Pollen, Agent of the general government, took ten experienced diggers in the cutter Cornstalk to the Thames.142 On 27 July 1867 an agreement was signed by Taipari and three other chiefs, and Pollen on behalf of the Crown, opening Kauaeranga for gold mining.143 It was agreed that Maori owners would receive £i for each miner's right issued and £i 5s. for each kauri tree felled. A small area, about four square miles, was proclaimed a goldfield on 30 July.

Within a week 250 men were on the field, the majority unemployed labourers from Auckland. Mining boomed with the discovery, on 10 August, by a group under W.A. Hunt, of a gold-bearing leader beside the Kuranui stream, and the discovery by Daniel Tookey on Moanataiari shortly after. The rush began. Between September 1867 and 9 March 1868 Mackay negotiated with Ngati Maru and Ngati Tamatera to open up for mining virtually all the land, west of the mountain divide, between Coromandel and Thames and beyond (to Omahu).144 But the really lucrative area ('the Thames') was limited to the land between Tararu and Kauaeranga streams.

The Thames rush characterized

To characterize the bonanza years of the Thames three features must be remarked upon:

•     the sheer scale of European settlement that precipitately resulted;

•     the size and revolutionary nature of the industrial development and its impact upon the environment which had previously sustained the traditional way of life of the tangata whenua;

•     the extent to which the economy of which mining was a part quickly began to erode Hauraki society.

Its unprecedented nature

The Thames Rush itself was beyond the imaginings of the Hauraki people; and it is pertinent to recall here that this substantially repeated on a larger scale the Coromandel experience. During 1864, when Pita and Taniwha complained that they had not as yet been paid during the period of prospecting, Mackay had explained that they were not entitled to any payment until gold was 'found in payable quantities'. To this they replied: 'This may be correct; but we never supposed it would take upwards of eight months to try the land, or that we would have 500 diggers from Otakau [Otago] to damage it. '145 And the damage arising out of the Thames rush was of a much greater order of magnitude.146 As was earlier cited:

It was something different, something

142 Mackay, The Opening of the Hauraki District, pp. 25-26.

143 AJHR, 1869, A-17, pp. 4-5, 17.

144 Mackay, The Opening of the Hauraki District, pp. 27-28; Salmon, A History of Goldmining, p. 186.

145 AJHR, 1869, A-17, p. 17 (Enclosure E).

146 Hutton puts it very well when he writes in "'Troublesome Specimens"', p. 144: 'the Thames gold rush was an exceptional event. Few other areas, in the Pacific region at least, had 10,000 Europeans planted in the midst of an exclusively indigenous community in a period of less than a year.' The upshot of this was such things as open sewers, epidemics, lawlessness (especially petty theft), riotous behaviour etc. See ACL A208/611 at NARC, especially reports by Mackay, 31 August 1867, and Alan Baillie, 15 June and 13 July 1868.

147 Allen Curnow, 'The Unhistoric Story', in Selected Poems, 1940-1989, London, 1990, p. 5.

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