by Michael King
You have learned that the law has a long arm, and that it can reach you, however far back into the recesses of the forest you may travel, and that in every corner of the great Empire to which we belong the King’s law can reach anyone who offends against him. That is the lesson your people should learn from this trial.
That was also the lesson Pakeha felt Maori should take from the outcome of the New Zealand Wars. But had that outcome been so decisive? Large sections of the inland North Island were still, in the 1870s and 1880s, in effect under Maori control. Few Pakeha were prepared to risk entering the King Country until King Tawhiao emerged from exile there in 1881 and formally laid down his arms and those of his followers. Fewer still felt welcome in the Urewera at that time.
For Maori adversely affected by the wars and subsequent land confiscations – principally in Waikato, Taranaki and parts of the Bay of Plenty – life would be considerably more difficult physically because of the loss of economic resources which had previously allowed them to feed themselves and to trade with Pakeha and in some instances with the wider world.[1] These peoples also experienced the demoralisation that came with what was viewed as a loss of mana. Tuhoe too in the Urewera had been adversely affected by the Te Kooti campaign. Their support for the prophet and adherence to Ringatu had been punished by the scorched-earth policy adopted by the colonial troops and kupapa pursuing him. In some instances, what could have been seeds of despair eventually became seeds of hope for the future: Tainui tribes, for example, continued to regard the Kingitanga as a shelter for the mana of all their peoples, and loyalty to it gave them a cohesion and a coherence that would sometimes be the envy of other tribes; and Tuhoe eventually found the same benefits from their continuing loyalty to the Hahi Ringatu. Taranaki people had tried to find grounds for renewal in the Parihaka movement, but this had been weakened by the imprisonment of its leaders and, though it enjoyed a resurgence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the movement barely survived the deaths of Te Whiti and Tohu in 1907.
Kupapa Maori – most of Te Arawa, Ngati Porou, Ngati Kahungunu and some Whanganui tribes – mostly prospered in the wake of the wars. Their lands and resources were intact, they received favourable government attentions, including ceremonial swords for their leaders, monuments for their dead, and consultation on some matters of public policy. They were also buoyed by the fact that their mana had been enhanced rather than diminished by the wars.
But all North Island Maori – kupapa, rebels and those like Ngapuhi who had avoided military engagements in the 1860s – were subject to the ravages of disease. And this curse, the effect of pathogens to which Maori still had insufficient immunity, took a higher toll on the Maori population in the second half of the nineteenth century than it had in the first. Epidemics of influenza, measles and whooping cough were reported frequently throughout this period as the rate of European immigration increased. There were also outbreaks of dysentery of massive proportions. The fertility rate declined as women suffered from general ill-health and from the effects of syphilis, gonorrhoea and tuberculosis. Communities, especially those already demoralised by the effects of the wars, which had led to poor nutrition and grossly substandard accommodation in the areas subject to confiscation, visibly shrank.
Nationally, the Maori population dropped from 56,049 in 1857–58 to 42,113 in 1896. As such figures became known they contributed to a widespread belief – among Pakeha and Maori – that Maori as a people and as a culture were headed for extinction. Wellington Provincial Superintendent Dr Isaac Featherston echoed liberal European sentiment in the late nineteenth century when he spoke of the responsibility to ‘smooth the pillow of a dying race’. John Logan Campbell, who had briefly been Superintendent of Auckland Province and was later the city’s mayor, made arrangements in his will for an obelisk monument to Maori to stand on the summit of One Tree Hill. These were not derogatory gestures. They were expressions of respect and regret on the part of Pakeha who admired Maori.
[1] Although it has to be said that the market for Maori crops in Australia had collapsed by the late 1850s, as Australian primary producers caught up with local demand – just as Pakeha producers eventually did in New Zealand. So, even without the effects of the New Zealand Wars, Maori farmers and horticulturists were likely to have been forced to fall back on subsistence farming.
Chapter 16
A Functioning Nation?
While the wars of the 1860s had been initially a drain on the finite resources of the fledgling colony, some prominent New Zealanders profited handsomely from the outcome. The most notable of these was Thomas Russell, an Auckland lawyer and businessman who was Minister of Defence in two ministries between 1862 and 1864 and law partner of Frederick Whitaker, who led one of them.[1] Russell, who was in his early 30s when he held the portfolio, has been described by business historian Russell Stone as ‘arguably the outstanding commercial figure in nineteenth century New Zealand’.
A ‘tall, dark, energetic, intelligent and masterful’ man, Russell accumulated a considerable fortune in his 20s through both his law practice and his speculative business activities. Among the latter was his close involvement in the foundation of the New Zealand Insurance Company in 1859, of the Bank of New Zealand, which took over much government business, in 1861, and, a little later, the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Company. As Minister of Defence, Russell eagerly prosecuted the Waikato War in order to put Maori in what he regarded as their place, and to open up the Waikato itself to property investment and settlement. In these aims he and his ministerial colleagues fell out with Grey, who believed, correctly, that the post-war confiscation policy was being applied to the most desirable land without any consideration as to which tribes had fought or not fought against the Crown.
Russell profited spectacularly from the war’s aftermath when he was out of politics, particularly by persuading the Government in 1873 to sell the enormous Piako swamp to a syndicate of which he was the leading member. This and a number of lucrative government commissions led the Canterbury politician William Rolleston to ask whether Russell ‘is not the representative of the Colonial Government, but the Colonial Government … the representative of Mr Thomas Russell’. Russell overreached himself in a complex network of investments, however; he was lucky not to lose everything he owned and came close to being indicted for fraud. His fortunes were restored by the Waihi Goldmining Company, which went into operation at the time a new cyanide process became available for extracting gold from quartz and brought him considerable profit.
Russell and his partner Whitaker, and their friend and colleague Josiah Clifton Firth, were not untypical of a certain kind of businessman in the colonial era who was prepared to take enormous business and investment risks and dabble in politics to help create the kind of environment in which they and their cronies were most likely to flourish financially. And, in the years preceding income tax and tighter commercial regulations, there were huge fortunes to be made.[2] The involvement of such figures in national life was inevitable, given the poor remuneration available for Members of Parliament. Even though politics involved about three working months of the year, it was only men of private means who could afford that involvement. Not until 1879 did a working man, Samuel Andrews, a plasterer from Christchurch, win election to the House, and the rates of pay were not raised to an adequate level until 1893.
The Auckland ‘society paper’ the Observer expressed the ideal that drove colonists such as Russell and Firth:
Here – where the social disabilities, the exclusive caste, the overstrained competition, and the stereotyped conventionalism of the Old World have not yet taken root – there is a clear field for men of talent, skill and energy to climb the social ladder, and to attain to a degree of wealth and social elevation that is possible only to the favoured few in older countries.
What could be gained spectacularly – money or reputation – could also be lost just as spectacularly. William Larnach entered Parliament a decade later tha
n Russell and Firth, representing a Dunedin electorate. Like his predecessors, he took enormous risks that sometimes left him, as he put it, close to ‘the edge of the ruinous cliff’. He too narrowly escaped prosecution for some of his less than ethical strategies. When his fortunes were at their height in the early 1870s he built the baronial mansion known as ‘Larnach’s Castle’ on the Otago Peninsula. At various times he was Colonial Treasurer, Minister of Public Works and of Mines. When his luck abandoned him in a bank collapse in the 1890s and it was widely believed that his third wife was having an affair with one of his sons, her stepson, Larnach became the first and so far only MP to commit suicide in his parliamentary office.
The dominant politician of the era after the New Zealand Wars, however, and the one responsible for launching the country on its most spectacular development phase, was Julius Vogel, who was Premier twice and Colonial Treasurer in six other ministries between 1869 and 1887. Vogel was a non-observant Jew born in London, who came to New Zealand via Australia in 1861 to work as a journalist. That same year he co-founded the Otago Daily Times, the first daily newspaper in the country and eventually the longest-surviving. His considerable appetite for politics and public affairs, which he initially gratified by promulgating his views and panaceas in the papers for which he wrote, led him eventually to seats on the Otago Provincial Council and, by 1866, the national Parliament, which he entered with a strong bias in favour of the provincial system and a plan to separate the South Island administratively and financially from the North.
He eventually modified these views as a result of experience in the House of Representatives, however, and, while not an inspirational speaker, he proved to be a shrewd prober of the Stafford Government’s weaknesses, particularly its policies towards Maori. When the Opposition toppled the Government in 1869 and William Fox returned for the third of his four premierships, Vogel became Treasurer. In the view of his biographer, Raewyn Dalziel, he made the portfolio ‘the most powerful post in government … He came into office at a time of economic stagnation [and] adopted a bold expansionist policy with plans to bring thousands of assisted immigrants to New Zealand, to construct roads, railways, bridges and telegraph lines, and to purchase [more] Maori land for European settlement.’
The plan was adopted by Parliament in 1870 and implemented over the following decade. It involved borrowing around £20 million on the London capital market to finance assisted immigration, and to build 1800 km of railway, 4000 km of telegraph lines, and roads and public buildings. It was also popular throughout the country, though the Government was defeated in September 1872, before the beneficial effects were apparent. A month later Vogel was back in office in the Waterhouse ministry, however, and the economy underwent a boom, with full employment and rising incomes up to 1874. Growth slowed in the two succeeding years as export prices fell. Vogel remained in office as Treasurer until 1876, being Premier as well from 1873 to 1875, and again for seven months in 1876, by which time he had been knighted.
Under the Vogel scheme of whole or partially paid assistance, immigrants flooded into the country: around 100,000 between 1871 and 1880. Over half came from England, about a quarter from Ireland, and slightly fewer than that from Scotland. Just under 10 per cent were from Continental Europe, largely Germans (of whom there were more than 4500 by 1878, building on a smaller population that had gone to Nelson in the 1840s), Scandinavians and Poles. Of the 3294 Scandinavians, 1938 were Danes, 667 Swedes and 689 Norwegians. They settled mainly in the Seventy Mile Bush area on the Wellington–Hawke’s Bay boundary and left placenames such as Dannevirke and Norsewood; the town of Eketahuna was once called Mellemskov. Another group settled in the Manawatu.
One major object of this immigration programme was to restore a greater balance in the sex ratio of the New Zealand population. In 1871 New Zealand had 89,000 men and 46,000 women over the age of 20 (66 to 34 per cent). This inequality meant that many thousands of men had no prospect of experiencing the settled existence of married family life, even if they wanted to. Many of these single men were absorbed into shearing or back-country farm work, or into milling timber, mining or public works, where they lived in camps and had little or no contact with the opposite sex.
A rich male culture grew up around the lives of such men. In the Coromandel forest, for example, gangs employed by such merchants as the Kauri Timber Company would go into virgin bush to build large shanties in the valleys in which they planned to work. These buildings with split-paling walls and nikau-thatched roofs would become their home for several years. They had bunks around the interior walls, a long table in the centre over an earth floor, and a kitchen and wide fireplace with a wooden or corrugated-iron chimney down one end.
The men worked up on the slopes felling trees and moving trunks by day, and ate, slept and took their days off in the shanties. In the evenings they read by lamplight and candles, played cards, told yarns and sang. Because it invariably led to trouble, liquor was forbidden in most camps – as was spitting, talking about sex and playing cards for money. Alcohol was sought in bush grog shops, and in the towns between contracts or on rare holidays. When the loggers did get to town to spend their wages, like men from other isolated work sectors they spent it on liquor, gambling and prostitutes. Although individuals might be unpopular, there was a strong camaraderie and sense of honour among bushmen. They prided themselves on working extraordinarily hard and in not stealing from one another, and they looked after mates who were sick, injured or sacked. They laid down many of the unspoken conventions of New Zealand male culture in the twentieth and twenty-first century.
To redress the sex imbalance, the Vogel Government offered free passages to British single women. Most of those who came were attracted by the prospect of domestic work at a higher wage than that available at home, and by the prospect of eventual marriage and escape from drudgery (or, rather, escape to drudgery on behalf of one’s own family rather than somebody else’s). Many failed to achieve that escape. But by 1891 the adult sex ratio was considerably more even: 56 per cent male to 44 per cent female. By this time, 58 per cent of men over 20 were married and 77 per cent of women.
As a consequence of the immigration influx, the non-Maori population of New Zealand had soared to more than 470,000 by 1881. By that year too, the Maori population had dropped to 46,000, and it would continue to decline as a result of disease and low fertility for most of the next two decades. Immigration peaked in 1874, when there were 34,000 assisted migrants, a number that has never since been exceeded. In the mid-1880s, however, those who were New Zealand-born became the majority of the population, and from that time population growth would result more from natural increase than from immigration.
As an integral part of the Vogel programme, transport and communications in New Zealand were revolutionised in the 1870s and 1880s. A telegraph cable had been laid between the North and South Islands in 1866. Ten years later a further line connected New Zealand to Australia, and from there to the wider world. Extensions of road and rail, carried out as part of the public works programme, sped up travel within the country and helped wheat-growers get their grain to markets within the country and to ports for export. In 1874, over 28,000 hectares of the Canterbury Plains was given over to growing wheat. By 1884 that area had jumped to more than 100,000 hectares and oats and wheat made up almost 20 per cent of New Zealand’s exports. That proportion dropped as prices declined and frozen meat was developed, but there was another peak of demand and supply in the early 1900s.
The introduction of steamships over this period and their connection with rail links also sped up travel and mail within the country and to and from overseas destinations. In 1859, the fastest journey possible from Dunedin to Auckland took fifteen days. By 1879 that had been reduced to five and a half days, and by 1898, three days. Telephone networks too were established and spreading out from the urban centres from the early 1880s. All these innovations enabled the colony’s widely scattered settlements to communicate better with on
e another, and with the world beyond New Zealand. They were part of the process of creating a single society – or, at least, a single Pakeha society – and, because they allowed more effective centralised administration, they were a factor in the abandonment of provincial government in 1875.
The year after that constitutional milestone was achieved, Julius Vogel resigned from Parliament to take up the post of New Zealand Agent-General in London (he would return to the country and to Parliament in 1884, however). He hoped that the job would allow him to pursue personal business interests and thus to strengthen his own financial position. He was replaced as Premier by a man who could not have been more different in temperament and appearance, the austere, straight-talking farmer Harry Atkinson. Atkinson, part of a tight network of pioneer Taranaki families that included the Richmonds and Hursthouses, had fought in the wars of the 1860s and become a strong advocate of suffocating any Maori resistance to the authority of the Crown. According to his biographer, Judith Bassett, he thought that ‘the indigenous population should be utterly suppressed and eventually assimilated by the superior British. If this could be achieved by intimidation that would be preferable to fighting …’ There was no suggestion that the Treaty of Waitangi might have any bearing on this.
In national politics, which he had first entered in 1861, Atkinson was a centralist in opposition to the provincialists, and it was largely on this issue that he had joined forces with Vogel. He was relentlessly critical of the provincial councils’ ‘reckless borrowing and refusal to co-operate either with central government or with one another …’ After they were abolished in 1876, it was left to Atkinson and his ministry to oversee their replacement with a local government system of boroughs and counties. He intended, wrote Judith Bassett, that ‘central government would have sole responsibility for borrowing money, but that localities would decide how and where it should be spent. He hoped that the new system would result in an even application of the colony’s revenues to people’s needs.’ He was a far more cautious borrower than Vogel, believing that there must be no doubt about a government’s ultimate ability to service and pay back loans. As the country drifted into depression, he became even more cautious – not only about borrowing but about public expenditure in general.