Who doesn’t love a good founding story? Whether a corporation, school or spectacular event, there was initially someone with grand dreams: Suzie Moncrieff dreaming up WOW, the World of WearableArt, or the young Woolf Fisher and Maurice Paykel (and their dads) starting in the 1930s as importers of washing machines before manufacturing their own.
Our cities are harder to pin down to a single visionary. Granted, Wellington has the Wakefields and the 1840 arrival of the ship Aurora, and the South Island’s cities were visited by whalers in the 1830s before the immigrant ships arrived.
What about our biggest city? Ah, yes, you nod confidently, Auckland’s Anniversary Day is celebrated in late January with a public holiday and a regatta. You might add, if you know a bit of history, it was enshrined in law in 1842 to commemorate the arrival in the Bay of Islands in January 1840 of New Zealand’s first Governor, William Hobson.
Except there’s another date with a claim to be Auckland’s true founding day, a far more interesting story that few Aucklanders know. On a spring Friday, September 18, 1840, two ships lay in the Waitematā Harbour, the Anna Watson and the Platina. They carried Hobson’s newly appointed officials, a kitset government house and about 50 “mechanics” – carpenters, stonemasons, sawyers.
Rowed ashore, the officials climbed a headland and conducted some last-minute negotiations with Ngāti Whātua chiefs led by Āpihai Te Kawau. They ran the Royal Standard up a tall spar and toasted the young Queen Victoria. Back on board, they organised an impromptu regatta with the ships’ boats and some local waka, and in the evening were entertained by Captain David Rough’s songs with his guitar – “though he had shouted himself somewhat hoarse, in honour of her Majesty in the morning”.
We know this, from the sole, first-hand account of Auckland’s proclamation as the capital of New Zealand, because of the one woman in the shore party. (Her Journal 1840 is an Auckland Central City Library taonga.) Sarah Mathew was 35, daughter of a London silk merchant and wife of the first surveyor-general, Felton Mathew. Earlier in the year, directed by Hobson to recommend a site suitable for a capital, the couple had carried out an arduous two-month exploration of the harbours south of the Bay of Islands.
For 20 years, I’ve been intrigued by the indefatigable Sarah Mathew and her contribution to New Zealand’s historical record, sufficient to produce a biography (2015) and recently a novel, The Sparrow, in which Auckland’s first six months are seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl.
Mathew is yet another example of how the contributions of pioneer women have been denigrated or ignored by (mostly male) historians. Even in 1940, editor James Rutherford titled his centennial publication The Founding of New Zealand: The Journals of Felton Mathew, first Surveyor-General of New Zealand and his Wife, 1840-1847. Felton’s name is remembered by an Auckland street. He wrote well but “his wife” was the keener observer.
Despite this, she has usually been dismissed as acerbic and priggish. She was a well-read, intrepid Englishwoman who clearly didn’t suffer fools. The ceremonies of September 18 Sarah Mathew thought “a good omen for the prosperity of the new city which is to rise on this spot. On the flagstaff was cut the name, Auckland, with the date of the day and year.”
In 2018, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and the Ports of Auckland unveiled the handsome memorial Te Toka o Āpihai Te Kawau on Quay St, near the site of the September 18 founding. This tribute deserves to be much better known and celebrated.
Tessa Duder is a writer of fiction and non-fiction for young people and adults.
