Whenua is a New Zealand Herald project to show and tell stories of our land and explain how our history affects the present day. In this article, Ngarimu Blair describes the incredible fall and rise of Auckland’s Ngāti Whātua.
When Ngarimu Blair tells the story of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, it feels like the secret history of Auckland.
In pre-colonial times, the tribe used to be the dominant iwi in the region. When the British arrived, Blair explains how at first Ngāti Whātua encouraged the settler Government to come to Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) and traded successfully with them.
But a series of land transactions and legal manoeuvres stripped the tribe of nearly all their land, leaving the embattled iwi with only a tiny patch in Okahu Bay and a sewer pipe across their urupā (burial grounds), disgorging hospital waste and other raw sewage into the bay.
Since then, the tribe has come back to become one of the most influential property owners in central Auckland. However, it has been a hard-fought battle and even today many Aucklanders have little idea of this version of their city’s history.
Blair, the deputy chairman of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, starts the story with his ancestors, who sailed their ocean-going waka all the way from Tahiti. They landed in the Far North and eventually made their way down to Tāmaki (Auckland).
At first the tribe didn’t have much contact with the European settlers, who were based in the whaling stations in the south or north.
“We had a few settlers come through Tāmaki in the 1830s and we gave tree-cutting rights around the Waitematā and the Waitākere Ranges,” says Blair.
“But we had very limited contact until 1840, when our chiefs came up with a new strategy, seeing what was happening with the Treaty of Waitangi up north, which we signed on the shores of Manukau. We changed our strategy to actively seek settlers on the shores of the Waitematā.”
From 1840 to 1855 Ngāti Whātua and their neighbours Ngāti Pāoa dominated trading at the ports of Auckland, says Blair.
“We were pretty good at it because we could undercut the European settler prices. Our chief of the day, Paora Tūhaere, bought a schooner and sailed up to the Cook Islands and Rarotonga and brought back a shipment of tropical goods, which was a very successful venture. He also brought back a few Cook Island chiefs, who we escorted to Helensville and the Waikato, establishing relationships that continue today.”
At the same time, Blair says other deals were undermining Ngāti Whātua’s economic future, with tragic long-term consequences. The tribe’s land loss began at Emily Place, in downtown Auckland, on September 18, 1840, when Ngāti Whātua chiefs gathered to sign a land transfer to the British of about 3000 acres (1214ha) between Hobson Bay (Mataharehare), Coxs Creek (Opou/Opoututeka) and Mt Eden (Maungawhau).
The deed signed by both parties recorded that £50 in coin and goods amounting to approximately £215 (a combined total of $26,000 today) were “te utu mo taua wahi wenua koia tenei”.
This was translated into English as “the payment for the said land” but for Ngāti Whātua, the term “utu” had a broader meaning of ongoing mutual obligation.
Blair describes the exchange as tuku rangātira – selling rights to occupy and use the land, as Ngāti Whātua already did with other iwi in Tāmaki.
Six months later, the tribe realised the British had a very different interpretation of the deal, as just 44 acres (almost 18ha) of the block were resold at public auction, for £24,275 ($2.95 million today).
The commercial lots were quickly subdivided and resold at even greater profits as government officials, merchants and speculators scrambled for choice sites in what became the central business district of the new capital.
Blair notes that even the terms of the deal were disputed.
“Our chiefs thought they were gifting 3000 acres, but when the final deed was drawn up, [the Crown] had shifted the boundary and took 500 extra acres [202ha] from day one. So that didn’t bode well for future land transactions.”
Land sales continued during the 1840s and 50s under similar dubious legal circumstances. In theory the Crown had a rule that 10 per cent of all resale income would be paid back to the original Māori owners, which would have made iwi throughout New Zealand relatively well off as land prices boomed. However, in most cases this rule was ignored or reinterpreted to suit the settlers, rather than Māori.
A large chunk of greater Auckland was also sold in multiple deals during the so-called “pre-emption waiver” period of 1844-45, when the Crown briefly allowed Māori to trade directly with settlers.
When the waiver system was scrapped, the Crown took about 15,000 acres of “surplus land” on the North Shore and West Auckland which it judged had been wrongly sold, instead of giving it back to Ngāti Whātua.
Some of the key land transfers in this period were:
- In June 1841, Ngāti Whātua sold a second block of 13,000 acres (5261 ha) lying inland from the original Waitemata block, from One Tree Hill (Maungakiekie) to the Whau river, for £389. (In May Ngāti Pāoa also sold 6000 acres (2428 ha) along the waterfront from Mission Bay to the Tāmaki estuary for £358 worth of cash and goods).
- In 1854, Ngāti Whātua sold two blocks of land, Pukapuka 1 and 2, now known as Meadowbank, for £770, the last major sale of this period. The 700-acre (283ha) Ōrākei block, set aside by Ngāti Whātua chief Te Kawau to be reserved in tribal ownership forever, became the last remaining tribally owned land.
- In 1858, Ngāti Whātua gave land at Ōrākei to the Anglican Church for a chapel and school. The church sold the land to the Crown, which then evicted Ngāti Whātua. The church used the proceeds to buy the land for Queen Victoria School in Parnell and St Stephens School in Bombay Hills.
“In the first 20 years of European settlement, we were separated from almost our entire tribal estate,” says Blair.
“By 1860 all we had left was a 700-acre (283 ha) block at Ōrākei. We had lost our native title and control over all of central Auckland, the upper Waitematā and other interests in wider Auckland.”
Ngāti Whātua elders thought they had made a breakthrough in 1869 when the Native Land Court ruled the Ōrākei block should be placed in a tribal trust, managed by 13 trustees.
“However, not long after that generation died, the Crown came in and recognised those 13 trustees as individual owners and divided up their interests among themselves and their children and grandchildren.”
The decision turned out to be the beginning of the end for Ngāti Whātua’s hopes of keeping the Ōrākei block. The iwi faced a series of attacks on their ownership rights at government, council and court level, which chipped away at the little they had left.
Ngāti Whātua gave Takaparawha Pt (site of today’s Okahu Bay wharf) to the Crown for a defence post against feared Russian invasion, on the condition it should be returned if no longer needed for defence purposes.
They ended up losing this land and more when the Government used the Public Works Act to take ownership of 13 acres of Bastion Pt for defence purposes in 1886. Ngāti Whātua claimed compensation through the courts and won but the money was exhausted on legal costs and expenses. Bastion Point was to become the focus of Ngāti Whātua’s public resistance to their land loss almost a century later.
Blair says the permanent loss of these headland areas for dubious – or possibly convenient – claims of imminent foreign invasion also impacted the iwi deeply.
“We were told the coastal land would be needed to defend Aotearoa from Russia, who were going to attack us from 16,000 miles away. We lost a very important site, Kohimaramara, which was a traditional peace-making area. Pākehā called it Sugarloaf Rock. It was blasted away and the Tāmaki Yacht Club sits on top of that. They took the name Kohimaramara and used it for what’s now Kohimarama beach – it’s in the wrong place and it’s spelt wrong.”
But the most dramatic reversal of fortune for the tribe was a special act of Parliament in 1908 to take land at Okahu Bay so a sewer pipe could be laid across the beach in front of the Ngāti Whātua village.
Many people left the village when the sewage began discharging in 1914, polluting shellfish beds and turning the village into a swamp in heavy rain.
“There could be no bigger insult from the Crown and council than building the sewer pipe that pumped raw effluent into our pristine Waitematā in front of our last remaining land and burial ground,” says Blair.
“This is not a unique case – this is the path of least resistance planning by finding the weakest people and putting the worst infrastructure right in front of them. That’s repeated throughout Aotearoa. You want to find the local Māori marae and community, look for the sewer pipes – it won’t be far from there.”
He remembers hearing from his grandfather how the pipe was built in 1912.
“Across the beautiful white sandy beach was placed an 8ft-high [2.4m] concrete sewer pipe that blocked off access to their waka, to their fishing, to the kaimoana.
“Raw sewage was pumped out at Okahu Bay and much of it landed back on the beach. That had massive cultural and spiritual consequences and impacts, let alone diseases like typhoid and dysentery.
“When that pipe was finally removed, in the 1950s, it was put right in front of our relations at Ihumātao, who suffered that for decades as well.
“My grandfather told us about his childhood and said because of the pipe, in winter the village would flood and he would wake up on his mattress floating. Half of his cousins died.
“He said their job as kids was to sweep the beach of hospital waste, sometimes arms and foetuses, tampons and condoms, and bury them before they went to school.
“It had huge impacts on that generation. I have never swum in Okahu Bay to this day.”
Once the sewer pipe was built, Ngāti Whātua began to feel the full effect of the Native Land Court decision to grant control of the Ōrākei block to the 13 trustees and their descendants.
The Crown began purchasing individual blocks from tribal members, using the Public Works Act when owners refused to sell.
Some sold on the understanding they could continue to live in houses on the land but were evicted.
Between 1912 and 1950, Ngāti Whātua tried to stop the Crown purchases with eight actions in the Māori Land Court, four in the Supreme Court, two in the Court of Appeal, two in the Compensation Court, six appearances before commissions or committees of inquiry, and 15 petitions to Parliament seeking the restoration of tribal land ownership. All failed.
Blair says the legal system, which should have supported his people, worked against them.
“Our whānau lost land when they ran up costs for lawyers and surveyors and then had to sell blocks of land, sometimes to the lawyers and surveyors, to pay those people off.
“This sad story is repeated throughout the country, where individuals who received land interests in breach of tikanga, in breach of Te Tiriti and in our case, in breach of the Ōrākei Block Trust.
“It should never have happened and we effectively became squatters on our own ancestral land. Our people moved to the four winds.”
His grandfather was part of the story and so is he.
“My grandfather was born in the Okahu tribal village but had to leave as a child because of land being lost and overcrowded.
“He sought refuge 35km away with his aunty at the Reweti village, near Waimauku, and that’s where we grew up.
“My grandfather made it back to the village in our kaumātua flats when he retired and became an active member of the iwi in his later life.”
By 1939, he says nearly all members of the tribe had been evicted. Planning began for a model suburb, that would take advantage of the stunning harbour views from streets like Paratai Drive, which boast multimillion-dollar homes today.
The Bastion Point land, no longer needed for defence, was transferred to the Auckland City Council for a reserve in 1941, instead of being returned to Ngāti Whātua.
“In post-World War II Auckland, we experienced another cultural destruction,” says Blair.
“We no longer had any land, we no longer had a meeting house to host people or where our people could grieve, and the flood of Māori migrants to urban areas meant we could not connect with them.
“Land is key to Māori identity. Toi tű te whenua, toi tű te tangata – without land, humankind is nothing – that had huge impacts on us, on our confidence, on our identity and who we are.”
The losses were relentless, he says.
“By 1951 all of those land interests had been purchased, apart from a 13-acre (5ha) block, which was taken under the Public Works Act at Okaku Bay and turned into the rugby fields and reserve.
“All we had left was a quarter acre [1012sq m] which is where the urupā is.”
In 1952, the Government decided it wanted the old village on Bastion Pt for a park. The remaining inhabitants were evicted and relocated as tenants to state houses in nearby Kitemoana St.
Then the marae and some homes were destroyed by fire, so the remains of the village and marae were demolished. One reason given was that the village was “a dreadful eyesore and potential disease centre” on the route the Queen would take on her official visit the following year.
In 1976 the remaining Crown-owned land at Bastion Pt was earmarked for high-income housing and parks. The following January a Ngāti Whātua group called the Ōrākei Maori Action Committee occupied Bastion Pt in protest.
This was the moment when many Pākehā New Zealanders became aware of Ngāti Whātua’s grievances for the first time. Protest leader Joe Hawke became a household name and the protesters’ catch-cry “Bastion Point is Māori land” resonated across news bulletins for months.
After 506 days the National Government, led by Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, had enough. It sent in a massive force of police, supported by the army, to evict the protesters on May 25, 1978. A total of 222 protesters were arrested and a temporary meeting house, buildings and gardens were demolished.
In 1987 the iwi’s fortunes finally started to turn. In response to a Waitangi Tribunal report, the Government agreed to pay $3 million to Ngāti Whātua o Ōrākei to assist it with housing and other development.
Four years later the Ōrākei Act was passed, which returned some land and set aside other land as reserve to be jointly managed by the Auckland City Council and the Ngāti Whātua o Ōrākei Trust Board.
In 1995 Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei purchased its former seabed Te Tōangaroa, which had become surplus railway land in the CBD, for $44m. The iwi gave a 50% rental discount to Auckland Council to enable Spark Arena to be built.
Full settlement of the iwi’s claims was delayed for many years because of a complicated mana whenua (historical rights to the land) debate involving Ngāti Whātua and several other tribes from across the wider region.
Eventually in 2011 Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei settled its treaty claims, accepting $18m in total, plus the right to purchase $120m of surplus Defence land which it had to fund itself.
Today the tribe is an economic powerhouse, with $1.6 billion of assets in 2022 and a key stake in major decisions for Auckland, such as a potential downtown stadium.
Last year it hosted Matatini with a pōwhiri at Okahu Bay and at Ngā Ana Wai (Eden Park), the most attended and watched Matatini event in its history.
Blair is happy to reflect on how far his people have come and the lessons he feels have been learned. One of his key themes is that Ngāti Whātua used to roam across the Tāmaki isthmus and were only restricted to Ōrākei after European settlement.
“Okahu Bay became our principal settlement, as well as Māngere and Onehunga. During the leaner winter months, the majority of the tribe would survive on the base villages at Okahu and Māngere and, in summer and spring, fish on both coasts.
“When John Logan Campbell [the 19th century ‘father of Auckland’ who bought One Tree Hill] arrived to look for our chief Te Kawau, he was at his Onehunga residence. But when Te Kawau enticed Hobson to base his government here in Tāmaki, Te Kawau moved back to Okahu to be close to the new Government.
“Our name today Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei reflects our loss because we were Ngāti Whātua ki Tāmaki – we were everywhere, but we ended up with quarter of an acre at Okahu and our people scratching out an existence on the land. Part of our restoration is demonstrating to our people that our ancestors moved across the Auckland isthmus.”
Blair thinks the iwi’s history is gradually coming full circle.
“In 1840, we were a strong, confident, welcoming people and we knew our connections to various tribes. Very few know that today.
“The investment we make in our people today is so they can have the same self-belief. Our ancestors were scientists, they were horticulturalists, they were warriors when they needed to be and they were very sharp business people. That’s where all our focus is as an organisation, to rapidly – as fast as we can – to get all our people back into that state of mind and being.
“The opportunities are almost limitless when I consider what has happened over my lifetime.
“In 1978, we had to purchase the houses on Kitemoana St after the Bastion Point occupation. In 1991, we got a $3m settlement and then in 1996 we purchased [the railway land] in Auckland city for $44m. When we look at our balance sheet today, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei is coming up to $2b of assets that we have managed to accumulate – and not because of any Crown handouts. We received the $3m in 1991 and $18m in 2012 – that’s not a lot in this context and we have managed to build our asset base. We have effectively funded our own Treaty settlement.
“That we can come back from almost being wiped out to where we are today is a testament to our fortitude. We have advanced but we are only at 5-10% of where we were in 1840. There’s much more to be done.”
Whenua is a New Zealand Herald data-led project, supported by the Public Interest Journalism Fund, in association with Māori land legal expert Adrienne Paul (Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tuhoe) from the University of Canterbury law school.