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Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 40 No. 17. July 18 1977

[Introduction]

Joe Hawke.

Joe Hawke.

Last week, Joe Hawke the leader of the Orakei Maori Committee Action Group which is struggling to regain the land at Bastion Point spoke at Victoria. While he was on campus he spoke to Lamorna Rogers and Gyles Beckford of Salient. Jane Wilcox took the photos.

Before Europeans came to settle in New Zealand the land on the Auckland isthmus, Tamaki Makaura, was owned by the Ngati Whatua tribe. However, consistent with their actions in other parts of the country the European authorities systematically gained the land by guile, deceit, trickery, empty promises and bribery. 1840, saw the first of the land, around 3,000 acres bought by the Government of the time for £200 in cash and goods. In little under 30 years all but 700 acres had been taken. During that time land had been taken for defence purposes but never returned when it was no longer needed and land was taken for a church and graveyard that were never established.

In 1869 a Native Land Court decision made the remaining land at Orakei (including Bastion Point) "utterly inalienable to any person in any manner whatsoever". Yet only 29 years later the Land Court ruled that the 13 Chiefs who had been nominated to hold the land for the Ngati Whatua were individual landowners and thus the remaining 700 acres was divided into 13 separate blocs with only 40 acres being left as inalienable. By 1940 most of that had been acquired by the government with only 12 acres being left in tribal hands. The government seized 10 acres of that for housing that was never built and finally the remaining Maori families were resettled in State Houses and their own homes bulldozed flat. The only remnant of Ngati Whatua land left in their own hands that had not been touched by the Government was a ¼acre graveyard.

Photo of a man on sand