Hikoi Day Two Alexandra/Pirongia.

 

17 June 22

I visited two museums today and meet some fabulous people passionate about their local history, keen to tell stories, and share resources.

At Pirongia Museum I meet Alan Hall a retired academic of from Waikato Museum.  Alan has a magnificent memory and a great grasp of New Zealand History and especially of Waikato Tainui and Maniopoto history back into the 18th century. 

Pirongia was known as Alexandra until 1896  when the name was changed to Pirongia (after the local Maunga) to avoid confusion with its namesake in Central Otago.  Many place names were changed as the provincial government system gave way to a central structure.  Alexandra was a frontier town and a military post during and after the Waikato war. In 1864 the Second Waikato Militia built two redoubts on either side of the Waipa River .  These were part of a series of fortifications between Alexandra and Cambridge designed to block possible attack from Māori living  in the Rohe Pōtae, which begins south of the Pūniu River a few kilometres from Alexandra.  There are rapids just above the town so that during the late part of the nineteenth century Alexandra was the terminus for steamers travelling up the Waipā River. When the Rohe Pōtae was opened the new railway was put through Te Awamutu rather than Alexandra and as a result the river trade died off and the township diminished.
It was at Alexandra, in 1881, that Kiingi Tāwhiao laid down his weapons to signal that he wanted to give up the ways of war and pursue a path of peace with the crown. He did not abandon his efforts to have Waikato’s confiscated lands returned.  His dream was of course never realised.

During the period of the aukati, trade continued as Māori farmers brought their poaka into town to trade with the settlers. However, pakeha were not welcome into the Rohe Pōtae and entered at the risk of their lives. The area around Alexandra was very fertile and Maori framers produced large quantities of potatoes and wheat which they processed in their own mill for export to Auckland Sydney and even to the US.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The myth of benign colonization

Image
Two major threads are evident in the telling of our nation's colonial history.  One thread perpetuates the popular myth that the colonists were benign; on the balance of things bringing more benefit to the indigenous people than costs.  This myth remains popular in some circles and has often been accompanied by the notion that race relations in New Zealand are among the best in the world, especially when compared with South Africa, Australia or the Americas.  This myth has its origins in the writing and work of Edwin Gibbon Wakefield of the New Zealand Company who believed that New Zealand could be colonized in an organised way to the benefit of Maori and settlers, making New Zealand a little England in the South Pacific.  (Part of Wakefield vision was the 'amalgamation' of the  Māori    race.  I will return to that in another post.) Erik Olssen has argued that the historiography of the nineteenth century European settlement in New Zealand seeks to offer an explanation and
Read more

Questions and Sources

Image
This like any good PhD project  is a significant endeavour with lots of questions that motivate research and the hope that there will be sufficient sources of information to adequately answer them.  Next week I will be visiting 10 museums in the Waikato and King Country region.  I will be looking for documentary sources, visual sources and objects that might shed light on my questions.   I will also peruse the official records of births, deaths and marriages, and the census, to see what they reveal about the living conditions of different communities. This may also give an indication of internal migration and transience. Among the early settlers were share-milkers, a particularly mobile population. I expect that such mobility had impacts on community building. How did changing demographics impact on cross-cultural relations? The opening of the aukati provided some opportunity for Māori, in terms of employment on the railways, improved land values and access to markets. Did this result
Read more

Interracial Marriage

Image
Intermit relations between Maori and Pakeha has been a feature of race relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Throughout the 19th century and through the first part of the twentieth century the vast majority of these relationships have been between Pakeha men and wahine Maori. From as early as 1820 sailors, sealers and whalers have formed intermit relations with wahine Maori and a number have lived as Pakeha Maori.  The signification of these relationships has changed with the political context and the agenda of the political players.  I wish to explore the role that interracial intimacy played in the coming together of Maori and settlers in the 'post-aukati' world of the King Country.   Angela Wanhalla has done important work on interracial marriages in the nineteenth century New Zealand and while her work focused on the South Island her insights and methodology will be useful in analysing interracial marriage within the King Country. Damon Salesa, following Alan Ward, elucidates
Read more