“Now we have fully considered and wept over and for ever bidden farewell to and transferred these lands descended to us from our ancestors with all their streams rivers waters grass stones good places and bad places and everything under and upon the land which has been transferred absolutely by us under the shining sun to Victoria the Queen of England and to the kings and queens who may succeed her for ever and ever.”—Translation of Maori Land Sale Deed.

In this poetic and somewhat pathetic diction, with its legal lack of punctuation, many early deeds of native land sales to the Crown were couched. When making historical researches for material dealing with the official career of that great Native Minister, Sir Donald Maclean, I read many of the documents of the Fifties, and it is to be noted, as proof of the care and deliberation and consideration for Maori rights which characterised all “Te Makarini's” transactions that none of these bargains in the early days were disputed. The Maoris were content with the payment given for the land; the Government was satisfied because it secured very large areas of land for comparatively small sums of money. That remark applies particularly to the early purchases in the Wairarapa country, where just on eighty years ago Governor Grey and Mr. Maclean secured from the Ngati-Kahu-ngunu tribe areas totalling more than half a million acres for white settlement.

That was the series of transactions which set the rich and beautiful Wairarapa sub-province fairly on the onward path as a district of civilised enterprise. But there was some settlement in the lower part of the Wairarapa long before the Crown purchases. Mr. C. R. Bidwill was there very early. That fine figure in New Zealand pioneer politics, Sir Frederick Weld, was sheepfarming there, with his friends Clifford and Vavasour, a decade before Governor Grey toured the Valley and opened negotiations with the Maori chiefs. In Lady Lovat's life of Weld, a book worth the reading for its sympathetic study of a splendid character, there are letters from Weld describing the vicissitudes of colonial life in the raw as experienced at Wharekaka, one of the woolgrower's primitive stations, and the difficulties of the coast journey from Wellington before the road was cut over the Rimutaka range from the Hutt Valley.

Wairarapa—the name means “Glistening Water,” applied to the long shallow lake, which was once the settler's and Maori's highway—possesses distinctive physical features which mark it as apart from other provincial areas in the Island. It was, in the first place, so hemmed in by mountain ranges that it was not an easy place to reach, and that to a certain extent is its character to-day. The mountain barrier is there, all the way from the southern sea to the plains of Hawke's Bay. Road transit was always difficult; it was not until the railway came that travel became simplified and comfortable. The Tararua ranges, extending northward to the great break made by the Manawatu River, are a formidable barrier on the west. On the east the main valley page 18 of the Wairarapa has another broken series of rugged country, and beyond there is the ocean, without a harbour along more than a hundred miles of its length. So it was necessary for the railroad to overcome the handicap of difficult communication, and this was accomplished by the building of a mountain system so skilfully engineered that it has excited for many a year the interest and praise of many world-experienced travellers and technical experts.