AFTER THREE GENERATIONS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11609, 29 January 1916, Page 8

AFTER THREE GENERATIONS.

To-day Auckland celebrates its seventy-sixth birthday, and the form of jubilation, a regatta, is peculiarly fitting there, an anniversary celebration which is indeed of ancient foundation in the chronology of civilised New Zealand, for it dates back to 1842. Auckland harbour on Anniversary -Day is a sight worth going a long way to see; 110 port in the Southern Seas, with the exception of Sydney, has such a holiday spectacle to show. But -to-day's event is of more than local inteiest, for it commemorates also the birth of New Zealand as a British colony. It was on January 29, 18-10, that Captain Hobson arrived at the Bay of Islands empowered, with the consent of the natives, to declare the sovereignty of Queen Victoria over New Zealand and to assume the government of this country. It was on January 30 that he hoisted that Union flag on the shores of the Bay and took possession in the Sovereign's name. It was not until some months later, as a matter t>f historic fact, that Auckland town was established. The British flag was hoisted on the site of the present city of Auckland on September 18, and the Lieutenant-Governor took up.his residence there. Wellington's actual foundation as a town antedates Auckland's, for the first body of immigrants under the Wakefield scheme reached Port Nicholson on January 22, 1t>4.0. Auckland has adopted the date of the first. Governor's coming to Kororareka as its official birthdajj, and there is a fitness in this, for it lives a wider and natibnal significance to the celebration and makes of it a mile-stone on the road of the Dominion's progress.

To the New Zealander of to-day the events of 1840 seem of an almost dream-like remoteness, so quickly do changes come about in a new land, and the Auckland citizen reads the description of his home as it was in the pioneer days with a sense of romantic wonder. " How silent and peaceful were Waitemata's lovely sloping shores as Aye explored them on that now long, long ago morning!" wrote Sir John -Logan Campbell in " Poenamo," narrating his boating expedition from Coromandel to the spot where Auckland now stands, a few months before the British flag was hoisted there. "As we rowed over the .calm waters the sound of our oars was all thaffc broke the stillness. . .

The open country stretched away in vast fields of fern,- and nature reigned supreme. I little thought on that morning that I should- live to see such marvellous changes—the wildest fanev could not have dreamt of them. Over how many miles did a clumsy locomotive run in England in 1840? We rowed up the beautiful harbour, closu mshdre. No sign of human life that morning; the shrill cry of the curlew on the beach and the full - rich carol of the tui or parson-bird from the brushwood skirting the shore fell faintly on the ear." Now, Auckland is a great city of a hundred thousand people, stretching from shore to ahoje of the Taniaki Isthmus; and the other day a northern M.P., who peered with prophetio eye into Auckland's future, declared siat it would be 110 extravagant estimate to say, looking to the great area of unoccupied lands yet in the province, and with the intensive cultivation that would cchne with the conclusion of the war, that twenty-live years hence there would be at least a, quarter of a million people on the shores of the Waitemata.

And when we cast a glance back at the untamed old days of New Zealand it is well to remember that it was only with the consent and the welcome of the Maori race that the white colonisation of the country became possible. Had the Native people chosen to resist pakeha sovereignty in 1840 the history of New Zealand and of the Southern Seas would have been changed to a vast extent. There were some shrewd old Maoris who foresaw that tho corathe whites involved the ultimate disappearance of the original race, and tlieso fears were expressed when the tribes debated the question of signing tho Treaty of Waitangi. But in general the jcedmg of sovereignty to the white Queen was cheerfully endorsed from end to end of these islands, and the basis of British settlement was thus established with honour to the two races and with tho acceptance of the Maori as a free people, possessing equal rights with the pakeha. That fact has never been forgotten, in spito of the unfortunate wars, caused too often by official

blundering, which disturbed the colony until 1871. The Native, happily, is no longer the source of anxiety that ho was"halt a century ago, when his loaders realised .'ll ■sorrow and anger the truth in tho predictions of the old tohunga 1 that the brown face must give place to the white and the booted foot tread down the Maori. But all those quarrels are almost as remote now from the public mind as the tale or 18-10, and the Maori, dwindled in numbers as 110 is, is a sourco of strength to tho Dominion, taking his share in Umpire defence and bearing himself as pioudlv and as bravely on the strange new battlelields as his ancestors did in the wild old years of early making 111 New Zealand.