THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SITUATION OF HAURAKI MAORI AFTER COLONISATION

1.4 The New Zealand state, from the governorships of George Grey and Thomas Gore Browne in the mid-19th century to the prime ministerships of Richard Seddon and William Massey in the early 2oth century, was active in the promotion of colonisation in New Zealand as a whole and in the Hauraki region. If there is one theme that links these otherwise disparate regimes, it is a determination to transfer the control of economic resources, especially land and land-based resources, from Maori to Pakeha, and to do so by legal and (in their view) morally justifiable means. In this report considerable attention will be paid to the role of the state, not in order to praise or to condemn those who managed it, but to enable a judgement to be made as to the wisdom, propriety and adequacy of the actions they took to deal with what they themselves recognised as the damaging consequences of their policies.

1.5 While this period is long enough for the major consequences of colonisation to become evident, it is also brief enough to indicate something of its concentrated impact. Maori born in the 184os would have been—if lucky enough—still alive in the early zoth century. A single lifetime would have encompassed a series of major transformations—a brief time of prosperous commerce with the young colonial capital, a time of war and blockade, the felling of the great forests, the gold rushes and the establishment of the gold industry, the decline of the Maori and the increase of the settler population, a series of major local outbreaks of disease accentuating a situation of persistent ill-health, the loss of all but a small proportion of the land, and a general condition of economic decline and social dislocation. It is important that both the pace and the extent of change be kept in mind; together they constitute a complete revolution, political, social and economic, affecting the whole of life.

1.6 To indicate the nature of this revolution, and to examine the role of government both in helping to bring it about and in dealing (or not dealing) with its human consequences, a brief background sketch is necessary. Two topics will be considered in the remainder of this section. First, the pattern of change over the period will be summarised; and second, its general character will be discussed in an effort to identify the role of the state in shaping events.

Overview

1.7 The European penetration of Hauraki began before 1840, with the arrival of a handful of missionaries and traders. Their number cannot have exceeded a few hundreds; the 1841 settler population of the Hauraki/Tamaki area has been estimated at about moo (Stone, The Economic Impoverishment of Hauraki Maori, p. 1). A modest quantity of land passed from Maori to Pakeha hands through land deals before 1840; the largest were the Fairburn purchase on the mainland and the Whitaker and Dumoulin purchase on Great Barrier Island. These deals were later investigated by government and in most cases settlers were confirmed in their claims, often with a reduction of the area

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