by Michael King
In 1840, however, the Treaty appeared to offer Maori certain guarantees, and many Maori had formed their own view of what those guarantees were and pronounced them acceptable. This degree of assent enabled Hobson to declare British sovereignty over the country and to set about the business of ‘governing’, at first from Kororareka in the Bay of Islands and subsequently, from February 1841, from Auckland, which Hobson named after Lord Auckland, one of his patrons in the Royal Navy. Now a full governor, appointed by the Crown in Britain and taking instructions from the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, he operated with the local assistance of two councils.
The Executive Council was made up of his three senior officials: Colonial Secretary Willoughby Shortland, Colonial Treasurer George Cooper and Attorney-General Francis Fisher. The first two of these men were notable for their incompetence and cupidity, and the third for his ill-health. Hobson had no substantial assistance from his officials until William Swainson replaced Fisher and William Martin became the country’s first Chief Justice late in 1841. The second governing body, the Legislative Council, was composed of members of the Executive Council with the addition of three justices of the peace (one of whom was replaced by Martin after his arrival).
Hobson had also to appoint a Land Claims Commissioner to confirm or invalidate all land sales made before the assumption of British sovereignty, and a Protector of Aborigines, a position given to the respected former missionary George Clarke. The latter role prefigured the later Department of Native Affairs, but its integrity was compromised by the fact that Clarke was also to act as government land purchase officer. As a consequence, he came to be regarded with equal suspicion by European settlers and by Maori. Funds for government were initially to be raised by way of the Crown pre-emption clause in the Treaty of Waitangi: Maori could sell only to the agent of the Crown, and the Crown would on-sell to European settlers at a profit. It was an arrangement that suited only the Crown, and was abolished in 1844 by Hobson’s successor.
Despite immediate difficulties, some of them caused by the intractability and ineptitude of Hobson’s first officials, and some of them by the Governor’s continuing ill-health after a stroke in March 1840, the British colonisation of New Zealand was able to proceed without any major initial breakdowns in administration or law and order. And it proceeded with all of the accoutrements implied by the term colonisation: transfer of people from one side of the globe to the other, exploitation of the country’s material resources for the benefit of both settlers and distant investors. In the words of a later Maori High Court Judge, Eddie Durie, tangata whenua, the people of the land, would now be joined by ‘tangata tiriti’, the people whose presence was authorised by the Treaty of Waitangi. And the face of New Zealand life would from that time on be a Janus one, representing at least two cultures and two heritages, very often looking in two different directions.
Chapter 12
Tangata Tiriti
While most Europeans in the first half of the nineteenth century referred to the native inhabitants of New Zealand as ‘New Zealanders’, the Maori text of the Treaty of Waitangi used the expression ‘tangata maori’ – ordinary people – to denote them. This indicates how Maori were referring to themselves by that time – and, indeed, recorded evidence of that expression goes back as far as 1801, to the journal of the ship Royal Admiral in the Firth of Thames. By the 1830s the word Maori on its own was in widespread use among Maori. And by 1860 Renata Tamakihikurangi of Ngati Kahungunu would go so far as to say to the European settlers of Hawke’s Bay: ‘Just as you are all English … so we (Natives) are all one: Maori is my name.’ In official usage, however, the word ‘Native’ was employed to describe the cabinet minister and government department responsible for Maori matters, and the Land Court until 1946.
The Treaty also employed the term ‘pakeha’ to refer to Queen Victoria’s non-Maori subjects in New Zealand. Use of this word in Maori to denote Europeans was current in the Bay of Islands by at least 1814, when the missionary William Hall reported that he had been referred to at Te Puna pa as a ‘rungateeda pakehaa’ (rangatira pakeha: a European gentleman). There is no evidence in this or any other instance in early literature that the term was derogatory. It was simply a necessary descriptive word to distinguish European from Maori, and it probably came from the pre-European word pakepakeha, denoting mythical light-skinned beings. It may not have been universally popular in Maori from the beginning of Maori–Pakeha contact – some early references note the term tangata tipua and, in the far south, tangata pora to describe Europeans. But use of the word Pakeha was widespread among Maori by the 1830s.
The main reason for its spread, of course, was the growth of the settler population and the increase in the proportion of Maori who would have direct contact with Europeans. The number of Pakeha living in New Zealand in 1830 had been just over 300. Most of these settlers had come from Australia, some of them ex-convicts seeking to escape their penal pasts and some traders working for Australian-based timber and flax operations. A smaller percentage included those who had jumped ship from vessels originating in Britain, the United States and France. The population of missionaries and their families came largely from England (the Anglicans and Wesleyans) or from France (the Catholics). The total number of Pakeha settlers in 1840 was a little over 2000. By 1858 they would outnumber Maori by approximately 3000: 59,000 to 56,000. And by 1881 there would be around 500,000 of them. What caused this massive removal of population from one side of the world to the other?
In global terms, of course, the development of the new state of New Zealand in the second half of the nineteenth century was a subplot in the diaspora of Europeans that sent as many as 50 million people from the Old World to the New over a period of 200 years. These were the settlers who created neo-Europes in North America, Australia and southern Africa, taking with them the flora, fauna, agricultural and horticultural practices and architecture that enabled them to transform whole landscapes into a likeness of the places they had left behind. The forces which scattered them have been categorised by James Belich into those which ‘pushed’ and those which ‘pulled’.
The ‘push’ or dynamic of ejection included such factors as European overpopulation, poverty, hunger, an inability to break out of class systems, and religious controversy or outright persecution. Scots who came to Otago and Southland from 1848, for example, were propelled largely by an urge to escape economic depression and its effects, and by the excoriating split between the Church of Scotland and Free Church Presbyterians. Thousands of Irish departures at about the same time were prompted by the devastating potato famines. The attraction lay in the promise of prosperity and healthier environments, prospects for social advancement without the hurdles of a class system and, for investors, opportunities to enlarge capital.
Much of the initial settlement of New Zealand in the 1840s was the result of private-enterprise immigration company schemes. The British Colonial Office had been persuaded to accelerate its plans for the annexation of New Zealand, and William Hobson to proclaim sovereignty before the Treaty of Waitangi had finished its perambulations, because of two of these private schemes.
One was French in origin, and resulted in the establishment of the Nanto-Bordelaise colony at Akaroa in August 1840. Had Hobson not already acted three months earlier, this settlement might have resulted in part or the whole of the South Island being annexed by France. As things transpired, however, organised French colonisation was confined to this small community (only 53 settlers in all) on Banks Peninsula, although individual Frenchmen and their families had found their way to such ports as the Bay of Islands and Tauranga. Because the inhabitants of Akaroa were nominally almost entirely Catholic, Bishop Pompallier established the first European station of his mission there in 1840, and for a short time it was a pleasant place for his culture-starved priests, and for the bishop himself, to renew their association with French cuisine, conversation and literature. Eventually, however, Pompallier closed the stati
on as a mark of disgust at the religious apathy of the Akaroa colonists.
A far more substantial scheme was the New Zealand Company settlement of Wellington, also established in 1840, on the shores of Port Nicholson. This was the brainchild of the mercurial Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Wakefield had been imprisoned for three years as a result of abducting the schoolgirl heiress Ellen Turner in 1826, and while he was incarcerated he formulated his famous theories for what he called ‘systematic colonisation’. The principal aim of this scheme, David Hamer has written, was to provide ‘a balance between capital and labour. [Wakefield] believed that to succeed a colony had to attract capitalists and that the way to do this was to ensure that labour would be available to work on, and add value to, the property in which they had invested … [Land] should be sold at a price beyond the means of labourers, but their migration … could be encouraged by the expectation of one day buying land with their savings.’
Although the New Zealand Company was set up by well-heeled investors to apply these concepts to its New Zealand settlements, Wakefield himself was obliged to play a behind-the-scenes role because of the notoriety generated by the Ellen Turner episode. In that role he argued and charmed into co-operation an influential group of aristocrats and politicians, including the Earl of Durham, John George Lambton, Baron Petre, Sir William Molesworth, the brothers John and William Hutt, and others whose names would eventually grace New Zealand streets and towns. Two of the company’s principal agents in New Zealand, however, would be Edward’s brothers William and Arthur Wakefield, in Wellington and Nelson respectively. Edward himself would not set foot in the country until 1853, whereupon he began a brief and disappointing political career.
The Wakefields’ plans for New Zealand sought to establish a ‘Better Britain’ or a ‘Britain of the South’ in which English class distinctions were preserved but where industrious artisans and farmers could more easily work their way towards prosperity and respectability. Company prospectuses and allied advertising told many lies about the nature of the new country (describing Wellington, for example, as a place of undulating plains suitable for the cultivation of grapevines, olives and wheat); by the time the truth was revealed, colonists had arrived and were unlikely to turn around at once and depart. And they were arriving in billowing numbers: Wellington had 2500 European settlers by 1841, and 4000 by 1843.
Wanganui was founded as Petre, after one of the New Zealand Company’s aristocratic directors, to provide additional land for the overflow of Wellington settlers and to supply the mother settlement with pigs, pork and potatoes. Nelson and New Plymouth were founded as further New Zealand Company settlements in 1841. All three would have serious difficulties with local Maori as a result of questionable land purchases.
Two further ventures, the establishment of Dunedin as a Scottish Free Church settlement in 1848 and Christchurch as a Canterbury Association (Church of England) settlement in 1850, were based on New Zealand Company models and hence can be seen as offspring or beneficiaries of its major enterprises, which formally ceased when the company surrendered its charter to the Crown in 1850. Auckland alone of the main centres was established (in 1840) and grew largely without organised immigration (although two shiploads of Scottish settlers arrived in 1842, six years before the Scottish settlement of Otago). Its prosperity was ensured by its location on an isthmus between two navigable harbours and by Hobson’s decision to relocate the country’s capital there from the Bay of Islands.
While the New Zealand Company settlements contributed only about 15,500 settlers to New Zealand’s founding population, they were disproportionately influential on account of being there first and establishing the ethos of their cities, three of which, with Auckland, would become and remain the ‘main centres’ and provide the foundation for the system of provincial government introduced in 1853. Christchurch, for example, would remain visibly English in character and appearance, and in the manners of its citizenry, for its first 100 years. And Dunedin, with its street names drawn from Edinburgh, its public buildings in stone and brick, and its scattering of Queen Anne towers, was still unmistakeably Scottish more than 150 years after its foundation.
No clear information is available on exactly what percentages of early immigrants were engaged in which occupations. But, as Jeanine Graham has noted, the New Zealand Company sought to attract ‘respectful hard-working rural labourers and cultured men of capital’ as its two categories of first choice. The Canterbury settlement, closer to land immediately available for agriculture and horticulture, wanted ‘industrious immigrants of the labouring class’ and small farmers, while the Marlborough Province, soon after its establishment in 1860, sought ‘ordinary farm labourers, carpenters, and mechanics, navvies, bush hands, shepherds, miners and domestic female servants’. Shepherds were especially welcome if they brought their own dogs. Most female immigrants who were not wives or daughters came as domestic servants. In terms of national wealth, in the pastoral era of the 1850s and 1860s the colony’s basic economic unit was ‘an efficiently managed sheep-run of 10,000 acres or more’. Such stations, predominantly in Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa, Canterbury and North Otago, ‘formed a settled community of about a score: family, shepherds and station hands’.
I. R. Cooper in The New Zealand Settlers’ Guide assured readers in 1857 that:
Those who arrive in the colony without capital will, if they enjoy good health, are sober and economical in their personal expenses, and are able and willing to work at any one trade, as farm servants, boatmen, shepherds, or house servants, soon realize a sufficient capital to invest in land, cattle or sheep, and thus to render themselves and their children independent.
Certainly a degree of adaptability and what might be regarded as upward social mobility is apparent in many individual families. The Olsons, for example, who came to Wellington in the 1850s as shoemakers, ran hotels in Lyttelton and then on the West Coast goldfields; and eventually one son, Teddy, became a landowner-farmer in Taranaki. All that prevented the family story being one of unmitigated success was the fact that Teddy Olson died on his farm in 1893 after being gored by one of his own bulls. It was the opportunity to make such adjustments that drew many colonists out from the United Kingdom, where such mobility was more difficult to accomplish, for economic and social reasons. Benjamin Shadbolt, transported in 1846 from Oxfordshire to Tasmania for burglary, won his ticket of leave in 1853, migrated to New Zealand in 1859 with sufficient capital to become, within a short period, a sawmiller, farmer, shopkeeper and publican on Banks Peninsula. By the time he died in 1862 at the early age of 57, he was a respected horse breeder and local body politician. His immediate descendants suppressed, or were never told about, the convict chapter of his life, which had enabled him to break out of rural poverty in England.
Like the Olsons and Shadbolt, the largest number of immigrants in the first 50 years of European settlement of New Zealand – close to 50 per cent – would come from England and Wales (the two countries are not distinguishable because early statistics lumped them together: evidence suggests strongly that the number of Welsh was considerably lower than that of English). Scots would make up the second biggest group, some 24 per cent, in contrast to Britain itself, where they made up only 10 per cent of the total population. Then came the Irish, whose numbers reached a peak of about 19 per cent in the wake of the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s. Of the minority groups, the largest were Germans, who settled in particular around Nelson. Scandinavians, Poles, French and Italians made up most of the rest. Chinese immigrants too arrived to take advantage of the gold rushes but were settled almost exclusively at first in Otago and Westland.
Despite these minor cultural variegations, New Zealand acquired a distinctly ‘British’ character as the nineteenth century advanced. Indeed, as commentators never tired of pointing out, the country became in some respects ‘more British’ than Britain itself, especially in expressing loyalty to the Crown and its willingness to take part in imperial wars. As Belich has
argued, the British abroad tended to drop their narrower ethnic identities to form a new ‘Us’ while confronting a shared ‘Them’, who in New Zealand were Maori and Catholic Irish. ‘Like the racial identities to which it was closely related, [Britishness] was a cloak you put on when you went out.’
There was certainly far more mixing of ethnic and religious ingredients on the colonial frontier than there was at ‘Home’. Dr John Shaw in A Gallop to the Antipodes described his continual surprise at the manner in which people were living in New Zealand in the 1850s, apparently without many of the prejudices or preconceptions common to British people in Britain. He was also favourably impressed by the success of the ‘mixed-race’ communities around shore whaling stations. He describes, for example, visiting John and Kurupa Davis – he an African-American whaler, she a former Moriori slave – near the Guards’ station at Port Underwood. Their cottage was identical to others in such settlements.
The roof, like that of a barn, was visible from the interior, from the rafters of which hung sickles, baskets, heads of Indian corn, bacon, knives, shears and a razor. The sleeping apartment was separated by a wall which terminated halfway between the roof and the floor. On top … dangled several clothes belonging to the lady of the establishment … [There] were no chairs, a long form being the only substitute … The floor consisted of terra firma covered with logs of wood, teapots, wooden casks, kettles and a nail-box. There was an imitation cupboard, placed at the top of which were some preserves … Lower down was a plate rack scantily furnished, beneath which … were hoes [and] hatchets … Across the chimney extended a spar on which were suspended pot-hooks and damp clothes waiting to be dried. The animals comprised of four cats, a few goats, numerous ducks and geese, cocks and hens …