From Tamaki-Makau-Rau to Auckland

by Russell Stone

This book traces the history of the region from the beginnings of settlement about 800 years ago up to 1840. Following a strong narrative line, it uses parallel and often corroborative versions drawn from Maori oral traditions and Land Court records, and from the work of archaeologists and pre-historians. It provides an epitome of the pre-history of much of Aotearoa - New Zealand, and of the impact upon traditional life that was made by the first European settlers.

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Peter G · Rating 5 out of 5]

The historian Vincent O’Malley has pointed out, and quite powerfully in my opinion, the things that a society collectively chooses to remember or forget speaks to its way it establishes its contemporary national myths and its priorities. And it certainly was true of my own experience, as someone of a fairly conventional pākehā upbringing, to be actively discouraged from learning all that much about the history of the city that surrounded me as I grew up inside it. I do recall vaguely in school being told that the Auckland region was more or less empty at the time it was selected to be New Zealand’s capital in 1840. Other than that, things tended to get a bit hazy. Overwhelmingly, the history that I learned was a pākehā history, primarily with a time period that began in the comfortable twentieth century past all the nastiness involved in carving out living space for settlers in an occupied country. Afterway, this is something I’ve been trying to address on my own in the last few years, and I’m happy to say that this book really filled a void in my own knowledge of what was in Auckland before Auckland.

Russell Stone is a very well regarded historian whose chosen focus has often been on members of the settler business communities and particularly those in the city of Auckland. I think his most popular book is his monumental two-part biography of Logan Campbell which I’ve got on my shelf but never got around to reading. I’ve always suspected it might be a bit hagiographic but after being impressed with From Tamaki-Makau-Rau to Auckland I think I’ll probably give it a punt sooner rather than later. He certainly seems familiar with the ins and outs of the colonial records and able to draw together information from diverse sources.

It was always going to be challenging to piece together the history of a piece of land as contested as Auckland has been. Stone relies quite heavily at times on the records of the Native Land Courts which, although they didn’t do a particularly fair-handed job at the legal side of their responsibilities, were very useful in collating together first-hand interviews from interested parties. This very nicely contrasts with the more conventional analysis of records and settler journals which very much seem to be Stone’s bread and butter otherwise. It’s nice to have Māori voices added to the other overwhelmingly settler narratives that are available to the historian, even if they are coloured by the context in which they were given.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the whole book for me was the sections about the fallout from Ngāpuhi’s raids against Tāmaki in the early 1820s. Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei ended up essentially exiled to the Waikato for part of this period and this is very movingly narrated by Stone along with their tentative attempts to reestablish their occupancy in the 1830s when the danger had settled down just enough to risk a return, all the while being aware of their vulnerability at the time. I found personally that this really helped me to contextualise the motivations of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei in the 1840s when they invited Hobson to set up a capital on the land that is now central Auckland. Āpihei te Kawau, about whom I honestly know very little about beforehand, must have been some kind of leader to keep his hapū cohesive throughout this period.

Stone brings the book to a close, as I suppose is appropriate, in the early 1840s after Auckland is officially designated as the country’s new capital. If I do have a complaint, and I don’t really have much of one at all, it's that the afterward of the book rushes quite rapidly through the nature of the land sales that really could be seen as a major part of the move from Māori collective ownership of land towards individual settler claims across the peninsula. I guess it is the nature of an afterward to lightly touch on ideas though, so I can’t complain too much, but I would have loved to have seen more about this interesting subject. If that is a book that has been written, I couldn’t locate it.

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting to read about the pre-European history of my birth place.