Paul Monin: This is my place: Hauraki contested 1769-1875

By JACK LEIGH

Four war canoes with fearsome crews raced in the Auckland anniversary regatta of 1863, making "a sight but rarely witnessed", according to an onlooker. Yet there was more foreboding than festivity in the scene. With real war looming in the Waikato, the number of waka taking part was fewer than in other years. And the presence of the modern steam frigate HMS Miranda, though ostensibly harmless, cast a symbolic shadow.

Land confiscations would follow the coming conflict, and the Hauraki tribes would speed down a path of decline. Their economic rise and fall is the subject of this study. It charts racial interaction, from Captain Cook's arrival in 1769 to 1875, when an insidious debt burden to the Crown finally cost them control of land for gold prospecting.

It is a poignant story exemplified in the book's title-quote from the Ngati-tamatera chief Te Hira, in defence of the Ohinemuri block: "This is my place ... It is only a little piece. Let it remain to me."

Retaining only about 1 per cent of their original domain, the Hauraki people have now become virtually landless and forgotten - their past erased from memory and the landscape alike, writes historian Paul Monin, whose work gains stimulus from the growing body of research for Waitangi Tribunal claims, to which he has contributed.

He rejects any suggestion of "fatal impact" and the unremitting destruction of an indigenous people, the evidence being rather of willing contact between two "fully fledged, resilient societies".

"European contact was not foisted upon Hauraki Maori nor did they strenuously resist it," he writes. They often welcomed it for material gain, advantage over tribal rivals and participation in a wider world, remaining independent and powerful in their own right until colonisation built up irresistibly.

Maori timber and flour exports went to the Californian goldfields and when that market failed they supplied the goldmining communities of Australia - an outlet that collapsed in 1856, weakening the ability to cope with later setbacks at home from land losses and changes in the patterns of commerce.

On the Waitemata, canoe traffic was such that in the peak year of 1853 there were 1812 arrivals bringing produce worth many thousands of pounds, mainly from the Hauraki tribes who fed Auckland from the beginning. The fleets came under sail or paddle, "precariously burdened with pigs, potatoes, maize, wheat, melons, pumpkins, cabbages, peaches and fish; they departed riding high, carrying diverse European merchandise".

Comparable quantities of produce came by Maori-owned schooner. Wheat and potatoes for Melbourne were transferred to ocean-going ships in Auckland.

Two canoe-borne invasions of the Auckland isthmus come within the book's purview. The first is the Ngapuhi onslaught in 1821 on a Ngati-paoa "city", which had sprung up with a population of 4000 in the shadow of Mt Wellington.

It consisted of a pa called Mokoia at the Panmure Basin entrance, and the settlement of Mauinaina with huge cultivations nearer the mountain. Two thousand raiders, half with guns, had come from Whangarei in some 50 canoes. About 2000 defenders escaped, the rest were killed or captured. Never in Hauraki history had two such armies battled each other.

The second event was the 1851 effort, by about 300 men in six war canoes and 25 smaller craft, to get hold of a Maori constable who had inflicted a serious indignity on a Ngati-paoa chief in a street fracas. They assembled at Blackpool, Waiheke, then headed for Auckland in full martial array, causing panic among the inhabitants. On being met by the frigate HMS Fly on one hand and "redcoats with glistening white cross belts" on the other, the expedition decided to accept Governor Grey's advice and return home.

The book gives many vignettes and provides thought-provoking insights into Maori beliefs - in distinctions between gifts and trade commodities, for example, or forms of land occupancy.

It is a work of scholarship, densely sourced, which will no doubt be added to those sources in future debate, since the author resists sweeping conclusions and insists history must be "dynamic and ongoing".

The cross-cultural enigma must have been as troubling to the Maori as to the European. A Ngati-tamatera chief, Te Moananui, commented wistfully in 1866: "We suppose that our knowledge surpasses that of the toroa [the albatross, meaning the European race] but the knowledge of the albatross shoots on before us ... You and I do not know where the albatross was born or its christening-place ... We are left solitary."* Jack Leigh is an Auckland journalist.

Bridget Williams Books

$49.95