The Wairau Incident

Press, 16 August 1983, Page 29

The Wairau Incident

The little township of Tuamarina, near Picton, hit the headlines during the recent floods. The Tuamarina River played an equally large part in an even more dramatic incident 140 years ago as the site of the Wairau Massacre, one of the bloodiest confrontations between Maori and Pakeha during the early years of European.

settlement. In June 1843 a dispute over ownership of the Wairau Valley resulted in a Maori raiding party crossing the Tuamarina River and killing 22 Europeans, among them the son of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, one of the founders of the New Zealand Company. A stone cairn marks the spot on the river bank

where the raiders crossed and an old titoki tree still stands where the pakeha group rowed across the river to parley with the Maoris. In the Tuamarina cemetery, on a hill above the town, a monument to the dead men was erected in 1863 and stands today as a memorial to those early, troubled times.