This overview is primarily concerned with the technical details of the alienations of the reserves – who sold them, to whom, when and for how much – but when general trends or circumstances in the district seem to have impinged on the ownership of the reserves, these have been given due consideration. For practical reasons, not all of the reserves are discussed. Archival limitations, combined with the sheer number of reserves, have led to a case study approach. Most of the transaction details have therefore been presented in a tabular format rather than as narrative accounts. This material is located in a companion volume. Finally, because the rate of alienation is a central theme in this report, a chronology of the transactions has been compiled and may be found at the end of the main report along with a separate list of the reserves and their owners.

Because this is a general overview of land transactions in the Katikati-Te Puna block, some issues are not covered by this report. While general questions of representation and the criteria used by the Crown to allocate lands to individuals and groups within the purchase are discussed, the identification of groups with customary rights in the purchase area has been left to historical reports supporting the claims of specific groups. Secondly, the identification of any boundary issues has been outside the scope of this report, so for this reason, maps that have been produced for other research have been used.

The report is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 considers only briefly the events leading up to and surrounding the purchase and subsequent negotiations as these have already been covered in some detail by other scholars, whereas Chapter 2 focuses closely on the allocation of reserves in the Katikati-Te Puna Block and the award of Crown Grants to these lands³

The next two chapters are closely related. Chapter 3 is devoted to the spate of transactions that occurred from 1868 to the early 1870s and the local context within

³ This author has consulted the following reports for some of the details covered in Chapters 1 and 2: Evelyn Stokes, Te Raupatu o Tauranga Moana, Hamilton, 1990, vol. 1; Stokes, Allocation of Reserves, vol. 1, ch. 3-4; Hazel Riseborough, ‘The Crown and Tauranga Moana 1864-1868’, Wai 215 #A23, Crown Forestry Rental Trust, October 1994; Robyn Anderson, The Crown, the Treaty and the Hauraki Tribes, vol. 4, Paeroa, 1997; Vincent O’Malley, ‘The Aftermath of the Tauranga Raupatu, 1864-1981’, Crown Forestry Rental Trust, June 1995; Vincent O’Malley and Alan Ward, ‘Draft Historical Report on Tauranga Moana Lands’ Crown / Congress Joint Working Party, June 1993.