purchasing methods of these men is that they took full advantage of the reserves’ lack of alienation restrictions and tended to disregard them even when they were in place. In fact, a variation of Halcombe’s observation might be a more useful reading of the transactions in the purchased block from 1868 to the early 1870s – that is, the facility with which Pakeha settlers managed to acquire so many reserves in such a short space of time.