AUCKLAND PROVINCE AND PROVINCIAL DISTRICTS

Auckland was the largest of the original six provinces of New Zealand both in population and in area. Despite separation movements in the outlying districts of Poverty Bay and Northland, Auckland maintained its unity until the abolition of the provinces in 1876. When the provincial boundaries were defined in 1853 the North Island interior was little known to the white man and the southern boundary of Auckland was drawn simply as the thirty-ninth parallel of latitude between Mahia Peninsula, on the east coast, and the Wanganui River. After 1876 the provincial district continued to be an administrative division for the Department of Lands and Survey, but with the expansion of settlement it proved too large a unit and was eventually divided into three land districts: North Auckland, South Auckland, and Gisborne. The arbitrary line of the thirty-ninth parallel was replaced by boundaries conforming more realistically to the surface configuration. Thus small areas of the Wellington and Hawke's Bay Land Districts extend into the former Auckland Province and a small area of the South Auckland Land District is in the former Wellington Province. The ties of community of interest between the Gisborne–East Cape district and the rest of the province have never been strong, and trade and communications have been with the southern North Island rather than with Auckland.

At the time of its establishment in 1853, the Auckland Province contained about one-third of the 30,000 European settlers in New Zealand and an estimated 70 per cent of the Maoris. By 1861 Auckland's European population was surpassed by that of Otago and, briefly, between 1878 and 1886, Auckland fell to third place after Otago and Canterbury. By 1901 the Auckland Provincial District once more regained first place and, thereafter, the gap between it and all other districts steadily widened. If the Maori population is included in provincial totals (the Maori numbers in the nineteenth century are not known with certainty) it is probable that Auckland has always been the most populous province.

Auckland has a longer history of continuous European enterprise than any other province, but unlike the other five original provinces its settlement did not originate in planned colonisation by a relatively homogeneous group. The population has always been more varied in race and origin than that of the other New Zealand provinces. Not only has Auckland always contained the greater part of the Maori population, but it has also been a focus for continuing migration from overseas. In 1956 the provincial district accounted for 40 per cent of the total New Zealand population, but it had the majority of the country's Pacific Island immigrants, 80 per cent of those born in Yugoslavia, 59 per cent of the Canadian born, 56 per cent of those of United States birth, 46 per cent of the Australian born, and 55 per cent of the Indian born.

Early Settlements

Auckland was the most densely populated part of the country when the first Europeans arrived. Estimates by the most reliable observers in the early nineteenth century suggest that it contained about 75 per cent of the population. Settlement was particularly dense in northern Northland, around the shores of Hauraki Gulf, around Kawhia and Raglan Harbours, on the banks of the Waikato and Waipa Rivers, along the Bay of Plenty coast, along the east coast from the Mahia Peninsula to East Cape, and in the Rotorua lakes district. Cultivations of the kumara, taro, and gourd were extensive, particularly on volcanic soils of northerly aspect; terraced hill forts and palisaded villages were numerous. The clearing of land by burning as a prelude to cultivation had made considerable inroads into the forests.

Abandoned Maori cultivations reverted to fern and scrub and on such open lands the first European settlers made their farms.

In 1853 the core of the newly established Auckland Province was the Tamaki Isthmus. In the settled districts within a radius of 20 miles of the town of Auckland lived nine-tenths of the white population of the province. Yet this area had been the focus of European activity only since 1840, when it was selected primarily as the site for the colonial capital. In no other province had European enterprise been so widely dispersed prior to the establishment of “official” settlement.

Timber for shipbuilding had been taken from the River Thames in 1792, and from 1794 onwards the Bay of Islands became a favoured refitting and victualling depot for deep-sea whaling ships of many nationalities. The riotous little settlement of Kororareka(q.v.) attracted a motley assortment of ex-convicts from Australia, traders, runaway sailors, and some Scottish artisans, who went there after the failure of an attempt at planned colonisation in Hokianga Harbour in 1827. Until the 1830s European interest centred on northern Northland, with its deeply indented harbours, its resources of flax and kauri spars, and its dense Maori population. From here the disruptive effects of the European contact with the Maori spread throughout much of the North Island. The trade in muskets made intertribal conflict much more devastating, and warfare and the depredations caused by European diseases may have reduced the Maori population by one half in the 30 years before 1840.

Mission enterprise had more constructive results. Inspired by Marsden, Anglican missionary activity began at the Bay of Islands in 1814, but it did not prosper until the arrival of the energetic Henry Williams in 1823. Wesleyan missions were established nearby on Whangaroa Harbour in 1823 and Hokianga Harbour in 1828. In 1831 New Zealand's first proper farm was established at Waimate, on the model of an English mixed farm, by the missionary-farmer Richard Davis. There were 10 mission stations in Northland by 1838. .

In the 1830s both missionary and trader spread their activities more widely throughout what was to become the Auckland Province and introduced the Maori to European crops and the rudiments of new farming techniques. Traders, based on Sydney, collected flax, pork, and potatoes from Kawhia Harbour, the Bay of Plenty, and remote Poverty Bay. Seven mission stations were founded between 1834 and 1839 on the west coast between Manukau and Kawhia Harbours, and there were three on Hauraki Gulf, two in the heart of the Waikato, two at Rotorua, and one at Tauranga.

Founding of Auckland

In 1840 European activity shifted abruptly to the Tamaki Isthmus and Northland became a backwater. Governor Hobson, in giving his reasons for selecting Auckland as the site for the colonial capital, pointed to its central position with respect to the native population, the ease of water communication by sea and river, the excellent harbour with ready access to fresh water and valuable timber stands, and the agricultural potential of the red volcanic soils which had long been cleared of forest and were then carrying scrub and fern. The terraced earthworks of more than 20 hill forts were impressive evidence of a dense population in the past, but in 1840 there were few Maoris within 20 miles of Auckland. Settlers in southern New Zealand criticised the choice of an “off centre” site for the colonial capital, but the Governor's mission was not so much to superintend white colonisation as to ensure that strife between Maori and European would be avoided, and for this purpose Auckland was an ideal site.

The town of Auckland was laid out to the plan of Felton Mathew and by the end of 1840 a large-scale influx of officials, tradesmen, and labourers had taken place from the Bay of Islands. By 1841 the white population was 1,500 and in 1842 the first two immigrant ships direct from Britain landed some 500 Scottish settlers. Auckland was more varied in its functions than any of the “organised” settlements in central and southern New Zealand. It was an administrative and military centre and a trading port for a widely scattered hinterland. Its export list was more varied than that of any other New Zealand settlement and in 1858 included copper ore, potatoes, gold dust and kauri gum, timber, cheese, and wool. It was also a centre for boatbuilding and for other woodworking industries based on the kauri timber of the nearby Waitakere Ranges.

Distinctive were the five “pensioner villages”, forming an outer defensive screen, overlooking the main waterway approaches to Auckland. These were established by Governor Grey after the war in the Bay of Islands in 1845; in return for light military service former Imperial soldiers were granted a cottage and an acre of land. Some 700 military settlers arrived, many of them of Irish origin. They formed a pool of rural labour and in their spare time tilled their garden-farms and supplied Auckland and the shipping with vegetables, fruit, and dairy produce. Despite the emphasis on trade, administration, and industry, Auckland made more rapid progress in mixed farming during the forties and fifties than any of the southern settlements. In 1858 Auckland Province, with 30 per cent of the country's white population, had 42 per cent of the crop and sown grassland in possession of Europeans, a greater acreage in potatoes than the whole of the South Island, and came third after Canterbury and Nelson in the area of wheat grown. The undulating farmlands around Auckland, with their stone walls, hedgerows, and numerous cottages, were commended by visitors for their neat “home-like English” appearance. Indeed, the “concentration and contiguity” of settlement and the English-style mixed farming envisaged in the theorists' plans for the southern settlements of New Zealand were probably achieved more faithfully in the neighbourhood of Auckland in the 1850s than in any of the “planned” settlements of the south.

Maori agriculture also prospered in the period 1845 to 1860, especially in the Waikato and Bay of Plenty districts. European crops were enthusiastically adopted and substantial quantities of wheat, maize, and potatoes were sent by canoe and coastal vessel to Auckland for export to Australia. The collapse of the market for foodstuffs on the Australian gold-fields after 1856 and the rise of Maori nationalism in the Waikato put an end to the “golden age” of Maori arable farming.

The land laws of the Province of Auckland provided for the sale of rural Crown lands at the fixed price of 10s. per acre, but much land was acquired by speculators in 1853 and remained unfarmed for decades. Alone among the provinces Auckland set aside certain blocks for “special settlements” by organised groups of immigrants. Unique also were the free grants of 40 acres of land made to fare-paying immigrants. These could be held either as part of a group settlement or in general country lands. Group settlements were founded under these conditions in three areas of Northland: at Waipu, near Whangarei, where some 900 people of Scottish highland descent, led by Norman McLeod, arrived in 1851 and 1852 after a sojourn in Nova Scotia, Canada; on Kaipara Harbour, where the Albertland settlement of English and Scottish Nonconformists began in 1862 and attracted about 3,000 settlers; and the Bohemian settlement at Puhoi, founded in 1863. All these areas were on soils difficult to farm and were generally without road access. South of Auckland the frontier of white settlement before the Maori Wars had reached Drury and Waiuku, on the fringe of the dense bush which barred the way to the Waikato.

The census of 1861 gives some indication of the varied origins of the settlers who came to the Auckland Province before the Maori Wars. Of the overseas-born population only 50 per cent were from England; 15 per cent were from Scotland; 21 per cent were from Ireland (the highest proportion in any New Zealand province up to that date); 5 per cent were born in Australia–a proportion exceeded only in Southland; and no less than 7 per cent were designated as “other British” including Canada.

The advance of European settlement provoked suspicion and resentment among the Maoris and determination to resist further land purchases was expressed in the Waikato-based Maori “King” movement. From Auckland, merchants, land agents, and immigrant farmers looked enviously upon the open plains of the Waipa and Waikato, while in the hill country beyond the Waipa the Maniapoto tribe was the most zealous Maori advocate of a resort to war. Conflict began in July 1863 when Imperial troops under General Cameron advanced into the Waikato. The wars fell into two distinct phases. In the first, Imperial troops conducted a regular campaign with gunboats, military roads, and artillery. By April 1864 they had subdued the Waikato tribes and, shortly after, defeated their allies at Tauranga. The supporters of the Maori king retreated into the hilly fastness of the King Country, where they lived in sullen isolation until the general amnesty of 1882. The Northland Maoris took no part in the wars of the 1860s and the Arawas of the Rotorua district provided a wedge of “friendly” territory which prevented natives from the East Coast giving support to the Waikato tribes.

The second phase of the war, between 1865 and 1872, was marked by sudden raids and guerilla skirmishes. The contestants were the fanatical Hauhaus and the followers of Te Kooti on the one hand, and armed settlers, colonial volunteer forces, and friendly Maoris on the other. The fighting took place mainly in the Taupo, Opotiki, Urewera, and Poverty Bay districts.

The removal of the national capital to Wellington in 1865 and the departure of the Imperial troops caused business depression in Auckland, but despondency was soon dispelled by the opening of the Thames goldfields. Small quantities of alluvial gold had been discovered at Coromandel in 1852 and modest success followed the opening of quartz lodes there in 1862. Prospecting on the Coromandel Peninsula was delayed by the reluctance of the Maori land owners to admit miners, but negotiations for the opening of 4 square miles in the Thames district were concluded by James Mackay in 1867.

The Thames quickly became New Zealand's greatest mining camp, with some 12,000 people. The quartz was of phenomenal richness, easily mined, and readily processed by simple machinery. In 1872, when the peak yield of £1 million worth of bullion was won, Auckland investors and speculators had floated at least 130 mining companies on the field. In 1875 the goldfields were extended when the Maoris agreed to open the Ohinemuri Valley. Some 1,500 miners took off at the starting gun, but it was found that the complex sulphide ores of the district could not be worked profitably by the techniques then available.

Settlement Pattern by 1874

The population maps for 1874 show that at the end of the provincial era there was intensive European activity only on the Coromandel Peninsula goldfields and on the early settled farmlands near Auckland. Elsewhere white settlement was scattered or in small clusters. In Northland there were some 10,000 Europeans, but no townships larger than 450 people, while Hamilton and Tauranga had barely 600 people each. After the Maori Wars the confiscation of extensive areas of bush-free lowland in the Waikato and Bay of Plenty pushed the frontier of white settlement forward. Military settlers, many of them recruited on the Australian gold diggings, had been granted 50–acre farms and formed a kind of frontier screen at Hamilton, Te Awamutu, Cambridge, and Tauranga. They were reinforced by group settlements of immigrants from Northern Ireland at Katikati in 1875 and at Te Puke in 1881. Small-scale mixed agriculture, as these settlers practised, was not a very profitable enterprise during the 1870s and 1880s. The real prosperity of Auckland Province in these decades was based on the kauri timber, kauri gum, and gold of the Northland and Coromandel Peninsulas.

Of the assisted immigrants who came to the country under the Vogel Scheme of the 1870s, 12,000 persons, or 13 per cent of the New Zealand total, came to Auckland–fewer than to Wellington Province and only twice as many as came to Hawke's Bay. Apart from the railway from Auckland to Te Awamutu, completed in 1880, Auckland had little share in the railway-construction boom. A fleet of small river and coastal ships linked outlying settlements with Auckland city and water transport played a far greater role than in any other province.

Trends of Development

Five main trends in the development of various parts of the provincial district can be recognised in the later decades of the nineteenth century:

(1) The kauri-timber industry in the northern peninsulas reached its peak and supplied the quality timber for most building construction in New Zealand, as well as enjoying a substantial export trade to Australia. In 1888 Melbourne business interests secured the merger of 28 sawmills and a fleet of steamers into the Kauri Timber Co., which for many years was New Zealand's largest single industrial enterprise. By 1905 the provincial district's 50 sawmills employed more than 2,000 men and produced 45 per cent of the New Zealand timber output, three quarters of it being kauri.

(2) The kauri-gum trade expanded steadily after 1870 to a peak yield of 10,800 tons in 1905. In 1885 some 2,000 diggers were at work on the swamps and hillsides of Northland. They were augmented to 6,000 in 1890 by an influx of Dalmatian immigrants and the unemployed of Auckland. The gumdiggers were a floating population living in primitive camps, but some settled as farmers and Dalmatians were the first to specialise in the cultivation of the grape vine.

(3) The languishing quartz-mining industry was revived in the 1890s through the use of the cyanide process and improved managerial and technical efficiency. Substantial investment of British capital made it possible to work the large, lowgrade, gold-silver ores in the Ohinemuri district and there was a considerable influx of Australian skilled labour. The Martha Mine at Waihi was soon numbered among the great gold mines of the world and was the premier mine of Australasia. In its peak year, 1909, it employed 1,500 men, and by the time work ended in 1955 it had returned 35½ million ounces of gold and silver, valued at £28½ million.

(4) In the Waikato the coalfields, discovered during the Maori Wars, were developed to supply Auckland with fuel, but rural settlement made slow progress. On small farms near Hamilton and on large freehold estates in the Thames Valley the farm economy was a mixed one of beef cattle and sheep rearing on temporary pastures, root and forage cropping, and grain growing. Although the climate seemed ideal for grass growth, soils appeared to be frustratingly infertile. But one of the keys to the success of the later-day dairy industry was revealed in the remarkable stimulus to grass growth that followed the top-dressing of pastures with artificial phosphate fertilisers.

(5)The winning of new farmland progressed more rapidly on forested hill country than on the fern-covered lowlands. The Raglan and Kawhia hills were settled in the 1880s and 1890s and, after the opening of the King Country in 1885, sawmillers and farmers advanced with the construction gangs who were building the Main Trunk Railway. Progress with bushfelling was particularly rapid between 1880 and 1900 in the Poverty Bay and East Coast districts where, in contrast to the general course of land settlement in New Zealand, the Maori retained ownership of the land and merely granted long-term leases to the European farmer. The area in sown pasture in the Auckland Provincial District increased from 0·5 million to 1 million acres between 1881 and 1891 and to 1·8 million acres by 1901.

Population Pattern in 1911

By the census of 1911 Auckland and its suburbs had 102,600 people; it was the largest urban centre in New Zealand and the country's largest industrial centre, The second town of the provincial district was Gisborne (8,196) centre for a sheepfarming hinterland, while Waihi, a gold-mining town, was third with 6,436 people. Hamilton was, as yet, no bigger than Thames (3,500). The completion of the main trunk railway in 1908 gave Auckland its first effective land links with the rest of the North Island but completion of the provincial railway network was long delayed. Rotorua had been reached in 1894.and Thames in 1898, but the scattered sections of the Northland system were not linked until 1925, and the Bay of Plenty line reached Taneatua in 1928.

Recent Developments

During the present century Auckland has been the most rapidly developing part of New Zealand. It has experienced consistent inwards migration, especially heavy between 1906 and 1911, slackening between 1926 and 1936, but accelerating since then. Up till 1930 progress depended mainly on the rapidly expanding dairy industry in the Waikato, Bay of Plenty, and Northland districts. Closer settlement stimulated growth in a large number of provincial towns, the most important change being the emergence of Hamilton by 1926 as the second largest urban centre. In the first decade of the century the acreage of sown pastures increased from less than 2 million to 3·3 million, and by 1931 it had reached 5·8 million. In 1920 the volume of dairy products exported from Auckland for the first time surpassed that from Taranaki. Government purchase of large estates played little part in the new wave of settlement, but by carrying out extensive regional drainage schemes on the Hauraki Plains and Rangitaiki Plains the State undertook its first major land-development schemes. The kauri-timber and kauri-gum industries were in steep decline by 1920 and the sawmilling industry had moved to the King Country and the interior volcanic plateau; gold mining survived only at Waihi, but the Waikato sub-bituminous coalfield produced a steadily bigger proportion of New Zealand's coal output–from 10 per cent in 1960

The first attempts at closer settlement of the pumice lands of the central North Island failed because livestock suffered from a wasting disease known as “bush sickness”. Large areas of scrub- and tussock-covered land were therefore regarded as agriculturally useless, but seemed admirably adapted to tree growth. The rapid depletion of native forests and the spectre of impending timber famine made both State and private interests favourable to large-scale forestry. Between 1925 and 1936 more than half a million acres of exotic conifers, mainly pinus radiata, were planted in the pumice country. The discovery of cobalt deficiency as the cause of bush sickness opened the way to renewed agricultural expansion in the 1930s and to an accelerated programme of land development by the State after the Second World War. Recently State land-development operations have also been carried out on “gumland” soils of Northland and in the hills of the northern King Country, where much land reverted and was abandoned during the depression of the 1930s.

Two other major developments since the Second World War have been the construction of a geothermal power station at Wairakei and eight hydroelectric-power stations on the Waikato River, and the establishment of large-scale timber and pulp and paper plants to process the rapidly maturing exotic forests on the Kaingaroa Plains and the upper Waikato valley. These developments, together with land settlement and the popularity of Lake Taupo, the Bay of Plenty coast, and Rotorua as recreational centres, have led to spectacular expansion of towns since 1945. Tokoroa (7,100 in 1961), Kawerau (4,500), and Murupara (1,570) were scarcely names on the map in 1945, while the Tauranga urban area has grown from 6,400 to 24,600 between 1945 and 1961 and the Rotorua urban area from about 9,100 to 25,000. Harbour improvements at Mount Maunganui have broken Auckland's long virtual monopoly of the external trade of the provincial district, and the Port of Tauranga in 1960 ranked fourth by volume (but not by value) of goods handled at New Zealand ports.

Population Pattern, 1961 Census

In 1874 the population of Auckland Province was 73,300. In 1911 it was 296,000 and it increased to 871,745 in 1956 and 997,000 in 1961, when it contained 41 per cent of the New Zealand population. Since 1911 Auckland has accounted for 52 per cent of all the New Zealand population increase, but not all parts of the provincial district have shared in recent growth. There has been rural depopulation in remoter hill-country areas–in the King Country, the Gisborne-East Cape district, and in rural Northland–all of these being areas where Maoris form a high proportion of the total population. Some of the older settled dairying counties of the Waikato have stable or even declining populations. The areas of most consistent and steady increase since the 1920s are the southern margins of the Waikato, the Bay of Plenty, and Rotorua-Taupo districts. The most remarkable development of recent decades, however, has been the growth of Auckland urban area to a population of nearly 450,000 in 1961. An interesting trend has been the movement of young Maoris from rural districts into this city. In 1936 the Auckland urban area had only 1,700 Maoris. In 1961 it had 20,000, or 12 per cent of the total Maori population of New Zealand.

by Murray McCaskill, M.A., PH.D., Reader in Geography, University of Canterbury.

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• The Maori King, Gorst, J. E. (1959)
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• The Gael Fares Forth, McKenzie, N. R. (1942)
• Armed Settlers, Norris, H. C. M. (1956)
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