The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 2 (May 1, 1934.)
Taipari, Squire of the Thames
Taipari, Squire of the Thames.
The Maori was quite a moneyed man in many a North Island district in the pioneer days. The gold-mining rush was responsible for some of the wealth acquired by the sons of the soil. Sixty odd years ago the Thames was at the height of its gold-getting tide, and the Ngati-Maru landowners shared in the boom. Describing the town of Shortland, as it was first called, at the mouth of the Thames or Waihou River, Governor Sir George M. Bowen wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1868:
“There is one peculiar and very interesting and suggestive fact connected with the town of Shortland, viz., that it is arising on ground belonging to the influential Maori chief Taipari. He declines to sell his land, preferring, with a view to its rapid increase in value, to let it in lots on building leases. But he has made liberal gifts of sites for churches for the Anglicans, the Roman Catholics, the Presbyterians, and the other principal Christian communions, as also for a public hospital, a cemetery, a park, and other public purposes. He employs Europeans to survey and lay out roads and streets and to construct drains, culverts and the like.”
The shrewd and benevolent Taipari appeared to the Governor to be as capable of maintaining his just rights and as desirous of improving his property as any English landlord. The chief's income from rents and mining licenses was at the rate of nearly #4,000 yearly. “He has caused a commodious house, in the English style, to be built for himself on a slope commanding a beautiful prospect over the sea and the rising town. Taipari's example and knowledge of the wealth which he is acquiring by allowing the colonists to occupy his land on equitable terms are beginning to exercise a beneficial influence over many of his Maori countrymen who have hitherto lived in sullen and hostile isolation.” That was truly the golden age of the Europeanised Tangata Maori. The pity was it didn't last!