Enemy at the Gates 1820, 1828

The Intertribal Musket War’s Impact on Tauranga

A Ngāpuhi musket haka or haka peruperu

During the 1820s and 1830s, the Matua-Otūmoetai foreshore boomed and echoed ominously to the roar of haka, as besieging enemy tribesmen from several iwi leapt and stamped in frustrated fury below Otūmoetai, a previously unconquerable pā tūwatawata (palisaded fortress). During the summer months of 1820, the foreshore became the scene of one of the most famous peace-making incidents of the intertribal Musket Wars.

In that year, Tauranga was invaded by a Ngāpuhi musket taua of 600-700 warriors aboard 50 waka taua.¹ The expedition was initiated by the rangatira Te Morenga, who was seeking further utu for the killing, cooking and devouring of his niece Tawaputa at Tauranga in 1806. Deploying his contingent of shock troops ahead of his force (35 toa armed with the only flintlock muskets in their possession), Te Morenga oversaw the destruction by gunfire of the Ngāi Te Rangi defenders of [Mount] Maunganui Pā, who twice charged their ranks with traditional short and long weapons of stone, bone and wood. ‘For three days the grisly aftermath of the battle [fought at Waikorire-Pilot Bay] continued as the bodies of those slain were committed to the hāngī and eaten’.²

Te Morenga and his triumphant taua next turned their attention to Otūmoetai Pā. Initially bypassing the fortress, the Ngāpuhi fleet encamped on Matakana Island for several days, before sweeping en masse one morning into the Matua inlet near the Wairoa River outlet. The toa disembarked and camped on the long-abandoned pā site of Matuaiwi, a knoll overhanging the Wairoa River, about a mile and a half from the great Otūmoetai pā. Like successive enemy taua before them, they too attempted to storm Ngāi Te Rangi’s central fortress without success.³

Te Morenga’s moko Mataora (face tattoo).
Eight years after the kidnapping of his niece and sister by convict pirates in 1806, Te Morenga sketched this image of his own moko Mataora for John Nicholas, who was friend and assistant to the leading missionary Samuel Marsden

Te Waru, Ngāi Te Rangi’s paramount chief, set out alone one day to reconnoitre the Ngāpuhi camp. Advancing carefully through the ngaio trees along the foreshore, he saw Te Morenga, who was resting in the shade, also alone and unguarded. Springing upon the Ngāpuhi, Te Waru disarmed him, bound his hands and drove his prisoner into Otūmoetai Pā. There he untied Te Morenga, restored his weapons and instructed him to treat him in the same manner. When Te Morenga drove the disarmed and bound Te Waru into the Matuaiwi encampment, he, with some difficulty, persuaded his warriors not to kill his prisoner. Invited to make peace with Ngāpuhi, an extended kōrero ensued during which Te Waru accepted the offer. Soon after, Te Morenga and Ngāpuhi fleet departed for the Bay of Islands. The peace was to last until 1831, when the tohunga Te Haramiti’s Ngāti Kuri and Ngāpuhi predatory raiders were defeated by Ngāi Te Rangi and allied iwi on Motiti Island.⁴

In 1828, Otamataha Pā on the Te Papa Peninsula was stormed in a night attack by a Ngāti Maru musket taua under the rangatira Te Rohu, during which most of the Ngāti Tapu inhabitants were slaughtered. Te Rohu’s waka fleet then crossed to the Otūmoetai foreshore and pā, where they met with counterfire from the now musket armed defenders. The besiegers withdrew when one of Te Rohu’s wives persuaded him that the utu he had attained from Ngāi Te Rangi during the storming of Otamataha Pā was sufficient.⁵

A pōwhiri or welcoming ceremony on the harbourside bench beyond the palisades of Otūmoetai Pā. The palisades proved impervious to musket and cannon fire when Tītore Tākiri of Ngāpuhi launched an amphibious artillery campaign against the Tauranga people in 1832

On 17 July 1842, Ensign Abel Best visited Otūmoetai Pa at a time when it was still subject to attacks by Te Arawa contingents from Rotorua. Impressed by its defences, he recorded:

Part of the Pa is on the sea beach and part on the top of a cliff or steep bank 40 feet high. By its position naturally strong it is rendered more secure by a strong palisade and on the land side & flanks it is further protected by a deep and wide Ditch having a Stockade on its exterior side. Moreover, the level of the exterior plain is somewhat lower than that of the Pa. Were it well defended its intricacy alone would render it formidable but at present there are not men in it to defend one fifth of its great extent. Nowhere have I seen so great a number of fine Canoes the care with which they preserve their fishing nets was also worthy of remark every net being placed on a little elevated platform and then securely thatched over.⁶

During the Musket Wars, the Ngāi Te Rangi hapu occupying the Otūmoetai Pā site were able to defend their fortress and drive off besieging Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Maru and Te Arawa  taua. The wars set in motion more than 40 heke or tribal migrations, but Ngāi Te Rangi were never driven from their lands. Otūmoetai Pā’s steep escarpments, defensive ditches and palisades were unassailable, the defenders too well led, provisioned and resolute.

Endnotes

¹ Crosby, Ron, The Musket Wars: A History of Inter-Iwi Conflict, Reed, Auckland, 1999: 71-72.

² Ibid: 72

³ Gifford, W.H. and H, Bradley Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga, Capper Press Christchurch, 1976: 18.

⁴ Ibid: 18-19.

⁵ Wilson, J.A. The Story of Te Waharoa, Whitcombe and Tombs, Wellington, 1907: 17.

⁶ Best Able, The Journal of Ensign Best, 1837-1843, Nancy M. Taylor (ed.), R.E. Owen, Wellington, 1966: 371-372.

Illustrations

Artist unknown, ‘New Zealand war-dance’, in Grant, James, British Battles on Land and Sea, Vol. III, Casell, Petter and Gilpin, London, Paris and New York, 1880: 259.

Te Morenga, self portrait in Nicholas, John, Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand, Performed in the Years 1814 and 1815, James Black, London, 1817: 216. Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. A-080-061

Joseph Merrett, A meeting of visitors Mounganui. Tauraga in the distance. [1843?], E-216-f-119, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

Making hay while the sun shines

Making hay while the sun shines

 From Tauranga City Library’s archives

A monthly blog about interesting items in our collection

Activities in January can include putting New Year resolutions into practise, summer swims, camping holidays, and haymaking - so here are a few snapshots from the archives of local farms and families haymaking and haybales.

In 1926 it was 'blazing weather' when Ethel Louisa and Charles Edward Macmillan were haymaking on their farm 'Yatton Rise', at St George's Hill, Fraser Street.

Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Ams 80/11/40

Ethel noted in pencil on the back of her watercolour. Fifty-six of her watercolours are viewable online in Pae Koroki, many of places around Tauranga 1920-1949.

Haymaking techniques have changed over the years - we wouldn't usually now see a stack as high as the one on Armstrongs' Te Puna farm in 1938.

Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo 01-263

The Gasson's were all wearing hats with wide brims when they were baling hay with a stationary baler on Tilby's Arawa farm, Ōtūmoetai (Matua) in the 1940s.

Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo 99-1277

In 1961 it was a team effort to unload hay bales on Matapihi Farm, this image taken by the Bay of Plenty Times, and part of our Gifford-Cross collection.

Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo 99-1277

Local farmer and chairman of the Te Puke branch of Federated Farmers, Mr T.B. (Rex) Benner, of Pongakawa was in the news on 29 November 1967 for inventing an 'ingenious' device to gather hay and mechanically toss the bales onto the trailer.  After three years development, trial and error, he had registered at the Patents Office and a firm in Morrinsville was starting manufacture. While demonstrating the prototype to the Bay of Plenty Times, he described the New Years Eve that had inspired the invention - while friends were all enjoying a New Years party, him and his wife had milked 120 cows, then were in the fields until midnight with aching backs from 'lifting up hay bales the hard way to beat the weather'.

Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo 99-1277

Not all haymaking was for farming purposes, the Bay of Plenty Grand Prix racetrack relied on haybales to stop careening cars on corners. The Mount News publishing this photograph of J. Murphy's Anglia in hay bales on 16 January 1967 - check out the spectator stand.

Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo gcc-5838

Although these are all local snapshots, they'll be familiar to people in other regions, as summer haymaking was similiar across the motu (country).

Bradbury's Illustrated Series

From Tauranga City Library’s archives

A monthly blog about interesting items in our collections.

Published throughout the first half of the 20th century, are a run of eleven Bradbury’s Illustrated Series, booklet guides to various districts of the North Island.  Journalist Ernest. E. Bradbury (1868-1955) produced the booklets and maps, having established publishers E. Bradbury & Co., in Wyndham Street, Auckland.  

Front cover of Bradbury's East Coast, 5th Edition.

E. Bradbury & Co. would drum up business by proposing to councils and chambers of commerce that they purchase the booklets for distribution through libraries and hotels (Bay of Plenty Times, 1915).   Te Ao Mārama – Tauranga City Libraries hold the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th editions of booklets on the Bay of Plenty region, in the Sladden Collection.

Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries' copies of the Bradbury's Illustrated Series in the Sladden Collection in a climate controlled room.

As well as an inclusion of photographs of the region, the booklets are described in their titles as “showing the resources and potentialities of this extensive district : with a short descriptive history from the early days up till the present”; including “scenic attractions”; and “industry and resources”.   

 Photo "A Bay of Plenty Peach Grove" in Bradbury's Bay of Plenty, 1919.

While the sections titled Early History and Maori War give an inaccurate historical account of Tauranga, other sections of the guides were likely to be useful for travellers, and a good resource for locals  to reference as well.  The Means of Access section provides details of how the settlements within the region could be reached from Auckland. Of note are the travel times in the early 1900s, for example, Ōpōtiki,  97 miles from Rotorua, is an eight-hour motorcar journey, including all the stops to small towns (Bradbury, 1919, p.3).

The booklets changed over the span of the years of their production.   "Bradbury's Bay of Plenty" was consolidated into "Bradbury's East Coast" by 1938, which also covered Gisborne and other East Coast settlements. Later editions contain glossier paper and better defined images.  A few colour prints  are included in the 5th & 6th editions.

A colour print in Bradbury's East Coast, 5th Edition.

A few fold-out maps, including local advertising, are attached inside each booklet.  They are described in one review as “a very useful map that should be of the greatest benefit to motorists” (Te Puke Times, 1928, p.3).

Map of the Bay of Plenty from Bradbury's Bay of Plenty, 1928.
Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries' reference: Map 20-288 Pae Korokī

Advertising sales revenue was another income source aside from the booklet sales, for E. Bradbury & Co.  The advertisements are now useful records of various Tauranga businesses, their owners and locations over time.

Advertisements for Tauranga businesses in Bradbury's Bay of Plenty, 1922.

 

Nursing Home advertisement in Bradbury's Bay of Plenty, 1949.

Bradbury likely created some of the more deluxe business advertisements with photographs that he took himself.   He would travel around the country, photographing prominent establishments, urban settings, kainga Māori and outdoor scenic areas.  

Image of Devonport Road, Tauranga, 1948.
Collection of Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato 1961/4/185

His images, produced with gelatin dry plate and glass plate negative techniques, would appear in other publications such as the New Zealand Graphic and the Auckland Weekly News.

"A Well-Known East Coast Port" Image of Tauranga, 1909, Auckland Weekly News -
Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections AWNS-19090603-04-05

Digitised images from Ernest Bradburys' collections can be found at various institutions, including Auckland Libraries, Waikato Museum, and the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which holds 780 of his glass plate negatives.  

 Note: A previous version of this blog referred to 'hand-coloured photographs', it is now amended to read 'colour prints'.

Flo Chapman's Farm Diaries

Flo's diaries, 1935, 1940, 1957

Farm diaries hardly ever survive. Because – if used as the publishers of these practical tools of farming life intended – they were there at the docking race, the hayshed or the A&P show. They, like their owners, had a hard life. Used to record only the dullest and most quotidian details from year to year they, mostly, were discarded as soon as the farm accounts were beyond the reach of auditors and the taxman.

Notwithstanding their usefulness for farming life, in fifty years of publication the New Zealand Journal of Agriculture makes only four references to the farm diary. These references are, however, very telling. The diary is an essential aspect of prudent husbandry [1] and land management [2]. It supports the farm’s business records [3] and can be used to satisfy an inquiring accountant of just when and why that cheque stub recording “Cash  - Repairs and Maintenance” (often abbreviated to “Cash - R&M”) was written out [4].

Perston Collection plan showing Chapman's farm, n.d.

You can therefore imagine the excitement felt by the archivist of the Te Puna Community Archive when, among the items stashed in a cupboard of the soon-to-be-demolished Te Puna Community Library, were found three battered volumes, each, apparently, recording day-to-day activities on George Chapman’s farm along Wairoa Road in Te Puna. The earliest has the scrawled inscription “1935” on its cover. The next carries an advertisement for boot polish and is from 1940, the first full year of the Second World War. The third, in slightly better nick, is confidently labelled, “Whitcombe’s New Zealand Farmers’ Diary for 1957” and carries the exhortation, below an image of exemplary mixed-country industriousness and prosperity: “This Diary will help you to increase your profit very materially, if you will keep a record of the notable facts and incidents, relating to your farming operations from day to day.”

How wonderful, the community archivist (the present writer) thought, in a landscape so changed and fractured by horticulture and life-style blocks as Te Puna’s, to have even three separate years’ record of day-to-day farming on a single farm before, during and in the decade after, WW II.

Vicinity of Chapmans farm, 2024, riverline in distance

George and Florence (always known as ‘Flo’)  Chapman’s farm was close [5] to those of H J Perston [6] and Arthur Todman [7].  If a conscientious record of ‘notable facts and incidents’ on their  property had been kept, the mid-twentieth century rural economy of quite a large swathe of land above the Wairoa River [8] might, by inference, be available to future researchers.

It turns out, not. The diaries are, each of them, Flo’s brief and unemotive account of the doings on, off and around the farm and within her household. There’s hardly a day missed, except for some blank sequences when she is evidently away from the farm. The weather is invariably reported on, but as often in terms of getting the washing dry as getting the haymaking done – or even, being “too wet to work this afternoon”. There are many references to arable crops – mangolds, onions, lucerne - and very few to animals. Pigs are delivered or sent away and the bobby calves are put out for the truck, which sometimes fails to turn up. (George’s carriage-horse hobby, for which he won prizes in 1927 [9], seems to have faded by 1935.) And his activities in the Farmer’s Union, which had been prodigious through most of the 1930’s [10], were much curtailed for the year of the 1940 diary. On January 26, Flo notes, “Men went to a farmers meeting, I went to the pictures”. After that, although they are sometimes in town on the day of Union meetings, Flo does not record any specific purpose for the trip. Fuel was tight in wartime, costs were rising in the war economy, and labour was in short supply. Their farm worker, Richard (Dick) Flavell was called up in early October [11] – nowhere mentioned in the diary – and was still on-farm for Christmas and Boxing Day, because Flo notes he had both days off.

In the easier economy of 1957, or maybe after some hard-won experience, Flo’s farm diary becomes more like the record idealised in the Journal of Agriculture. She notes the cost of baling 333 bales of hay on January 8: “£25-13-0 paid”. One-and-six a bale would have seemed a lot compared to 1935, when George and helpers built a haystack, but, unlike stacked hay, bales maintain higher nutritional qualities and all of every bale is quick and easy to feed out. The herd tester is there for the afternoon and morning milkings over 24 and 25 March. The dairy season re-starts on 7 July, when the first calf is born on a morning of “very heavy frost”. The first can of cream is sent off on 19 July, presumably still in excellent condition after eight successive days of frost that ended only on the 17^th. As the cows “come in” for the new milking season, arrivals of bobby calves and the first lamb are interspersed with car repairs and Flo’s bowling scores. On the same day she got a £2/7/2d cheque for the bobbies, George got measured for a suit. Flo has hot water piped to her wash house and carpet in her kitchen. Things are looking up on the farm.

Flo's handwriting, 31 Dec 1957

Such threads and patches are probably insufficient to support any firm historical conclusions about mid-twentieth century farming life in Te Puna. But, lodged safely as they are in the Te Puna Community Archive, the diaries are valuable as representative examples of rural work and local society, only occasionally resonant of the world a long way away [12] and often silent or only hinting at issues that must have had significant impact on the Chapman’s life on their farm [13].  These humble volumes would repay more considered study.

All images by Beth Bowden

References

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[1] Papers Past | Magazines and Journals | New Zealand Journal of Agriculture | 20 June 1914 | WORK FOR THE COMING MONTH.  Author, Primrose McConnell

[2] Papers Past | Magazines and Journals | New Zealand Journal of Agriculture | 16 June 1947 | STUDIES IN FARM MANAGEMENT  Author, J G Richards

[3] Papers Past | Magazines and Journals | New Zealand Journal of Agriculture | 15 August 1945 | SEASONAL NOTES  Farm Records, author E M Bates

[4] Author’s personal recollection, Ettrick Farms Limited records (private archive).

[5] Trespass warning, Papers Past | Newspapers | Bay of Plenty Times | 28 April 1921 | Page 1 Advertisements Column 7

[6] I am indebted to René Swan of Tauranga City Libraries for finding Perston’s survey drawing in their collection of local maps and plans

[7] https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2021/11/after-demobilisation-arthur-weber.html  Author, Beth Bowden

[8] https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2024/05/maihi-te-poria-and-wairoa-road.html  Author, Beth Bowden

[9] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19270224.2.20 

[10] Papers Past, multiple references; for background to farming politics at the time, see also https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2019/12/putting-matters-right.html  Author, Beth Bowden

[11] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19401003.2.32

[12] Diary entry, 4 October 1935:  “War started between Italy & Abyssinia.”

[13] Farm labour, for instance.  Not only was Dick Flavell’s departure to be a soldier delayed for months after he was balloted in 1940;  Flo’s 1935 entries between the fortnight beginning 30 September – 13 October tersely describe the strains created by worker Reg’s decision to leave.

Matakana Island

Pilot Bay from above, Mauao and Matakana Island
Colour postcard, photographed by Bob Ricketts, Old Grumpy’s Gallery, Mt Maunganui
Collection of Justine Neal

Matakana Island is a mixture of white, sparkling sand, pine forest, farmland and a peaceful harbour. It is the third largest island by area in the North Island and the 15^thlargest within New Zealand waters. The island’s long, white sandy beach is popular with surfers and is also a nesting place for the New Zealand dotterel/tuturiwhatu, a threatened shorebird.

Matakana Island and the Tauranga Harbour from the Bowentown Heads, June 2023
Photograph by Justine Neal

The island is 24 kilometres long and rarely more than 3 kilometres wide. It is New Zealand’s largest barrier island. Its development, together with that of the tombolo (a narrow strip of land, usually made of sand or gravel, that connects an island to the mainland or another island) adjoining Mauao and Bowentown Heads, formed Te Awanui/Tauranga Harbour, a 200 square kilometre estuarine lagoon.

Matakana Island, northern channel and Mauao from the Bowentown Heads, June 2023
Photograph by Justine Neal

The island has been continuously populated for centuries by iwi who are mostly associated with Ngai Te Rangi.

Nine year-old trees, Matakana Island
Unmounted silver gelatin print by unidentified photographer
Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Ams 12/4/5

The island has two distinct parts, 5,000 acres of farm and orchard land on the inner harbour and 10,000 acres of forest covered coastal land.

Wharf at Matakana Island
Unmounted silver gelatin print by unidentified photographer
Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Ams 12/4/4

The 1920’s saw the development of a pine forest through private plantings. In 1949 the first logging crew went into the forest. The first 30 year old plantings were used for the post and poles market. In 1951 Bunn Brothers Ltd. took up the island’s pine milling rights.

S.S. Ngakuta clearing the Tauranga Heads, View from the Mount, c. 1916-1922
Real photo postcard, photographed by John Welsh, published by Frank Duncan & Co. for A.J. Mirrielees, Tauranga
Collection of Justine Neal

My postcard shows part of Matakana Island as a low-lying sand bar in pre-forestry days. The SS Ngakuta was built in 1913 and owned by the Blackball Coal Co. She was designed and equipped as a collier but carried other cargoes including fruit from Pacific Island ports. From 1922 she was leased to the United Steam Ship Co. and purchased outright by them in 1942. She was sold to ship breakers in 1952.

References

Wikipedia

NZ Ship and Marine Society

National Library of New Zealand

Bay of Plenty Regional Council