Topic Two: Essay Three 2007

Topic Two: Essay Three 2007

Explain the factors that contributed to the decision made by Governor Thomas Gore Browne to pursue the purchase of the Waitara block in 1860.

Evaluate the consequences of this decision on race relations in Taranaki up to 1863

The candidate’s response to the first part of the essay question could include:

· In the period after the initial Pākehā settlement of New Plymouth, several blocks of land had been purchased from Taranaki and Te Ati Awa hapū. Most of this land was inland and covered in bush. Pākehā settlers were eager to acquire the more fertile land around the Waitara River, which flowed into a river mouth harbour. New Plymouth lacked a decent harbour.

· The settlers were jealous that 4000 Māori in Taranaki owned 800 000 hectares while the original New Zealand Company purchase for New Plymouth was just 1400 hectares.

· In one of his dispatches, Gore Browne alleged that Māori had far more land than they needed and that the settlers would get hold of it “recte si possint, si non quocunque modo” (“fairly, if possible, if not, then by any means at all”).

· The establishing of Kingitanga in 1858 was viewed by most Pākehā as a land-holding movement. This was a time when the populations of Auckland and New Plymouth were increasing. Governor Thomas Gore Browne believed that Māori needed to be taught a “sharp lesson”.

· Governor Gore Browne believed the rumours that Māori who wanted to sell land were being intimidated by a pupuri whenua land league. In 1859, he had announced that any Māori wanting to sell land were able to do so without the consent of their chiefs. (This was a direct breach of Article Two of the Treaty, which affirmed chiefly authority.)

· Governor Gore Browne saw the dispute over the sale of the Waitara block as an issue of sovereignty. When Te Teira offered the land for sale, the paramount chief of the area, Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake, objected. He argued that Te Teira didn’t have the mana or support needed to make the sale.

The candidate’s response to the second part of essay question could include

· When the survey began, Wiremu Kingi’s supporters disrupted it by pulling out the survey pegs.

· In February, Governor Gore Browne declared martial law and troops were sent in from New Plymouth. Waitara was occupied by troops, and Kingi’s pa Te Kohia was bombarded. The Te Ati Awa garrison abandoned the pa with little loss.

· Wiremu Kingi had not initially supported the establishment of Kingitanga, but he now sought an alliance with Te Wherowhero. Kingitanga sent a force of volunteers to support Kingi in Taranaki. This was significant as it showed that Kingitanga would support Māori landholders in their disputes against the British. (Governor Grey later used Kingitanga’s involvement in the Taranaki War as part of his excuse to invade the Waikato).

· On 27 June 1860, Te Ati Awa and their allies inflicted some heavy losses on British troops at the twin pa of Puketakauere and Onukukaitara near Waitara. On 6 November the British troops gained their first success when they drove Ngāti Haua and Waikato from their defences at Mahoetahi.

· In July 1860, Governor Gore Browne convened the Kohimarama Conference, at which he attempted to undermine Wiremu Kingi and the Kingitanga (neither Kingi nor Te Wherowhero were invited) by having other North Island chiefs reaffirm aspects of the Treaty of Waitangi.

· For almost three months, early in 1861, General Pratt led more than 2000 men on an advance by the means of a sap (trench) and a series of redoubts against Māori occupying pa and rifle pits at the bush edge on the bank of the Waitara River.

· The conflict remained unresolved as neither side was strong enough to defeat the other, and a ceasefire was agreed in March 1861. Māori continued to control the Tataraimaka block but lost control of some of the land around Waitara.

· When Governor Grey reoccupied the Tataraimaka block before giving up land at Waitara, there were further incidents around New Plymouth.

· Tension continued in the late 1860s with the rise of the Pai Marire prophetic movement.

The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period: Volume I (1845–64) by James Cowan

Chapter 17: The Waitara Purchase

THE COMPLICATED HISTORY of the Waitara purchase may be reduced to a simple summary. Teira, a minor chief of the Atiawa, living with his fellow-tribesmen on the ancestral lands on the Waitara, was persuaded to offer 600 acres of the land to the Government, at a price of £1 per acre. This block was on the left side of the Waitara, near the mouth, and included the ground on which the present Town of Waitara stands. A number of Teira's people supported him, but the majority of the Atiawa, headed by Wiremu Kingi te Rangitaake, opposed the transaction, and made vehement and repeated protest. It was acknowledged that Teira was the occupier of a portion of the land, and the Government contention—on the advice of Mr. Parris, its local native agent—was that a native had a right to dispose of his individual interests in land. But this was long before the establishment of the Native Land Court. Titles in native land had not been individualized; it was practically impossible to determine the precise extent of Teira's interests. The case for the opponents of the sale was that while individual cultivation rights existed no one had a right to part with the tribal estate without general consent. The land was the common property of the people, and it was against accepted tribal policy to permit a wedge to be driven into the estate by deed of sale without the acquiescence of all concerned. While the whole tribe might be called upon to fight to maintain any or every member of the tribe in possession, so no member was justified in parting with the joint property of the clan.

Plan of the Pekapeka Block, Waitara
(Inset, Te Kohia pa, called the “L” pa from its shape.)

It was the dispute over the defective purchase of this land by the Government that caused the Taranaki War. Waitara Town now occupies part of the block.

This land had always been thickly populated, and was the property of a great many families, and Wiremu Kingi, as the paramount chief, undoubtedly exercised his right in vetoing the sale. Moreover, it is known that Wiremu Kingi was the victim of a private feud. He and Teira had quarrelled, and Teira, in order to obtain revenge, deliberately proposed the sale in order to bring trouble upon his antagonist and the tribe. This was a common mode of action among the Maoris. The determined opposition of Wiremu Kingi—who was no fire-brand, but a well-wisher of the whites and a man of high intelligence and cool reasoning—should have been sufficient warning to the authorities, at any rate, to treat the matter delicately and to submit the dispute to a competent tribunal. Possibly a proposal to rent the land would have been more favourably received by the Atiawa. But in the existing tension of feeling among the natives, the Waitara, with its fairly numerous population and its highly complicated system of ownership, was the worst possible spot that Governor Gore Browne's advisers could have selected for a demonstration of their announced intention to bargain with individual owners.

As was often the case in native disputes, a quarrel over a woman was one of the roots of dissension. The following is a statement by a Kingite survivor of the wars:—

“Our troubles which led to war began when our people lived in their pa called Karaponia (California), on the left (west) side of the Waitara River, at the mouth. A woman, Hariata, was the cause. She was the wife of Ihaia te Kiri-kumara, and because of her unfaithfulness Ihaia had her seducer, Rimene, killed. The man's body was buried in the pa. Because of the wrong done to him Ihaia sought for further revenge and sought compensation in land. The tribe would not agree to this, inasmuch as the offence had already been paid for sufficiently by the death of the man Rimene. Ihaia, however, would not listen to this agreement, and he joined with Teira and sold some of the land of Te Rangitaake to the Government in order to obtain compensation for the adultery of his wife. Hence this haka song of the Atiawa:—

“The land was seized upon because of the woman,
At Karaponia it all began.
E Mau na wa!”

The case for the European settlers of Taranaki lay in the necessity for obtaining more land for the extension of the settlements. With thousands upon thousands of acres of beautiful and fertile but unused territory around them, it was very natural that they should urge the Administration to purchase new blocks for farms. Immigration was increasing, and the large families of the original settlers made obvious the need for more land. The vigorous men of Cornwall and Devon, who formed the larger proportion of the settlement-founders, were not disposed to permit a few hundreds of natives to bar the way to the good acres lying waste under fern and tutu. Hemmed in as they were between the mountains and the sea and between the domains of the Maori tribes, they were impatient for expansion of their landed possessions. The Maori, on the other hand, had become very uneasy at the steady incoming of immigrant ships, and feared that the pakeha, with whom at one time he would have been content to live in friendship, would presently outnumber and overrun the native people. Wise statesmanship might have averted a clash, but, unfortunately, the one man who could have devised a method of conciliating the antagonistic factions was absent from the colony.

Thoughtful men such as Sir William Martin vigorously condemned the Waitara blunder. Many years later Dr. Edward Shortland made the following comment on the land dispute and its causes in his book “Maori Religion and Mythology”: “It is a recognized mode of action among the Maoris, if a chief has been treated with indignity by others of the tribe and no reasonable means of redress can be obtained, for the former to do some act which will bring trouble on the whole tribe. This mode of obtaining redress is termed whakahe, and means putting the other in the wrong. There appears little reason to doubt,” Shortland concluded (p. 104), “that Teira's proposal to sell Waitara was prompted by a vindictive feeling towards Wi Kingi, for he knew well that by such mode of proceeding he would embroil those who would not consent with their European neighbours. At the same time it is a rather mortifying reflection that the astute policy of a Maori chief should have prevailed to drag the colony and Her Majesty's Government into a long and expensive war to avenge his own private quarrel.”*

* See Appendices for Sir George Grey's memoranda on the Waitara question.

Paragraphs explaining factors

Using the DVD from yesterday, the key words and the images as a prompt write as your notes the paragraphs that would explain each factor that contributes to the Waitara decision.

LAND SALES / NO-ONE THERE / CAPT CRAYCROFT
CARTS / 3000 TROOPS / NIGER
CANOES / WIREMU TAMIHANA / HAPARONA
LAND HOLDING / REWI MANIAPOTO / FALSE TARGETS
POTATAU / TAWHIAO / MARJORAM
TAUPIRI / INVESTIGATE / MAORI BRAINS
WAIKATO PLUS / MARJORAM / MARTIAL LAW
‘MAORI’ PEOPLE / PA CLOSE / PART TIMERS
GORE-BROWNE / MAORI TACTICS / SHIFT SYSTEM
ASSERT BRITISHNESS / ENCIRCLED / MODERN PA
WAITARA / SIEGE / SAPPING
NEW PLYMOUTH / DISEASE / PRATT
HARBOUR / PROCLAMATION / GABIONS
STRATEGIC / I WILL NOT SELL / REDOUBTS
WIREMU KINGI / KING MOVEMENT / ESCAPE ROUTE
54-58 – 100 DEAD/INJURED / I WILL SELL / MIMICRY
TEIRA – IHAIA / ENVIOUS / SPADE RACE
600 ACRES / NEW LAND / ARROGANCE
PROCLAMATION / SECRET SUPPORT
TE KOHIA / TEACH LESSON
CHAS GOLD / PAINTING
WAIREKA / KILLED
ODGES VC / REFUGEES
PAPER VICTORY / MILITIA
NO MEN KILLED / VOLUNTEERS