The Meeting Place - A New Zealand History Blog

Tiritiri Matangi is a 543-acre island that is today a wildlife sanctuary. Located in the Hauraki Gulf, just a few kilometres from the Whangaparaoa Peninsula, the island is a popular destination for daytrippers taking the ferry from Auckland. Besides abundant wildlife (including kiwi, kokako and takahe), the island also boasts New Zealand’s oldest working lighthouse (constructed in 1864).  Tiritiri Matangi Lighthouse The island was also the focus of a baffling and quite extraordinary Native Land Court decision in 1866, when the Māori claimants found themselves ranged against the Crown, which claimed the island on the basis of an 1841 deed of purchase. Although the court quite rightly rejected this claim (since the deed made no reference to the island), it nevertheless awarded the island to the Crown. That was despite declaring that it was ‘unable to discover the origins of the Crown’s title, or by what means the native title has been extinguished’. It did so, ac...

Satirical analyses of New Zealand culture and society have often poked fun at the fondness of New Zealanders for forming and joining committees. As Austin Mitchell wrote in 1972, ‘[g]ive them a problem and they’ll set up a committee’. And although it is rarely mentioned in such contexts, Maori were early and fervent converts to this apparent national trait. Their problem was a big one: how to find a place for themselves in the colonial era following the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 that did not involve being entirely subsumed by this new order. At stake was the very survival of Maori society itself. Over the years I have written extensively on the history of Maori komiti (committees), and related runanga (tribal councils), exploring the legacy of efforts on the part of nineteenth-century Maori to establish new institutions of self-government in the colonial context. My first book Agents of Autonomy: Maori Committees in the Nineteenth Century , published by Huia i...

In 1840 the Ngati Ruapani people lay claim to an area of more than 250,000 acres around the shores of Lake Waikaremoana (much of it subject to overlapping or contested claims from other hapu and iwi). Today, with the exception of a few tiny reserves, they are a landless people. The process by which Ruapani lands were wrested from their ownership and control was a long and at times complex one. Yet one key theme dominates the history of land alienation in the region: the Crown’s acquisition of almost the entire land base of Waikaremoana Maori was achieved only through compulsion or coercion. Ngati Ruapani never willingly parted with any of their lands. Ownership of the lakebed of Waikaremoana itself was also bitterly contested between Maori and the Crown. Although the Crown lost that battle, it effectively won the war by ignoring Maori ownership of the lakebed for half a century, and then imposing a settlement that gave it perpetual access to the lake. But the battle for control of Lake...