THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SITUATION OF HAURAKI MAORI AFTER COLONISATION

Li' The Wars of the 186os were preceded by opposition to land sales and by widespread sympathy with the goals of the King movement. Nevertheless, for the most part, Hauraki Maori were either 'loyal' to the Crown or maintained a neutral stance during the years of fighting. Their wish to maintain a trade relationship with Auckland provided an incentive to at least neutrality Though they were in the main nonparticipants, they suffered from the war, by the cessation of trade with Auckland and through the confiscation of some of their lands. In its turn, confiscation put pressure upon the remaining lands of the tribes affected. As well as from the war and its consequences, in the 186os major pressures upon Maori resources came from a renewed determination to exploit gold-bearing land, from the increase in timber exploitation, and from a heightened demand for either the control or the outright acquisition of land.

1.12 At the beginning of the 186os the Auckland provincial government began to campaign for the opening of the Coromandel Peninsula to gold mining. There was limited Maori support for this initiative. The rush of 1862-1863 was brief and insignificant, but that of 1867 to the Kauaeranga district had very different results. The Pakeha population shot up to around 12,000 in 1868; some ro,000 are said to have arrived within a single year. Almost at once, the new town of Thames acquired a population of some 5,000. By 1871 it had become New Zealand's fifth largest population centre (Stone, pp. 63-64). Most of the growth came from the arrival of miners, together with storekeepers, publicans, farmers and professionals, from elsewhere in New Zealand. In particular, Hauraki absorbed Auckland's surplus labouring population and gave struggling rural settlers an additional source of income.

1.13 This new population greatly intensified the demand for land and further stimulated the existing demand for timber for mining operations and for building, throughout the colony as well as locally. As steam driven mills took over Maori tree-fellers were driven out of business; as competition increased the pressure upon timber-bearing land intensified. Gold mining required the large scale cession by Maori of rights (and by that token also of control) over their lands. This was a quartz not an alluvial field, requiring capital investment and a permanent supply of wage labour. In the main, the goldfields population was not a migratory collection of diggers but a relatively stable population of workers whose presence created a sizeable market and a source of supplementary employment for farmers. Settlement of this kind, especially as the industry fell away from its peak, required land for townships and farms and so brought about a demand for the outright transfer of ownership from Maori to Pakeha, either through the Crown or private purchase. By 1865 the Native Land Court had been established to service both modes of transfer; its operations begin in Waiheke and Coromandel in that year.

1.14 In the 187os the economic and social penetration of the region by gold, timber and settlement reached a peak and though there was some decline in the volume of economic activity, thereafter it was permanently at a much higher level. Hauraki Maori, who had experienced in the 185os a new economy in which they could participate without loss of

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