ES.5.1 Context

We consider that:

► Gold, apart from land, was not considered a taonga in Maori culture. On the other hand, land and control of access to land were highly valued, and the importance of gold and other minerals in the commercial economy was quickly understood.

► The first significant discoveries of gold at Coromandel came only three years after the great California rush and a year after the first Australian rush. Crown officials and Maori alike were genuinely concerned about the likely influx of a large, itinerant, and turbulent mining population and how best to manage it.

► In contrast to the South Island fields, however, there was little alluvial gold in Hauraki. Individual miners had very short-lived success. Gold had to be extracted from a quartz matrix, by companies able to make large and long-term capital investments, and (apart from a few ‘bonanza’ reefs at Thames) to process large quantities of low-grade ore.

► Consequently, the mining population in Hauraki was not as transient as on an alluvial field. It consisted largely of wage labourers working on company mining leases and then settling in the district. Hauraki Maori were not only demographically overwhelmed by the mining population but also displaced by it in local industries.

ES.5.2 Coromandel: the first gold-mining agreement

We consider that:

► The agreement negotiated between Crown officials and Hauraki rangatira at Patapata in 1852 was a provisional attempt to deal with a situation that was new to both sides. It was limited to three years or whenever payable gold ran out. Although the Crown could not in good faith abrogate the terms lightly, it was inevitable that the basis and scale of payments would be reviewed. They had been based upon the precedent of alluvial mining in Australia and the mining licence fees charged there; it was recognised from the outset that the terms for mining matrix gold had yet to be negotiated. (Moreover, the fee for a miner’s licence in Australia was drastically reduced following the Eureka Stockade rising of 1854.) Claimant submissions to the effect that the Patapata agreement was a ‘treaty’, a ‘blueprint’ or ‘template’ therefore overstate its significance. In any case, the Crown is correct in pointing out that two of its fundamental principles were in general maintained: namely, that gold-mining on Maori land would occur only with the landowners’ consent; and that rent or revenue payable to Maori would be pegged to the number of miners working the field.

► The claimants have submitted that the Crown was negotiating in bad faith in 1852. It really would have preferred to acquire the freehold and soon set about doing so. The Crown has submitted that the Patapata agreement, or any other mining cession