PART 1

INTRODUCTION

1841-1901: An Economy Transformed

During the last 60 years of the nineteenth century, life in the lands bordering the Hauraki Gulf was transformed.

In March 1841 when the governor took up residence in Auckland, the Hauraki-Tamaki region, in the midst of which was his new capital, encompassed two Maori domains. Over the first, Tamaki-makau-rau, the Orakei branch of Ngati Whatua held the mana whenua. The second, and much larger, area was made up of the littoral lands of the Firth of Thames and of the Hauraki Gulf, extending from as far north as Warkworth, taking in most of the islands of the gulf as well and the Coromandel peninsula including its eastern coastline as far south as the northern shore of Tauranga harbour. These were the lands of the Hauraki iwi, of which the dominant element were the four member tribes of the Murutuahu federation. The European community in the region—at the time Hobson first settled there, about 1000 in number1 —had the barest of footholds, being, in a manner of speaking, grace and favour residents.

It was the Maori presence alone which gave the region its economic viability. Until the first Crown land sales in 1841, the Pakeha administration was able to support itself only by drawing on an imprest account provided by the New South Wales government. The settlers were equally dependent, though in a quite different way; they relied heavily on Maori for food, housing, labour, a trading income, and much else. Where the traditional Maori economy had been modified by Pakeha contact at that time this was in ways that Maori had chosen that it should be; tree-felling or growing cash crops, for instance, had been deliberately undertaken to provide an income that would allow valued western goods to be acquired.

By 1901 the situation had changed utterly. With a population of 67,226, Auckland was the largest city in New Zealand and the most rapidly growing one.2 Possessing an infrastructure of commercial buildings, industries, transport facilities, wharves, financial institutions and the like, it was well on the way to establishing itself as the main entrepot and commercial centre of New Zealand. Thames, though fallen away from its 1874 population peak (which had been exceeded only by the four main cities at that time),3 was still, according to the 1901 census, the tenth largest borough in the colony, and it continued to make up, with the counties of Waihi and Coromandel, the great centre of quartz mining in the colony.4 Conversely, Hauraki iwi had retrograded.

1 Greater precision is not possible as New Zealand Blue Books do not give population before 1842. Statistics for early New Zealand used in this paper drawn from Statistics of New Zealand for the Crown Colony period, 1840-52, Auckland University College, 1954. (Population section: Appendix B).

2   Population figures drawn from G.T. Bloomfield, New Zealand: A Handbook of Historical Statistics, Boston, 1984.

3   Ibid., p. 35.

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