Wakefield - troubles with the 'Mechanics' and the Maori

THE VERY HIGH WAGES REQUIRED BY MECHANICS

As I previously quoted, Wakefield had already figured by the time he left England for New Zealand that it was ‘hard to get good servants there’ – or workers to do one’s bidding.

He had written of his imagined settlement in New South Wales:

‘I soon found (seeking an estate with a large domain, pleasure grounds, park and game preserves, and tenant farmers) that a (‘good’) house would, though stone and timber were to be had for nothing, cost three times as much as in England.

This was on account of the very high wages required by mechanics … the whole colony did not contain as many masons, carpenters, glaziers, painters, black and whitesmiths, and other mechanics as I should have required’.

So it is nice to know that his scheme to reproduce the rural English Class System of the early 19th century into New Zealand met some snags.

When the first settlers landed in Wellington Harbour, they did so in what is now Petone at the mouth of the Hutt River. This fleeting first settlement did not prosper as the immigrants had chosen the delta and floodplain of an unpredictable river for the site of their new city ‘Britannia’.

It was though the site of an interesting exchange over labour conditions and terms in the new colony.

Arriving on the English ship ‘The Duke of Roxburgh’, George Hunter who was a shipping agent, asked around on the beach for a carpenter, among those who disembarked, who could erect a prefabricated storehouse for him.

Samuel Duncan Parnell stepped forward. He had been born in London where he had worked in a large joinery shop.


Parnell’s words to Hunter have become immortalized:

‘I will do my best, but I must make this condition, Mr. Hunter, that on the job the hours shall only be eight for the day ... There are twenty-four hours per day given us; eight of these should be for work, eight for sleep, and the remaining eight for recreation and in which for men to do what little things they want for themselves. I am ready to start to-morrow morning at eight o'clock, but it must be on these terms or none at all.

'You know Mr. Parnell,' Hunter replied, 'that in London the bell rang at six o'clock, and if a man was not there ready to turn to he lost a quarter of a day'.

'We're not in London', said Parnell.

With few tradesmen in the young settlement, Hunter had little choice but to accept the carpenter's terms. As Parnell later wrote, 'the first strike for eight hours a-day the world has ever seen, was settled on the spot.'

Other employers in the new settlement tried to impose longer hours, but Parnell enlisted the support of fellow workmen and informed those arriving on incoming ships of the local custom. In October 1840 a meeting of Wellington workmen apparently resolved to work eight hours a day, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. – anyone offending would be ducked into the harbour.

In the early 1840s Parnell bought land in Karori and established himself as a farmer (to the chagrin no doubt of the Wakefields).

Back in England, things were not so dandy. There was a struggling eight-hour day movement, which had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large factories regimented working life and imposed long hours and poor conditions. The use of child labour was common and the working day could range from 10 to 16 hours for six days a week.

A shorter working day and improved working conditions were part of the general protests and agitation for Chartist reforms and the early organization of trade unions.

While the industrialist and philanthropist Robert Owen had raised the demand for a ten-hour day in 1810, and instituted it in his socialist enterprise at New Lanark, it was not until 1847 that women and children in England were granted the ten-hour day.

However, most employed people had to wait to the early and mid twentieth century for the eight hour condition to be widely achieved through the industrialized world through legislative action.

As the 50th jubilee of European settlement in New Zealand approached in 1890, the emerging trade union movement looked to its origins. Parnell was invited to write a short narrative of the introduction of the eight-hour day, and Wellington citizens formed a committee to honour him during the first annual Labour Day demonstration on 28 October 1890.

Seated on a brake drawn by four horses, he headed the march to Newtown Park where he was heralded as 'the father of the eight hours movement'.

Parnell fell ill a few weeks later and died on 17 December 1890.

A meeting chaired by the mayor decided to give him a public funeral and on 20 December a crowd of thousands, headed by the Garrison Band, marched in procession from Cambridge Terrace to the cemetery.

RAVISHING THE LAND AND DIS-INHERITING MAORI



As recorded by the history books, Wakefield’s extended family descended on New Zealand hoping to make a quick quid. They included brothers William, Arthur and Felix and at least one nephew.

The most dangerous and possibly most despicable of these Wakefields were William and Arthur who set a pattern of double-dealing, fraudulent transactions and payment avoidance in their purchases of land from the local Maori.

Unlike the English labourer ‘mechanics’, local Maori were ill-equipped to contend with the unscrupulous settler establishment. The consequences of the patterns that the Wakefields developed remain a burden to New Zealand even today.

Let’s look briefly at a couple of examples.

In 1839 the New Zealand Company bought land in the Wellington Harbour area, Porirua and Queen Charlotte Sound in advance of the settlement. The Company was acting on its own behalf, with no backing from the British government.

The following year, English immigrants began arriving by the shipload prompting one local Maori chief to marvel at and regret their numbers and ability to collaborate.

The demand for land and pressure on the areas occupied by Māori pā and settlements therefore steadily increased.

The New Zealand Company had sold sections already occupied by Māori to the new settlers. To resolve this issue, Lieutenant Colonel William Anson McCleverty was appointed to obtain deeds from the tribes concerned, exchanging their settlements and cultivations for land elsewhere.

The McCleverty awards of 1847 were the final allocation of lands for Māori in the Wellington Harbour area. Pā such as Te Aro, Pipitea and Kaiwharawhara became less desirable as their food-growing areas were replaced by less productive and more remote land, mostly outside the town of Wellington.

The pressure on the Te Aro people was such that by 1881, a census showed only 28 Māori still living at Te Aro, and nine at Pipitea.

The New Zealand Company purchases were all investigated by a special commissioner, William Spain. He accepted some of the company’s claims to have purchased land (for example at Wellington and Nelson) and disallowed others (including at Porirua and in the Wairau Valley).

Where a claim was allowed, the governor then issued the New Zealand Company with a Crown grant, allowing it to complete the many transactions it had embarked on with private settlers. Both the Nelson and Wellington grants exempted Māori cultivations, villages and burial places.

William Spain also confirmed that Māori were entitled to the ‘tenths’ reserves, agreed by William Wakefield. These set aside one-tenth of all the surveyed sections in New Zealand Company settlements for Māori in the Port Nicholson Block, which stretches from Wellington’s south coast to the beginning of the Tararua ranges.

These 'tenths' reserves were rarely allocated in practice and Maori were essentially disinherited from much of the land.

In 2008, some redress was awarded in a Treaty settlement signed by Wellington Tenths Trust chairman Dr Ngatata Love. This ‘ended’ a 21-year legal battle over the Port Nicholson Block claims and closed over 160 years of grievance.

Part of the settlement includes an option to buy back 24 sites of cultural significance, including prime Wellington sites, and $25m in cash.

The Taranaki Whanui will also be given the opportunity of taking control of the former Shelly Bay air force base, as well as title to three islands in Wellington harbour, and Rimutaka forest park.

Dr Love says these are “iconic,” and the new owners will want to give the community more access to them. The Govt has high hopes Maori ownership of the Miramar peninsula, where’s NZ’s film industry is located will open up the prospect for development of a tourism project, perhaps in association with film industry interests, to showcase Maori culture which would be an international attraction.

This could be a model for Maori economic development.

But in the Wairua Valley things went even less well.

The New Zealand Company had built a settlement around Nelson in the north of the South Island in 1840. The settlement had been planned since its conception in April 1841 to be 200,000 acres (810 km2), but by the end of the year, even as allotments were being sold in England, the company's agents in New Zealand were having difficulty in identifying, let alone buying from local Māori, sufficient land to support a settlement.

In January 1843 Captain Arthur Wakefield, who had been despatched by the New Zealand Company to lead the first group of settlers to Nelson, informed the New Zealand Company, that he had located the required amount of land at Wairau, an average distance of 25 km from Nelson.

He held a deed to the land, having bought it from the widow of a whaling Captain John Blenkinsop, who in turn had bought the land from Te Rauparaha of the Ngāti Toa iwi at Tuamarina.

But Arthur acknowledged in a letter to the Company in March 1843: "I rather anticipate some difficulty with the natives."

Blenkinsop it seems had not even tried to take up possession. Like all land purchases at that time it is likely that the parties were talking entirely at cross purposes; with Captain Blenkinsop hoping he had purchased outright freehold, and the Tāngata whenua believing they had received koha (a gift) from him to simply use the land.

The source of the basic difficulty though was simple: Chiefs Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata, who along with their kinsman of Ngāti Toa owned the land, had not accepted the bargain and had not been paid for the land.

In January 1843 Nohorua, the older brother of Te Rauparaha, led a delegation of chiefs to Nelson to protest about British activity in the Wairau Plains. Two months later Te Rauparaha himself arrived in Nelson, urging that the issue of the land ownership be left to Land Commissioner William Spain, who had begun investigating all the claimed purchases of the New Zealand Company.

Arthur Wakefield rejected the request, informing Te Rauparaha that if local Māori interfered with company surveyors on the land, he would lead 300 constables to arrest the Māori chief.

Wakefield duly despatched three parties of surveyors to the land. They were promptly warned off by local Māori, who damaged the surveyors' tools but left the men unharmed.

Things then went from bad to dreadful.

The Police Magistrate Henry Thompson was asked to issue an arrest warrant for Te Rauparaha.

On the morning of 17 June 1843, the Europeans approached the Māori camp, armed with cutlasses, bayonets, pistols and muskets. At the path on the other side of a stream, Te Rauparaha was surrounded by about 90 warriors as well as women and children. He allowed Thompson and five other men to approach him, but ordered the rest of the British party to remain on their side of the stream.

Thompson immediately adopted an aggressive approach. He refused to shake hands with the Chief Te Rauparaha and said that he had come to arrest him. He then produced a pair of handcuffs, angering the chief further.

Thompson called out to the men on the far side of the stream, ordering them to fix bayonets and advance, but as they began to cross, a shot was fired by one of the English (apparently by accident). Te Rangihaeata's wife Rongo was killed from one of the first volleys fired sparking gunfire from both sides.

The English retreated across the stream, scrambling up the hill under fire from the Ngāti Toa. Eleven settlers and two Maori were killed.

Te Rauparaha ordered the Ngāti Toa warriors to cross the stream in pursuit. Those Englishmen who had not initially escaped were quickly overtaken. Wakefield called for a ceasefire and surrendered along with Thompson, Richardson and ten others. Two of the English party were killed immediately.

Te Rangihaeata then demanded utu (revenge) for the death of his wife Rongo, who was also Te Rauparaha's daughter. All the remaining captives, including Thompson and Captain Wakefield, the younger brother of William Wakefield, were then killed.

Samuel Cottrell, a member of the original survey team, and John Brooks, an interpreter, were also killed.

Four Māori died and three were wounded in the incident, while the English toll was 22 dead and five wounded.

The news of a reported 'massacre' did not go down well with Edward Gibbon Wakefield's backers and investors in London, where the New Zealand Company was almost ruined by the news of "British citizens being murdered by barbarous natives".

Land sales almost halted and it became ‘obvious the company was being less than honest in its land purchasing tactics and that reports on the events in local newspapers were far from accurate’.

Wakefield's land development theories & that 'restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism’

SOME MORE GRIPES ABOUT EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD

As even the most casual reader will easily deduce, I am not exactly a fan of Wakefield. He was a parvenu toff, a property developer and a real estate agent. Well that’s a pretty good start. But he was also an abductor (and potential child abuser) who believed that the law could be bent by fraudulently obtained signatures and that ‘possession was nine tenths of the law’.

Beyond these basic imperfections, I also have some serious concerns about the errors and consequences of his land development theories, his views on working people (or ‘mechanics’ as he preferred), and his total disregard for native land rights. In all of these areas, there were consequences for New Zealand that continue to play out today.

I’ll deal with the second two issues in a subsequent post, and concentrate on land development and Wakefield’s invisible and dead hand on New Zealand society in this one.

WAKEFIELD’S LAND & SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT THEORIES

As I showed in my previous post, Wakefield believed that it was dangerous to let a colonial society evolve naturally on an open frontier, noting that:

‘An abundance of land produced a people, like what the Canadians will be, and in the United States Americans are – a people who, though they increase in number make no progress in the art of living.’

His answer was to restrain the allocation of land, impose a threshold price, and release land in limited quantities to wealthier immigrants who brought capital with them.

Regardless of his apparent objectives, it was always clear that he had no understanding of practical farming, of the importance to farmers and pastoralists of variations in land quality or of the very different challenges posed to agriculturalists in environments as varied as those of Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Like many a good bureaucrat, he plucked regulations and charges out of his hat.

In New South Wales, he successfully promoted raising the price of land from five to 20 shillings an acre but pastoralists began to squat ‘illegally’ farther afield, and settlement became more dispersed. In South Australia, he argued for a price of 12 shillings per acre and resigned when his recommendation was overruled.

In Canada, he opined that crown lands should be sold at $2.00 an acre although alternative American lands were available at $1.25.

Beyond that, his theories are of course nonsense in economic terms. So let’s pay a brief visit to a real economist – and one of my great heroes – Johann Heinrich von Thünen.

A REAL LAND ECONOMIST AND THE VIRTUES OF AN OPEN FRONTIER

Johann von Thünen (24 June 1783 – 22 September 1850) was a Mecklenburg estate holder and practical farmer who had also studied at Göttingen university. He is credited with being the first in the field of spatial economics but he also developed the essence of marginal productivity theory (i.e. that successive increments of inputs are beyond a certain point met with successive decreases in unit outputs).

As if that is not enough, his ideas also have a serious claim to being one of the wellsprings of empirical econometrics (testing theories mathematically using statistical evidence).

In his book The Isolated State (1826), drew on the work of the English economist Ricardo and suggested that land development could be analyzed by assessing the respective influences of:

1. basic land productivity (what Ricardo termed the ‘original and indestructible powers of the soil’)
2. the combination of labour and capital in the form of a ‘production function’ for a commodity (that represented the most appropriate form of cultivation).
3. variations in effort, technology and management (what we can call for the purposes of this assessment ‘non-factor productivity’)
4. net received / farm-gate prices (that is the prices that famers actually receive)

Von Thünen then proceeded to develop a theory of what would happen during the settlement and development of a uniformly fertile and otherwise undifferentiated plain, if influences 1-3 were held constant but net received prices were allowed to vary as a consequence of the cost of transporting commodities to a single central market / city.

This state of affairs was not completely unrealistic in an era when the frontier of settlement in North America was continuing to move forward into open land that was suitable for cultivation using European techniques.

In the original Isolated State the model generated four concentric rings of agricultural activity:

1. Dairying and intensive farming lying closest to the city, as high value and recurrently demanded but weighty and perishable products like vegetables, fruit, milk and other dairy products had to be delivered to market quickly
2. A second ring producing timber and firewood for fuel and building materials. Wood was a very important fuel for heating and cooking and is very heavy and difficult to transport so its production was located as close to the city (an arrangement that still applies in many cases in the Third World)
3. The third zone consisting of extensive fields crops such as grain. Since grains last longer than dairy products and are much lighter than fuel, thereby reducing relative transport costs, they could be located further from the city.
4. Cattle production / ranching was forecast in the final ring. Animals can be raised far from the city because they are self-transporting and can walk to the central city for sale or for butchering.
5. Beyond the fourth ring lies the ‘wilderness’, which is too great a distance from the central city for any type of agricultural product.

Now it doesn’t take much imagination to see that as the population of the Isolated State grows, the frontier will be pushed back at first by the ranchers (as is currently happening in the Amazon Basin) and then by the cultivators.

And von Thünen went on to argue that the availability of virgin land would determine the ‘natural wage’ of the community. That is the floor wage that would have to be paid to prevent landless labourers from upping sticks and moving to the frontier to build their own log cabin or bough shed and knock down the Backwoods or the Bush or run some cattle or sheep in the wilderness.

A process which, despite the machinations of Wakefield, is still evident in New Zealand in the form of roads named after the ‘lines’ that the pioneers first cut to mark their boundaries.

So here we have a land development situation where enterprise can be rewarded and economics alone shapes the development of society. And we can now splice in the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 – March 14, 1932).

Turner was an influential American historian who is best known for his book, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, the basis of which is generally known as the ‘Frontier Thesis’.

It argues that ‘the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development’ ...

‘and that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things... that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism’.

And Turner goes on to explain that:

‘the American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier -- a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land”.

“The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur trader, miner, cattle-raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent.

Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file-- the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer --and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between.

The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader's frontier, the rancher's frontier, or the miner's frontier, and the farmer's frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line the traders' pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader's birch canoe.

When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri.”

So there we have it really, Wakefield not only wanted to rule out free enterprise and the Kiwi battler at the stroke of a bureaucratic pen, he also would have been happy to snuff out the pioneer spirit. Whether this has inflicted any permanent damage on the New Zealand national psyche, I leave the reader to judge.

POSTSCRIPT

I will add a couple of things though. It is ironic but perhaps all too predictable that we as a nation are preoccupied with buying and selling property – such that we have borrowed upwards of $150 billion from foreigners to fund the buying and selling of houses and farms among ourselves. And that we constantly struggle to involve ourselves in more productive activities and to earn our way in the world through innovation and enterprise.

As I have commented elsewhere, there is an old saying to which I was introduced when I arrived in Wellington, which is that ‘if you want to run a small business in New Zealand, you had better start by buying a big one’.

So it was with considerable surprise that I found out, during PD Soccer one Saturday morning with Theo, from the Scots grandfather of one of the players, that he spent the better part of his retired life cruising the world on luxury liners.

He had made some money as a butcher in Silverstream and had begun to build up businesses that he then sold on. This led him into property investment and property development and a relatively opulent old age.

The trick he told me was simply to ‘buy and sell property in New Zealand’. Well, I have no doubt that Edward Gibbon Wakefield would pout a malevolent smile at this point if he were around to reflect on the society that he helped to procreate.