From Tauranga City Library’s archives
A monthly blog about interesting items in our collection
Resting quietly in the cold, dry, dark of our public library’s archive, sits a grey cardboard box holding a single handwritten volume, Ms 18. The volume itself is equally drab, letters mostly, from a variety of early surveyors. Absent are the sweat and dirt stains that no doubt illustrated the originals. This hand is deliberate, neat, an easy read making a “most obedient servant,” as they were so often signed, of the original letters now lost to us.
They could really be thought of as “letters from the front” within The New Zealand Wars, a far more accurate title than the older Land Wars or the absurd misnomer the Māori Wars. The surveyors if you like, were some of the last of the Empire’s troops, measuring and apportioning the spoils of war, all respectfully gazetted and clothed with the appropriate legislation. On the whole.
An invisible residue permeates Ms 18. A residue of neither ink, glue or mould, but that most powerful of colonial tools, the assumptions and ethnocentricities of the British Empire. They begin in May of 1866 and conclude in October 1868. They are full of concrete practical matters, wages, complaints, supplies and so on. However well disguised within the hum drum of bureaucracy, is a steady, dogged, grinding of the colonial mandate into this shiny new landscape; a city laid out in grids, with churches and wharfs and important people living in the best places. Land features that frustrated this effort were merely problems to be solved. Swamps were to be drained; bush and fern was to be cleared; gullies were to be avoided. There was “good land” and there was “broken land.” And there was never enough land becoming available, soon enough.
It’s not the ink and paper, or even the words themselves that make Ms 18 such an interesting part of our archive. It’s what wasn’t said, what wasn’t acknowledged, that hidden power that survives even today wherever there is prejudice, ethnocentricity and racism.
This archival item has been digitised and is available to view on Pae Korokī. You can also watch a short talk on the letters by Heritage Specialists Harley Couper and Abby Wharne. For more information about this and other items in our collection, visit Pae Korokī or email the Heritage & Research Team: Research@tauranga.govt.nz
Written by Harley Couper, Heritage Specialist at Tauranga City Library.
