by Michael King
Having accomplished this, though with some doubt over the question of who ‘won’, Grey set about the administration of wider Maori matters with considerable skill and a strong sense of justice. He went to some lengths to ensure that the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi were observed by the Crown and he constantly assured Maori that their land rights would be respected. With his Chief Land Purchase Commissioner Donald McLean, Grey evolved a system of hui for the discussion of land sales to the Crown – a procedure that recognised the communal nature of tribal ownership and gave all interested parties in the negotiations an opportunity to participate.[2] Land bought in this manner was then on-sold to settlers at a profit to the Crown, the major method by which Grey generated government revenue. In this period some 30 million acres of land was acquired from South Island Maori, in circumstances which would be challenged by Ngai Tahu in subsequent years, and three million in the North Island.
Grey also appointed resident magistrates in Maori areas to apply the law of the land with the help of Maori assessors. He subsidised mission schools and some Maori agricultural schemes (with money to construct flour mills, for example) and built several hospitals specifically for Maori patients. And he learned the Maori language and persuaded Maori authorities to commit their legends and traditions to writing, some of which he subsequently published (for example, Ko nga moteatea me nga hakirara o nga Maori in 1853, and Ko nga mahinga a nga tupuna Maori in 1854). His collected papers, which eventually found their way to the Auckland Public Library, would turn out to be the largest single repository of Maori-language manuscripts in the world. Grey’s understanding of Maori custom in the course of his first governorship enabled him to achieve successes that would have eluded other governors or politicians. William Pember Reeves tells of an occasion when a chief refused to allow the building of a road through his territory; Grey’s response was to send the gift of a carriage to the chief’s sister, after which, because of the law of utu or reciprocity, authorisation was forthcoming.
But he was no Apollonian hero or plaster saint. He had faults. One was his tendency to exaggerate the beneficial effects of his policies in his communications with London. Another was the inclination to blame problems on others, especially his predecessors. Grey had an autocratic temperament. And when, despite his own infidelities, he suspected his wife of forming an attachment with another man, he refused to speak to her for 36 years. On the whole, however, his first term as Governor of New Zealand was well executed. The high point may well have been the acceptance by the British Government in 1852 of his new draft constitution for New Zealand, which came into effect the following year, just after he had left the country.
This new blueprint for governance provided for elected provincial councils, each presided over by a superintendent, for Auckland, Taranaki, Wellington, Nelson, Canterbury and Otago. Later legislation allowed Hawke’s Bay to separate from Wellington (1858), Marlborough from Nelson (1859), Southland from Otago (1861), and Westland from Canterbury (1873). Over and above the provincial governments there was to be a bicameral Parliament consisting of an elected House of Representatives of 24 to 42 members, and an appointed Legislative Council of not fewer than ten. National legislation, having passed the two Houses, would be signed off by an Executive Council consisting of the Governor and – eventually – a ministry chosen by the House of Representatives. The leading minister would in due course be known as the Premier, and later, from 1902, as Prime Minister.
To be eligible to elect members to both the provincial councils and the House of Representatives, voters had to be male owners of property valued at £50 a year or leasehold valued at £10. Elections for the House of Representatives were initially to be held every five years, and the House would initially have 37 members elected by 5849 voters, around 100 of them Maori.[3] The Governor would for the immediate future retain responsibility for native affairs, and foreign policy would be controlled by the Government of Great Britain.
This constitution in effect brought ‘The Crown’ to New Zealand and laid the foundation for the manner in which the country was to be governed for the next 150 years. There would be changes: the franchise would be extended to all Maori men in 1867 and to all women in 1893. The ballot would be secret after 1870. The property qualification would be abolished in 1879 and plural voting in 1889; there would be variations in the number of seats in the House of Representatives, and in the frequency of elections (standardised at triennial after 1879); and the Legislative Council would be abolished in 1950. But the House of Representatives would persist, and those able to command majority support in it would select ministries and govern the country; and the elected leader of those majorities would be the Premier and later Prime Minister. The powers of the Governor, and after 1917 Governor-General, would be steadily reduced until, by the latter part of the twentieth century, they could and would act solely on the advice of their ministers. They would continue to chair the cabinet on the occasions when it acted as the Executive Council to sign parliamentary Acts into law.
At the very outset, the provincial councils proved more able than the national House of Representatives at finding workable coalitions of interests and personalities. But both systems became locked into a battle for supremacy that would last for 20 years. One reason affairs were initially so chaotic in the House of Representatives was that the membership was a mixture of strong personalities and varied regional interests. Another was that most of the personalities involved had had little experience of acting politically for the common good. A third was the considerable anger that the members would at first have no representation on the Executive Council, the body that would make governmental and legislative decisions for the colony as a whole. At the very first meeting of the House in May 1854, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who had arrived in New Zealand for the first time a little over a year earlier and been elected MP for the Hutt,[4] moved that the House of Representatives be given responsible as well as representative government immediately – that is, control over appointments to and the decisions of the Executive Council. It was passed by 29 votes to one.
The country’s Administrator, Robert Wynyard, filling in between Grey’s departure and the arrival of the new Governor, Thomas Gore Browne, put three members of the House ‘unofficially’ on the Executive Council: James Edward Fitzgerald, the Canterbury Provincial Superintendent, and Henry Sewell and Frederick Weld, both future Premiers. After seven weeks, when it had become apparent that these first three ‘ministers’ had no powers, they resigned. When Gore Browne arrived in 1855, however, he announced that he was authorised to introduce responsible government and a new election for the House of Representatives was held before the end of the year. This produced the country’s first ‘responsible ministry’ and first ‘Premier’, Henry Sewell, appointed by the Governor with the support of the House in April 1856 (the term Premier was not used officially until the beginning of the Frederick Weld ministry in 1864).
The first ministry was short-lived. Sewell, a non-practising lawyer and an official of the Canterbury Association, announced that he planned to strengthen central government at the expense of the provinces. This provoked strong opposition from and around fellow lawyer and New Zealand Company official William Fox, leader in the House of what came to be called the ‘Wellington party’, which favoured the provinces. Fox then became the country’s second ‘Premier’ but his ministry lasted less than a fortnight. He was outmanoeuvred by the ‘centralist faction’ which had grouped around Edward Stafford, the immensely able Superintendent of Nelson. Stafford’s ministry took office in May 1856 and retained power for five years. Fox’s light was far from eclipsed, however, and he would return to office as Premier three more times in the next 17 years.
Edward Stafford, who must be given considerable credit for ‘bedding in’ responsible government and demonstrating that it could work in New Zealand despite a wide variety of competing interests and personalities, was a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry and had arrived in Nelson in 1843 to bec
ome a runholder. Success in farming combined with the education he had received at Trinity College, Dublin made him confident about assuming a leadership role in the Nelson settlment. He helped found the Constitutional Association there, and in 1850 he wrote a ‘memorial’ sent to the British Government demanding full suffrage and responsible government for the colony. He cemented his role in the establishment by marrying Emily Wakefield, daughter of Edward Gibbon’s brother William, though she died young in 1857 and he remarried.
Stafford had become first Superintendent of Nelson in 1853 and some of his measures there – the free, secular and compulsory education system and County Roads Act, for example – became models for eventual countrywide legislation. Those who knew Stafford well and had watched the assured way he dealt with Nelson provincial business were convinced that he was the ‘coming man’ for the whole colony, and he effortlessly became member of the House of Representatives for Nelson in 1855. According to his biographer, Edmund Bohan, Stafford was in his element when confronted by the first parliamentary era, ‘with its confusion of personalities, interests and shifting cabals . . . His wide knowledge of constitutional history and contemporary government gave him an unmatched awareness of how the new … system ought to develop, and of the need to pass a body of specifically New Zealand law … From the start [his] ministers met privately as a working cabinet without the governor, so reducing the Executive Council to a more formal role.’
Stafford was distrustful, however, of the fact that Maori affairs remained in the Governor’s hands, and of Gore Browne’s over-reliance on the advice of his land purchasing officer, Donald McLean. Stafford was out of the country when the Crown’s invalid purchase of land at Waitara was made and returned to find that his parliamentary colleagues were prepared to go to war if necessary to defend the arrangements, which had been made with the wrong chief. In 1861 William Fox and his Wellington-based alliance used conflict that developed in Taranaki to defeat the Government in the House by 24 votes to 23. While Stafford lost on that occasion, he was to witness new ministries coming and going annually – led by Fox, Robert Browning’s writer friend Alfred Domett, Frederick Whitaker and Frederick Weld – until he regained the premiership for another four years from 1865 to 1869, and again in 1872.
Meanwhile, the 1860s would be dominated by the second round of the New Zealand Wars (see Chapter 15), and by the effects of the long-awaited discoveries of gold in both islands. Every province in the country was keen to find ample deposits of ‘payable’ gold within its own boundaries after hearing of the effects of such bonanzas in Siberia, California and Victoria, Australia, in the 1850s. Gold was seen as the magic ingredient that would attract immigrants, transform sluggish economies and deliver instant prosperity to all and great riches to some. To make this outcome more likely, most of the provinces offered rewards as an incentive to attract experienced prospectors and painstaking investigations.
Scientists such as Hochstetter had already reported that geological and mineral configurations were favourable for the presence of gold in some parts of the country – in particular, the Coromandel Peninsula, land either side of Nelson, the West Coast and Otago. Visiting whalers had found traces of gold on the Coromandel in 1842. Ten years later a timber merchant named Charles Ring noticed gold-bearing quartz embedded in a log which he had tumbled down a riverbed behind Coromandel Harbour. Subsequent prospecting turned up further deposits, and the country’s first gold rush was under way around Coromandel township, and at Cape Colville and Mercury Bay. It was short-lived, however. Little of the Coromandel gold was in the river silt; most of it was locked up in veins of quartz, from which it was difficult and expensive to extract. Consequently the ‘rush’ lasted less than a year and the prospectors turned their attentions elsewhere.
Modest quantities of gold were found at Collingwood and Aorere near Nelson in 1857. But the real bonanza turned out to be in Otago. Gold was discovered there in the bed of the Mataura River in 1860, and at Lindis in 1861. The ‘rush’, however, was sparked by Gabriel Read’s strike in the Tuapeka district in May 1861, where he found alluvial gold ‘shining like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night’. Within months the word was out, and thousands of would-be gold miners flocked to the valley still known as Gabriels Gully. Other discoveries followed at Waitahuna and further afield in Central Otago, where towns sprang up literally overnight. Read, a Tasmanian who had worked previously on the Californian and Victorian goldfields, eventually won the provincial prize of £500 for his contribution to the rush of people and prosperity that followed his find.
The Otago goldfields were the most spectacularly productive. But other discoveries occurred throughout the decade: on the West Coast, which had a mixture of alluvial and quartz deposits, from the mid-1860s (and the coast then became the wildest frontier in the country as merchants, publicans and brothel-keepers converged to share the profits), and back on the Coromandel, this time around Thames and further afield, from 1868. By 1871 there were 693 stamper batteries crushing quartz around Thames alone, and the settlement shook day and night as if from continuous earthquakes – except on Sundays when, it was reported, people were unable to rest because of the unfamiliar silence. The bonanzas came to an end in the 1870s, but dredging and sluicing kept the industry going in a modest way in Otago and on the West Coast. The Martha Mine in Waihi produced four billion dollars’ worth of gold between 1879 and 1952, and reopened in 1988.
Thanks to a decade of unprecedented prosperity and immigration, the population of Dunedin exploded: from 1700 people in 1858 to 18,500 by 1874. It had by then displaced Auckland as the country’s largest city. The full tallies in 1874, for cities and their suburbs, were: Dunedin 29,832, Auckland 27,840, Wellington 15,941 and Christchurch 14,270. Wellington had been boosted by the transfer of the capital there in 1865, a move which coincided with and contributed to a serious economic recession in Auckland. That was eventually relieved by the influx of wealth from the Thames goldfield, which by 1874 had a population of 8000.
Dunedin’s new commercial pre-eminence was reflected in the number of mercantile companies and banks newly established there, and by a building boom on a monumental scale, which included the construction of the country’s first university, founded by Robert Burns’s nephew Thomas Burns in 1869.[5] Many manufacturing, distribution and retail companies that later went national – Hallenstein Bros, DIC, Sargood, Son & Ewen – established their New Zealand bases in Dunedin. The city also developed a tradition of considerable private endowment of education and the arts, particularly through the gifts of members of the extended Hallenstein family. The latter were descended from or connected by marriage to Bendix Hallenstein, a German-born Jew who established highly successful stores on the Central Otago goldfields before moving to Dunedin.
Nationally, thanks also largely to the gold rushes, the non-Maori population almost doubled in the years 1861–64, from 98,000 to 171,000, and had increased by another two-thirds again by 1874 (255,000). The goldfields also attracted immigrants from countries not previously represented in the New Zealand population. The 1874 census, for example, reveals that 6.06 per cent of the population of Westland and 4.19 per cent of that of Otago were Chinese. By contrast, no Chinese were living at this time in other parts of the country. The Irish presence too had increased considerably, up to 18.95 per cent in Westland, many of whom were diggers who had followed the gold trail from California to Victoria and on to New Zealand. Their presence resulted in Irish issues being debated on the West Coast, and in the arrest and expulsion of some who supported the Fenian cause of Irish independence. It also resulted in a demand for Irish priests and bishops to serve the country’s Catholic population, and in an eventual change in the character of the church in New Zealand from a French institution to a largely Irish one.
By the close of the 1860s, the country’s earnings from gold were twice those derived from wool, which had been the largest export until that time. If this was all good news for the nation’s future economic prosperity
– and it was, even though the impact of gold would diminish steadily through the 1870s – it was undercut only by the expense and anxiety generated by the New Zealand Wars in the North Island over the same period.
[1] The other, a century later, was Keith Holyoake.
[2] There is some evidence that McLean, another controversial figure in New Zealand history, also made secret deals with some Maori chiefs. It is not clear whether this would have been done with Grey’s approval. McLean would move even closer to the forefront of New Zealand public life as Minister of Native Affairs in a succession of ministries from 1869 to 1876.
[3] By contrast, the country would have 2.6 million voters in 2003, 196,000 of them on the Maori roll.
[4] In the same election, Wakefield’s volatile son, Edward Jerningham Wakefield, was elected member for the Christchurch country seat. Neither member of this illustrious family had a successful parliamentary career, though Edward Jerningham, by then visibly the worse for excessive use of alcohol, was elected for another term in another Christchurch seat from 1871 to 1875.
[5] Other universities opened in Christchurch (Canterbury) in 1873, Auckland in 1883, and Wellington (Victoria) in 1899; Massey (Palmerston North) followed in 1964, Waikato (in Hamilton) in 1965, and Lincoln in 1990.
Chapter 15
A Time of Turbulence
Despite the skirmishes around Wellington and Wanganui and the Northern War in the 1840s – in all of which Maori had fought on both sides – the two decades following the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi were characterised nationally more by co-operation between Maori and Pakeha than by conflict. As James Belich has noted, a periphery of European settlements on the coast of the North Island became economically interdependent with the Maori hinterland. The two spheres interacted without either side being dominant and Maori were in complete control of their own tribal territories. Most Europeans, however, regarded this state of affairs as temporary. They took it for granted that the Maori population would continue to decrease while that of European settlers increased; and that Maori land would progressively become available to Europeans for agricultural development.