by Michael King
Some hapu were selling land willingly to government agents, especially in Taranaki and Hawke’s Bay, to cater for the still-climbing numbers of European immigrants. Others by the 1850s were declining to do so, and going so far as to form land leagues actively opposed to further sales. The latter were experiencing and voicing many of the misgivings about Maori survival first expressed in the 1840s. By 1860 the European population in New Zealand surpassed that of Maori for the first time, and it seemed to some leaders that the very survival of Maori people and their culture might be under threat. These feelings, combined with crises associated with land sales, would make the 1860s the most volatile decade in the young nation’s history.
[1] Upheld by the Waitangi Tribunal in 2003.
Part III: Consolidation
Chapter 14
New Settlers Take Control
British colonists established a foothold in the Crown Colony of New Zealand in the 1840s and, if they did not succeed in actually ‘defeating’ Maori who rebelled, they had at least kept the rebels at bay and secured the immediate zones of Pakeha settlement. By and large the new settlers were safe because most Maori who had an opinion on the issue consented to Pakeha being where they were, on small sections of the country’s coastal fringe. One reason they consented was that they did not yet see the Pakeha presence as something that would substantially change the way Maori lived or behaved. In the next two decades, however, the demographic, economic and political impact of the new colonists would transform the country in ways that the tangata whenua could never have foreseen. That transformation occurred at several levels simultaneously.
One was in the exploration and renaming of many parts of the land. As Maori had done before them, Pakeha colonists set out to make the unknown known and to discover for themselves the country’s physical resources. They imposed a high proportion of new placenames, derived mainly from British places or people, on parts of the country where they established ascendancy and in places apparently devoid of Maori occupation (among the latter, mountains, lakes and rivers were especially favoured targets). So Tamaki-makau-rau became Auckland, Te Upoko-o-te-Ika became Port Nicholson and Wellington, Otakou became Dunedin (the Gaelic name for Edinburgh), and so on. All the major rivers in Canterbury were given English names, though in time they reverted to their Maori ones. In some instances the new names were translated back into Maori for Maori use – Akarana for Auckland, Poneke for Port Nicholson, Niu Terani for New Zealand itself.
The exploration and surveying of the land was another way in which, by being made known to Pakeha and subject to cadastral surveys and triangulation, fixing locations by instrumental and mathematical calculation – concepts and practices unknown to Maori – the country was being appropriated at yet another level. This appropriation was symbolic in some regions and actual in others, where ownership of specific places changed hands. Most of the coastline was surveyed by the naval vessels Acheron and Pandora between 1848 and 1855, with particular attention paid to actual or potential ports. Major investigations on land were undertaken by such figures as William Colenso (interior of the North Island, 1841–42), Edward Shortland (Otago to Banks Peninsula, 1844), Thomas Brunner and Charles Heaphy (West Coast of the South Island, 1846), Colenso again (Hawke’s Bay and inland North Island, 1843–47), Nathanael Chalmers (Central Otago, 1853), Ferdinand Hochstetter (geographical surveys in the Auckland province and Nelson region, 1859). All the country traversed by these men – it was always men at this time – was well known to Maori, and many of them succeeded and survived only because they had Maori guides. But the journeys were made so that topographical features could be placed on otherwise blank provincial government maps, so that authorities might have some notion of which regions were suitable for farming, forestry or mineral exploitation, and so that subsequent travellers could find their way back to the geographical features described. In 1875 the central government agreed to undertake a triangulated survey of the country as a whole, and John Turnbull Thomson, who had done pioneering survey work for the Otago provincial administration, became the country’s first surveyor-general; for the four years he held the position, he performed his duties with competence and distinction.
The bulk of the country was ‘known’ to Europeans and traversed by them by the 1860s. For the later decades of the nineteenth century, however, individual surveyors and adventurers filled in the remaining blank spaces on maps, most of them peaks and saddles and valleys on either side of the Southern Alps. One such gentleman-explorer was the artist and writer Samuel Butler, who arrived in Canterbury in 1860 with the intention of increasing his capital by means of high country farming and would be remembered for, among other things, playing Bach in his sod hut homestead among the tussock and the sheep. His first run was in the foothills of the alps west of the upper Rangitata River; his second the station Mesopotamia where, in just over three years, he did succeed in doubling his investment to the tune of £8000.
In 1860 and 1861 Butler searched on foot and on horseback for unclaimed sheep country around the headwaters of the Canterbury rivers. With a companion, he discovered and crossed the Whitcomb Pass to the West Coast in February 1861 in the course of a series of expeditions beyond the Rangitata headwaters (and his name is commemorated in Mount Butler, the Butler Range and Butler Saddle). Parts of his descriptions of these journeys were subsumed into his enormously popular satirical novel Erewhon:
Never shall I forget the utter loneliness of the prospect – only the little far-away homestead giving sign of human handiwork; the vastness of mountain and plain, of river and sky; the marvellous atmospheric effects – sometimes black mountains against a white sky, and then … after cold weather, white mountains against a black sky – sometimes seen through breaks and swirls of clouds – and sometimes … above the mist; going higher and higher, I would look down upon a sea of whiteness, through which would be thrust innumerable mountain-tops that looked like islands.
Erewhon, written largely in New Zealand but not published until 1872, eight years after Butler had returned to England, has been ranked alongside Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. While it is, as one critic has noted, a ‘perceptive response in imaginative literature to colonial New Zealand experience’, it is in essence an exploration and satirisation of Victorian English manners and morals rather than those of New Zealand. Butler’s views of New Zealand and, more specifically, of the Canterbury settlement, can be found in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), which his father compiled and published from letters back to England. It constitutes a ‘spiritual journey from the confines of civilisation to high places occupied by a handful of men though there is high culture there too’ (Butler found a copy of Tennyson’s Idylls under the bed of one of his shepherd companions).
At the same time as European knowledge of the country was expanding and settlers were building houses, halls and churches on land claimed from forests, they were also practising intense colonisation of the flora and fauna. Samuel Butler, writing of the South Island high country, voiced the feeling that underlay such practices. ‘Snow-grass, tussock grass, spaniard, rushes, swamps, lagoons, terraces, meaningless rises … It is so hard for an Englishman to divest himself, not only of hedges and ditches, and cuttings and bridges, but of all signs of human existence …’ What followed was partly the process of creating a ‘neo-Europe’ – a world that looked and felt more like the one from whence they had come – partly the business of establishing animals, pasture and grains that could be husbanded to provide food and income, both national and individual, and partly an attempt to enlarge the opportunities for recreational hunting and fishing. East Polynesian colonists had introduced kiore, kuri (dog) and half a dozen plant species. Ship rats had been hurtling ashore from the time of Cook’s voyages and the great navigator himself had left behind pigs and goats and some species of vegetable. Sealers and whalers had brought with them dogs and cats, more pigs, and more fruit and vegetables.
The preda
tion of kiore on reptiles and on nesting and ground birds, of kuri on flightless birds, and of Maori themselves on forest and bird life – all these had taken an ecological toll on primordial New Zealand. But it was minor compared with the environmental effects of European colonisation. The great botanist Thomas Kirk estimated that the new plants introduced to New Zealand by Europeans prior to 1840 numbered a few dozen only. By 1870 there were almost 300, and by the 1930s over 1000, of which two-thirds had arrived between 1851 and 1900.
Birds, animals and fish were imported by local acclimatisation societies so that, according to one of them, ‘the sportsman and lover of nature might then enjoy the same sports and studies that make the remembrance of their former homes so dear, the country rendered more enjoyable, our tables better supplied …’ The Auckland society alone brought in more than 30 varieties in its first year. Nationally, in the 1860s, introduced species included salmon, rainbow trout, Californian quail, Pinus radiata and macrocarpa from the United States; starlings, blackbirds, sparrows, gorse, foxgloves, rabbits and red deer from Britain; black swans, possums, green frogs and eucalypts from Australia. Sheep and cattle were being introduced from the 1830s, and wool was to become the country’s major export in the nineteenth century.
Collectively, these introductions had a traumatic impact. In the words of one historian, they not only transformed the appearance of the landscape, but also ‘changed ecologies, and reduced, drastically, the range and … population of many indigenous species’. Some of the species reduced or lost died because of destruction of habitat, some because they could not co-exist with introduced animals, and others because they succumbed to diseases introduced with exotic creatures. Initially poor judgements were compounded when further species were brought in to limit the disastrously prolific spread of others. Thus farmer-ecologist Herbert Guthrie-Smith described the liberation of weasels, ferrets and stoats in an effort to control rabbits as trying to ‘correct a blunder by a crime’.
Among the New Zealand birds that disappeared in the nineteenth century were the piopio, native quail and Stephens Island wren. The latter, the only known example of a perching bird which lost its power of flight, was once common all over the country. Kiore wiped it out on the New Zealand mainland and on other offshore islands. It hung on on Stephens Island until 1894, when the Government built a lighthouse there and installed a lighthouse keeper. The keeper brought a cat, and almost every day the cat brought a wren to the keeper’s door. In little more than a year the entire species was exterminated by this one cat. Other birds, such as the emblematically distinctive huia and the laughing owl, followed soon after. And a much larger clutch – takahe, kakapo, kokako, stitchbird, black robin and others – became endangered and were brought back from the brink of extinction only via a large expenditure of ingenuity and public funds. The upokororo or grayling, the country’s most popular edible freshwater fish, also disappeared.
The largest sheep-runs in the country were established on the South Island golden tussock grasslands, which were often ploughed or burnt over and sowed with English grasses. In the North Island, forest had to be cleared and burnt and grass sown to make room and feed for sheep. In the country’s early years as a Crown colony, sheep were by far the most favoured animal for farming: wool was easily transported and exported; meat could not yet be refrigerated; and the grass intake of one cow would feed eight to ten sheep. By 1858 the country had 1.5 million of them, at a time when the human population was just over 115,000. The sheep population had risen to 13.1 million by 1878, whereas over the same period cattle numbers were up from a mere 1400 to 5800.
As far as mineral resources were concerned, every region of New Zealand hoped to find gold and coal, the one seen as the basis for genuine prosperity, the other as an essential fuel that would reduce the wasteful burning of wood. It was in an effort to discover both minerals that the Austrian geologist Hochstetter had been enticed away from his Austrian imperial scientific expedition on board the naval frigate Novara in 1858–59. He wrote a favourable report on the Huntly coalfields, which would be mined systematically from the 1860s, and the books he wrote on wider New Zealand geology laid the foundation for serious study of the subject. Gold had been found near the township of Coromandel as early as 1852, but it was not discovered in easily accessible form and quantity until the strikes that opened up the Otago goldfields in 1861, and subsequently those on the West Coast in the mid-1860s and in the Hauraki district towards the end of the decade.
At the same time as the land and its resources were beginning to be explored and exploited by the new colonists, so was the country’s system of government. In the Crown colony period, 1841–53, New Zealand was governed by three successive Governors – Hobson, FitzRoy and Grey – and their Executive Councils. As noted previously, the councils were made up of the Governor himself, the Colonial Secretary, the Attorney-General and the Colonial Treasurer, in that order of seniority. In addition there was a wider Legislative Council consisting of the Executive Council members plus three justices of the peace appointed by the Governor.
This constitutional arrangement was unpopular with European colonists, especially those in the New Zealand Company settlements of Wellington and Nelson, who were dissatisfied with many of the Governors’ and Executive Council decisions, particularly those involving relations with Maori, and who sought popular representation in government and ultimately self-government. In an effort to appease this demand, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Earl Grey, despatched an extraordinarily complex constitution for George Grey (no relation) to introduce in 1846. The country was to be divided into two provinces: New Ulster (the North Island north of the Patea River) and New Munster (everywhere south of this line, including Wellington and the whole of the South Island). No explanation was given as to why the names of Irish provinces were being applied to a country on the other side of the world, though the north and south dispositions of the regions coincided. Each province was to have a Lieutenant-Governor, an appointed Legislative Council, and a House of Representatives elected by mayors, aldermen and councils of the province’s townships. A General Assembly for the colony as a whole was to consist of the Governor-in-Chief (in the first instance Grey), a Legislative Council appointed by the Governor-in-Chief, and a House of Representatives elected by the provincial Houses of Representatives.
Grey assumed the new office of Governor-in-Chief on 1 January 1848, shortly after he had been knighted. But he declined to enact the new constitution in full on the ground that it would ‘give to a minority made up of one race power over a majority made up of another’. He believed – and he told the British Government – that Maori would not agree to such an injustice. And, of course, there had been no suggestion of Maori representation at any of the new layers of government and administration. As a consequence of Grey’s reservations, the Secretary of State was persuaded to suspend for five years those parts of the new constitution which allowed for election to provincial and general assemblies. Grey meanwhile would govern on ‘as a despot’, in Keith Sinclair’s words, with appointed councils only for each province and no elected or part-elected national parliament. This decision drew rancorous comment from the settlers who, already less than satisfied with the modest degree of self-government offered, then had to endure it being whipped away from them.
For all the criticism levelled at Grey at this time and subsequently, the term of his first governorship was highly successful and represents the zenith of his long career in public life in New Zealand – which was to include being Governor twice and then Premier in the late 1870s, making him one of only two New Zealanders to hold both offices.[1] Was he, though, as his admirers submitted, ‘Good Governor Grey’? Or was he a patronising and racist autocrat, as others have claimed?
George Grey became Governor of New Zealand for the first time in 1845 at the age of 33. He had already enjoyed an extraordinary career for one so young. Brought up by his mother – his father had died in the Napoleonic Wars eight days before Ge
orge was born – he had run away from his English boarding school but studied with distinction at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He served in the British Army in Ireland for six years and was shocked by the poverty and the powerlessness of the Irish people. One conclusion he drew from that experience was that new lands should be opened up to allow opportunities for the poor of the Old World to better themselves.
From 1837 to 1839 Grey led two expeditions of exploration in Western Australia, neither of which discovered any places or resources of significance. They were, however, adventurous. On the first he was speared by an Aborigine, whom he shot; on the second he was shipwrecked. In 1839, still in Western Australia, he was appointed resident magistrate at King George Sound and that same year married Eliza Spencer, daughter of his predecessor there. Grey’s contact with Aborigines gave him a lifelong interest in indigenous cultures and a paper he wrote for the Secretary of State for the Colonies on racial amalgamation was partly responsible for his being appointed Governor of South Australia in 1840, when he was still in his 20s. He was sufficiently successful in this role to earn his first term in New Zealand, where the initial challenge was to bring to an end the war in the north which had ignited during the term of his ineffectual predecessor, Robert FitzRoy.