki iwi had retrograded.

1 Greater precision is not possible as New Zealand Blue Books do not give population before 1842. Statistics for early New Zealand used in this paper drawn from Statistics of New Zealand for the Crown Colony period, 1840-52, Auckland University College, 1954. (Population section: Appendix B).

2   Population figures drawn from G.T. Bloomfield, New Zealand: A Handbook of Historical Statistics, Boston, 1984.

3   Ibid., p. 35.

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All but a remnant of their lands had passed into Pakeha hands, public or private. The traditional Maori economy was virtually destroyed, and as a substantially landless people, Hauraki tribes had been imperfectly and disadvantageously absorbed in a dominant Pakeha economy. They had become, in modern parlance, marginalized.

Scope of this Report

The following version of what took place will attempt to:

•     indicate the nature of the economic transformation in this period, and for 30 years beyond;

•     explain (where possible) when changes took place, and why they took the form they did;

•     discuss the decisive role of the Crown in the process, sometimes facilitating, at other times supervising, arbitrating, and even on important occasions actively participating by doing things like buying land;

•     measure the social consequences upon Hauraki Maori of these often deepseated economic changes; and

•     try to determine who were, relatively, the winners and losers in the transformed situation, and what part Crown acts of commission and omission played in that outcome.

4   New Zealand Official Year Book, Wellington, 1901, pp. 363-66.

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PART II HAURAKI IWI
CHAPTER 1

NATURAL AND CULTURAL INFLUENCES UPON
HAURAKI IWI IN PRE-EUROPEAN TIMES

The Physical Setting

The traditional life of Hauraki people was much shaped by their environment. An underlying theme of Taimoana Turoa's account of iwi in that region5 is the pervading presence of the Tikapa moana, the inland sea we call today the Hauraki Gulf. Consider its elements: the Firth of Thames with its extensive shoreline, protected by that mountain wall called 'the Coromandels', and north of the peninsula its discontinuous projection (for this is a region of geological submergence) by the barrier of gulf islands, intricately embayed. With the sea ever present, both as challenge and opportunity, Hauraki people became mariners and fishers. Abundant seafood from gulf waters was supplemented from eel-rich swamplands (oozing northwards into the base of the firth), and from the shallows and wetlands of areas like the Miranda coast where birds no less than fish could be abundantly caught. And the temperate moist Hauraki climate, reflected in giant kauri and kahikatea on the lower slopes of the ranges, allowed prolific cropping of the region's alluvial flats, limited in size to be sure on the cramped deltas and alluvial flats of the Coromandel peninsula, but much less so on the Pacific-facing Waihi plain, or on the southern and western shores of the firth. 'Te Pai o Hauraki' was a justified proverb.

A Region of Convergence and Contention

But Hauraki, because of its riches and marine location (attributes it shared with Tamaki-makau-rau) was both blessed and cursed. Blessed because of the prodigality of nature. Cursed, since for Maori, waterways were the avenues of war as well as those of trade, Hauraki's wealth made it a prize to be contended for, and the surrounding sea offered the means by which covetous enemies could attack. Hauraki like the Tamaki isthmus became, so to say, a frontier of convergence, with tribal boundaries much subject to ebb and flow. (This shared destiny with Tamaki did not inhibit bitter fighting between the people of those two adjoining regions; Hauraki iwi waged war, first on Wai-o-hua, and later on Ngati Whatua once their dominance of the Tamaki isthmus began (c.1750).6 ) The lesson learned by Hauraki tribes was that survival depended on prowess in war. The dominant group, led by chiefs of the Marutuahu

5   Taimoana Turoa, 'Nga Iwi 0 Hauraki, The Iwi of Hauraki', Hauraki Maori Trust Board, 1997.

6 George Graham in John Barr (ed.), The City of Auckland, New Zealand, 1840-1920, Auckland, 1922, pp.17-19; and F.D. Fenton's Orakei Judgment in Important Judgments Delivered in the Compensation Court and Native Land Court, 1866-1879, Wellington, 1879, pp. 61-62, 67-68, 84-87.

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federation, Ngati Maru, Ngati Tamatera, Ngati Paoa and Ngati Whanaunga, descendants of the fighting sons of Marutuahu, had that prowess in good measure.

Two consequences of the unremitting warfare in the region and the warlike propensities of the Marutuahu federation bear on the present paper:

•     At the opening of the nineteenth century, a considerable residue of utu accounts had accumulated to be made right. When, by 1820, the advent of muskets upset the previous precarious balance of power old enemies exploited this situation to settle scores.

•     Past contention had led to an irregular pattern of settlement with tribes found in layers or pockets. James Mackay, long-serving Crown agent and land-purchase officer, was later to remark that the lands of 'the principal Native landowners' in Hauraki 'are very much intermixed, and there is hardly a tribal boundary which has not been the subject of dispute for some generations past.'7 With the return of Hauraki tribes from their places of refuge in the Waikato after 1831, rights of ownership which absence had put in doubt or abeyance, had to be reasserted. Uncertainty as to ownership led to continuing disputes between hapu, which the Crown and private agents in the years ahead, in a traditional 'divide and rule' manner, were able to exploit when negotiations for cessions of land for miners' rights or actual purchases were in train.

7   AJHR, 1869, A-17, p. 3, often identified as 'the Mackay Report'.

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CHAPTER 2

THE FIRST ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIP, PRE c.1860:
A RETROSPECTIVE OVERVIEW

Webster of Waiau: A Case Study

It is now a historical commonplace that Maori, at an early stage of culture contact, adapted their traditional economy with ingenious selectivity in order to produce goods that they could exchange for those of the West. Well before New Zealand became a Crown colony in 1840, Hauraki Maori, just as had Ngapuhi in the Bay of Islands and in the Hokianga, had already established a firm economic relationship with Europeans. Logan Campbell, so-called 'Father of Auckland', whose first New Zealand lodgings were at Herekino on Whanganui island close to Coromandel, recalled in later life that once there he quickly became aware of how the steady inflow of immigrants into New South Wales during 1838-39 had set up a 'brisk trade' in 'supplies from the Maori people who were in a flourishing condition therefrom'.8 Early in 1840 Campbell had lodged with the American trader William Webster. He observed that although Webster was the Pakeha-Maori of the Ngati Whanaunga chief, Te Taniwha (whose daughter Webster had married), that American had many irons in the fire, acting as trading agent for Ngati Tamatera as well, and generally playing a full part in exploiting the anxiety of Hauraki tribes to sell timber, flax, maize and other foods in order to buy European goods.9

At that time, spar contracts were the most important transaction of all. On 28 April 1840, Campbell saw at first-hand how large-scale these operations could be when, on a visit to Man-o-War Bay at the eastern end of Waiheke Island, he observed over one hundred Maori timber workers, probably Ngati Tamatera, employed by Webster to drag out kauri logs for the Delhi, 'a barque of some 500 tons which he was loading for the Australian market'.10 But the 'fine trade' Webster 'had worked himself into . . . preparing cargoes of timber', was not confined to such activities. Local Maori provided him with pigs, potatoes and maize to ship to Australia. Webster also had Pakeha boat-builders at work for him constructing vessels at Herekino (Whanganui island) and Waiomu.11

One guards against inflating what Webster did simply because through archival serendipity that portion of his life which Webster passed as (in Campbell's phrase)

8   J.L. Campbell, 'The Story of One Tree Hill', n.d. (1902?), p.1, Folder 243, Campbell Papers.

9   See W.H. Oliver (ed.), Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Vol. 1, Wellington, 1990, pp. 578-79, pp. 427-28.

10 J.L. Campbell, Poenamo: Sketches of the Early Days in New Zealand, London, 1881, p.73; R.C.J. Stone, Young Logan Campbell, Auckland, 1982, pp. 47.48

11 R.G. Jameson, New Zealand, South Australia and New South Wales, London, 1842, p. 294; Campbell, Poenamo, p. 146.

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the King of Waiou' is richly documented. Webster was in fact no more than a small part of a fairly large pattern. And although, in all those trading activities in which he was caught up, he seemed at first essential, he soon proved not to be; Hauraki Maori were, in fact, substantially in control of their own economic destinies. They became even more so when the capital was established on the Waitemata. Like other tribes in proximity to Auckland they were full economic partners of Pakeha, co-operators in the founding of a colony.

Maori as Economic Partners in Early Auckland

Maori were the provisioners of the infant capital. This service was provided at first by those iwi and hapu resident on the isthmus or close to it: Ngati Whatua, small pockets of Waikato tribes (such as Ngati Te Ata and Ngati Maoho), and two Hauraki tribes on the capital's perimeter, Ngati Paoa and Ngaitai. In the early 1840s, these tribes and Ngati Whatua most of all, provided food, firewood, housing and much else. Maori were seen as essential to the colonizing process. An early settler hailed them as 'our very life blood, the vital fluid'.12 Another testified that as suppliers of food and labour, and as customers they were 'the chief supporters of the country'.13

With the steady rise during the Crown Colony period (1840-52) of Auckland's European population on the isthmus and in adjoining settlements, to a figure approaching 10,000,14 there was a proportionate growth in Maori trade, especially on the part of those operating from further afield—in the Waikato, Hauraki, Bay of Plenty, Poverty Bay. Participation by Hauraki seems to have been unusually large, which should not be considered surprising when one recalls that they were a sea-faring people, ambitiously competitive, and mercantile in spirit. But giving a precise statistical measure of this Hauraki participation is not easy, as will become clear.

Extent of Hauraki Participation in Trade with Capital

An Auckland newspaper remarked in 1853 that 'As landowners, farmers, graziers, shipowners, and artisans, Maori had shown themselves to be the main prop of New Zealand'.15

Produce was brought by Maoris to the port of Auckland from 1st April to 30th June 1853, in 549 canoes, with total crews of 1830 men and 686 women: 2781 kits potatoes, 211 kits onions, 2988 kits maize, 281 kits kumaras, 317 kits cabbages, 1181 bundles grass, 727 tons wood, 5 tons fish, 254 pigs, 12 tons flour, 559 bushels wheat, 112 kits pumpkins, 200 kits kauri gum. Total value £2,900.

Since official statistics for trade at the port of Auckland are totals only, making no distinction between participating tribes, the precise share of Hauraki can not be determined. But two items of qualitative evidence found in Swainson and Turoa suggest it would have been considerable. Drawing on oral traditions, Turoa has written of the Crown colony years (1840-52): 'The Hauraki tribes . . . documented great

12 New-Zealander, 13 Feb. 1847.

13 Walter Brodie, Remarks on the Past and Present Stage of New Zealand, London, 1845, p. 120.

14 Statistics of New Zealand, Table 1.

15 J.P. Kalaugher, Gleanings from Early New Zealand History, Auckland, 1950, p. 36.

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tonnages of food, flax, and timber which were transported . . . around the gulf at first by canoes, which were later supplemented by schooners and ketches, some of Pakeha, some of Maori construction.16 Maori seem to have taken over the design adopted by European shipwrights in the colony, with floors and framework built of pohutukawa and planking of kauri, making for vessels of 'extraordinary strength'.17 (Monin has alerted us to the fact that schooners had more than an economic function: 'schooner-ownership' gave a 'boost . . . to mana', of both chief and hapu.18) There were other signs that Maori had begun playing the white man's game very well indeed. At the third official agricultural show in Auckland held on the site of the rope walk in Mechanics' Bay, Maori exhibitors won the classes for pigs, grains and vegetables.19

A dramatic instance of the extent of Hauraki participation in the Auckland trade is provided by William Swainson's classic description of the visit of a Hauraki flotilla to the capital in 1853.

Never, perhaps, is [the Waitemata] seen to so great an advantage as when once or twice a year the native chief Taraia [Ngakutu to Tumuhia] and his tribe, from the eastern boundary of the Gulf, pay Auckland a visit in their fleet of forty sail of well-manned war canoes. Drawing them up in a line upon the beach, and with their masts and sails pitching a long line of various coloured tents, they encamp themselves for several days.20 The neighbourhood of their camping ground presents the appearance of a fair: pigs and potatoes, wheat, maize, melons, grapes, pumpkins, onions, flax, turkeys, geese, ducks, fowls, and firewood, and exposed for sale in great abundance, and meet with a ready market. But the money they receive in payment does not leave the town: for several days the shops and stores are frequented by careful, curious, keen-eyed customers. Their 'shopping' ended, they take their departure with the first fair wind, laden with spades and blankets, ironware and clothing of various kinds; their fleet departing, homeward bound, in a body as it came, the canoes extending over the surface of the harbour, with their many-shaped sails of mat and canvass wide-spread to catch the western breeze.21

The Souring of a Relationship, 1850s

Maori trade with Auckland came to a peak about 1855. Thereafter it fell away sharply. Past commentators, such as Sorrenson22 and Waititi,23 have discerned, as a cause of rising antagonism, the resentment of settlers over Maori ability, using traditional cooperative practices, to undercut the Pakeha price for labour and produce. More recently, Monin has suggested that Hauraki Maori as a whole had developed a mood of independence from seeing how those of their kin in close continuing contact with Pakeha had suffered 'damaging effects'.24 However, disentangling and measuring

16 Turoa, 'Nga Iwi o Hauraki'.

17 Kalaugher, Gleanings, p. 99.

18 Paul Monin, 'The Maori Economy of Hauraki, 1840-1880', New Zealand Journal of History, Vol.29, No.2, Oct. 1995, p. 200.

19 Kalaugher, Gleanings, p. 53.

20 Their encampments stretched from Mechanics' Bay (Te Toanga Roa) along the shoreline to St George's Bay (Wai-a-Taikehu). Produce was usually sold at the outcrop of rock by the mouth of the Horotiu at the foot of Queen St or in the auction rooms of merchants in Shortland St, where most of their purchases were also made.

21 W. Swainson, Auckland, the Capital of New Zealand, and the Country Adjacent, London, 1853, pp. 33-34.

22 M.P.K. Sorrenson, 'The Maori People and the City of Auckland', Te Ao Hou, No. 27, June 1959, p. 11.

23 John Waititi, 'An Outline of Auckland's Maori History', Journal of the Auckland Historical Society, No.3, Oct. 1963, p.10.

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motives on this issue is tricky. What is undoubted is the general Maori conviction (which Ngaitai and Ngati Paoa had acquired from first-hand experience) that Pakeha appetite for land south of Auckland had become voracious, and that the economic relationship between Maori and Pakeha was not an unmixed blessing. By the early 186os, although between Hauraki iwi and even within iwi, political attitudes varied, there was a general opposition to the sale of land, and less readiness to trade with Auckland. Sympathy for the King Movement—overt in some parts of Hauraki, covert in others (usually in tribes close to Auckland)—politically expressed this new mood of economic disengagement.25

24 Paul Monin, 'The Maori Economy of Hauraki', p. 204.

25 As Monin points out, the growth of the timber industry on the Coromandel peninsula tended to work against this general trend. (pp. 204-05). A hidden cost arising out of this close economic relationship was (in Monin's opinion) that 'Hauraki Maori were incurring heavy expenses from participation in two societies and inevitably some hapu were living beyond their means'. (p.202). He refers here not only to new consumption interests, iron tools, textiles, alcohol etc., but also to the further incitement towards extravagance, provided by Pakeha (generally unwittingly) with regard to flour mills, feasts, and the like, considered in Maori terms to enhance the mana of the tribe. A prudential cutting back on ostentatious consumption seems not to have been a reason for Maori opting out of the European economy, however.

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CHAPTER 3

THE SECOND ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIP,
1861 ONWARDS:
A PROSPECTIVE OVERVIEW

Why Absorption in the Western Economic System Corroded Maori Society

The first economic relationship which Hauraki Maori had formed with the Pakeha community, say up to the late 1850s, was based on trade. They had entered it deliberately looking on the association as serving their interests no less than those of their trading partners.

The second economic relationship, properly beginning about 1861 and extending through the rest of the century and beyond, was based on gold, and to a lesser extent on timber. Hauraki iwi were drawn into this later relationship with some reluctance; whether they should take part was an issue that divided them. In the event, their hesitation proved well-founded. Income that Maori had expected as landlords was never to reach promised levels; money paid out as miners' rights revenue, as leases, or as consideration for blocks of land sold, tended to be unevenly spread, often unfairly so, between and even within hapu.

It must be appreciated, however, that it was not only the Pakeha failure to fulfil the terms of agreements that made this new partnership so bad a bargain for Maori. As a British historian has recently reminded us, equally destructive and demoralizing for indigenous peoples as the breaches of deeds and treaties have been 'the corrosive effects ... on their societies and economies' of absorption within the western economic system.26 And this, precisely, was what happened when the Hauraki region was precipitately opened up for gold mining and large-scale forestry.

At this point, the broad influences that worked to the disadvantage of Hauraki people will be discussed as an introduction to an account of the opening of the various parts of the region that will then follow, in sequence and in detail.

Influences Which Worked to Disadvantage Hauraki Iwi Financial constraints on government

The needs of the Pakeha community drove the whole process of colonization along, rather than any sense of obligation under the Treaty of Waitangi felt towards Maori by agencies of the government—this reality was at the heart of the failure of the Crown to

26 Gareth Stedman Jones, Independent, London, 3 July 1995.

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administer the region in a way that did not prejudice Maori interests. From the beginnings of the colony, administration and development were expected to be carried out in a manner that did not drain scarce government resources. Until 1844 the Colonial

Office worked on the patently unreal assumption (really a variant of Wakefield's sufficient price theory) that governors should finance all requisite services and works

from the high profits expected to be made on the resale, at Crown auctions, of land previously bought from Maori at peppercorn figures.27 This fiscal chimera had faded

away by FitzRoy's time (1844), but the belief that colonial government in New Zealand must be financed on the cheap had not.

When representative government came (1853-56) exposing administrations more than

ever to the importunities of the settlers, ministerial tightfistedness carried on at both central and provincial government levels. Indeed, where there were unresolved questions of financial responsibility, the buck could be passed back and forth between

general and local authorities. John Williamson, provincial superintendent spoke of such an instance in 1868:

Although the revenue from the Gold Fields has not met the expenditure, I have tried to provide as far as possible for the requirements of the district

. . . I regret that, I have been unable to spend an adequate sum on public works on the Gold Field. This arises from the circumstance, that the export duty on gold, which amounted to £2,334 5s. 3d. up to the end of May, has been retained by the General Government, although the cost of administration has to be borne by the Province. I hope, however, that during the ensuing half-year the gold revenue will be paid into the Provincial Treasury as the law requires, and thus enable me to undertake the necessary public works on the field.28

Costly capital formation limited share of wealth available for Maori

In the 1860s, decade of the gold discoveries, New Zealand suffered from a great dearth of capital assets needed to give long-term living standards and amenities comparable with those of Britain, which immigrants coming to the colony seemed to expect would be theirs as of right. By 1914 heavy investment had been made in the following:

•         buildings—residences, shops, commercial and public structures;

•         city assets—drainage, water supply, sealed roads;

•         transport—roads, railways, wharves and docks;

•         productive assets—farm development, factories, mines.

27 R.C.J. Stone, 'Historical Report on the Auckland Metropolitan Area to Crown/Congress Joint Working Party', April 1992, pp. 14-15.

28 Address presented by Superintendent to Provincial Council, 15 June 1868 in Auckland Provincial Council Journals, June-July 1868, Session 23.

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Most of these assets were provided out of public and private borrowing, which in time required debt servicing, a costly business. In this straitened financial situation, in the late nineteenth century, the temptation to shortchange the Maori people was irresistible.

The complication of Hauraki quartz mining

Rich gold strikes at Kauaeranga in 1867 galvanized Auckland out of depression and created a large boom town on the Thames at astonishing speed. But only a small share of the winnings filtered down to local Maori to compensate for the social disruption to which they were quickly exposed. A significant factor in all this was that the Thames field, like all those which were within Hauraki rohe, yielded gold not in an alluvial form but embedded in quartz. This gave rise to a style of mining which did not work to Maori advantage:

1.    As an essentially industrial activity, quartz mining required a costly infrastructure of tramlines, roading, and machinery for crushing batteries, drainage pumps, and the like.

2.    Returns were rarely immediate. Syndicates of prospectors and miners needed a monetary reserve to tide them over, which encouraged conversion of claims into company holdings. Companies employing labourers paid less through leases to Maori landlords than did individual miners through miner's rights.

3.    Whereas prospectors on alluvial fields, as in the South Island, were transients often in ephemeral communities, Hauraki quartz miners, after the frenzied rush of 1867-68, became an occupational group more analogous to industrial workers or European-style coal miners, part of a relatively static labour force, living in stable communities with an orthodox nuclear family structure of wives and children. Thames, Coromandel and Waihi miners were not content with short-term housing of tents, 'whares', or ramshackle huts, but turned to more permanent kinds of residence.

4.    Having put down roots in the region, when returns fell off in nearby mines, say in the early 1870s, miners in settlements such as Grahamstown expected government either to put pressure on Maori to open up new mining areas in the Upper Thames Valley, or to make cheap homestead blocks available through purchase of Maori lands on the Hauraki plains. As a populist politician in the Thames from the mid-seventies, Sir George Grey deliberately whipped up this Pakeha land-hunger. And the reality was that settlement of ex-miners could only be achieved by unsettlement of Maori presently in occupation; they would be dispossessed and displaced by such a process.

The emergence of a large, stable, vociferously radical 'poor white' community which Hauraki Maori found in their midst was not at all what they had expected. Nor was this Pakeha group much disposed to sacrifice its own economic well-being to Maori rights.

17

Treaty of Waitangi guaranteeing Maori 'full exclusive undisturbed possession of their lands' would pose an extraordinarily difficult problem.30

Furthermore, the Collingwood (Nelson) rush in 1857 had already demonstrated, before the opening of the Thames field, that the possibilities for friction were all the greater when Maori were in the vicinity of the field in any numbers.

A Reckoning: Were These Influences Likely to Conduce to an Equally Beneficial Partnership?

Pakeha who advocated the opening up of Hauraki goldfields argued that this would be the prelude to an economic relationship that would serve the interests of both races. Maori would make money, as producers of supplies, or as landlords earning an income from miners' rights or leases. Pakeha would have a needed source of employment. H.H. Turton, Resident Magistrate at Coromandel, caught the essence of this attitude in 1862 with the first discovery of leaders of 'moderate worth' on the field.

All seems to indicate a great future for this country for I cannot look upon the good to be derived from this Gold Field except as a Colonial Blessing and that is why I am so anxious to preserve peace amongst all & to dispense equal justice to the numbers of both races. Any deviation from the latter course would cause the Miners very speedily to hate the Maories & then the Natives' fate would be sealed whereas by the gentle but constant enforcement of mutual duty the Good fellowship of both may be preserved and increased.31

Turton quite obviously saw the goldfields as providing for Maori a path towards speedy assimilation.

In practice, however, things worked out otherwise. Some weeks later Turton recorded Maori annoyance at miners 'rushing' reserved land as trespassers.32 Later, he spoke of Maori obstructiveness: 'They [resident Maori] have become so exceedingly grasping and expectant and make such extraordinary demands that I find it quite impossible to give them any satisfaction without injustice to others.'33

This pattern, set in Coromandel, was repeated in the Thames in the later 1860s, and in Ohinemuri in the 1870s. Usually the pressure for the opening up of a field came from settlers or their government (although some individual Maori—as often as not selfinterested—would be in favour in face of the general reluctance if not outright opposition of the majority of the tribe). From the Maori viewpoint, the relationship, far from being beneficial, could be, even in the short term, deeply disruptive.

30 Robyn Anderson, 'The Crown, the Treaty, and the Hauraki Tribes, 1800-1885', Hauraki Maori Trust Board, 1997.

31 H.H. Turton to Secretary of Crown Lands, 18 Oct. 1862, BACL208/688.

32 Ibid., 18 Dec. 1862.

33 Turton to A.B. Domett, 11 Feb. 1863, BACL208/688.

19

CHAPTER 4

THE COROMANDEL EPISODE, 1852-53:
AN ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE

How the Coromandel Rush Foreshadowed Later Problems

This first discovery of gold of any consequence in the colony which, in the event, yielded so little (less than £1,500 seems the generally accepted estimate) and in consequence was 'regarded in Auckland as a fiasco',34 should not on that account be underestimated. Robyn Anderson has given two good reasons why:

1.    November 1852 Agreement—a 'first benchmark'

The November 1852 agreement, reached on Patapata Beach after prolonged debate between Maori and Crown representatives, which opened the field, set what Anderson calls, correctly I think, the 'first benchmark in Crown thinking'.35 The similarity of later agreements in the 1860s suggests that this earlier settlement established guidelines if not actual precedents.

2.    Crown readiness to act unilaterally

Once Maori had agreed to the field's being opened, the Crown issued regulations which (citing Anderson once again) 'unilaterally changed' the terms of the original agreements, a government practice which demonstrated a 'pre-eminence of concern for mining interests over promises to Maori.'36

There were other premonitors of racial conflict arising out of this goldfield arrangement, but of these, one already in view in 1852 was to repeat itself so often on subsequent occasions it could almost be considered the leitmotiv of the second phase of the economic relationship between Hauraki iwi and the European community.37 This is a further reason why these 1852-53 Crown dealings over Coromandel were so particularly significant. It can be briefly stated as a further portent of a disharmonious future:

34 J.H.M. Salmon, A History of Gold Mining in New Zealand, Wellington, 1963, p. 30.

35 Anderson, 'The Crown, the Treaty, and the Hauraki Tribes'

36 Ibid.

37 See p. 15 of this report.

21

(c)   Constraints on Crown acting as the 'honest broker'

In 1852-53, as later, the determinant of policy was the economic needs or ambitions of the white settler community, not a concern for the material benefit of Maori. Although the Crown (from Wynyard down) sought to win Maori agreement to concessions for mining, by setting itself up as 'the honest broker', with promises to supervise payment of revenues to Maori landowners and to maintain order on the field, the reality of its role was otherwise.

Conflict of Interest in Role of Crown

This first short-lived Coromandel rush had shown how difficult the mediating role of the Crown would be in the future. For the Crown, sticking to its obligation to honour the Treaty of Waitangi while throwing open the field to Pakeha prospectors (most of whom were insensitive to Maori rights) in such a way as to satisfy them without offending Maori owners, evolved into a task equivalent to squaring the circle. Haglund points out the early appearance of digger insensitivity. A group whom he describes as 'a party of new arrivals from Australia' in February 1853 made a hostile response to the limits imposed on their prospecting by Paora and Taraia: they 'became impatient of restrictions and adopted an abusive attitude towards the Maori.'38 This early experience left little in the way of a legacy of goodwill among Coromandel hapu. Salmon speaks of them as 'disillusioned', and 'increasingly resentful of the failure of some of the prospectors to honour their [licensing] agreement'.39 The lesson had not been lost on the strongly independent and influential Taraia, by this time the acknowledged leader of Ngati Maru as well as Ngati Tamatera. Earlier subjected to pressure to throw open his lands to prospectors, Taraia had opted for a policy of wait and see.40 How he had seen the leases given by other Coromandel chiefs work out in practice had not encouraged him to change his mistrustful position.

Economic Pressure in Auckland to Have Local Goldfields Opened

We can understand why Hauraki Maori were exposed to intense pressure to open up the area around Coromandel in 1852 only if we appreciate that the motives of the authorities in Auckland were primarily economic in origin. And it was less a matter of an attack of gold fever among would-be diggers than one of the self-regarding desire of settlers of consequence to keep Auckland buoyant economically, and to stem the outflow of young male labour from the province, a scarce commodity Auckland could not afford to lose.

38 J.R. Haglund, 'History of Coromandel Goldfield, 1853-1868', MA thesis, Auckland University College, 1949, p. 11.

39 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 29.

40 Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Vol. 1, p. 428.

22

When news of the true extent of the gold discoveries in California reached Auckland in early 1850 there had been great excitement. It has been estimated that of the 2,000 or so New Zealanders who were drawn to the diggings there, perhaps two-thirds came from Auckland. The discovery of gold in New South Wales in February 1851, then in Victoria later in the year, compounded the loss of men. The Southern Cross, mouthpiece of the Auckland merchants, complained in 1852 that:

With lands locked up [a reference to growing Maori resistance to land sales] California created a golden drain on the left, and Australia is now entailing another similar drain on the right hand . . . . but we cannot behold ship after ship stripping us of our truest and our staunchest colonists.41

In the same year the Southern Cross reported that nearly one hundred persons, including many heads of families, had left Auckland in the Moa and Iliomana for New South Wales, and added despondently that 'the town of Auckland [is] rapidly becoming depopulated, and it abounds with notices of shops and houses to let and entire streets are nearly deserted.42

This explains why settlers in Auckland were so anxious that the Coromandel field be opened, and why Wynyard took with him to the meeting at Patapata beach on 18 November 1852 a high-ranking official group to effect that purpose. Gold discoveries did indeed rescue the capital from its depression, but not finds made in diggings on Coromandel, rather those on the goldfields of New South Wales and Victoria. The demand for goods and food from miners there brought high speculative profits for Auckland merchants and a return of prosperity to the community at large.43 By 1856 this Australian market had collapsed,44 but the mystique of gold did not go away. The discovery of a large goldfield within reach of Auckland continued to be regarded, in the years ahead, as the panacea for all the economic ills of the settlement.

41 Southern Cross, 22 June 1852, p. 3, co1.3.

42 Kalaugher, Gleanings, p. 96.

43 Haglund, pp. 2-4.

44 Stone, Young Logan Campbell, pp. 185-86.

                23

CHAPTER 5

THE TIMBER INDUSTRY WITHIN HAURAKI ROHE

The Pakeha Side of the Equation

In their attempts to explain how Hauraki lands came to be opened for gold mining and timber milling, historians have customarily concentrated on why and how hapu there came to give way to outside pressure. But it is also illuminating to look, as it were, at the settler side of the equation. Once we appreciate how insistent were Pakeha pressures, economic and political, we begin to understand why Crown officials tended to negotiate for timber and mining rights with such urgency.

The sustained drive of settlers to gain control of Hauraki resources is traced in the story of the timber industry in the region.

Dimensions of the Hauraki Timber Industry Statistical problems

There are no satisfactory statistical measures of the colony's timber production—and therefore the output of Hauraki mills—in the nineteenth century.45 In government returns, only timber exports are given; how much timber was absorbed in the domestic market is not. The only informed estimate I am aware of is given by Captain J. Campbell-Walker, Conservator of State Forests, who calculated that during 1875, 45% of the output of New Zealand sawmills (103 million superfeet) came from the Auckland province.46 But these figures would not take into account the preparation of baulk timber which made up a significant proportion of timber exported from Auckland; so we can safely assume that over 50% of timber felled for construction purposes came from that province. Auckland's dominance of this colonial industry increased: by 1882 the province was responsible for 91.8% of New Zealand's off-shore timber trade, almost entirely in kauri.

During the 1880s, timber production was the largest single industry in the colony, and Auckland (within whose provincial boundaries kauri was only to be found) the greatest timber-producing province.

The southern geophysical boundary of the kauri runs more or less from Maketu to Kawhia. Within this regional confine there were, in the nineteenth century, three centres of concentration of kauri milling: the west coast of Northland (great centre of production, Northern Wairoa); the east coast of Northland (great centre of production, Mangonui/Whangaroa); and the Coromandel Peninsula where, by 1876,

45 AJHR, 1877, C-3, p. 38, where J. Campbell-Walker discusses the problem.

46 Ibid., p. 39.

            25   

250,000 acres of forest land were in government hands. Determining with any certainty how much timber came from within Hauraki rohe is (once again) difficult; regional production figures do not exist. And whereas there are tables of timber exports from registered export ports such as Hokianga or Kaipara or Whangaroa, quantities of timber coming from the Coromandel forests are subsumed in the statistics of exports from the 'port of Auckland'.

Sources used

Nevertheless sound qualitative evidence goes some distance to remedy this deficiency. This comes from:

•     two thorough-going nineteenth-century commissioned reports by J. Campbell-Walker (1877) and Thomas Kirk (1886);47

•     archival records of the four major companies working in Hauraki in the 1880s:

Auckland Timber Company,48 New Zealand Timber Company,49 Mercury

Bay Timber Company,50 (these three milling kauri), and Hauraki Sawmill

Company51 milling kahikatea;

•     Kauri Timber Company archives (a Melbourne incorporation).52

We here come to the central question: what elements in the culture and economy of the settler community drove it so quickly to destroy a unique resource of the Maori, the forest with which that native people had had, moreover, a unique spiritual relationship since time out of mind? In a sense the story of the passing of the Turua bush is simply, writ small, substantially what happened to the great native forest resources of the Hauraki region.

Hauraki Sawmill Company—A Case Study Beginnings

This company arose in the first instance out of the lightning growth of Shortland and Grahamstown, 1867-71. The goldfields set up an extraordinary demand for timber:

•     in mines themselves, for pit props, struts, cap pieces, preferably heart kauri for durability; but 'junk timber' was also called into service;53

•     tramways to mines (or bush—usually horse-drawn) had rails and lateral sleepers, both of heart kauri;54

47 AJHR, 1886, C-3. The best secondary sources are Michael Roche, History of Forestry, Wellington, 1990, chapter 3, and
R.C.J. Stone, 'Auckland Business and Businessmen in the 1880s', PhD thesis, Auckland University, 1969, chapter 7.

48 A-204, Northern Archives Record Centre (NARC).

49 A-52, NARC.

50 A-242, NARC.

51 A-38, NARC.

52 Kauri Timber Co. Archives, Melbourne University Archives.

53 AJHR, 1877, C-3, p. 21.

54 Ibid., p. 40.

         26

• in the mining settlements themselves, heart timber, usually, for houses and shops, but also needed for town amenities—wharves, boardwalks etc.

Salmon states what old photographs confirm, that 'within a few months' of the first lucrative gold strike at Thames in 1867 'all the kauri and kahikatea trees along the flat had disappeared and the hills themselves were soon denuded.'55 The removal of the vegetative cover of Kauaeranga simply foreshadowed the much greater spoliation of the forest cover of the whole peninsula that took place before the century was out.

The Turua bush, 14 kms from Shortland, lying mainly in the swampy lowland between the Waihou and Piako rivers seemed, at least in part, one obvious solution to Thames's timber problem. This bush, almost entirely kahikatea, was extensive, stretching unbroken roughly from Turua (where the main sawmill was soon to be installed) as far south as Paeroa. Before 1868 it had been milled on a small scale. But with the surge in demand for timber created by the gold rush, the bush seemed ripe for more thoroughgoing exploitation. That was the thinking of a group of seven speculators who acquired a tree felling interest in this bush. Kahikatea appeared to be a tough, physically attractive timber. At first its limitations—lack of durability especially when in contact with the ground, and vulnerability to borer—were not appreciated, and until these shortcomings were exposed over time, it was used in housebuilding, particularly for weatherboards, flooring and joinery, and in general construction, jetties and the like.

Promotion of a company

Following the promotional pattern that had become common among syndicates of miners, these timber speculators decided to convert themselves into a company which would bring in an infusion of Auckland capital, required to pay for necessary milling machinery, and also to enable them (following the gambit of gold-mining stock jobbers) progressively to offload their shares so that they could make capital gains.56 The seven original subscribers were made up of four Shortland businessmen, J.S. Macfarlane (an Auckland entrepreneur), James Mackay and Wiropi Hotoreni Taipari ('Native Assessor', who was the third largest shareholder).57 The speculative intentions of the original promoters were quickly realized. In the first return to the Registrar of Companies (12 April 1870) the promoters had reduced their holdings of 100 shares to 35 (£68 paid up), Taipari having reduced his personal stake from 16 to 2. The new shareholders were almost entirely hard-headed Auckland businessmen such as J.T. MacKelvie, David Nathan and Thomas Russell—not men likely to be sold a pup. The venture was sound. They were determined to keep it so.58

55 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 193. Recent research suggests stripping of the bush there was well under way before 1867.

56 R.C.J. Stone, Makers of Fortune, Auckland, 1973, pp. 54-55.

57 Memorandum of Association, Co. A 38, NARC.

58 Sources used for the history of this company are NARC Dead Companies File (Co. A 38); the Campbell-Walker Report (AJHR, 1877, C-3); Kirk Report (AJHR, 1886, C-3); G.C. Dunstall, 'Colonial Merchant: J.T. Mackelvie, Brown Campbell & Co. and the Business Community of Auckland, 1865-71', MA thesis, Auckland University , 1970, pp. 205-06; Cyclopedia of New Zealand, Vol. 2, (Auckland), Christchurch, 1902, pp. 207, 421.

         27

The new proprietary lost no time in shifting the head office of the company from Shortland to Queen Street, Auckland, where its financial management could be kept under their inspectorial eye. When the gold output from the Thames goldfields fell away sharply in the 1870s, the population of Shortland and Grahamstown declined. Building stagnated. But the company was able to exploit new markets opened up by the Vogelite boom and began exporting its product to the south.

Hauraki Sawmill Company—An Epitome of its Memorandum
of Association

Date of Registration: 8 Feb. 1869

Objects: To saw and prepare timber for sale and to act as timber merchants

Capital: £1,000 made up of 100 £100 shares

Source: Dead Companies File Co A 38, National Archives, Auckland

The Bagnall years

In an industry which was a graveyard of companies in the 1880s, this Hauraki concern emerged as a great survivor for two reasons. First, like the profit-driven kauri timber companies, it attacked its bush without stint. Second, unlike the great kauri companies, it was astutely managed.

During the expansionist years of the seventies the company milled the bush extensively. By the mid-1880s the annual output of the Turua mill was 2,000,000 superfeet, much of which was shipped to Christchurch as dressed flooring boards; but it was also, by this

         28

stage, shipping a large quantity of milled kahikatea to Queensland. Targeting markets was a feature of the shrewd management that enabled the concern not merely to survive the Great Depression but also to emerge from it stronger than before. At an early juncture the directors had appointed as manager a Thames timber trader, G.L. Bagnall. It was a wise appointment. Bagnall was a decisive businessman, as he demonstrated in 1877 by taking up a lease for timber cutting over a substantial part of the Turua bush. Kirk later reported that 'this bush was worked in a most systematic manner, and with an absolute minimum of waste, every available stick being taken out.'59

During the 1880s Bagnall and his five sons moved to make the company a family concern by progressively buying out fellow shareholders who would sell. By 1888, with a majority family block of shareholders behind him, Bagnall was able to bring about a return of the head office to Thames. There, Bagnall switched his marketing policies once again. By this time the great deficiency of kahikatea (its lack of durability) had been exposed. Bagnall exploited its other properties, short-term toughness and absence of odour, to open up an alternative use for the timber. Made up into boxes and casks, kahikatea was an ideal material for containers in which food products, especially butter, could be transported or exported, a veritable coup in the emerging post-refrigeration age. Bagnall's other great achievement was to conduct his milling operations in the Turua bush in tandem with the 'development' of its adjacent lands. He grasped that milling was a precursor to farming; timber workers and mill workers provided a market for farm produce; milling helped clear land and make farming possible. And when the bush was exhausted many timber workers would settle as farmers. (But a Maori resource was destroyed; and settlement of Pakeha meant unsettlement of Hauraki hapu.)

By the time of Bagnall's death, his family held 80% of the company's shares and was itself conducting farming (it was said) 'on a considerable scale' in the vicinity of Turua.60 In 1895 the five Bagnall sons brought about the company's voluntary liquidation and reformed the venture in the following year as 'Bagnall Brothers and Company Ltd'. By the turn of the century it was one of the largest industrial establishments in the province with a workforce of over 200, employed chiefly in its sawing and planing mills and box factory in Turua, and its newly-opened (1897) factory in Auckland.

The Turua kahikatea forest no longer exists.

59 'At the Turua Mills the supply is obtained from freehold land held by the proprietors, or from the land leased by the Natives, or from the settlers; in the latter case the timber is purchased standing, and a royalty of 3d. per 100 ft is paid upon the measured logs, the expense of felling and hauling being defrayed by the purchaser. The cost of felling, conversion and haulage may be estimated at 2s.6d. per 100 ft for labour only.' Kirk Report. AJHR, 1886, C-3, p. 25.

60   Cyclopedia, Vol. 2, p. 421.

29

An Industry Characterized by Spoliation

If the passing of the Turua bush indeed presents in microcosm the story of what happened to the much greater kauri forests of the Hauraki region, important questions suggest themselves:

•    Why did the kauri timber industry acquire an unstoppable momentum in the later nineteenth century, moving towards what Germans call a Raubwirtschaft (a 'robber economy'), able to survive only by ruinous exploitation, destroying resources as it went along?

•    Why, over the same period, were Pakeha needs with regard to those forests, considered so compelling that they took precedence over Maori rights and needs (including paying an adequate price for timber rights and bush lands), and over accepted standards of conservation?

Every informed visitor who came to New Zealand in the 1870s and after deplored the settler tendency to treat the kauri pine as though it were an illimitable resource, a profound colonial misconception. Such wastefulness astonished J.A. Froude the historian, when he travelled through the province in 1885: 'They [colonists] are cutting [kauri] down and selling it as fast as axe and saw can work.'61 Early conservators had alerted the government in two separate published reports to the disastrous consequences of this relentless onslaught. Their warnings were disregarded; the second conservator (T. Kirk) was dismissed as a retrenchment measure in 1888 and his department closed.

This paper now attempts to answer why there was an unstoppable onslaught upon the kauri forests within Hauraki rohe and why this development was hostile to the interests of iwi there.

Early Milling of Bush

Compared with the later decades of the nineteenth century, felling of kauri went on until the 1850s at a modest pace. Settlers were certainly wasteful62 but their small number kept these domestic demands within bearable limits. The main export demand was preparation of masts and spars for shipping, especially Admiralty contracts.63 As demand for that market became irregular after 1848, kauri millers increasingly directed their product towards the local construction industry.64 P.H.H. Taylor records that the 1861 census returns showed that of the 6,063 houses in Auckland, 5,236 were of wood;65 according to Hochstetter almost entirely kauri timber.66

61 J.A. Froude, Oceana, London, 1886, p. 213.

62 See Paul Monin, Waiheke Island, A History, Palmerston North, 1992.

63 AJHR, 1877, C-3, p. 20; Stone, Young Logan Campbell, pp. 134-35.

64 P.H.H. Taylor, 'A History of the Kauri Timber Industry', MA thesis, Auckland University College, 1950, p. 42.

65 AJHR, 1862, D-9, cit. Taylor.

66 R. Hochstetter, New Zealand, Stuttgart, 1867, p. 144.

30

Factors in Accelerating Growth of Hauraki Milling

During the 1860s milling of the kauri forests became of a quite different order of magnitude—output accelerated. But in the expansionist 1870s, growth was exponential. Some of the factors in this leap need to be separated out.

Technical change

Whereas the earliest sawmills were small-scale affairs utilizing pit-sawing or power derived from water-wheels, in the 1860s they gave way to steam mills, enabling the industry to meet the sudden explosive demand for sawn timber. Heavy investment in machinery continued until, by 1886, Auckland sawmills 'with the most approved machinery' and 'the most efficient appliances' were 'classed amongst the best in the world'.67

Demography

The apparently insatiable domestic demand for kauri (until the Great Slump overwhelmed the colony in the early 1880s) had its origins in the population explosion of the later nineteenth century.

TABLE 1: POPULATION TOTALS

Note 1: Estimate. Suburban figures not given in Census

Note 2: Figure does not take in whole goldfield Source: Censuses, 1861, 1874, 1901

Although the Auckland totals are significant, so are those for New Zealand as a whole, as kauri was used as the prime building material throughout the whole colony, especially in urban areas.

The burgeoning construction industry

A rapidly expanding population and the need to overcome the paucity of capital assets of pioneer days—buildings, wharves, railways, etc.—interacted to make construction the largest single industry in Australasia in the nineteenth century.68 But only a limited

67 AJHR, 1886, C-3, p. 25.

68 N.G. Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861-1900, Cambridge, 1964, chapters 3, 4, 5; also J.A. Dowie, 'Studies in New Zealand Investment', PhD thesis, University of Canberra, 1965, passim.

31

proportion of the winnings on the colonial goldfields in the 1860s was expended on construction. The real impetus to that industry came during the expansionist period, 1871-85; from borrowing, private (through banks and financial institutions using offshore deposits and debentures) and public (central and local government alike, the latter including borough councils and harbours boards raising loans on the London capital market). Public capital works financed by borrowing abroad fell away during the latter years of the Great Slump but resumed in the early twentieth century most markedly among Auckland municipal bodies including the Harbour Board, but generally throughout the colony.

Campbell-Walker observed that by 1876 the annual requirement of the new expanded public works schemes for durable native timber had become huge.69 For kauri above all.

Why Investment in Hauraki Forests became Important to Auckland Capitalists

To meet this demand, timber companies with a predominantly Auckland proprietary came into being. Circumstances favouring this are detailed below.

Search for economic viability

The Auckland Province over its first 50 years lacked a viable export base, unlike the southern pastoral provinces (wool in 1875 earned just on 60% of New Zealand's export income). So Auckland entrepreneurs turned to the timber industry as a money spinner; and more so when, in 1871, gold production in Thames began its long downward slide.

Company device well suited to character of timber industry and of Auckland

The kauri timber industry became most productive with an injection of the kind of substantial capital foundation that joint stock companies could provide. Auckland, a financial centre, was prolific in the promotion of these in the thirty years which followed the passing of the Joint Stock Companies Act 1860. Local rentiers, moreover, had become habituated to such investment when gold-mining companies enjoyed wide popularity in Auckland during 1868-71.70

The expansionist 1870s

In Auckland it became customary for capitalists who had prospered through investment in gold-mining companies, or through speculation in their shares, to seek further investment opportunities in the Hauraki region. We have seen how some Auckland capitalists bought into the Turua sawmill company. Or again it is noteworthy that the Thames Gas Company, incorporated on 28 April 1874, had as prominent shareholders

69 Campbell-Walker said that by that date, kauri and totara made up more than two-thirds of all the timber used for buildings and construction works; AJHR, 1877, C-3, pp. 20, 22, 38.

70 Stone, Makers of Fortune, pp. 72-73, also Table 5-1.

32

men who had previously plunged into goldfields speculations: J.M. Clark, J.T. Mackelvie, Logan Campbell, C.J. Stone, W.C. Wilson (of the Herald), A.K. Taylor and others. In the timber companies which boomed in the 1870s these same men were also prominent, as were other big wheels in the banking and insurance world taking shape in Auckland in that decade: Joseph Howard, P. Comiskey, Thomas Russell, J.C. Firth, T. Morrin, the Taylor family and David Nathan, to give no more than a representative cross-section. It was not surprising therefore that Auckland entrepreneurs should have turned to the Cape Colville and peninsular area, a brief sea-journey away, whose 'heavy forest' was reported in 1877 as being 'unsurpassed in any part of the colony'.71 The bush was milled by a number of companies, but in the expansionist economic environment of the Vogel period, the little concerns made no great headway. This was the heyday of the large timber companies, three of which—the Auckland Timber Company, New Zealand Timber Company and the Mercury Bay Timber Company—dominated the kauri timber industry in Hauraki.72

Brittle Business Structure of Timber Industry and Consequences Therefrom

Here we come to a paradox: why was it that these large timber companies, so highly mechanized and productive that they were regarded (mistakenly) before the slump as blue chip investments, so niggardly in their payment to Maori owners and so destructive in their milling practices? The short answer is that like many economic activities in colonial New Zealand their continued growth had become excessively dependent on borrowing. In order to finance the installation of the most up-to-date milling machinery and the purchase of accessible bush, the company directors were obliged to borrow heavily from banks who used the mills and timber lands as collateral. As a result the companies became heavily capitalised concerns whose high gearing was sustainable only in expansionist times.73

The Decline of Kauri

A reckoning came when the domestic demand fell away with the slump of the 1880s. But the timber companies, though faced by a shrinking local market, did not shut up shop. On the contrary they expanded. The industry had acquired a dynamism of its own. The companies competed fiercely with one another though profit margins were slender and shrinking. In an environment of low prices, over-capitalization and over-competition they sought to survive by

•     borrowing more heavily from the banks;

•     buying up timber rights and timber lands from Maori as cheaply as they could;

71 AJHR, 1877, C-3, p. 12.

72 See Co-A 204, 52, 242 (NARC).

73 A 'gearing' or 'leverage' ratio is sustainable when the profit level enables the firm both to service its borrowing and to have funds left over for appropriation to provide dividends as a return on the shareholders' investment.

33

•     cutting out the cream of the bush. Milling rights, wrote Scholefield, became 'simply and solely an executioner's warrant to pick out the eyes of the forest, to slay and ruin the rest, and then go elsewhere';74

•     trying to compensate for the decline of the New Zealand market by making massive exports to Australia at sacrificial prices.

By 1886 the timber companies were in deep financial trouble, and their shares of little value. In 1888 a Melbourne-based consortium bought all the major kauri companies-including the three big Coromandel Range companies-at fire-sale prices. These concerns it converted into a conglomerate, the Kauri Timber Company (KTC). Though operating as a quasi-monopoly, the KTC did little better financially than the predecessors which it had taken over. Like them, it was overcapitalised, and had poor gearing. It tried to overcome the depressed conditions of the industry by keeping costs down, driving a hard bargain when buying forest land from Maori, and promoting export drives. Ruthless exploitation of the kauri forests continued. By 1906, a year of peak production, the end of New Zealand's finest timber was near. 'There were no forests of young kauri reaching maturity'; only scattered stands in inaccessible locations such as remote parts of the Coromandel range.75

Gains and Losses of Intense 'Mining' of Hauraki Bush

What in sum were the losses and gains to the colony of New Zealand arising out of the ruthless milling of Hauraki's kauri forests under the conditions of Raubwirtschaft?

1.    In terms of resource management, the swift destruction of a priceless resource was an environmental disaster. Twice officially alerted to this danger, the Crown, nevertheless, did nothing.

2.    The damage to the economy and society of Maori was enormous whether one thinks of forest as taonga, or as food (bird, berry and fern-root), medicinal source, and building resource, or as an asset that could have been exploited by Maori themselves during the twentieth-century renaissance.

3.    The costliness of the technologically advanced milling machinery which the competing timber companies felt they had to install, in the context of the narrow profit margins of the industry, and of the burden of debt servicing borne by government and timber companies, was presented as

74 G.H. Scholefield, New Zealand in Evolution, Industrial, Economic and Political, London, 1909, p. 52, cit. by Taylor, 'A History of the Kauri Timber Industry', p. 69. Campbell-Walker had drawn attention to wasteful felling in the 1870s. Logs only were cut: 'the rest including top, lop, and branches, are left lying in the forest . . . fine pieces which would be of great value in other countries are thus left to rot or burn'. AJHR, 1877, C-3, p. 40. Selective felling in the 1880s notoriously damaged or destroyed saplings and rickers.

75 Taylor, 'A History of the Kauri Timber Industry', p. 83.

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the justification for the low figures Hauraki tribes were offered for purchase of forest land or for timber-cutting rights. (Steam-powered mills had already tended to strip from Maori their earlier activity as tree fellers.)76

4.    When the building boom collapsed in the 1880s, colonial investors holding shares in timber companies suffered financial loss. (But as in the stock exchange boom and bust in Auckland a hundred years later-1987-there were speculative winners as well as losers.)

5.    The settler community as a whole is to be regarded as the great beneficiary of the opportunity to appropriate at bargain prices a superb building material for continuous use during the whole of the nineteenth century. Nor did the working out of stands of kauri destroy Auckland's timber mills, still a significant employer of the city's labour by the turn of the century. After 1900 Auckland's timber mills turned to alternative native timbers such as rimu, now made accessible by the opening up of the interior of the island by railway. (Brett's Auckland Almanac, 1905, p. 169, has kauri as only fourth in order of importance of timber produced in New Zealand.)

This extractive industry sustained the Auckland economy to an unusual degree up to about 1896 when the province entered upon a stage of 'economic takeoff' based on the farming of refrigerated produce, and could then (economically speaking) stand on its own feet.

(g) The kauri timber industry provided at low cost a premium building timber which became an integral part of the infrastructure of urban New Zealand, its residences and city buildings, and its major capital works associated with railways and ports.

This was the largest and probably the most enduring of the material contributions of Hauraki to the making of New Zealand in the nineteenth century.

76 J.L. Hutton, "'Troublesome Specimens": A Study of the Relationship between the Crown and the Tangata Whenua of Hauraki 1863-1869', MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1995, p.67.

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CHAPTER 6

GOLD IN HAURAKI IN THE 1860s:
THE POLITICO-ECONOMIC DIMENSION

European Auckland and Maori Hauraki in the 1860s Auckland's pressure upon Hauraki

The 1860s were climacteric for the Hauraki people; over these years they moved into a new and damaging economic relationship with the European community. And though by 1870 the process of colonisation within the region was by no means complete, the Pakeha position within the Hauraki rohe had become immeasurably strengthened. This cannot be attributed to the land wars; in contrast to Waikato, a minority only of Hauraki took part. Nevertheless, the economic history of the Hauraki iwi demonstrates that the subordination of a non-western society can come about just as surely as by defeat in war if the resources of that people are appropriated to serve the economic purposes of a colonising society and government.

Yet to speak of a monolithic colony in the 1860s is to indulge in a fiction. Settlement in this era, Morrell has reminded us, was characterized by 'dispersion and diversity'.77 Better to speak of the 'six colonies' of New Zealand, or as one of the provincial superintendents (J.D. Ormond) worded it, 'a number of kingdoms without a common bond of union between them'. Auckland, perhaps more than any other province, stood apart. As an aspect of this uniqueness, we can note that to an unusual degree Auckland had a vested interest in having the resources of Hauraki-timber, gold and lands-at its disposal. That was why Auckland's policies reverberated through Hauraki lands.

Hardliners versus philo-Maoris, 1861-63

A revived interest in the potentialities of the Coromandel peninsula as a goldfield coincided with a hardening of settler opinion in Auckland on the race question.78 After hostilities broke out over Waitara in 186o, a small group, denounced by their opponents as 'philo-Maoris', stood for a continued search for conciliation with Maori. Prominent among them were C.O. Davis, George Graham, Bishop Selwyn and William Swanson. But the majority of settlers, and their numbers swelled as competition for land heightened, thought the time had come for a reckoning by armed force. This viewpoint was represented by the Southern Cross, whose proprietor privately believed that Maori in 'lawless rebellion' were 'revengeful, remorseless and

77 W.P. Morrell, The Provincial System in New Zealand, 1852-76, Christchurch, 1964, p. 11.

78 See e.g. Southern Cross, 3 April 1860, p. 3, col. 3.

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cruel savages' who 'must be thrashed' then have 'their millions of useless acres' confiscated, and 'occupied by military settlers in all directions'.79 The organ of the philo-Maori colonists was the New-Zealander whose editor was John Williamson; it attacked the Southern Cross for its 'd....d nigger tone' when speaking of our 'dark-skinned brethren',80 denouncing the staff of the Southern Cross as the 'literary hirelings of the war-at-any-price party'.81 Williamson's partner, W.C. Wilson, found the editor's policy of opposing recourse to war and confiscations quite unacceptable. He broke up his partnership with Williamson and started a new pro-war paper-the New Zealand Herald.82 Williamson became one of a dwindling band. He was defeated in a crucial contest for the superintendency of the province in November 1862 by an acknowledged hardliner, Robert Graham (later to be founder of Grahamstown). This made for a united governmental front on both levels (colonial and provincial) in the capital during the crucial period of confrontation and war with Kingite Maori, because the general government between August 1862 and November 1864, led first by Domett and then by Whitaker, likewise stood for the subjugation of all 'rebels'.

A more uniform 'Native Policy' emerges, 1864 on

However, anticipating somewhat, the Waikato war and Maori protest movements such as Pai Marire which continued after it, tended to create a more unified attitude among the Auckland settlers on the 'Native question'. On the one hand, the conciliatory policies of the philo-Maoris tended to be watered down as time went by, for they were offended by Maori separatism and by well-publicised violent episodes such as the Volkner killing. On the other hand, the firebrands were chastened by the military prowess displayed by Maori during the Taranaki, Waikato and Bay of Plenty campaigns; by 1864 it had become clear that a swift and total defeat of Maori was far beyond the capacity of the colonial forces. In the later 1860s the undoubted success of Titokowaru and Te Kooti also kept settler bellicosity in check and reinforced the belief that a circumspect even conciliatory policy toward Maori was likely to be the better strategy.

In fact, right through the decade, differences between settler leaders over how best to solve the 'Native problem' were less clearcut than they superficially seemed. Amongst virtually all settlers and their political leaders, there was general acceptance as self-evident truth that the agreed objective in racial policy must be to raise Maori to `civilisation' by integration within the western economic and social order. Few questioned this objective. Settlers simply divided over lesser issues: the means and timing by which this could be brought about.

Reinforcing this policy in Auckland were that settlement's economic imperatives-the need to have access to resources in order to maintain living standards and prevent population outflow to other parts of the colony, and develop a viable export base in a regional economy lacking the pastoral advantages of the southern settlements.

79 W. Brown to J.L. Campbell, 16, 19 Oct. 1863, Fol. 160, Campbell P., Auckland Museum; also R.C.J. Stone, Father and his Gift, Auckland, 1987, p. 38.

80 New-Zealander, 6 Jan. 1863, p. 2, col. 5.

81 Ibid., 30 April 1863, p. 7, col. 3.

82 Cyclopedia of NZ, Vol. 2, p. 269

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That was why Auckland's leaders had been so anxious to have gold discovered in Hauraki in 1852. By the 1860s the need for a payable goldfield was considered greater than ever.

Reopening of Coromandel Goldfield, 1862 Motives

Unlike the earlier agitation for the opening of a goldfield as an antidote for depression, that of 1861 developed when business in Auckland was buoyant; it coincided with a property boom in town and suburbs. Discoveries in the Middle Island-Collingwood (1857) and Tuapeka (August 1861)-acted as a spur. So did alarm at the threatened loss of settlers to South Island fields as they opened up.83 Auckland had just launched itself on a scheme to settle assisted British migrants on 40-acre blocks in North Auckland. It was important that new settlers should not be drawn out of the province.84

Agitation for resumption of prospecting

During the later months of 1861, a campaign to carry out further prospecting in the Coromandel Peninsula got under way.85 Charles Heaphy,86 a former goldfields commissioner, chaired 'a great public meeting' in the capital at which it was resolved that the Coromandel 'field ought to be opened immediately' and that 'the Government be strongly recommended to extinguish the native title to the auriferous areas of the province. '87

Both the pressure to open the field and, that achieved, to encourage the interests of miners rather than those of Hauraki Maori, are explicable only in terms of the hardline uncompromising political tone of most Auckland settlers in the crisis period before the Waikato war. Maori were said to be obstructive about giving access to land. Admittedly, the main bone of contention was the valley of the Waikato. But the mood of confrontation carried over to Hauraki lands, too. Late in 1861, 26 chiefs headed by Te Taniwha, mainly Ngati Whanaunga and Ngati Tamatera, made a conciliatory move and signed an agreement with McLean, Chief Land Purchase Commissioner, to allow Europeans to prospect for gold between Waiau and Cape Colville. Auckland's settlers nevertheless grumbled. They considered the terms of the agreement much too loosely worded. Only after gold was discovered did the agreement provide for negotiations that would lay down the terms by which the goldfields would be worked.88

83 Haglund, 'History of the Coromandel Goldfield', p. 24.

84 Southern Cross, 13 Sept. 1861.

85 Haglund, 'History of the Coromandel Goldfield', pp. 25-26.

86 Charles Heaphy was as well qualified to evaluate the mining potential of Coromandel as any colonist. He had been a gold commissioner there in 1852-53, surveyed blocks in the region in 1858, and had been assistant to von Hochstetter during his geological survey (1859) of the Auckland province. (Dictionary of NZ Biography, Vol. 1, p. 182) .

87   Southern Cross, 1 Oct. 1861.

88 AJHR, 1869, A17, pp. 3, 15-16.

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done.'110 This added point to Governor Bowen's opinion that 'If the entire Maori people were to unite against us now [1868], we could probably hold [in the North Island] only the towns of Auckland and Wellington.'111

Clearly, the Maori independence movement was yet to be broken because, in Belich's words 'the simple fact of the British victory had been insufficiently demonstrated'.112 Nor was such a victory likely to come, given the exposure of the inability of the so-called 'self-reliant' government to create a permanent and effective defence force; the reluctance of the imperial government to finance what had patently become a colonists' war;113 and 'the removal of the English regiments before any tender of submission was made by, or any peace ratified with, the Maori King, and the tribes which adhere to him.' 114

The 'Pacification' of Hauraki Tribal autonomy largely intact

If, as is suggested here, those campaigns in the Waikato and Bay of Plenty, 1863-65, ended in a military stalemate, the process of pacification so much associated in Hauraki with the efforts of James Mackay, is to be seen in quite another light. Pacification was less a matter of a victorious colonial power imposing its will, than the cementing of a truce, likely to be upheld by both sides because the advantages that would come from avoiding conflict in the forseeable future were greater than those likely to follow from needlessly provoking it. For their part, the Kingite chiefs were prepared to maintain peace so long as their autonomy was respected.115 Such a kind of prudent realism was not far distant from the viewpoint of moderate elements within Hauraki ranks who were in the ascendant by late 1863 when Mackay set about persuading them to give up arms as a gesture of loyalty to the Crown. But they were not pacific because they had been cowed. Theirs was, rather, a policy of inaction rooted in 'wait and see'. This mood was even more marked among Kingite sympathisers in Hauraki ranks. They were aware that the King Movement was still intact in 1865 because, in Belich's words, 'the British were militarily unable to destroy it'.116

110 F.E. Maning to J.C. Richmond (Native Secretary), 29 March 1868, AJHR, 1868, A4, p.2.

111 G.F. Bowen to the Duke of Buckingham, 7 Dec. 1868, AJHR, 1870, Al, p. 5.

112 Belich, The New Zealand Wars, p. 198.

113 Ibid., p. 199.

114 G.F. Bowen to the Duke of Buckingham, 7 Dec. 1868, AJHR, 1870, Al, p. 2.

115 Hutton, '"Troublesome Specimens"', pp. 44, 54.

116 Belich, The New Zealand Wars, p. 200.

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New strategy of colonial government

Here we have the explanation for the caution of the colonial government in handling the Hauraki people. And the delicacy of the diplomatic situation did not abate. It extended to 1872 and beyond because of:

1.    the continued loyalty towards the Maori King of influential leaders like Te Hira who shared his resistance to continued land sales.

2.    the prolonged success of Te Kooti and Titokowaru. (Just after the escape of Te Kooti, Mr Justice Johnson said that the colony was 'more crippled . . . in its power, and more exposed' than it had even been.)117 According to Mackay, in October 1868, Te Kooti's escape, and Titokowaru's defeat of colonial troops on the West Coast, demoralized 'friendlies' and made Hauhaus more 'elated and exultant' than ever before.118

After 1865 the colonial government was to use two powerful economic weapons: improved communications (military roads and the telegraph), and the new Native Land Court. If adroitly used these devices would conquer without war, because time, the Crown believed, was on the Pakeha side. Repeating the argument of advisers with 'long experience of the Native character', Governor Bowen maintained, in 1868, that if no

further attempt were made to occupy lands in distant and isolated positions, or in the immediate neighbourhood of hostile tribes, this Colony would probably enjoy permanent peace and security. It will be remembered that the Native race is rapidly diminishing, while the Europeans are as rapidly increasing in numbers. In 1848, only twenty years ago, the Maoris in the North Island exceeded 100,000; while now, in 1868, they are under 40,000. Consequently, the Maori difficulty is a question of time — probably of the next ten years. During that period, every effort should be made to push roads into the interior. Experience has amply shown that the best weapons for the conquest of the Highlands of New Zealand in the 19th, as of the Highlands of Scotland in the 18th century, are the spade and pickaxe . . . . It is politic and more humane to outlive the King movement than to endeavour to suppress it by the strong hand.119

'Permanent pacification of the country, and the dominion of law', in Judge Maning's opinion, would inevitably follow, once the 1865 Native Land Court had been in operation for a few years. The Court would 'stimulate industry, detach them [Maori owners with individual titles] from tribal or national interests . . . and put them in the position of having much to lose and nothing to gain from war . . . . "The Native Land Act, 1865", will prove the most beneficial action we have ever attempted in Native affairs.'120

117 AJHR, 1870, Al, p. 1.

118 AJHR, 1868, A18; James Mackay to J.C. Richmond, 9 Oct. 1868.

119 AJHR, 1870, Al, p. 7.

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Why the process of pacification was prolonged

Pacification, as I have conceived of it here, was broader in scope and longer in time (extending through the 1860s and beyond) than some have imagined it to be. It proceeded as it did because the military and political situation in 1865 entered into an unusual stage of flux arising out of:

1.    uncertainty among administrators related to the withdrawal of imperial troops; a change of capital; financial constraints; and division of powers between the central and provincial governments; and

2.    divided counsels within the Hauraki tribes, not least because experience of the problems thrown up by the incursion of Pakeha into the north to extract timber and gold, acted as a warning to the more obdurate tribes in the south and increased suspicions there.

Importance of role of Mackay

Here we have a situation of diplomatic delicacy peculiarly suited to the talents and personality of a civil servant like James Mackay whose unusual background enabled him to exploit divisions between those who opposed him, particularly Maori, and to take advantage of the uncertainty of his political masters. Like Donald McLean (in his bureaucratic, not later ministerial role) Mackay was more than a civil servant. It was the nature of mid-Victorian systems of government moving into new uncharted areas of administration, that they enabled knowledgeable government officials 'serving' inexpert ministerial heads, to act off their own bat, to arrogate extensive powers to themselves so that they did much more than implement policy laid down from above; sometimes they themselves initiated it. More than bureaucrats, they have been described as closet statesmen, 'statesmen in disguise'. On the humble colonial stage, the politique Mackay was one such player.

120 AJHR, 1868, A4, p. 3.

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CHAPTER 7

THE THAMES ERA, 1867-80

Significance of Thames

In 1902 it was stated that 'the Auckland of today may fairly be described as a product of the [Hauraki] goldfields'.121 Equally could it have been claimed that the exploitation of those same goldfields unleashed forces which more than anything else contributed to the decline of the Hauraki people.

The detailed steps in the opening up of the Hauraki mining regions is not given here. My concern is rather to compare and contrast the benefits accruing to the Crown, to the Pakeha community, and to Maori, that arose out of the goldfields agreements. As a prelude to this I recapitulate certain issues already mentioned in passing in this report which are further developed in this and subsequent chapters.

Key Issues in the Opening of Thames Goldfields

By the 1860s the assumption prevailed within colonial society that if Maoris were to survive (and that in itself was by then thought conjectural) they must be speedily 'civilized'; that is, integrated within the western economic, social and legal systems. (The flaw at the heart of this convenient belief was the assumption that what was of benefit to colonists equally benefited Maori.)

From economic co-existence to subordination

The 1860s marked the movement of the Hauraki economy from a state of co-existence and symbiosis with the colonial economy to one of subordination to it. In the period before, the Maori people could earn money to buy the western goods they wanted by modifying their age-old productive activities to produce the commodities for which Europeans had set up a demand. In effect, they grafted the fetching of timber, the growing of provisions and so on, on to the stock, so to speak, of their own traditional modes of production. In the new phase, however, western economic demands became so insistent and large-scale that they began to erode the very foundations of Maori society.

'Pacification's' economic dimension

If, as has been argued, Pacification can be extended to mean conquest by non-military

121 Cyclopedia of NZ, Vol. 2, p. 462.

122 Kingite Maori, according to Hutton in '"Troublesome Specimens"', p. 80, were most alert to the fact that cession of land for goldmining, was all too often the forerunner of colonisation.

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(that is, primarily economic) means, then the opening up of the Thames goldfield was the thin edge of the wedge by which the Crown, with or without foreknowledge, moved the Maori economy irreversibly towards this stage of subordination.122 For it was the conferring of miners' rights that precipitated the rush of thousands of diggers to the Peninsula thereby swinging the demographic balance in the colonists' favour; facilitated the penetration of the region by communications; and incited Maori to sell land, under the Native Land Court, to an extent unthinkable before 1865.

Hauraki belief in own autonomy

Yet, on the eve of the opening of the Thames goldfield, Hauraki Maori had, by and large, not regarded themselves as conquered, but as an autonomous people still in charge of their economic destiny. Nothing had changed with regard to the opening up of land to mining, aptly expressed in the deed of agreement between McLean and Marutuahu chiefs in 1861 throwing open the northern part of the peninsula, between Waiau and Moehau, to prospecting. The deed recited: should gold 'really be found' and terms 'made with the Government for the regular working of such gold; let all men know, likewise that the title to the land remains with us, and will not be affected by this arrangement.' 123

Early Crown policies cautious

In this uncertain situation James Mackay became a key player. How decisive was his role will be demonstrated later. Not without reason has he been called the 'Maker of Thames'.

But though masterful and able to exercise initiative, he carefully paced his policies. Appreciating how volatile was the so-called 'Native political situation', he chose to occupy the middle ground between contending parties, Maori and European, just at that point of decision which provided opportunities to bring about a change in either

side.124

Limits to Crown's even-handedness

Mackay and other apologists for the opening of the Thames goldfield prophesied that diggers would 'open a mine of wealth for themselves and the Natives', and that benefits would accrue to Maori and Pakeha alike.125 They did not. The Crown was less than even-handed in ensuring that Maori benefited fully, because the reality was that the field, on which the economic survival of the province depended heavily in the 1860s, was obliged to develop in a way that would not endanger Auckland's interests; and the underlying principle of colonial administration in a continuing period of financial stringency was that economic development must be carried out 'on the cheap'.

123 Agreement between Te Taniwha and others and Donald McLean, 2 Nov. 1861, Enclosure C, p. 17, AJHR, 1869, A-17.

124 Hutton, '"Troublesome Specimens"', p. 26.

125 Mackay as reported in the House of Representatives, 2 Sept. 1868, NZPD, 1868, Vol. 3, p. 89.

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Opening of goldfields harmful to Maori

In practice, the opening of the goldfields was deeply destructive to the tangata whenua. If warfare and confiscation subdued Waikato, economic penetration broke Hauraki. Dextrous diplomacy, largely in the hands of Crown officials and Ministers, opened up Hauraki lands in a way that locked local Maori into the western economic system. In the process their traditional society was laid waste.

James Mackay's Crucial Role Source of his extensive power

It would be difficult to exaggerate how crucial was the part played by Mackay in the opening up of Hauraki goldfields. He, in association with Hotereni Taipari, won over Ngati Maru to allow mining on the Thames, where the industry built up an unstoppable momentum which led, by 1900, to mining operations being carried out throughout the whole Coromandel range. Originally appointed as Assistant Native Secretary to coax rebel members of Marutuahu back to a state of allegiance to the Crown, Mackay (in May 1864 appointed Civil Commissioner for the Hauraki district) lost no time or opportunity in 'pointing out to the Natives the advantages which would be derived from the leasing of their auriferous lands.'126

The volatile and unpredictable political situation was one custom-built for a man of his personality and diverse experience. He was a fluent speaker of Maori, had had first-hand knowledge of goldfields in Collingwood in Nelson, and had been a successful negotiator of land deals with Maori in the South Island.127 This background, and his standing (over those particular years) as a protégé of McLean, meant that on his appointment as a Commissioner, he was given much more of a loose rein than was normal. Between 1864 and 1867 Mackay combined his peacemaking assignment with the advocacy to Maori chiefs of the advantages to be gained from throwing open auriferous areas to miners.128 He held meetings in all quarters of the region, befriending some chiefs, and ascertaining where pockets of disaffection were. By 1867 he had acquired almost a monopoly of first-hand knowledge of the region. Because he was the 'man on the spot' in a politically delicate region, his seniors in Auckland and Wellington were prone to defer to him, as he himself often demanded that they should. In typical manner he wrote to the superintendent of Auckland in 1867:

I hope the Government will leave that question [opening up Ohinemuri] entirely in my hands as the interference of any other person will complicate matters; as few are sufficiently acquainted with the previous history of Native affairs here and are likely to be misled by hastily formed conclusions and inaccurate information.129

126 AJHR, 1869, A-17, p. 4. (Tense changed.)

127 According to P.R. May in The West Coast Gold Rushes, Christchurch, 1962, Mackay had been 'a particularly successful land purchase agent' in the South Island, and one who '"understood" the Maoris — perhaps not always to their advantage'; cit. Alison Drummond (ed.), The Thames Journals of Vicesimus Lush, Christchurch, 1975, p. 22.

128 James Mackay, The Opening of the Hauraki District for Gold Mining, Auckland, 1897, pp. 23-24.

129 Mackay to Superintendent, 5 August 1867, ACL A208/611, NARC.

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Masterful by nature, he relished the situation in which he found himself. Increasingly he became an initiator of policy, not just an executant of the instructions of others.

Mackay held a variety of offices over the years—between 1863 and 1868 he was an assistant secretary of the Native Department, Civil Commissioner, Resident Magistrate, and, without official sanction, acted both as a goldfields warden, and 'paymaster and a sort of agent of the Provincial Government on the gold field'.130 Some of these posts he held concurrently; sometimes his official function ran 'notoriously' in tandem with his private business interests (R.J. Creighton complained in the House in 1869 that Mackay was said to conduct his 'thriving' business as 'a private agent in the acquisition of Native lands' out of his Civil Commissioner's office in Thames).131

Convenience to superiors of Mackay's wilfulness

By occasionally acting as a law unto himself,132 Mackay could annoy his superiors at provincial and general government levels. But as Hutton has further pointed out, the Crown did not necessarily honour what Mackay had promised. Yet, from the Maori point of view, the damage usually had been done; the objectives of the Crown had been achieved by methods which its Ministers could ex post facto disown. In that respect Mackay's wilfulness could have a positive convenience for the Crown or for the Auckland provincial administration to which the central government had delegated extensive powers on the goldfield.

Instances of sharp practice

In what Mackay wrote to his political masters, he not only feigned to be an 'obedient servant', but also assumed the high moral ground.133 And this was even more marked in what he wrote for posterity and in his hindsight speeches to the Maori people.134 The reality was that he could be devious in his tactics and resort to questionable practices if such suited his purposes.

(a)   Opening of Waiotahi

The best known example of this, and one which Mackay regarded as a personal triumph, was his use of his powers as magistrate to force open the forbidden Waiotahi Block, mistakenly supposed by diggers—who were constantly trespassing upon it to prospect—to be the richest on the Thames field. Three days before (31 August 1867) he had written to his provincial superintendent, Williamson, warning him that 'This land will take some further time to arrange owing to the conflicting interests of the natives'135. How Mackay came to speed up his timetable is best given in his own words:

130 J.C. Richmond, Minister of Native Affairs, NZPD, 1868, Vol. 3, p. 100.

131 R.J. Creighton, 3 June 1869, NZPD, 1869, Vol. 5, pp. 22-23.

132 Hutton, '"Troublesome Specimens"', pp. 26, 110.

133 See, for example, James Mackay, evidence before Royal Commission on Native Lands, 16 March 1891, in AJHR 1891, G1, pp. 39-40.

134 See, for example, J. Mackay, Our Dealings with Maori Lands, Auckland, 1887.

135 Mackay to Superintendent, 31 August 1867, ACL A208/611.

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This was the state of affairs on the 1st September, 1867. On the 2nd a quarrel took place between a miner and two of the sons of Aperahma te Reiroa (one of the principal owners of Waiotahi). The Natives succeeded in getting the man into the Kauaeranga River, where they nearly drowned him. A great disturbance ensued, and fearing a fracas between natives and Europeans, I went with the police, and arrested the three disputants.

On the 3rd of September the man was convicted of assaulting a Native, and was fined £3, or one month's imprisonment. The Natives were proved to have nearly drowned him, and they were fined £5 each and costs, or two months' imprisonment. They were unable to pay the fine, and would have been removed to Auckland. Their father, Aperahma te Reiroa, came to solicit their release; and asked me to lend him the money to pay the fine. I agreed to do so if he would take it as an advance on miners' rights for the Waiotahi Block. He consented to do this, provided a line was cut along the base of the hills, and the flat land left as a cultivation reserve. He paid the fine, and his sons were released. That afternoon, the line of demarcation was laid off on the ground, and the Waiotahi was rushed by the miners.136

This action by an officer, who was a Civil Commissioner and a Resident Magistrate, smacks of sharp practice if not positive entrapment. After all, the assaulted Pakeha was a trespasser. J.H.M. Salmon's judgment that this was an instance of Mackay's 'unscrupulous handling of Maori interests' seems not excessively severe.137

2.    Use of debt to open Ohinemuri

An even more dramatic instance of the way Mackay used debt to win concessions came about in 1875. For ten years Ohinemuri Maori had refused to open their land to diggers. After what Mackay described as 'protracted negotiations' he had turned the Maori landowners around: But not through persuasion. Some years later a representative in the House explained how: 'consent had been ensured by Mackay's unscrupulous use of the debt system.'138 He had made advances to the owners, some of which had been in the form of 'rations', credits made available to Maori at local stores. The only way that landowners could repay these debts was to concede miners' rights on their lands.

3.    His dealing in Maori lands It could be argued that when Mackay was reappointed as Civil

136 AJHR, 1869, A-7, p. 6.

137 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 184.

138 NZPD, 1890, p. 252.

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Commissioner in 1873 with special responsibility for land buying he had no option but to follow the somewhat dubious practice of private land buyers then prevalent. It had become routine for speculators' agents to make advance payments to Maori landowners in the form of credit made available in stores, and this long before titles had been determined in the Native Land Court. Mackay admitted in later years that, after the passing of the Native Lands Act 1873, whenever he was negotiating for land he would make a point of getting the signature or mark of every available man, woman or child of the tribe who were regarded as the putative owners, in order to secure the title even before it had been determined in the Native Land Court. In a fit of forgetfulness he denounced this practice when giving evidence before the Royal Commission on Native Lands saying that 'this was the main upshot of the 1873 Act when the Native Land Court put in every ragtail and bobtail'.139 In his pamphlet Our Dealings with Maori Lands, Mackay observed that 'It is also a law of nations that a treaty shall be interpreted in favour of the weaker party'.140 There is little evidence that, in his dealings with the Hauraki people on land matters, he applied this ideal of trusteeship to benefit them.

(d) MacCormick's misgivings (1940) about trust reposed in Crown agents

   It was precisely this issue of Mackay's moral responsibility that Chief Judge C.E. MacCormick pondered many years later when he sought to explain 'the long acquiescence by the Natives' in the failure of successive governments to pay in full those revenues arising out of goldfields agreement they felt to be their due. 'Should not Hauraki Maori have been more vigilant?' MacCormick asked himself rhetorically—with the implied answer, No. At that crucial time, they were 'mainly illiterate and incapable of appreciating the legal effect and implications of deeds . . . and I think it quite probable that they relied very largely on the Government representatives, especially Mr James Mackay.'141 It is clear that Maori were not the easy dupes MacCormick, rather patronisingly, suggests they were. Perhaps they expected a trust to be honoured.

The Opening and Growth of Thames Background to the 1867 rush

The Thames gold rush, for which Mackay and his Ngati Maru ally, Hanauru Taipari had long planned, began in July 1867 with the discovery of gold beside the Karaka stream in Kauaeranga by Paratene Whakautu and Haniora Kewe. On the strength of a favourable assay of a sample of this gold brought to Auckland, Mackay and Daniel

139 AJHR, 1891, G-1, p. 39.

140 Mackay, Our Dealings with Maori Lands, p. 4.

141 AJHR, 1940, G-6A, p. 6.

54

The Economic Impoverishment

of Hauraki Maori

through Colonisation,

1830-1930

R. C. J. STONE

HAURAKI MAORI TRUST BOARD

1997

1997

First published in 1997 by
Hauraki Maori Trust Board
PO Box 33, Paeroa
Aotearoa New Zealand

ISBN 1-877198-06-4
© Hauraki Maori Trust Board

This report was commissioned by the Hauraki Maori Trust Board
as part of its Waitangi Tribunal Claim research programme.
Any views expressed and conclusions drawn are those of the author.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

Pollen, Agent of the general government, took ten experienced diggers in the cutter Cornstalk to the Thames.142 On 27 July 1867 an agreement was signed by Taipari and three other chiefs, and Pollen on behalf of the Crown, opening Kauaeranga for gold mining.143 It was agreed that Maori owners would receive £i for each miner's right issued and £i 5s. for each kauri tree felled. A small area, about four square miles, was proclaimed a goldfield on 30 July.

Within a week 250 men were on the field, the majority unemployed labourers from Auckland. Mining boomed with the discovery, on 10 August, by a group under W.A. Hunt, of a gold-bearing leader beside the Kuranui stream, and the discovery by Daniel Tookey on Moanataiari shortly after. The rush began. Between September 1867 and 9 March 1868 Mackay negotiated with Ngati Maru and Ngati Tamatera to open up for mining virtually all the land, west of the mountain divide, between Coromandel and Thames and beyond (to Omahu).144 But the really lucrative area ('the Thames') was limited to the land between Tararu and Kauaeranga streams.

The Thames rush characterized

To characterize the bonanza years of the Thames three features must be remarked upon:

•     the sheer scale of European settlement that precipitately resulted;

•     the size and revolutionary nature of the industrial development and its impact upon the environment which had previously sustained the traditional way of life of the tangata whenua;

•     the extent to which the economy of which mining was a part quickly began to erode Hauraki society.

Its unprecedented nature

The Thames Rush itself was beyond the imaginings of the Hauraki people; and it is pertinent to recall here that this substantially repeated on a larger scale the Coromandel experience. During 1864, when Pita and Taniwha complained that they had not as yet been paid during the period of prospecting, Mackay had explained that they were not entitled to any payment until gold was 'found in payable quantities'. To this they replied: 'This may be correct; but we never supposed it would take upwards of eight months to try the land, or that we would have 500 diggers from Otakau [Otago] to damage it. '145 And the damage arising out of the Thames rush was of a much greater order of magnitude.146 As was earlier cited:

It was something different, something

142 Mackay, The Opening of the Hauraki District, pp. 25-26.

143 AJHR, 1869, A-17, pp. 4-5, 17.

144 Mackay, The Opening of the Hauraki District, pp. 27-28; Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 186.

145 AJHR, 1869, A-17, p. 17 (Enclosure E).

146 Hutton puts it very well when he writes in "'Troublesome Specimens"', p. 144: 'the Thames gold rush was an exceptional event. Few other areas, in the Pacific region at least, had 10,000 Europeans planted in the midst of an exclusively indigenous community in a period of less than a year.' The upshot of this was such things as open sewers, epidemics, lawlessness (especially petty theft), riotous behaviour etc. See ACL A208/611 at NARC, especially reports by Mackay, 31 August 1867, and Alan Baillie, 15 June and 13 July 1868.

147 Allen Curnow, 'The Unhistoric Story', in Selected Poems, 1940-1989, London, 1990, p. 5.

55

Nobody counted on.147

The numbers grow

On 31 August 1867 Mackay wrote to his Superintendent that there were already 400-500 on the field and that 129 miners' rights had been taken out.148 Of course not all who went to the Thames were miners. Speaking of the Australian fields A.G.L. Shaw wrote that 'diggers had to be fed and clothed' and housed 'even if primitively'.149 And that process set in early at the Thames. Before August was out, Mackay reported that about 20 were already engaged as publicans or storekeepers and 56 allotments taken up for business purposes in the hitherto 'paper' town of Shortland.150 The growth of the settlement was perceptible. Within a few months kahikatea and kauri disappeared from the flat, and the hills behind were denuded apart from a few clumps. Tramways, batteries, cottages, wharves, churches, hotels, banks and shops all rapidly took shape.151 In under two years, according to one estimate, the value of buildings erected on leasehold land in Shortland, was at least £250,000.152

Boom town

Once parts of the field had proved fabulously rich, the population took off. The Herald reported that within three months of the field's opening Thames had 5,000 residents.153 But 1868 was the year of spectacular growth. Mackay was astonished at how 'rapid and complete' were changes taking place in a period of two months (for most of which he was absent) during the winter of 1868.154 In September G.M. O'Rorke claimed in Parliament that the Thames population had reached 12,000.155 Gold was the magnet. In 1868 some 6,000 miners' rights were issued.156 The insignificant gold export out of Auckland in 1867 of £18,277 lifted in the following year to £168,874 climbing to £1,188,708 in 1871.157 The census of 1871 showed that Thames had become the fifth largest town in the colony; larger than Nelson, and much larger than Napier and New Plymouth; its population was exceeded only by Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

148 ACL A208/611, NARC.

149 A.G.L. Shaw, The Economic Development of Australia, Camberwell (Vic.), 1973, p. 69.

150 Mackay to Superintendent, 31 August 1867, ACL A208/611.

151 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 193

152 AJHR, 1869, A-17, p. 11.

153 New Zealand Herald, 7 Nov. 1867.

154 Mackay to Superintendent, 13 July 1867, ACL 208/611.

155 NZPD, 1868, Vol. 3, p. 561(24 Sept. 1868).

156 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 187.

157 Stone, Makers of Fortune, p. 10.

56

How the Special Character of Thames Impacted upon Relations between Crown, Colonists and Tangata Whenua

Distinctive makeup of Thames mining community

In one important respect, and this was recognised at the time, those who flooded to Thames had a different social background from the diggers who had rushed the South Island goldfields earlier in the 186os. Most of those who went to the Otago diggings, or subsequently to the West Coast, came from outside the boundaries of the province where they started to prospect; indeed, a sizeable number came from abroad. Much of the growth of the Thames population, however, arose out of a redistribution of Auckland's existing provincial population, most markedly the unemployed from Auckland town, or 'struggling settlers' from the country.158 The winter of 1867 had been the nadir of the depression overwhelming Auckland in the mid-186os. Labourers in the town were starving, soup kitchens ineffectually ministered to the needy.159 Mackay said that when the news of the first discovery at Kauaeranga came through, he and Pollen were 'besieged' with applications of unemployed to go to the diggings.160

Country settlers, some of whom had been recently placed on confiscated land, were equally in sore straits. Nona Morris in her history Early Days in Franklin speaks of settlers in the Pukekohe, Pokeno, Tuakau region on ten-acre blocks, some of which were heavily bushed. These men 'not possessed of means' and with little or no opportunity for supplementary work, writes Morris, greeted 'the great news of the gold discovery at Thames' as 'salvation', and 'flocked to the fields'.161 Vicesimus Lush, vicar of Thames, recorded that within a year, some of these settler-diggers had built up a small stock of capital and had been able to send 'sufficient money home to their wives to purchase cows, pigs etc.'162

Technological distinctiveness of Thames

Neither colonists nor Maori (especially) had anticipated the extent and rapidity of growth of the settlement that rose at the Thames diggings in the late 1860s. Equally unforeseen was the technological character of the mining industry that took shape.

The first diggers who rushed the Thames, as at Coromandel, had looked for alluvial gold, hoping for a poor man's field where riches could be won with equipment as rudimentary as a pick, a shovel and a prospector's pan. Before 1867 was out, the field had

158 New Zealand Herald, 7 Nov. 1867, cit. Dunstan, 'Colonial Merchant', p. 107.

159 Journal of Auckland Provincial Council, 1867 (Session 1), Appendix 1A.

160 AJHR, 1869, A-17, p. 4.

161 Nona Morris, Early Days in Franklin: A Centennial Volume, Auckland, 1965, pp. 162, 167.

162 Ibid., citing Lush. See also Drummond (ed.), The Thames Journals of Vicesimus Lush, excerpts on pp. 15.16.

163 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, pp. 182-85.

57

revealed its true nature. It was a centre for quartz, not alluvial mining.163

Because the mineral to be extracted was auriferous rock which required crushing in batteries, the industry and its labour force had a distinctive structure, in the case of Thames one already foreshadowed on a smaller scale at Coromandel.

The unit of production

As an extractive process, quartz mining operated within a wider time-frame than its alluvial counterpart. Time was consumed with driving shafts among leaders and propping them, and shifting quartz to batteries for crushing (or otherwise processing) to obtain the final bullion. Such delays, and the costly nature of machinery to be installed, made this style of mining ill-suited to the financial resources of the usual individual transient miner, even to syndicates of such men unless well-to-do sleeping partners could be induced to buy shares or to 'grubstake'. In consequence the ephemeral, self-employed prospector quickly gave way on the Thames to a relatively static wage-labourer working within or employed by a syndicate, or (increasingly) employed by a company.

Companies displace groups of miners

The first wave of companies, soon to be numbered in their hundreds, were formed under the 1865 Gold Mining Companies Limited Liability Act. Usually these small

gold-mining companies had little more financial strength than the partnerships of miners which they tended to replace. Generally speaking, the more substantial of the mining companies were those incorporated under the Joint Stock Companies Act 1860.164 Companies marked the large-scale entry of Auckland capitalists and entrepreneurs into the mining industry.165 But what is more germane to this report is the effect that the replacement by companies of individualised mining had on the revenue Maori received as rent. Companies could substitute a lease for the previous payment by each miner of his miner's right, a financial arrangement much less favourable to Maori landlords.

General stimulus to capital investment

Salmon wrote: The advent of heavy machinery gave Thames its special character at the peak of its prosperity',166 reminding us that the opportunities for company investment offered by quartz mining were not confined to the gold mines themselves. Cognate industrial activities such as foundries and engineering works-in Auckland and Thames-made an appearance. Also encouraged were coal mines providing for steam engines (for example, the Bay of Islands Coal Company),167 the timber trade (for example, the Hauraki Sawmill Company),168 and others-mines had a voracious

164 See, for example, Dead Companies File, A35, A42, NARC.

165 New Zealand Herald, 5 July 1869, p. 6, col. 1; Stone, Makers of Fortune, pp. 13, 54.

166 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 195.

167 Co. A34, NARC.

168 Co. A38, NARC.

58

appetite for pit props and 'junk' timber and heart stuff for their tramways; the construction work in the boom towns of Shortland and Grahamstown accentuated the demand for timber. The Thames Gas Company of 1871,169 and the Auckland and Thames Steampacket Company are instances only of the phenomenon here cited.170

Problems of government expenditure on the goldfield

The Thames goldfield in the later 1860s was repeatedly spoken of as 'the salvation of Auckland'. But though it saved both the destitute in town and country and the hitherto struggling capitalists and merchants of Auckland, it did little for the finances of the provincial government. Costly public works were needed to keep the mining industry productive. This can be shown from the estimates of the province for the year-ending 31 December 1869.171 The general expenses of the provincial government totalled £61,311, while expenses for the Thames goldfield (not included in that figure) totalled £40,981, of which the major items were Tramways £18,780, Roads £4,100, and Wharves and Jetties £3,245.

It had been appreciated that when the field was first opened the cost to the provincial government would be, in the short term, 'very much in excess of the revenue derivable from the Gold Field'.172 (This particular revenue was made up of the fees paid on the issue of Publicans' and Business Licences, and the duty on the export of gold; it must be appreciated that Maori thought that, under the original agreements, the whole of the money received from the issue of miners' rights was payable to Maori proprietors.) It had been the hope of the superintendent that goldfields revenue would in time restore the provincial administration to solvency,173 but the continuing demand, for example, for 'the construction of tramways up the main creeks with connecting lines', meant that the goldfield remained a continuing fiscal drain.174 Preoccupation with its own financial problems encouraged the Auckland provincial administration to regard any Maori unrest over revenues arising from mining as not its responsibility but as a matter for the central government in Wellington to settle.

Social and political character of Pakeha settlers on the Thames

A distinctive kind of community took shape in Thames during 1867-71, marking it off from other European settlements in the province. It has already been remarked upon how Thames diggers tended to differ from their South Island counterparts: being uniformly involved in quartz mining they tended to be not prospectors but wage-labourers in an on-going capitalist industry; and they were less transient and socially more stable. However, like mining groups elsewhere they were politically radical. They

169 Co. 1871/94, NARC

170 Dunstall, 'Colonial Merchant', p. 207.

171 Journals of the Auckland Provincial Council, 1869, Sess. 24, Appendix B2.

172 Ibid., Sess. 22, Williamson, 28 Nov. 1867.

173 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 201.

174 Journals of the Auckland Provincial Council, 15 Jan. 1869, p. 23, Report of provincial accountant.

59

were not inclined to defer to the city's capitalist leadership, and adhered to a brand of populism that Mackay soon learned to tap, and that later leaders like Sir George Grey exploited. The 1869 provincial election was one of extraordinary turbulence in Shortland and Grahamstown.175

In a fit of irritation in 1867 Mackay complained diggers and local Maori were 'as troublesome specimens of humanity as ever were brought together'.176 In the years ahead diggers seemed to trouble him more than Maori. He lived in their midst; their views were provocatively expressed; when he entered politics (1869) he relied on their vote. But their readiness to act off their own bat and to rush areas such as Hikutaia and Ohinemuri caused him the greatest worry.177 Mackay was patient, and believed (as did McLean) that Maori opposition to opening lands for mining or for sale could be worn away by slow attrition. On no account therefore should the prosperity of Thames and Auckland or the fragile peace of the Upper Thames Valley be jeopardized by giving the impetuosity of disgruntled miners its head. And in the 1870s pressure was not for goldfields alone. Where the output of the Thames field fell away after 1871, the unemployed of Thames put further pressure on the Crown to accelerate the purchase of areas for small farmer settlement in the Upper Thames Valley and in the Piako.

175 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 202.

176 Mackay to W. Rolleston, 29 Nov. 1867, Rolleston MSS, cit. Hutton, '"Troublesome Specimens"', p. 24.

177 Mackay, The Opening of the Hauraki District, p. 30.

         60

CHAPTER 8

CONSEQUENCES OF ECONOMIC COLONISATION

OF THE HAURAKI REGION IN THE LATER

NINETEENTH CENTURY

Forecast of Mutual Benefit to Maori and Pakeha

Mackay wrote that at the 'numerous political meetings' which he held 'in 1864 and 1865 in the Thames district' he urged Maori to open up their auriferous lands, assuring them of the advantages that leases would bring to them.178 Like the generality of settlers he argued that mining would benefit Maori and European alike. But does the history of the province bear out this prophecy? In providing an answer, this report will deal first with the impact of the discoveries on the settler community, then with the consequences for Maori.179

The Thames Gold Rush

During 1865, after the sudden collapse of a two-year boom in suburban land and town building, Auckland business went rapidly downhill. The failure of confidence associated with this cyclical downturn was accentuated by the shift of the capital to Wellington. More demoralizing in the short-term was the redeployment of troops to other parts of the North Island and the withdrawal of imperial troops over 1865-66; in those two years the number of troops in Auckland dropped by almost 8o%,180 drawing attention to the extent to which military expenditure in recent years had propped up the town's economy.181 Merchants, their warehouses full, were demoralized; bankruptcies multiplied; labourers according to Mackay were 'starving',182 and destitution was general.183

With the gold strikes on the Thames in 1867 gloom quickly dissipated. The storerooms of merchants were cleared of accumulated stocks, soup kitchens emptied of the destitute. Widespread confidence built up among Auckland businessmen and remained high until 1871, the year when it became apparent the bonanza era had manifestly ended. Anticipating somewhat, how much the tone of Auckland (the city) business had come by that year to depend on Thames was shown by the following news item:

178 AJHR, 1869, A-17, p. 4.

179 Dunstall, 'Colonial Merchant', p. 81.

180 AJHR, 1867, D-8, pp. 4.5.

181 Dunstall, 'Colonial Merchant', p. 83.

182 AJHR, 1869, A-17, p. 4.

183 Journals of Auckland Provincial Council, 1867, Appendix A-1, 'Report on . . . the Destitute'.

            61

In 1871, there was serious unemployment in Auckland, and 500 unemployed men attended a meeting in the Drill Hall, Princes Street, at which it was decided to wait on the Superintendent (Mr Gillies), and if their request for work was not granted it was decided to petition the Government of Victoria to send steamers to take the men to Melbourne.184

These anxieties were, in fact, unfounded. Government borrowing soon solved both Auckland's, and the colony's, difficulties. Quartz mining continued steadily in the region, though at a much less adventurous level than previously. And the benefits conferred by the Thames mining industry on the colonial economy were deep and enduring.

Short-term Gains for the Colonial Economy

Some benefits were obvious and immediate. Thames goldfields had ended the depression, restored confidence, and created wealth.185 Farming benefited. The new industry stimulated engineering, timber milling and coastal shipping. Prosperity arising from gold consolidated the position of pioneer Auckland companies, New Zealand Insurance (formed 1859), Bank of New Zealand (1861), Auckland Gas Company (1862) and the Loan & Mercantile (1865), and, as we have seen, encouraged the formation of others such as the Bay of Islands Coal Company (r868) and the Hauraki Sawmill Company (1869).

By the 187os, because of the Thames gold boom, Auckland (both city and province) was a going concern, well placed to take advantage of the developmental capital brought in by Vogelite governments of the 1870s and the inflow of off-shore money channelled through banks and loan companies in the same decade.

184 Kalaugher, Gleanings, p. 96.

185 Stone, Makers of Fortune, pp. 11-12.

62

Medium-term Benefits for Colonial Economy

In a short burst of under four years (up to 31 March 1871) Thames gold mines had yielded 290,023 ounces. The downward trend of the 1870s, after the ending of the fabulous 'Caledonian' bonanza, is shown by the graph listing Auckland exports. That this was no terminal decline, however, is indicated by the table which now follows, showing the yield in ounces of gold or bullion of Hauraki mines (excluding Ohinemuri-Waihi) between 1880-1905.186

TABLE 2: YIELD OF HAURAKI MINES, 1880-1905

Coromandel Thames   Te Aroha   Great Barrier   Total

353,087 992,227 59,507   37,386   1,442,207187

It will be observed that Te Aroha field which opened in 1880 had proved disappointing and that renewed capital investment and technology had revived the Coromandel mines.

Because Hauraki gold was no flash in the pan, its miners continued to benefit Auckland in the later years of the century.188 In gold and timber the province had export staples well able to sustain its economy until the mid-1890s when the perfecting of the cyanide process and the large-scale entry of British capital into Ohinemuri mining companies, led Hauraki mining to move into a spectacular, albeit short-lived period of production; and rural Auckland acquired in the post-refrigeration era a viable economic base—more permanent than that of gold mining—of small-scale farming producing meat and dairy foods.

186 New Zealand Mining Handbook, Wellington, 1906, pp. 361.65.

187 The comparable figures for Waihi-Ohinemuri between 1894 and 1905 were 7,066,156 oz.!

188 Cyclopedia of NZ, Vol. 2, pp. 462-63.

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TABLE 3: TURN-OF-CENTURY DOMINATION OF HAURAKI FIELD BY WAIHI

64

Long-term Consequences for the Modern Economy

The long-term consequences of the goldfields, though less obvious at the time, are the more significant. The commercial character of Auckland today owes much to Thames and Coromandel, and (later) Waihi.

The Auckland Stock Exchange has a direct lineal descent from Thames. Salmon, in his history of goldmining, tells how the first trading in shares took place on 'Scrip Corner', the boardwalk intersection of Albert and Davy streets at Grahamstown, conveniently opposite to the Pacific Hotel and the jetty which were the gateway to the field.189 Just such an informal exchange grew up in Queen Street in Auckland (inspired by gold-mining companies, too) during the Thames rush. In time it absorbed its Thames counterpart.

The stock exchanges were simply part of a larger development. The Thames rush set Auckland firmly on the path of equity investment. Companies promoted to develop the goldfields spread the habit of investing in scrip through a surprisingly wide spectrum of the Auckland community. When the Thames field fell away, past winnings from gold were reinvested by local capitalists in a variety of companies—in timber companies above all. In 1886 the Registrar General listed the Auckland-dominated timber industry as the greatest of the manufacturing industries of New Zealand; it was also the most capital-intensive.190

189 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 196.

190 Results of a Census of the Colony of NZ, 1886, 'Report of the Registrar-General', pp. 30-31.

65

MAP 2: PROCLAIMED THAMES GOLD FIELDS 1869

66

During the rushes, people in Auckland became habituated to the practice of investing in companies, which, objectively stated, is how a modern capitalist society marshals the private capital resources of its members. With hindsight this can be seen as the first significant step Auckland took towards its modern role as the commercial centre of New Zealand.

An Overview: The Transformation of Hauraki Economy and Society

If there is little doubt that the exploitation of the resources of the Hauraki region brought great benefits to the European community, what of the impact upon the indigenous people themselves? The evidence is equally clearcut. Hauraki society was quickly and thoroughly transformed. Three main reasons should be listed:

•     The region's closeness to Auckland with water transport providing easy access; in consequence those Hauraki people, who preferred autonomy, found it difficult to maintain the self-imposed seclusion of, say, Kingite Maoris in more remote areas.

•     The sheer weight of European settlement in the region; by the time of the 1871
  census the balance of population had tipped markedly in the colonists' favour.

•     Auckland's nineteenth-century reliance on extractive industries—gold, timber, and to a lesser extent gum and flax—to bolster its economy.

The integration on balance proved deeply disadvantageous to Hauraki iwi.

67

MAP 3: HAURAKI GOLD MINING AGREEMENTS, 1861 AND 1867

Source: James Mackay 1 June 1896.

68

General Consequences for Hauraki Iwi Novel fluctuations

In pre-European times, fluctuations in living standards depended in large measure on agricultural considerations or on the rhythms of natural phenomena-such as changes in climate which could affect fishing. However, once Hauraki Maori became integrated into the European economic order, their living standards became subject to the ebb and flow of the cyclical fluctuations characteristic of western industrial capitalism.

Three economic downturns in the colony hit Maori particularly hard.

1.    The decline in Thames goldfields in the early 1870s when the faulted erratic nature of the reefs showed the prosperity of the bonanza years to be short-lived. Puckey, the local magistrate, wrote to the Native department in 1875 in this vein:

The falling off of the Native revenue, in the shape of miners' rights fees, during the last twelve months (to the extent of about 40 per cent) has caused a great deal of discontent among the owners of the goldfield. I have made it my special care to warn them from time to time of the gradual decline of their income. They do not seem, however, either to realize or are unwilling to believe the actual facts of the case, or the causes that have led thereto.191

2.    1879-81: a period of public retrenchment related to a cyclical downturn and a decline of confidence among overseas investors in New Zealand partly arising out of the collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank. The policy of retrenchment adopted by the new Hall government led to the withdrawal by the Crown as a main land purchaser at the very time when Hauraki blocks were coming on to the market, thus leaving the way open to price-cutting groups of European speculators.192

3.    1886-94: a period of deep depression, first in New Zealand, and later

extending to Australia, the colony's main market for kauri timber.

With the blighting of the timber industry, Maori income from leasing

or selling forest land in Hauraki fell away significantly.

There are economic historians who set little store by these (relatively) short-term economic downturns, favouring instead the concept of a 'Long Depression' covering the whole period 1865-96, regarding it as a period of persistent economic stagnation

191 E.W. Puckey to Under Secretary of Native Department, 28 May 1875, in AJHR, 1875, G-1B.

192 R.C.J. Stone, The Maori Land Question and the Fall of the Grey Government, 1879', New Zealand Journal of History, Vol. 1, No. 1, April 1967, pp. 71-73.

69

fallaciously masked by loans raised by public and private borrowers within the colony who did not, in fact, have the means of effectively servicing their debts. This theory also helps to explain the cost-cutting exercises to which Maori were constantly exposed whenever negotiating agreements with Crown and private business interests with regard to miners' rights, leases, and land sales through the period.

Extractive industries marginalize Hauraki Maori

Gold mining and timber production, the two main extractive industries in Hauraki, and the most pervasive in their influence, emerged in this period to become capital-intensive and machinery-oriented (particularly steam-powered). Since neither capital nor technological expertise were at Hauraki command, tangata whenua as entrepreneurs or labour force were progressively excluded from the productive process.193 In his MA thesis, Hutton gives a revealing illustrative instance of this. He shows how, with the growth of steam mills in the region, Maori proprietors were no longer able to insist that they sell only individual trees, but were obliged to transfer the right to mill kauri over entire blocks of land.194

Timber as a special case

The most heavily capitalized and dominating of the Auckland industries by the 1880s195 and one crucial to the Hauraki region, kauri-timber milling, could, at that stage, remain economically viable only by compensating for shrinking domestic consumption by selling abroad, particularly in the Australian colonies.196 Provincial timber firms had become drawn into a world timber market that was notoriously cut-throat. The consequence for New Zealand was ruthless slaughter of the bush, most markedly about the Kaipara and in Hauraki, in order to keep production high in a corporate struggle for survival.197 Timber companies, and later the leviathan, Melbourne-incorporated, Kauri Timber Company (which failed to win expected profits by rationalisation) were forced to operate on paper-thin profit margins at a time when Oregon and Baltic pine were flooding the international market. Auckland timber companies kept down costs by paying as little as possible for either purchase of the freehold bushland or timber-cutting rights on leased blocks.198

Nature of Economic Subordination in Hauraki Defined

How were the Hauraki people affected by that condition of 'subordination', which came about when their region was absorbed into the western economy? A generalized picture can be given, albeit one that ignores changes occurring over time and subregional variations. However some clearcut points can be made:

193 Paul Monin, 'The Maori Economy of Hauraki 1840-1880', New Zealand Journal of History, Vol. 29, No. 2, 1995, pp. 204-05. I acknowledge my indebtedness here to the research and insights of Monin.

194 Hutton, '"Troublesome Specimens"', pp. 66-68.

195 Results of a Census of the Colony of NZ, 1886, Industrial and Occupational Sections.

196 Roche, History of Forestry, pp. 104-06; Stone, Makers of Fortune, ch. 6.

197 Stone, Father and his Gift, pp. 177-78.

198 Hutton, '"Troublesome Specimens"', pp. 68-69.

70

•     disruption was general, not confined to hapu in the vicinity of heavy white settlement or concentrated economic activity-it reverberated throughout the whole region;

•     damage to Maori society was more likely to be contained where Maori, as provisioners or labourers for the colonial community for example, acted within their normal social framework; and

•     the most revolutionary change for Maori was the appearance of 'unearned income' arising out of financial agreements arrived at with either settlers or the Crown. This was the source of greatest social disruption.

Unearned (Non-work Related) Income

A new departure

In traditional Maori society, modes of production or wealth creation-farming, fishing, food gathering, building and craft work-had been communal in nature, and had relied on co-operative labour of groups discharging kinship obligations within whanau or hapu and under the direction of chiefs. These labour responsibilities had been, for time out of mind, the very cement binding together Maori society.

A new order came with the unprecedented irruption of timber milling, gold mining and land selling into the region in the 1860s. As an alternative to income resulting from work, a cash nexus was established: money payments were derived from concession rights, and rents and consideration money. Some chiefs acted no longer, as of old, as trustees of tribal property obliged to deal fairly and co-operatively with lesser people on whose labour they depended. Chiefs were shaken free from their kinship roots as they became the recipients and (sometimes unsupervised) distributors of money earned in ways that had no connection with co-operative labour.

The contrast can be exemplified in the changed role of Maori chiefs in the timber industry. Logan Campbell recorded how, in 1840, a large labour force (Ngati Tamatera? Ngati Paoa?) was mobilized by chiefs to fell and drag to the shore of Waiheke island a cargo of kauri.199 Compare with that the function of those Marutuahu chiefs who in the 1860s and 1870s were directly paid leasehold money by timber firms to mill bush; here was a financial transaction which bypassed the usual network of reciprocal labour and social relationships of which chiefs had once been an integral part.

Who were the real beneficiaries of unearned income?

In a summation of his main conclusion in his thesis on the relationship between the Crown and the tangata whenua of Hauraki in the 1860s, J.L. Hutton writes:

199 Campbell, Poenamo, pp. 76-86.

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Only a few Maori received large and sustained benefits from the goldfields. This and the kauri timber trade sparked an unprecedented level of uneven development among hapu and iwi. Those Maori who opposed goldmining had their claims ignored while the few rangatira who received miners' rights and other payments were able to control the redistribution of wealth, thus strengthening their individual positions and freeing themselves from kinship obligations. 200

This general statement is confirmed by empirical evidence which I have encountered. But I delay an attempt to say how much was paid and to which recipients until I move on to a later portion of this report when I revisit the 1940 MacCormick Report. What can be said at this juncture is that misdirected expenditure of this unearned income limited its potential benefit to Hauraki people. Maori chiefs became exposed to sudden, one-off, inflows of money, in the spending and/or disbursement of which their previous cultural experience gave them little or no guidance. Consequently the money was often squandered in the sense of not being used to develop work-related sources of income that compensated for the reduced resources that hapu would have at their disposal in the future.

Unearned income as a socially disruptive force

The discretionary power assumed by chiefs to distribute revenue derived from miners' rights and from rents was the source of much mischief. Monin puts it thus: 'The longstanding role of chief as trustee of tribal property and channel of tribal wealth was challenged in the new circumstances by that of chief as individual proprietor.'201

And considerable sums were involved. £17,761 were collected as miners' rights at the Thames goldfields in a 25 month period during 1867-69; of this amount £10,075 was distributed as part-payment including £4,459 to 'Taipari and others', £1,600 to 'Pepene and others', £1,530 to 'Rapana and others', and £1,15o to 'Meha te Moananui and others'.202 The sums for distribution were much greater than these figures imply. Monin estimates that about £10,000 a year was the average payment for the goldfield over 186772, and £42,000-minus survey costs-paid by millers (up to the latter date) for cutting rights throughout the whole peninsula.203 'If short of real riches, this was still considerable wealth to be distributed and used as chiefs saw fit, since rent monies were untagged with the social obligations of wealth produced by communal labour.' Certainly large sums remained in the hands of those chiefs prone to regard themselves as personal proprietors rather than as tribal trustees. Taipari accumulated much wealth which he spent on his fine house, company investment, high living, and community activities, even providing Mackay with a bridging loan on one occasion to meet what was in fact a government expense.

Inevitably this was some cause for contention within hapu but not so great as to cause a public scandal. But leases were a cause of tension between tribes. In the leasing of forests,

200 Hutton, '"Troublesome Specimens"', p. 159.

201 Monin, 'The Maori Economy of Hauraki', p. 206.

202 AJHR, 1869, B-15.

203 Monin, 'The Maori Economy of Hauraki', p. 205.

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Misdirected Expenditure Temptations of consumerism

As Hauraki iwi became locked into the new economy two problems concerned with expenditure came to the fore: chiefs and others were called on to exercise budgetary skills alien to their culture, and Maori became exposed to the attractions of consumerism. An appetite for alcohol and processed foods such as biscuits211 proved financially wasteful and physically debilitating. But uncontrolled spending habits also proved socially destructive.

Considerations of mana

The tragedy was that new money inflamed aspects of Maori culture admirable in themselves so as to produce crippling over-expenditure. The Thames Native Agent reported in 1877 that

There is a custom, which, I think, has rather grown upon the Natives of late years than the contrary, and as it tends materially to impoverish them, and rob them of such negative industry as they possess [is] . . . the custom of uhunga -"wailing for the dead". It appears to be a universally-accepted fact amongst them that they cannot be strong to cry unless there is not only a sufficiency but a superabundance of food provided; and they consider that it redounds to the glorification and credit of the departed . . . that a lavish supply [of food] should be made.212

In fact such gatherings had served a valuable social purpose in traditional life, providing familial bonding at, say, whanau level, and giving scope for conflict resolution for hapu and iwi at the level of paremata and political congresses. Considerations of mana, competitiveness and emulation which were intrinsic parts of Maori society were often expressed in feasts, wakes and other gatherings, usually carrying an expectation of reciprocity. These social occasions, though involving material sacrifice on the part of hosts, were sustainable in the Maori subsistence economy before 1840 when there were no sudden accessions of wealth that guests, in order to maintain mana, would have to match in the future.

The escalation of impoverishing spending

Pakeha money changed this, moving social gatherings and other occasions for competitive expenditure onto a crippling level. The ominous signs were there as early as 1844 with the profligate Waikato feast at Remuera.213 Monin and others have drawn attention to over-lavish expenditure, by Hauraki tribes, for reasons of mana, on schooners and flour mills in the 1850s; almost a kind of 'conspicuous consumption'. But the new accession of money from Pakeha sources worked a particular mischief, for it incited competitiveness in a way that impoverished the Hauraki people and corroded

211 Puckey, 9 July 1872, in AJHR, 1872, F-3, p. 6.

212 Puckey, 8 June 1877, in AJHR, 1877, G-1, p. 4.

213 See GBPP, NZ, Vol. 4, p. 9. FitzRoy to Lord Stanley, 25 May 1844; to finance this congress Waikato sold extensive land in the Pukekohe area.

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their society. Monin has provided dramatic instances of this 'distortion of traditional institutions' and the consequent beggaring of the people.

This spiral of gifting, which could even extend to the ritualistic destruction of goods, steadily impoverished the communities of participants. Tribal estates were whittled away, as leaders struggled to raise sufficient money to stave off the calamitous prospect of having to default.214

The compulsion to sell land became irresistible.

The Sale of Lands

The Native Agent at Thames forecast that when rents and other revenues ran out, Hauraki Maori having been encouraged to disregard their cultivations, and incited by calculating land-buyers to rely on credits or rations (raihana) from storekeepers, would begin (metaphorically speaking) 'to eat their seed corn'. For the next step was to sell lands in order to pay their debts.

I think it improbable that the Natives, as a people, will settle down to industrial habits whilst they have land left to hypothecate to settlers or storekeepers; it is so much easier for them to get needful supplies in that way than by raising crops for sale.215

The following year (1880) he sounded a sterner warning to the Native Minister: 'I think care should be taken lest they [Hauraki iwi] dispossess themselves of their lands before it is too late.'216

The warning was unheeded. In the later years of the nineteenth century all but a remnant was lost.

214 Monin, 'The Maori Economy of Hauraki', p. 207. See also subsequent pages for excellent material.

215 Puckey, 26 June 1879, AJHR, 1879, G -1, p. 14.

216 Puckey, 29 May 1880, AJHR, 1880, G-4, p. 4.

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PART III
A SUMMATION OF ECONOMIC GRIEVANCES

CHAPTER 9
REVISITING THE MACCORMICK REPORT

The Argument for Reopening the Issues

The MacCormick Report of 1940 has considerable historical significance. It is the first important documentary register of the two outstanding grievances of Hauraki Maori: Marutuahu failure to share in the economic development of the province since the opening of the Thames goldfields; and the ruinous social consequences of the colonisation of their lands.

The report itself, recording the response of Charles E. MacCormick (chief judge of the Native Land Court) to issues raised in petitions of certain Hauraki Maori in the early 1930s, is, regrettably, less than penetrating, and failed to address obviously important points. It is worthwhile, therefore, to revisit not only the report itself, but also the extensive documentation generated by government departments in preparation for this judicial inquiry, and the minutes of the sittings of the Court itself, not least because of the wider scope now provided under the Treaty of Waitangi Act for claims against the Crown where its actions or inactions could be considered to have breached the Treaty.

The Genesis of the MacCormick Report

The inquiry conducted by Judge MacCormick arose out of petitions presented to the General Assembly by:

•     'Rihitoto Mataia and others' of Ngati Tamatera and Ngati Maru, in 1931, laying a general claim to monies due under agreements concerned with Hauraki lands and a precise claim attached to the Ohinemuri Block.217

•     'Hoani te Anini and 501 others . . . descendants of the original owners and occupants of the lands in Hauraki and Coromandel Districts' claiming their entitlement 'to a share in the accumulated funds' arising out of agreements concerned with 'lands and mineral and timber rights and royalties' in those districts .218

217 AJHR, 1940, G-6A, Appendices A(1), A(3).

218 Ibid., App. A(2).

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