This second part of the report, following on from Volume 4 of the Hauraki Treaty Claims, discusses Hauraki's relationship to the Crown from 1880 to 1980. Two major themes underlie this discussion: Hauraki expression of political concerns and aspirations and the Government's response; and the continuing Hauraki land and resource loss, and the role of the Government—as purchaser, legislator, and administrator—within that process.
The first part of the report (The Crown, the Treaty, and the Hauraki Tribes, 1880–1885) discussed the first 50 years of the Crown's relationship to the Hauraki tribes. By the end of this period, the economic and social penetration of the region by the Government-fostered extractive industries of goldmining and timber milling had reached a peak, firmly establishing European settlement and strengthening government intervention in the district. For many Maori, however, and particularly for those based at Thames, Coromandel, and the harbours of the eastern divide of the peninsula, at Whangapoua, Mercury Bay, and Tairua, the choice must have seemed clear: economic blockade, Government harassment, and the sort of poverty experienced by many of the interior communities after the war, or participation in the cash economy and the ongoing prosperity promised by Government agents and local politicians in their persuasions to allow mining, roads, river improvements, land purchase, and settlement.
At first there was an appearance of successful engagement, epitomised by those whanau and individual rangatira fortunate enough to hold rights recognised by the Crown and the Native Land Court in commercially valuable properties—productive gold field, township, and kauri timber blocks. And at this point Maori at Thames were able to exert some influence over the implementation if not the direction of public works policy, insisting on concessions for their agreement to roads going through, and a measure of employment on projects involving their own lands. Cracks were, however, readily apparent in that facade: the lack of any real place for Maori in the national and local political structures of the colony; the lack of consultation about legislation that would have a direct impact on their lands, income, and rangatiratanga; the increasing reliance on land sales as a source of cash; and warnings from Government agents and court officers, themselves, of increasing poverty and landlessness of the Hauraki people.
The 187os were particularly crucial years, in which the activities of James Mackay, as the Government's land purchase officer and major agent in the region, helped tip the balance of power and control decisively into the hands of the European settlers. Having succeeded in opening much of the district to mining and the Crown's jurisdiction, Mackay turned his attention to the acquisition of the freehold, deliberately seeking to undermine the authority of those Hauraki rangatira who attempted to hold onto their lands for the future sustenance of their hapu and iwi. In the space of ten years, the
