Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Making Pakeha
By 1840, Maori tribes described local Europeans as 'their Pakeha', and valued the profit
and prestige they brought. Maori wanted more of both, and concluded that accepting nom-
inal British authority was the way to get them. At the same time, the British government
was overcoming its reluctance to undertake potentially expensive intervention in NZ. It too
was influenced by profit and prestige, but also by humanitarian considerations. It believed,
wrongly but sincerely, that Maori could not handle the increasing scale of unofficial
European contact. In 1840, the two peoples struck a deal, symbolised by the treaty first
signed at Waitangi on 6 February that year. The Treaty of Waitangi now has a standing not
dissimilar to that of the Constitution in the US, but is even more contested. The original
problem was a discrepancy between British and Maori understandings of it. The English
version promised Maori full equality as British subjects in return for complete rights of
government. The Maori version also promised that Maori would retain their chieftainship,
which implied local rights of government. The problem was not great at first, because the
Maori version applied outside the small European settlements. But as those settlements
grew, conflict brewed.
Scottish influence can still be felt in NZ, particularly in the south of the South Island. NZ has more Scot-
tish pipe bands per capita than Scotland itself.
In 1840, there were only about 2000 Europeans in NZ, with the shanty town of Koror-
areka (now Russell) as the capital and biggest settlement. By 1850, six new settlements had
been formed with 22,000 settlers between them. About half of these had arrived under the
auspices of the New Zealand Company and its associates. The company was the brainchild
of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who also influenced the settlement of South Australia.
Wakefield hoped to short-circuit the barbarous frontier phase of settlement with 'instant
civilisation', but his success was limited. From the 1850s, his settlers, who included a high
proportion of upper-middle-class gentlefolk, were swamped by succeeding waves of im-
migrants that continued to wash in until the 1880s. These people were part of the great
British and Irish diaspora that also populated Australia and much of North America, but the
NZ mix was distinctive. Lowland Scots settlers were more prominent in NZ than else-
where, for example, with the possible exception of parts of Canada. NZ's Irish, even the
Catholics, tended to come from the north of Ireland. NZ's English tended to come from the
counties close to London. Small groups of Germans, Scandinavians and Chinese made their
