which these sales occurred. The purchasing activities of Richard John Gill, and Te Moananui Maraki’s allegedly ‘clandestine’ sales of reserves at Rereatukahia, which involved Gill, come under particular scrutiny in this chapter. The task of Chapter 4 is to look closely at Native Land Court evidence disputing several of the sales discussed in Chapter 3. Significantly, the minutes from the hearings reveal cases of administrative oversight that facilitated the disposal of the disputed areas.

During the 1870s and 1880s the rate of alienation in the Katikati-Te Puna block slowed down. Conversely, and contrasting with the late 1860s, the number of leasing agreements increased during this time. This fall-off in sales coincided with official debates about how best to ensure that transactions involving Maori land were conducted in a fair and equitable manner. Chapter 5 looks at the effectiveness of policies and practices that were initiated by the Crown in the 1870s. Of course, official concern came too late to effectively safeguard the Katikati-Te Puna reserves and only one case of an investigation prior to the alienation of a reserve in the area has been found. The tactics employed by a Katikati settler to bypass legal ‘safety-nets’ in order to extend the lease to a reserve and official reactions to this pressure, are the subjects of this chapter.

Thirty-five years after their allocation, few Katikati-Te Puna reserves were still in Maori hands and those that remained were geographically scattered and increasingly partitioned. While the creation of the reserves was inextricably linked to raupatu, and, for those that had been sold, their alienation as well, by the twentieth century, more sophisticated policies and practices had replaced confiscation as the method used by the Crown to appropriate Maori land. Chapter 6, therefore, provides a descriptive sample of twentieth-century transactions.

A summary of the points raised by this author concludes the main report.