LAND UNDER MAORI MANAGEMENT Difficult country on Patemaru Station, farmed by the East Coast Commission, now to be transferred to Maori Committee of Management. (John Ashton Photograph) A country of narrow, high mountain ridges, covered with bush fern and scrub, deeply and irregularly cut by streams, the district from the Wairoa northwards was first settled by the Ngati Kahungunu and Ngati Porou. It was not country that attracted many pakeha settlers in the early nineteenth century. This was not only accounted for by the difficulties of the ground, but also by the frequency and vigour of the Maori land claims and disputes in the area, as well as the bands of Te Kooti and others. Even in 1868, so Lambert tells us, the area back of Wairoa properly cleared and laid down in English grasses was inconsiderable. Further north along the East Coast there was a certain amount of farming. After the Maori Wars, the state of the inhabitants was critical; great debts had accumulated and poverty and undernourishment were rife. The wheat and flax industry and the shipping industry started by Ngati Kahungunu and Ngati Porou had collapsed; the plantations were neglected. Worse still, reconstruction of these means of livelihood was retarded by the onset of a world-wide depression, during which the newly acquired pakeha skills could not avail the Maori people. Among the many schemes of land development that sprang up about this time was the East Coast (later: New Zealand) Native Land Settlement Company which was incorporated in 1881. This venture was an unusual and ingenious one. Promoted equally by European settlers and Maori leaders, chief of whom was Wiremu Pere, it was a genuine profit-sharing enterprise, with the Maori owners holding two-thirds of the shares of the company. These shares had been exchanged for 200,000 acres of tribal lands in the Wairoa, Gisborne and Tolaga Bay districts, so that in effect the Maoris contributed land to the company and the Europeans cash. Unfortunately, there was