CHAPTER 7

THE THAMES ERA, 1867-80

Significance of Thames

In 1902 it was stated that 'the Auckland of today may fairly be described as a product of the [Hauraki] goldfields'.121 Equally could it have been claimed that the exploitation of those same goldfields unleashed forces which more than anything else contributed to the decline of the Hauraki people.

The detailed steps in the opening up of the Hauraki mining regions is not given here. My concern is rather to compare and contrast the benefits accruing to the Crown, to the Pakeha community, and to Maori, that arose out of the goldfields agreements. As a prelude to this I recapitulate certain issues already mentioned in passing in this report which are further developed in this and subsequent chapters.

Key Issues in the Opening of Thames Goldfields

By the 1860s the assumption prevailed within colonial society that if Maoris were to survive (and that in itself was by then thought conjectural) they must be speedily 'civilized'; that is, integrated within the western economic, social and legal systems. (The flaw at the heart of this convenient belief was the assumption that what was of benefit to colonists equally benefited Maori.)

From economic co-existence to subordination

The 1860s marked the movement of the Hauraki economy from a state of co-existence and symbiosis with the colonial economy to one of subordination to it. In the period before, the Maori people could earn money to buy the western goods they wanted by modifying their age-old productive activities to produce the commodities for which Europeans had set up a demand. In effect, they grafted the fetching of timber, the growing of provisions and so on, on to the stock, so to speak, of their own traditional modes of production. In the new phase, however, western economic demands became so insistent and large-scale that they began to erode the very foundations of Maori society.

'Pacification's' economic dimension

If, as has been argued, Pacification can be extended to mean conquest by non-military

121 Cyclopedia of NZ, Vol. 2, p. 462.

122 Kingite Maori, according to Hutton in '"Troublesome Specimens"', p. 80, were most alert to the fact that cession of land for goldmining, was all too often the forerunner of colonisation.

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