STORIES OF NEW ZEALAND. By james cowan.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 181, 1 August 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

STORIES OF NEW ZEALAND. B y james cowan.

EARLY DAYS OF WELLINGTON—THE MAORIS AND THE SETTLERS—THE PIONEERS' HOMES IN THE BUSH.

THE English settlers and the Maoris of (he Atiawa tribe, originally from Taranaki, were very friendly with each other in the first four or five years of the Wellington colony, founded by the New Zealand Company. The Maori people were generous with their help. They built raupo-thatched huts for the newcomers, they brought them fish and potatoes and other food, and were content with trifling presents in return. The English farmers who cut their sections out of the dense forest in the Hutt Valley and on the slopes and levels of Karori were very glad to have the Maori axemen to assist them in felling the great tree 1 and clearing the land for potatoeand wheat.

But the land sales to the company presently cau=ed trouble that ended in a little war. in 1546. The white men did not understand the Maori system of land ownership, and they claimed far more land than ths owners thought they had sold to them. The root of the trouble wa= that 'Wakefield did not have the assistance of skilled interpreters. The only Europeans who spoke* the Maori tongue correctly were the missionaries and a very few traders in the north. There were no missionaries at Wellington. and in any event they were opposed to the land-buyins plans of the company. Wakefield and his staff were forced to rely chiefly on a whaler. Richard Barrett, who had a Maori wife and lived as a petty chief. He had influence among the tribes because of his proved bravery in battle and his skill and success as a trader and whale hunter. But he was an illiterate man. and knew little of the language. At any rate he could not interpret accurately the bargainings for land. The boundaries were not well defined, and Wakefield imagined he had bought very large areas with which the Maoris had no intention of parting. These loose bargains caused disputes, not only in the Wellinston district but in the Wairau Valley, in the Province of Marlborough, and in the Wanganui and New Plymouth settlements. , .

Colonel Wakefield's Attitude. It has been said of Colonel Wakefield that 110 doubt there was at the back of his mind a feeling that once the lands were settled by a strong bodv of British settlers, ready and able to hold their farms ajrainst all comers, the native population would quickly diminish in importance. In his journal he pave credit to the Maoris of the Wellington country for their stalwart appearance and their intelligence, but he limited their share in the future of New Zealand. They would merely be "extremely useful to settlers as labourers, fishermen and sailors." The war in the Hutt Valley altered his views. He had to admit that they were able warriors also, and better bush fighters than the white men.

It must be explained that the Atiawa tribespeople remained generally friendly with tlie whites. It Nvas the Ngati-Toa, the tribe of the great Rauparaha [pronounce with the accent on the second syllable] and his fierce nephew, Te Rangiliaeata [ha-ay-ata] ("The Dawn if Day"), with some warriors from the Upper Wanganui, who fought the pakeha in the Wellington bush for several months. The Atiawa took the pakeha side and served as auxiliary fighters against Rangi-haeata. Te Rauparaha himself was too astute to take action against the whites;

he sat still and professed peace while his fiery relatives went bn the warpath. Too Many Pakehas. Earlier in the day, however, the hospitable Atiawa themselves had their doubts and fears concerning the incoming shiploads of white people. The chiefs who had so cheerfully welcomed the Tory's people in 1839 and sold land to Colonel Wakefield, were dismayed at the growth of "Wellington's population. Te Wharepouri visited Colonel Wakefield and said he had come to say good-bye.

"We are <roing to our old home at Taranaki," he said. "I know that we sold you the land, and that no more white people have come to take it than you told me. I thought you were telling lies and that you had not so many followers. I thought ■that you had nine or ten, or perhaps as many as there are at Te Awaiti [the whalinjr station]. I thought that I could get one placed at each pa as a white man to barter with the people and keep us well supplied with arms and clothing, and that 1

should be able to keep those white men under my hand and regulate their trade myself. But I see that each ship holds two hundred, and I believe, now, that you have more coming. They are all well armed, and they are strong of heart, for they have begun to build their homes without talking. They will be too strong for us. My heart is dark. Remain here with your people; I will go with mine to Taranaki." However, the old warrior chief, who had his war canoes hauled down to the waterside ready for launching, was persuaded to abandon his pro-

posed return to Taranaki. His tribe, or most of them, wished to remain near the white people for the sake of the goods they would obtain by working for them and supplying them with food. He lived for many years at Ngauranga [Nga-00-rah-nga], "The Landing-place of Canoes," a pretty spot where the railway line from the North reaches the shore of Wellington Harbour. The Home-Makers. Meanwhile the- stout-hearted British families were making homes for themselves under somewhat greater difficulties than existed in Auckland, because practically the whole of the land surrounding the harbour was thickly grown with bush. Some of the leading men in Wellington made their homes in the bush covered high levels of Karori, west of the town from about 1842 onward. Our picture of a large dwelling in the Karori forest is reproduced from a beautiful little oil painting which the late Sir Frederick Chapman, Supreme Court

judge, of Wellington, lent me to be photographed for use in my histories. "Homewood" was his birthplace, in 1849. This was the comfortable home built by his father, Judge H. S. Chapman, the first judge of the southern district of New Zealand. The rata and rimu forest, which then covered that part of Wellington, has long since disappeared and the place is now the heart of the suburb of Karori.

Several of the original pioneers of the Karori settlement, over the hills to the west of the town, narrated to me their first experiences in felling the forest, sowing their wheat and potatoes in among the burned logs, cutting roads, "corduroying" the boggy patches (there was one in the middle ol the present suburb of Karori) with trunks of fern trees and other small trees of even size. Their first huts were built of slalw and thatched with fern fronds until they had time to split shingles for roofing. The sides of many of* the hills and ravines were covered with rata trees, a beautiful sight in summer time. The principal timbers on the flats and slopes, now covered with houses and gardens, were rimu, kahikatea, hinau, matai and totara. Many of the pines were of great size; a Karori man mentioned a matai black pine eight feet through in the butt. From one immense white pine in what wa9 then known as "Hughie's Clearing," in Karori, a settler got 2500 feet of timber, pit-sawn. There were several saw pits in the Karori basin; the grassed-over hollows marking the sites of several of these are still to be seen.

The tall, straight trunks of the white pine made excellent masts for ships. A Karori man remembered one being cut for a lower mast for a whaleship lying in Wellington Harbour; it was a spar about 60 feet long, and it was hauled down along the narrow, twisting gully track to the- town by a team of bullocks.

There were alarms in 1846, and the Karori settlers built a small but strong stockade of split and squared timbers as a refuge place in case of attack. The palisade formed a solid wall 10 feet high, loopholed all round. There was a small shelter-house ineide the wall. The stockade logs were pointed on top, and the work was surrounded by a trench. Out at the Lower Hutt bridge there was a much larger stockade, named Fort Richmond; it had small blockhouses at two of the angles. These rough forts were never attacked, but there was a little battle one foggy morning at. Boulcott's Farm camp, a weakly stockaded post, where a detachment of the 58th Kegiment was stationed. This fight, the scene of which is about two miles north of the present town of the Lower Hutt, will be described in a future story on this page.