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Pāpāmoa

Pāpāmoa (c. 1460-1700)

Outstanding cultural landscape

At least since the time of the Tākitimu waka, the western Bay of Plenty has been an abundant food basket. The evidence for this lies here at Pāpāmoa, where a nationally significant pā complex straddling ignimbrite (volcanic) hill country once watched over fertile coastal dune plains and rich coastal fisheries. If radiocarbon dating is correct, settlement began on the plain about 1400. For the next 300 years the people prospered, harvesting their crops and fisheries, occupying and abandoning sites in accordance with the kumara cycle and soil fertility. Today’s subdivisions and sprawl are oozing their gimcrack way over an ancient palimpsest of kāinga, garden soils and swamp pā.

But look to the hills. Here, as elsewhere in the North Island, Māori fortified their settlements as competition for resources intensified. The Bay of Plenty still has fine examples of ancient hill forts at Maunganui, Mangatawa and Pāpāmoa. The Papamoa Hills offered good views in all directions at an inevitable point of inter-tribal tension between Ngāi Te Rangi and Arawa. Archaeologists have located about 60 sites – pits, terraces and, of course, pā. Pā range from a massive 7 ha (Wharo pā) down to 0.15 ha. The oldest was begun some time after 1460 and they were all built by 1700. The scientists have given them number-names that make them sound like U-boats, but the two largest pā also have proper names. The largest, Wharo (U14/166,167), on the spine of a ridge with three ‘limbs’ on side spurs, has nine separate defended units. Karangaumu (U14/238), probably the earliest and full of large storage pits, has eight defended units. It sits atop the summit of Papamoa Hill and may have been rebuilt at least once. At the other end of the scale, little U14/1660 occupies a knoll on a ridge below Karangaumu.

This sprawling cultural landscape is more important than its individual components. Here on the coastal plain and along the rolling hillsides of Pāpāmoa is the record of the lengthy evolution from Polynesian colonists to the Māori who would encounter European society.

Late in 2000, in the face of the threat posed by soaring land values and development pressure, local authorities conditionally approved the creation of a regional park in the Papamoa Hills to continue to tell that story to future generations. The Papamoa Hills Regional Park (Te Rae-o-Papamoa) opened officially in 2004 and two years later a conservation plan was published to guide its future use.

Further information

This site is item number 7 on the History of New Zealand in 100 Places list.

On the ground

There is an information board by the car park.

Websites

Books

Kevin L. Jones, The Penguin field guide to New Zealand archaeology, Penguin, Auckland, 2007
Nigel Prickett (ed.), The first thousand years, Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1982

Credit:

Text: Gavin McLean, 2013

Main Image: Matt & Becky (Flickr)

Other image: Bay of Plenty Regional Council www.boprc.govt.nz

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Date established:

c. 1460-1700

Ōtātara Pā Historic Reserve

Ōtātara Pā Historic Reserve (c. 1400-1820)

Major hill pā complex

In the Taradale Hills on the outskirts of modern ‘Art Deco’ Napier lie the remains of a much earlier settlement. Twentieth-century quarrying largely destroyed one of the two pā now covered by the name ‘Ōtātara’ but even so, its 33 ha form one of the most impressive archaeological sites in New Zealand and have been compared to One Tree Hill in Auckland. It is certainly the largest and oldest in Hawke’s Bay and once may have covered almost 50 ha. The small ditch and bank defences point to its antiquity and it is thought that Ōtātara may have been settled between 1400 and 1500. As you will appreciate on a clear day, Ōtātara commanded good views of rich kumara gardens, fishing, fowling and flax and raupō resources in the swamps and the then-navigable Tūtaekurī River. Stories about the place often conflict because the iwi associated with it later became factionalised, but its significance for commemorating the conquest of Heretaunga by Ngāti Kahungunu from Poverty Bay about 1550 under Taraia is clear.

The name Ōtātara originally belonged to the lower pā. Now mostly quarried away, this pā occupied an isolated ridge cut on one side by the Tūtaekurī River to form a natural defensive cliff. What you see now is the larger and higher of the two, Hikurangi (‘the cloud piercer’), about 500 m further up the ridge. On the way up you can see house terraces and regularly spaced deep pits that were once roofed over for kumara storage. Hikurangi has no ditch and bank defences but there is evidence of defensive scarping.

Permanent occupation probably ceased about 1820 after northern raiders struck elsewhere in the district during the Musket Wars. Donald McLean bought the Ahuriri Block for the Crown in 1851. The Dolbel family owned Ōtātara and much of the surrounding land for more than a century. It has been an historic reserve since 1972 and remains important to the local Māori who ‘live in the shadow of Ōtātara’.

Further information

This site is item number 6 on the History of New Zealand in 100 Places list.

On the ground

The site is managed by the Department of Conservation in partnership with Ngāti Paarau of Waiohiki Marae. It is professionally interpreted.

Websites

Book

Elizabeth Pishief, Kevin Jones and Waiohiki Marae, Assessment of heritage significance, Otatara Pa Historic Reserve, DOC, Napier, 1997

Credit:

Text: Gavin McLean, 2013

Main image: Gavin McLean

Other images: mrcjhicks (Flickr) and Kevin Jones, 1995

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Date established:

c. 1400-1820

Palliser Bay

Palliser Bay (c. 1300-1600)

An early ecological disaster?

In Kupe country at the other end of the island from Ōtuataua, people were building similar walled gardens along a narrow coastal strip of stony soils, creating a typical East Polynesian settlement pattern of small villages by stream mouths. Their neat garden walls still stretch across the coastal platform and the lower coastal slopes. These walls marked boundaries and absorbed stones cleared from the gardens. Their builders lived to an average age of 38 and used tools that were in some cases fashioned from materials brought in from outside the area. The Palliser Bay settlements were undefended almost until the end and there is very little sign of fighting.

It was environmental degradation that drove these people away. Archaeologists still dispute the causes. Some say it was climate change, suggesting that Palliser Bay, settled during a warm period, was abandoned after temperatures dropped between about 1600 and 1850. Bruce McFadgen has argued that tsunami may have had a devastating impact here and elsewhere throughout New Zealand. The majority blame human activity. Once fire destroyed the natural forest cover, bird numbers fell and hunting parties had to travel further to get food. Fire also accelerated soil erosion, reducing crop yields, choking streams and smothering shellfish beds. By about 1500, filter feeders such as oysters, mussels, pipi and tuatua had vanished. Sometime between 1550 and 1625, people drifted away.

Further information

This site is item number 3 on the History of New Zealand in 100 Places list.

On the ground

There are several sites in the vicinity. Kevin L. Jones’s book The Penguin field guide to New Zealand archaeology, Penguin, Auckland, 2007, features several aerial photographs and small-scale maps.

Websites

Books

B. Foss and Helen M. Leach, Prehistoric man in Palliser Bay, National Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, 1979
Helen Leach, 1000 years of gardening in New Zealand, A.H. & A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1984
Bruce McFadgen, Hostile shores: catastrophic events in prehistoric New Zealand and their impact on Maori coastal communities, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2007

Credit:

Text: Gavin McLean, 2013

Main image: Kevin Jones

Historic images:

Alexander Turnbull Library
References: PAColl-6301-62 and B-031-018 (painted by Samuel Charles Brees)
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any reuse of their images.

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Date established:

c. 1300-1600

Tent embassy at Parliament, 1975

Following the 1975 land march Matakite broke into several factions. Whina Cooper publicly distanced herself from a group which established a tent embassy on the steps of Parliament. The march signalled the beginning of a renewed phase of Māori activism over land that was demonstrated by the occupations of Bastion Point (1977) and the Raglan golf course (1978).

Credit:

Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference: EP/1975/4379/33A-F
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image.

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Māori land march passes through Awapuni

Māori Land March on the outskirts of Palmerston North, October 1975.

Credit:

Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference: EP/1975/4202/8a-F
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image.

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Vogel's legacy

Julius Vogel cartoon

After the initial enthusiasm of the 1870s, Julius Vogel’s reputation suffered in the 1880s when New Zealand’s economy slumped into a long depression that was triggered by an international banking crisis. Political rivals condemned him as an ‘impudent adventurer’ whose reckless borrowing had fuelled an unsustainable boom, leading to an inevitable bust. But as prosperity returned in the 1890s and 1900s, and the Liberal government championed its own public works schemes, Vogel was again praised as a progressive visionary.

Nation building

During the 1870s railways and other technological innovations (like the electric telegraph and steam ship) quickened the pace of life in New Zealand. Improved communications knitted communities closer together and encouraged centralisation and uniformity. The rail-building project launched by Vogel in 1870 was one of the New Zealand state’s most significant achievements – and one of its greatest financial commitments. Between 1870 and 1929 the government devoted half of all its public works spending to railways: equivalent to state spending on roads, telegraphs, public buildings, immigration, defence, lighthouses and harbour works put together.

Making history

Historians have generally been kind to Vogel. The Liberal politician and historian William Pember Reeves described him as ‘one of the short list of statesmen whose work has left a permanent mark on the Dominion’. To biographer Raewyn Dalziel, he was a ‘powerful and magnetic’ leader who ‘towered over his colleagues’ and established the political agenda of the late 19th century.

Immigration graph

The 1870s was also a decade of dramatic demographic change. The government assisted 100,000 migrants to come to New Zealand, the great majority of them British and Irish. The colony’s European population soared from 256,000 in 1871 to 490,000 ten years later, dwarfing a Māori population of fewer than 50,000. (See Te Ara for more on the history of immigration.)

These migrants were among the chief beneficiaries of Vogel’s public works revolution. They settled in cities that were now profitably linked to their hinterlands, in the new towns that sprouted along the rail routes, and in newly accessible rural regions that were becoming part of the productive economy.

In other ways, though, Vogel’s legacy was less positive. Public works spending concentrated power in central government’s hands, and rail- and road-building decisions were often made for political gain rather than sound economic reasons. Railways and roads radically transformed much of the natural environment, facilitating forest clearance, flaxmilling, the drainage of swamps and a transition to pastoral farming.

Maori land loss, 1860–2000

The impact on Māori was massive. The railway lines that edged inland from the coast nibbled away at the edges of the Māori landed estate before slicing it up into more digestible chunks for the state and settlers to consume. It may have taken four decades, but the rail-building programme launched in 1870 eventually prised open the Māori heartland of the central North Island. Ultimately it was Vogel’s public works and immigration programme, rather than the wars of the 1860s, that cemented the colonial government’s authority over all of New Zealand.

Building Vogel's railways

Julius Vogel wasn’t the first colonial politician to promise public works and immigration on the back of borrowed money. But the early 1870s offered better prospects for success. War in the North Island was all but over. The main British railway network was largely complete, so English contracting firms like John Brogden and Sons were looking for new opportunities overseas. An outbreak of rural unrest in Britain also encouraged some farm labourers to undertake the long and difficult sea voyage to New Zealand.

Along the lines

Road and telegraph networks were extended at the same time as railways were built. The former often accessed rail construction sites or linked railheads, and the latter frequently followed rail lines. Significantly, by 1876 New Zealand had an undersea telegraph link to Australia, which reduced communication with Europe to a matter of hours.

Early railway construction workers

The colonial government contracted Brogdens to build railways and recruit migrant workers. In 1872–3 they brought 2200 English immigrants here, including 1300 working-age men (mostly agricultural labourers) contracted to two years’ work on railway construction. Brodgens’ ‘navvies’ (this common name for public works labourers derived from the ‘navigators’ who had dug Britain’s 18th-century canals) set to work on six contracts at or near Auckland, Napier, Wellington, Picton, Oamaru and Invercargill. They worked by hand using simple tools – picks and shovels, horses and carts, and dynamite – and endured primitive living conditions in isolated camps.

Problems with the plan

Rail construction forged ahead, despite occasional delays, labour shortages and industrial disputes over wages and conditions (not least the local custom of an eight-hour working day). By the mid-1870s the government was offering assisted passages from Britain without any work obligations. Many disgruntled navvies broke their contracts and drifted into farming, urban jobs or gold-prospecting. British recruitment was soon abandoned; from now on navvies would be recruited locally.

Turning the ‘first sod’ of the Temuka–Timaru line

By 1873, when Vogel became Premier, other tensions were emerging. Members of Parliament and local Railway Leagues were lobbying for rail lines through their electorates and towns. More borrowing was needed, an estimated £1.5 million for railways alone in 1873. To guarantee further loans and help pay for the scheme, Vogel proposed to reserve 6 million acres (2.4 million ha) of ‘wasteland’ along rail routes as a Crown endowment. But South Island provincialist MPs feared a central government land grab and defeated the proposal in Parliament. Vogel and his allies plotted their revenge.

Although provincial feelings remained strong, politicians increasingly realised that only central government could pay for and carry out such an ambitious nation-building programme. The abolition of the provinces was carried in Parliament in October 1875 and came into effect a year later. By that time the Vogel ministry had lost power, but subsequent governments continued to pour money into public works. Along with rail development itself, the abolition of the provinces was a key element in the emergence of a strong central government in New Zealand.

A network emerges

Celebrating the Dunedin–Christchurch rail link

Vogel’s rail plan initially made its greatest strides in the South Island. A Christchurch–Dunedin railway was completed in 1878, cutting travel time between the South Island’s largest cities to around 11 hours. The following year New Zealand’s first ‘main trunk’ line linked Christchurch with Invercargill, while a series of branch lines snaked inland from the coast.

Auckland’s first railway, between the city and Onehunga, was built by Brogdens and opened in 1873. More significantly, within 18 months the South Auckland line – following in the footsteps of General Cameron’s Imperial troops a decade before – had reached the Waikato basin, opening up a million acres (405,000 ha) of recently confiscated Māori land to Pākehā settlement and exploitation. By 1880 rails reached Te Awamutu, on the border of Te Rohe Pōtae (the King Country), the Māori heartland into which the Kīngitanga tribes had withdrawn after the Waikato War.

Wellington’s first railway, opened in 1874, ran between Thorndon and Lower Hutt. By 1878, following the completion of the ambitious Rimutaka incline railway, the capital was linked to the Wairarapa plains. Elsewhere in the North Island, railways were built in the Bay of Islands, north-west Auckland, Taranaki, Hawke’s Bay and Manawatū.

Expansion of the North Island rail network

By 1880 the government-owned New Zealand Railways was operating almost 2000 km of working railway, three-quarters of it in the South Island. In the centre of the North Island rugged landscapes and resolute Māori landowners had slowed rail’s progress. Following lengthy negotiations with Ngāti Maniapoto, work on the central section of a North Island main trunk railway began in 1885 (by which time Vogel was Treasurer again). The eventual completion of the main trunk in 1908, nine years after Vogel’s death, represented the realisation of his 1870 vision.

Vogel's vision

In 1869, when Julius Vogel became Colonial Treasurer in the government led by Premier William Fox, he observed that:

New Zealand is a peculiar country. You cannot get over its geographical configuration. You cannot bring together the two ends nearer than they are. There will always be a certain amount of isolation in different parts until the iron horse [railway] runs through the two islands.

Immigrants landing at Lyttelton

In June 1870 Vogel unveiled the most ambitious public works and assisted-immigration programme in New Zealand’s history. It was to be funded by massive borrowing in the London money markets, rising to £10 million by 1876 and £21 million by 1881 (equivalent to $1.4 billion and $3.3 billion respectively in 2011). This would be spent on assisted (government-subsidised) immigration and on building or improving infrastructure, including the telegraph network, roads, public buildings and port facilities. Its centerpiece was a promise to build more than 1000 miles (1600 km) of railway in nine years.

A peaceful conquest

Vogel hoped to stimulate a stagnant, war-weary colonial economy. He also promised to reignite what many saw as New Zealand’s faltering colonisation project – to ‘re-illume that sacred flame’. To Pākehā eyes, much of the North Island remained a wilderness of bush, native ‘wasteland’ and potential rebellion. As recently as the late 1860s, clashes with the warrior prophets Tītokowaru and Te Kooti had forced many Pākehā settlers to flee isolated homesteads for the safety of coastal towns. Instead of war, Vogel hoped that immigrants, roads and railways would spearhead a peaceful Pākehā conquest of the Māori heartland.

The policy’s success hinged on the rapid and cheap acquisition of Māori land. The resulting influx of settlers into new districts would not only stimulate economic growth but quickly swamp the local Māori population. Employment on public works schemes, Vogel believed, would hasten the integration of Māori into the European economy. Two decades later, while living in Britain in 1893, Vogel put it even more bluntly: ‘The Public Works Policy seemed to the Government the sole alternative to a war of extermination with the natives.’

Railway workers at Chain Hills tunnel

Building railways (as well as roads) in a mountainous, geologically unstable and swampy country was a difficult challenge. New Zealand lacked capital and labour, but compared to Britain and Europe land was relatively cheap. Rather than build the most direct routes with expensive earthworks, tunnels and stone bridges, it made sense to build longer, winding routes around obstacles, to erect wooden trestle bridges, and to tolerate tight curves and steep gradients. These factors, together with the wish to build quickly and cheaply, led to the adoption of a narrow 3 ft 6 in (1067-mm) gauge as the national standard.

A single gauge

Canterbury’s first railways were built using the broad 5 ft 3 in (1600-mm) ‘Irish’ gauge, while Southland adopted the 4 ft 8½ in (1435-mm) ‘standard’ gauge (used in Britain, the US and many other countries). The government’s decision to impose the 3 ft 6 in ‘Cape’ gauge (the earlier lines were converted by 1877) meant that New Zealand avoided the problems that have plagued Australia, where colonial (state) railways were built using three different gauges.

The Vogel era

Julius Vogel

In 1870, Colonial Treasurer Julius Vogel launched the most ambitious development programme in New Zealand’s history. He proposed to borrow huge sums from Britain to revitalise and accelerate European colonisation. The money would be used to assist British migrants to settle here, to speed up the purchase of Māori land, and to build the ‘public works’ or infrastructure essential for economic development: railways, roads, bridges, port facilities and telegraph lines.

The steam railway was the cutting-edge technology of the time, and the centrepiece of Vogel’s plan was a bold promise to build 1000 miles (1600 km) of rail lines in nine years. Despite problems and delays, this aim was achieved – New Zealand’s rail network grew from a mere 74 km in 1870 to 2000 km by 1880. British migrants flooded in, almost doubling the colony’s population in ten years. New regions were ‘opened up’ to Pākehā settlement, and central government became increasingly powerful, eclipsing its provincial rivals.

Vogel-era locomotive

Today Vogel is generally seen as a nation-building visionary, but he was a controversial figure in his time. When the colony slipped into a long depression in the 1880s, many blamed his overambitious borrowing in the previous decade. His policies contributed to the dispossession of Māori and the exploitation of the natural environment. The ‘Vogel era’ was a decisive moment in New Zealand’s 19th-century transformation from a Māori world to a Pākehā one.

Henare Tomoana

Seated portrait of Henare Tomoana. Taken 29 April 1873 by Samuel Carnell.

Read more about Henare Tomoana

Credit:

Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference: 1/4-022168-G
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa must be obtained before any reuse of this image.

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henare tomoana

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