Most of these assets were provided out of public and private borrowing, which in time required debt servicing, a costly business. In this straitened financial situation, in the late nineteenth century, the temptation to shortchange the Maori people was irresistible.

The complication of Hauraki quartz mining

Rich gold strikes at Kauaeranga in 1867 galvanized Auckland out of depression and created a large boom town on the Thames at astonishing speed. But only a small share of the winnings filtered down to local Maori to compensate for the social disruption to which they were quickly exposed. A significant factor in all this was that the Thames field, like all those which were within Hauraki rohe, yielded gold not in an alluvial form but embedded in quartz. This gave rise to a style of mining which did not work to Maori advantage:

1.    As an essentially industrial activity, quartz mining required a costly infrastructure of tramlines, roading, and machinery for crushing batteries, drainage pumps, and the like.

2.    Returns were rarely immediate. Syndicates of prospectors and miners needed a monetary reserve to tide them over, which encouraged conversion of claims into company holdings. Companies employing labourers paid less through leases to Maori landlords than did individual miners through miner's rights.

3.    Whereas prospectors on alluvial fields, as in the South Island, were transients often in ephemeral communities, Hauraki quartz miners, after the frenzied rush of 1867-68, became an occupational group more analogous to industrial workers or European-style coal miners, part of a relatively static labour force, living in stable communities with an orthodox nuclear family structure of wives and children. Thames, Coromandel and Waihi miners were not content with short-term housing of tents, 'whares', or ramshackle huts, but turned to more permanent kinds of residence.

4.    Having put down roots in the region, when returns fell off in nearby mines, say in the early 1870s, miners in settlements such as Grahamstown expected government either to put pressure on Maori to open up new mining areas in the Upper Thames Valley, or to make cheap homestead blocks available through purchase of Maori lands on the Hauraki plains. As a populist politician in the Thames from the mid-seventies, Sir George Grey deliberately whipped up this Pakeha land-hunger. And the reality was that settlement of ex-miners could only be achieved by unsettlement of Maori presently in occupation; they would be dispossessed and displaced by such a process.

The emergence of a large, stable, vociferously radical 'poor white' community which Hauraki Maori found in their midst was not at all what they had expected. Nor was this Pakeha group much disposed to sacrifice its own economic well-being to Maori rights.

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