The history of Ōtuataua Stonefields is lengthy and complex, extending from early human exploration and settlement of Aotearoa New Zealand to recent activism and protest. The following narrative draws on traditional, archaeological and historical sources in the public domain to outline major known developments, which include arrival of the ancestor Hape and the Tainui waka; horticultural and related settlement over many subsequent centuries; evolving methods of agriculture by Māori communities and involvement with the formation of the Kīngitanga movement in the 1840s to 1860s; raupatu or land confiscation, the creation of early European mixed farms and the return of Māori communities; and subsequent evolution of dairy farms and growth of support for preservation of the land.
The main purpose of this narrative is to inform assessment under the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Act 2014. Tangata whenua have their own histories and narratives for the subject area, some of which may not be publicly available for a number of valid reasons. As such, the account in this report should not be considered the only or single definitive history of the area. Tangata whenua histories and narratives of this area may encompass a wider range of values and considerations than those contained within this report.
Background
The history of Ōtuataua Stonefields in the northern part of the Ihumātao Peninsula is closely connected with the area’s geological origins. The site lies within an extensive volcanic field centred on the Tāmaki or Auckland isthmus, which has erupted intermittently over the last 250,000 years. Activity from two volcanoes within the current site, Ōtuataua and Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape (or Pukeiti), created substantial lava fields between their craters and the current shores of the Manukau Harbour. Ash associated with a separate flow from a third crater in the southern part of the Peninsula at Maungataketake (Ellett’s Mountain), sealed the contemporary remnants of a podocarp and broadleaf forest, part of the fossilised remains of which survive. These craters, lava fields and other features created a visually and otherwise distinctive landscape that was overlain by highly fertile, volcanic soils.
The area’s productive soils and warm temperate climate made it desirable for settlement and horticultural activity after first human arrival in Aotearoa New Zealand - currently estimated as occurring in the late thirteenth century. Aotearoa New Zealand is significant as the last major habitable land mass in the world to be discovered and settled by human beings. Early Polynesian settlers are likely to have been familiar with volcanic landforms and the value of related soils from their homelands, and brought with them ‘long-established traditions and techniques for growing food crops.’ Opportunities for obtaining kai moana and other resources were also available due to the site’s location beside the Manukau Harbour, Ōruarangi Creek and a freshwater lagoon to the southwest of Ōtuataua maunga. Gardening in Aotearoa New Zealand generally formed part of a mixed economy that also involved gathering and fishing.
Traditional history to the early 1800s
Ancestral Māori recognised the area’s volcanic origins and resource opportunities, and incorporated this into their cosmological understanding of the world and its creation. Land to the south of the site was named Te Ihu ō Mataoho (the nose of Mataoho), after the deity Mataoho - god of volcanoes and earthquakes; while a few kilometres to the north, the maunga at Māngere was called Te Pane ō Mataoho (the sacred head of Mataoho). Within Māori custom the head is the most sacred part of the body, and life force or mauri is breathed through the nose, indicating the spiritual and other importance of the area. It forms part of a wider interconnected landscape within the Tāmaki isthmus that relates to Mataoho. Collectively, Auckland’s volcanoes are sometimes referred to as Ngā Tapuwae ō Mataoho (the footprints of Mataoho), and associated features such as lava flow and volcanic soils recognised as the result of Te Riri ō Mataoho (the wrath of Mataoho).
Another tradition links creation of the volcanic landscape with supernatural beings known as patupaiarehe and tūrehu, who resided in the Hūnua and Waitakere ranges. Te Kawerau a Maki accounts refer to tūrehu or ‘people from the earth’ as among the earliest occupants of Tāmaki, who were supplanted by a group known as Tini ō Maruiwi. Peoples linked with Toi Kai Rākau or Toi Te Huatahi subsequently arrived and intermarried with Tini ō Maruiwi, resulting in the first creation of a papakāinga at Puketāpapa according to this tradition - although the wider Ihumātao area is said to have been occupied for many generations. Puketāpapa has been especially associated with the northern half of the Peninsula, in which most of the Ōtuataua Stonefields site lies, while Te Ihu ō Mataoho or Ihumātao is more closely linked with land in its southern part.
In the fourteenth century, the Tainui waka stopped at the Peninsula after crossing the nearby Ōtahuhu portage, which connects the east and west coasts of Aotearoa New Zealand, anchoring close to the mouth of the Ōruarangi Creek at Te Punga ō Tainui (the anchor stone of Tainui). According to a Te Waiōhua tradition, the waka was spotted and greeted by an ancestor, Hape, from the top of Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape (Hape’s resting place). Hape had been refused permission to board the waka in Hawaīki due to having deformed feet, but after praying to Tangaroa, god of the seas, was transported to Ihumātao on the back of a stingray, Kaiwhare - a taniwha and guardian of the Manukau - who gave his name to the channel in which the waka subsequently anchored (Te Tārai ō Kaiwhare). After the Tainui canoe had landed and acknowledged Hape’s mana, a small number of its crew remained. Another name for Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape is Rakataura, after the Tainui tohunga Rakataura, who left the waka at Tāmaki. Some accounts consider Rakataura and Hape to be the same individual. Sacred springs at the base of the hill are known as Te Punarere ā Hape, and another spring on the northern fringe of the lava field is referred to as Te Puna Wai ā Hape.
Descendants of the Tainui waka and local people became known under the general name Ngā Oho - a group later possibly referred to under several names including Ngā Iwi. A particular grouping of Ngā Oho, Ngāti Poutūkeka, is said to have occupied the area for several centuries. Perhaps in the seventeenth century, a descendant of the notable Ngāti Poutūkeka rangatira Whatutūroto, Huakaiwaka of Ngā Iwi, united various groups in the region into a formidable force - subsequently known as Te Waiōhua - which held much of the Tāmaki area, including the Ihumātao Peninsula. During this period, Te Rangikaimata of Te Waiōhua is said to have held Ōtuataua pā (also sometimes referred to as Moerangi) within the current site. This settlement was reportedly still occupied in the 1700s when its inhabitants were called on by Te Waiōhua ariki Kiwi Tāmaki to fight at Te Whau, where he was killed by Te Taoū hapū of Ngāti Whātua. The nearby maunga at Maungataketake was probably also inhabited until this time.
After withdrawing southwards, Te Waiōhua may have returned to the Peninsula by the late eighteenth century, when the future Te Taoū rangatira, Āpihai Te Kawau, was born at the Ihumātao kāinga of his Te Waiōhua mother, Mokorua - helping to seal peace between the two groups. Prior to temporary abandonment of the Tāmaki isthmus during the Ngāpuhi raids of the 1820s and early 1830s, the Peninsula was occupied by Te Haupa, Heihei and possibly Awarua. In 1866, Eruera Te Paerimu also stated that his father Te Paerimu had cultivated land at Puketāpapa before leaving in 1825. Their displacement during this period marked a brief hiatus before an era began that was more directly influenced by contact with European peoples.
Archaeological history to the early 1800s
Extensive physical evidence exists that the Ōtuataua Stonefields landscape was used for gardening and other activities in the centuries before European arrival. The site can be considered to reflect the adaptation of Polynesian cultivation approaches to a particularly favourable New Zealand environment and, potentially, changes to these approaches as circumstances changed and Māori society evolved. On first arrival, ancestral Māori faced significant challenges adapting cultigens derived from a warmer, tropical climate to the more temperate conditions and restricted seasonal range that prevailed in New Zealand. As archaeologist Louise Furey has noted:
"The successful introduction of Polynesian root crops to New Zealand not only required skills in plant husbandry, but also modification of the garden environment to improve conditions for plant growth and maturation. These modifications included the addition of gravel and sand to soil, mulching, fences and windbreaks, and possibly stone rows, to provide shelter for the growing plants, heaped soil and stone for warmer ground temperatures, and mechanisms for storage of kumara tubers once harvested. Over time, there may have been some selection for varieties that were more tolerant of cooler growing conditions or that were faster maturing."
The requirements of Māori society are also likely to have changed as populations moved and expanded, and different forms of social organisation developed. Prior to European arrival, the Tāmaki isthmus is believed to have supported one of the densest areas of settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Known archaeological features within the Ōtuataua Stonefields site include a variety of visible elements, including stone rows, heaps, mounds and enclosures connected with gardens in a lava field of some 100 hectares. They reflect a distinctive feature of Māori horticulture in the Auckland region, which involved ‘the use of stone on the basaltic lava fields surrounding the volcanic cones to construct rows, alignments, mounds, heaps and stone-faced terraces within and around the gardens.’ It has been estimated that several thousand hectares of this distinctive activity may once have existed across Auckland, representing ‘the largest, densest and most complex area of Maori stone construction in Northern New Zealand’. The full extent of gardening on volcanic land in the region may have been even larger, with fertile tuff and loam soils adjoining the lava flows being easier to cultivate.
In addition to visible stone features, the Ōtuataua Stonefields site contains a variety of other physical elements including earthworks, midden, rua (crop storage pits), whare (house) floors, ara (tracks) and burials. These present a complex and as yet imperfectly understood archaeological landscape connected with a great range of activities besides gardening, including habitation, food preparation and storage, resource-gathering, trade and exchange, and care of the dead.
The earliest archaeological occupation within the site is unclear. Moa bone, symptomatic of early human activity, has been reported in the lowermost occupation levels at nearby Maungataketake, associated with other bird remains from forest environments. Limited scientific dating evidence from the Tāmaki isthmus suggests that subdivision of the land through the creation of stone walls and related features may have begun by the 1400s or 1500s. Of two published radiocarbon dates from the Ōtuataua Stonefields site, the earliest - from shell midden associated with a stone foundation interpreted as an inland whare or house - was probably from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Midden nearer the shore was radiocarbon-dated to probably the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
Differing archaeological theories exist about how horticulture and settlement may have developed within the site. One suggestion is that initial habitation may have occurred around springs on the edges of the lava fields, where water- and forest-based resources as well as gardens on the volcanic soils could be exploited with a minimum of effort. Gardening may then have gradually increased as pre-existing forest cover on the lava fields was removed and as technical expertise and innovation advanced. An alternative proposal is that horticultural activity began on the side of volcanic cones and gradually spread to the lava fields and, later, adjacent stone-free soils.
At some point, pā defined by terraced earthworks rather than the more usual banked and ditched arrangements were created on the cones at Ōtuataua and Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape. Fortified enclosures on the Tāmaki isthmus and elsewhere are generally considered to have been created in the latter part of pre-European Māori occupation as a response to population increase and competition over resources, and may also signal shifts in social organisation, identity or other focus. Auckland’s many volcanic pā formed a distinctive component of the regional landscape. As exemplified at the Ōtuataua Stonefields, they were closely associated with surrounding cultivation networks, collectively forming a ‘vast settlement-agricultural system’ on the isthmus.
In themselves, the Tāmaki gardens can be seen as an especially widespread expression of intensive horticultural activity in a New Zealand context, in which particularly large-scale production may have occurred. At the Ōtuataua Stonefields, these gardens may have assumed additional importance through their coastal location and strategic position in relation to major portages across the isthmus. The latter traditionally provided the Ihumātao Peninsula with status as an important pou rangatira or meeting place.
Current evidence at Ōtuataua Stonefields suggests that a continuous area between cone and coast was utilised, containing demarcated areas of gardening and occupation. Habitation sites have been primarily identified in association with raised and often irregular ground, while cultivation areas include adjacent, flatter land that has been cleared. Groups of house sites in some places may indicate the presence of kāinga or open village settlements. People not only lived and worked within the lava field landscape but were buried there. Evidence has been reported for a range of burial practices, including the placement of kōiwi in rock fissures and lava caves, and interment in pits, mounds, or pits and mounds. Of high cultural and spiritual importance to Māori communities, these activities involved a return of individuals to the earth mother Papatūānuku so that, as historian Lucy Mackintosh notes, ‘the past, present and future could continue to grow and bind together’.
The range of micro-environments in the vicinity may have meant that varied food production was possible. The main crop is likely to have been kūmara, which thrives in fertile, well-drained soils, and may have been particularly effectively grown on the lava fields due to heat retained by the underlying rock. It was the most widely planted Māori cultigen in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a much more significant food source than in most of tropical Polynesia. The production of kūmara had a strong social dimension, and became subject to numerous rituals and traditions. Kūmara cultigens have been identified at Ōtuataua Stonefields using plant microfossil analysis. Stone and earth mounds at the site may have been created for incubating kūmara, although their use for cultivating gourds has also been considered a strong possibility.
Some of the archaeological features at Ōtuataua Stonefields may directly reflect societal requirements. For instance, although stone rows, heaps and other elements could have been created primarily as a consequence of ground clearance, they may also relate to aspects of social organisation such as boundaries between or within activity by sub-hapū or whānau groups. At nearby Te Motu ā Hiaroa, or Puketūtū Island, stone walls and cultivations were named after particular ancestors or historical events, with individual stones indicating the boundary of each family’s unit being considered tapu. This reflects the importance of stonefield systems as ancestral landscapes, embodying ‘carefully arranged instantiations of ancestors and events which helped govern important modes of being…’. Together with other features in the locality they formed - and continue to form - ‘landscapes of memories’, helping to shape and reinforce the identities of associated communities.
Extensive midden within the Ōtuataua Stonefields provides considerable evidence of kai moana collection, including the exploitation of surface and subsurface species from inshore and creek mudflats, and mid-harbour species such as scallops. Tongues of lava flow extending into the harbour on the northern shore have been considered likely activity areas and access points connecting the elevated coastal margins and the sea. Numerous midden have been identified at the interface between the lava field and the tidal harbour and Ōruarangi Creek.
There is also increasing evidence for contemporary activity directly to the south and southeast of the lava flow, within the broader Ōtuataua Stonefields site. The latter contained a large freshwater lagoon and watercourses running parallel to the edges of the lava fields, which are likely to have provided resources unavailable on the lava flow itself - which has no streams. Areas of midden have especially been found on locally raised ground, including near the watercourses. One of these has been radiocarbon-dated to probably the sixteenth or seventeenth century, indicating that at least some of this land was in contemporary use with gardening systems on the lava flow. It has been observed that the stone remnants surviving on the main lava flows may more accurately represent the visible survival of archaeological material than the general nature or extent of Māori horticultural activity in the area.
Outside the site, former and current stone alignments and related features around remnants of the nearby pā at Maungataketake similarly reflect horticultural and other activity within a wider interconnected landscape. Successive occupation layers to the south of a ditched pā on the east bank of the Ōruarangi Creek (R11/575) have also been respectively radiocarbon-dated to the sixteenth or seventeenth and seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
Adaptation to European arrival (1830s-1863) - the ‘golden age of Māori enterprise’
In the mid-1830s, local peoples returned to the Manukau Harbour under the protection of the Ngāti Mahuta leader Pōtatau Te Wherowhero. Cultivation on the Ihumātao Peninsula, at both Puketāpapa and Ihumātao, may have resumed. By this time, horticultural activity in the region included growing imported crops such as potato, maize and wheat, both for local use and for sale or exchange with incoming European traders and settlers. Capable of being grown on a wider range of soils and requiring different husbandry techniques, these new cultigens are considered to have revolutionised gardening in the region. Potatoes, for example, required greater labour and for longer periods than kūmara, but were also more bountiful. Their cultivation, and the husbandry of introduced livestock such as pigs, is likely to have particularly expanded after the advent of formal European colonisation in 1840, when nearby Auckland was chosen as the site of colonial New Zealand’s first permanent capital, and became a significant commercial entrepôt. By the mid-1850s, Māori cultivation of potato in the surrounding area may have exceeded that of kūmara.
As historian Hazel Petrie has noted, during the period of early European settlement, ‘there is considerable evidence that…Māori production formed the mainstay of the colonial economy and, in particular, of the largest population centre, Auckland.’ The extent and contribution of this agricultural and related activity is such that the period has been labelled ‘the golden age of Māori enterprise.’
Groups that took up the production of introduced cultigens included Ngāti Tamaoho under the leadership of Wiremu Wētere Te Kauwae and Epiha Putini Te Rangitāhua, who initially grew European crops and sought to build a wheat-grinding mill at Āwhitu, in the south Manukau, with help from their Wesleyan missionary contacts. In 1846, Ngāti Tamaoho and an associated hapū, Ngāti Rori (subsequently known as Te Ahiwaru), relocated to ancestral land on the Ihumātao Peninsula, partly due to conflict with other groups at Āwhitu but possibly also because of its proximity to the Auckland market. By the summer of 1846-7, they were engaged in land improvements such as digging ditches to drain highly fertile, swampy ground, probably around the edge of the lava fields, with the intention of cultivating ‘a large piece of ground’. Wētere subsequently provided land for a small Wesleyan mission station beside Ihumātao kāinga, consolidating access to European ideas and technology. A Māori-owned threshing mill processed wheat and oats that were extensively grown in the vicinity. Produce was exported to Onehunga, the main gateway on the Manukau Harbour for the Auckland market.
Settlement by Te Ahiwaru included the northern part of the Peninsula, at Puketāpapa, which encompassed over 400 acres (160 hectares). This area probably included most - if not all - of the Ōtuataua and Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape lava flows and the lower-lying catchment of the Ōruarangi Creek to the east, which contained northward-flowing watercourses. Puketāpapa kāinga, beside the Ōruarangi Creek, became known as the largest Māori settlement in the district. In the early 1850s it appears to have included several buildings near the mouth of the creek at Ōtekiore. By 1855, a Māori Wesleyan chapel had also been erected to the south, a short distance east of the lava field. Other elements between the lava flow and creek included an urupā to the east of the chapel, and what may have been a relatively substantial building on the eastern slope of Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape looking out towards the kāinga.
The kāinga was central to a large network of rectilinear fields extending between the east side of the Ōtuataua lava field and the Ōruarangi Creek, and also on the opposite (east) side of the creek towards Waitomokia maunga - the latter additionally occupied and cultivated by Ngāti Tamaoho and Te Ākitai in the early 1850s. These can be seen to represent agricultural activity on less stony and well-watered soils around the lava fields that were more suitable for European crops and livestock. A cluster of similar-sized fields on the western part of the lava flow may have been worked in association with settlement on the Ōtuataua lava flow or at Ihumātao. Other cultivations are said to have been centred on Te Tiki, immediately to the southeast of Maungataketake. In the mid-1860s, the greater portion of the Peninsula was considered to have been under prior cultivation.
The unusually large scale of these field systems is indicated by it being the most extensive Māori cultivation network depicted on an 1853 survey of the Manukau Harbour. Individual fields may have been delineated by physical boundaries: in the early 1860s, Māori settlements at both Puketāpapa and Ihumātao were among a number in the vicinity described as ‘securely fenced’. Documented evidence for the adoption of European technology and other introductions at Puketāpapa includes ownership of horse and plough, payment for goods with bushels of wheat, and the presence of at least one stockyard. A similar situation existed at Ihumātao, where the settlement’s assets in 1863 included potato and corn fields, a plough and harrow, and livestock that encompassed 200 pigs, three cows and six horses. Kūmara and potatoes were kept in separate storage pits. A large waka known as Taiaroa could also carry up to twelve tons of produce, presumably for the Auckland market.
Large-scale food production not only enabled an accumulation of wealth through sale or barter, but also facilitated displays of hospitality and mana in the form of hākari, or feasts - a tradition that increased in extravagance during the nineteenth century. At the tangi of Te Rangitāhua at Ihumātao in 1857, Ngāti Tamaoho provided 1800 baskets of potatoes and 6000 loaves of bread, as well as traditional foods for some thousand attendees. Another hui at Puketāpapa the following year included provisions for up to 700 guests, with a structure 140 yards long being erected for the occasion.
Both gatherings were connected with tensions arising from growing European encroachment on Māori land. Attended by the Ngāti Mahuta ariki Pōtatau Te Wherowhero and other rangatira, the Ihumātao meeting ended at Ōtekiore and formed one of a series of hui in the Waikato and elsewhere that led to the foundation of Kīngitanga - one of New Zealand’s most enduring political and cultural movements - and Te Wherowhero’s selection as its leader at Ngāruawāhia in 1858. The Puketāpapa meeting was also referred to as ‘a preliminary to the great Hui’ at Ngāruawāhia. In the years before the outbreak of the Waikato War in 1863, links between the Peninsula’s inhabitants and Kīngitanga remained close. A freshwater spring near the coast, known as Te Puna ā Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, commemorates its use by the Kīngitanga leader.
Land confiscation and early European settlement (1863-circa 1880s)
During the early 1860s, events occurred that were to have a major impact on Māori communities on the Peninsula and their responsibilities over ancestral lands. Until that time, the Ihumātao Peninsula remained one of the largest areas in the Tāmaki isthmus under Māori ownership - consciously retained for reasons that included its great economic and strategic importance. In 1863, however, the area was subject to traumatic events linked with the Waikato War (1863-4). The following year, the land was taken under raupatu, or confiscation by the Crown.
On 9 July 1863, the government required that local Māori swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown or be expelled from their lands. Bound by ties of kinship and loyalty to Kīngitanga, the Peninsula’s occupants sold their cattle and poultry under duress, and moved southwards. Government forces immediately launched an invasion of the Waikato, crossing the Mangatāwhiri Stream on 12 July. Possessions left behind by Māori were taken, damaged or otherwise lost, including farming equipment and church furniture. A military expedition to remove and destroy Māori waka retrieved several from Ōruarangi and Ihumātao. These events were to have a lasting impact on the Peninsula’s Māori community and their descendants.
Settlers soon requested the land for grazing livestock, including the cattle of European refugees from the Waikato to prevent the sale of these animals from flooding the Auckland market. The cattle and horses of such refugees were briefly granted pasturage on the land before, in early 1864, the Crown rented the whole Peninsula to Henry Vercoe, a Mangere farmer and brother-in-law to the Defence Minister, Thomas Russell. In May 1864, the colonial government formally confiscated the land on behalf of the Crown.
In May 1866, the Ihumātao Block - as the Peninsula became known - was surveyed and divided into large allotments with an interconnecting network of access roads. At this time, it was noted that the greater part had been cultivated but was now overgrown with fern. The boundaries of surveyed allotments immediately to the east of the Ōtuataua and Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape lava fields shared a very similar orientation to those of the field systems indicated in the 1853 Pandora survey, suggesting that the former may have been influenced by the pre-existing land use arrangements. In particular, a surveyed northeast-southwest road reserve (now the Ōruarangi Road) was created in a very similar position to an earlier indicated boundary and additionally aligns with the earlier chapel and an inlet on the Ōruarangi Creek, which could suggest prior use as an access route for produce from the fields to the kāinga and waterfront. This would mirror a previous arrangement conceived by Ngāti Tamaoho in their prior agricultural settlement at Pehiakura. The network of pre-existing fields in the western part of the lava flow was also almost entirely encompassed within a single new allotment.
Smaller allotments occupying the cones at Ōtuataua and Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape, as well as land to the south, were set aside for quarrying and water purposes. Apart from these areas and the site for a Māori township in the locality occupied by much of Puketāpapa kāinga, most land in the northern part of the Ihumātao Block was offered for sale in 1866-7.
European farms were almost immediately established, reflecting an important shift towards private land ownership, and full integration of the land into a competitive European economy. Their relatively modest size, particularly on the Ōtuataua and Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape lava flow, was symptomatic of the general pattern of Pākehā agricultural landholdings in the Auckland region at this time, which were often based on grants of 40 or 50 acres.
Allotments on the lava fields were respectively purchased by Isaac Morris (Allotment 172: 62 acres), Janet Somerville (Allotment 173: 47 acres) and William Buchanan (Allotment 174: 52 acres). A larger holding incorporating deeper soils on the southern fringe of the lava field and further east (Allotments 163, 170-1, 177 and 179-80: 288 acres) was obtained by Samuel Fleming, an Onehunga merchant, who was soon exporting potatoes. Gavin Wallace, a recent migrant from Campbeltown, Scotland, similarly bought land on the eastern fringes of the lava flow (Allotments 175-6: 81 acres), which had been occupied by Māori agricultural systems in the 1850s. After 1868, Wallace may have had access to Buchanan’s land after it was transferred to his brother, James Wallace.
Most of the new enterprises were owner-occupied and initially engaged in mixed production, like many other colonial farms in the region. In the late 1860s, Gavin Wallace grew potatoes, kept cattle and possibly ran sheep. Wheat or barley may also have been produced at an early stage. When the Somerville family leased Allotment 174 from James Wallace in 1874, there were requirements for the land to be cultivated ‘in a good and husbandlike manner’ and also to be laid down with perennial grass and clovers. James Montgomerie, who created a 50-acre farm on Allotment 171 - partly on and partly off the lava flow - after Fleming’s large holding was broken up in 1875, initially produced grain and hay for the Auckland market as well as having milking cows for home consumption.
Related changes to the landscape included the hand clearance of stone and construction of long, straight drystone walls, a type of structure characteristic of the Auckland farmscape at this time. During this period, the priority was generally to erect walls along farm boundaries to keep other people’s stock out rather than to keep animals in. Farms extending onto the deeper soils off the lava flow engaged in ‘mending ditches’ - perhaps similarly to at least part of the 1850s Māori cultivation systems - and also introduced newer forms of drainage. Stone-filled drains created by Gavin Wallace are said to have been based on his experience on the estate of his former employer, the Duke of Argyll, in Scotland.
Small homesteads were constructed on most of the holdings. The initial Somerville homestead on Allotment 173 appears to have consisted of a basic, two-roomed cottage. Erected in the southwestern part of Allotment 175, the Wallace farmstead is said to have grown in stages from small beginnings in circa 1867, eventually consisting of a one-and-a-half storied timber building with associated structures such as stables and a hay shed. The residence of Isaac Morris and his wife Sarah on Allotment 172 was later described as a ‘plain wooden five-roomed cottage’, associated with a water pump, orchard, boxthorn hedges and associated pine and macrocarpa trees. After 1875, the Montgomerie family is believed to have occupied a dwelling in the middle of Allotment 171. These residences were collectively associated with farming the lava flow and its immediately connected land, and were themselves built on the lava fields - generally close to their edges.
Return of Māori communities to Puketāpapa, and land conversion for dairying (circa 1880s-early twentieth century)
Reflecting the strength and importance of ancestral ties to the land, from the 1870s members of Te Ahiwaru returned to Puketāpapa - to the site of the current papakāinga (now more generally known as ‘Ihumātao village’) immediately adjacent to the Ōtuataua Stonefields site. Initially re-settling on a small portion of land beside the Ōruarangi Creek, members of this community began to be employed as seasonal workers on surrounding farms, especially for silage- and hay-making. Following a petition on behalf of Te Ahiwaru, the Crown agreed in 1888 to set aside land on the site of the earlier Puketāpapa kāinga on Allotments 196 and 197. Formal title for just over 41 acres (16.6 hectares), however, was not obtained until 1915-16, by which time the settlement contained several buildings mostly concentrated near the Ōruarangi Creek, associated with plots of kūmara, potatoes and oats as well as grass paddocks. Creating good relations with their neighbours, Māori use of the surrounding farmland included collecting bracken for kūmara beds and gathering watercress.
As the papakāinga was becoming reestablished, further significant changes to the adjoining landscape took place. From the 1880s onwards, there was a major shift in farming practice towards dairying and to a lesser extent other stock, reflecting a nationwide expansion in the ‘protein trade’ brought about by refrigeration (from 1882) and tightening imperial links with Britain. Between the turn of the century and the 1960s, New Zealand has been referred to as ‘the Empire’s dairy farm’, and the widespread conversion of land to pasture an aspect of ‘imperialising the landscape’. Changes in the Ōtuataua area particularly demonstrate dairying’s emergence from an aspect of settler self-sufficiency to a major commercial enterprise - an activity that has remained pivotal within wider New Zealand society into the twenty-first century.
Local farmers were early suppliers to Ambury and English’s dairy factory at nearby Māngere Bridge, opened in 1882, whose activities included exporting butter to the British market. Ambury and English claimed that its Star brand came from ‘the best butter-producing district in the Province of Auckland’. The firm also dominated Auckland’s milk market. In 1888, it was said in relation to its output that ‘in the Mangere district there is a strong Scottish colony of farmers, who contribute largely, if not mainly, to the milk supply’.
New infrastructure on and around the Ōtuataua and Puketāpapatanga ā Hape lava flows included sub-dividing fields with stone walls; and erecting windmills, milking-sheds and other related structures. In 1905, improved access to the dairy processing facilities at Māngere was created by erecting a bridge over the Ōruarangi Creek, on the edge of the lava field, created from local stone. Direct quarrying of the volcanic cones at both Ōtuataua and Te Puketāpapatanga ā Hape may initially have been carried out in a limited manner by local farmers and, in part at least, undertaken for roading improvements. This activity demonstrates the extent to which the exploitation of natural resources for practical outcomes outweighed other values associated with these places at this time, as well as reflecting the more widespread reshaping of the landscape that was occurring.
Many of the farms were enlarged to include land both on and off the lava flow, allowing all-year grazing. In 1890, Gavin Wallace’s property was expanded to include Allotment 174; a decade or so later Herbert Ellett, who owned a very large holding further west at Maungataketake, obtained Allotment 170; and the Somerville and Morris allotments (173 and 172) were also successively taken over by neighbour Thomas Morton Rennie, who had obtained the adjacent Allotment 177 in 1904 and also leased Allotment 177A - collectively creating the main landholding on the lava field area.
In contrast to the first generation European farmsteads, new and larger homesteads reflecting the increased wealth brought by dairying were erected just outside the lava field, on sites closer to the main road network - possibly to assist milk collection. These included the spacious Montgomerie and Rennie homesteads on Allotments 171 and 177 respectively, at around the turn of the century, and the Wallace homestead (Kintyre) on Allotment 176 in the 1920s. With residence on the lava field now considered unnecessary, at least two of the early dwellings were physically relocated to the Rennie farmstead, the Somerville cottage being re-used as a washhouse for the main homestead and the Morris house being employed as a farmworker’s cottage in an adjoining field.
The ornate nature of these new residences can be seen not only to reflect greater wealth, but also perhaps the growing social stature and connections of their owners. Christina Paul, the daughter of an immediately neighbouring farmer Walter Paul, had some time earlier married William Massey, who became Prime Minister in 1912. In 1913, several of the area’s landowners - including Paul’s son W.N. Paul and others who farmed land on and adjoining the lava fields such as T.M. Rennie, John (Jock) Montgomerie, Hugh Wallace and Herbert and Ernest Ellett, became founding shareholders of the Auckland Farmers Co-operative Milk Supply Company (later the Auckland Milk Company (AMC)), Auckland’s first co-operative dairy venture. Co-operative companies formed an important means by which farmers could pool resources and take control of the dairy industry - an approach that occurred widely in New Zealand.
Rennie, Wallace and Paul subsequently served as long-term directors of the AMC. Jock Montgomerie also became prominent as a director and then chairman of the co-operative in the late 1920s, before serving as a representative of the Auckland Wholemilk Producers’ Association, and then on the Auckland Metropolitan Milk Council (1935-7). His son, K.K. Montgomerie, who inherited the family farm on Allotment 171 in 1952, was similarly active in attempts to reform the Auckland milk industry. In part, the prominence of local farmers reflects the South Māngere-Ihumātao district’s importance as one of the region’s top producing town milk supply areas during the first half of the twentieth century.
Recent history (mid-twentieth century onwards)
In contrast with this growing prosperity, conditions for the Māori community at Puketāpapa were often difficult. During the economic depression of the 1930s and subsequently, some inhabitants were employed at nearby Chinese market gardens. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the settlement expanded. Loans by the Department of Māori Affairs enabled construction of a number of new semi-detached homes at Puketāpapa, which by 1961 had increased to nearly 200 people. Reflecting the area’s pou rangatira status, Waitangi Tribunal hearings were held at Puketāpapa in 1984, at which local kaumātua and others from around the region expressed their views on matters relating to the Manukau, including despoilation of the Harbour and the loss of associated lands. The papakāinga remains owned by descendants of the area’s pre-confiscation inhabitants, and represents centuries-long Māori occupation of and association with the land, extending into the present.
Within the wider community, a growing appreciation of the distinctive values of the Ōtuataua Stonefields slowly developed. Perhaps as a result of an increasing emphasis on pasture, the area became popular for rural pursuits such as hare-coursing by the Pakuranga Hunt and bird-shooting, and also outdoor recreational activities such as camping. A small number of baches created from imported car crates were erected close to the shore. Before the Second World War (1939-45), concern began to be expressed about the destruction of volcanic cones through systematic quarrying, including on the Ihumātao Peninsula, and the first archaeological survey of the lava field area occurred in the 1930s. Both at this time and during the Second World War (1939-45), rough terrain on the lava flow was used for military exercises.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the wider area’s importance in relation to agricultural history was reinforced by the activities of Trevor Ellett who developed a new ecotype of perennial ryegrass on his farm, which although primarily located to the south of Ihumātao Road, also included Allotment 170. The first experimental planting of this ecotype as pasture evidently occurred on land in the Ōtuataua Stonefields, chosen to facilitate improvements in performance because it contained the ‘worst’ paddock on the farm. This ecotype was subsequently developed into Grasslands Nui and Ellett ryegrass, which became the most widely used perennial ryegrass varieties in New Zealand. In 2011, perennial ryegrass was described as ‘the foundation pasture species from which early $20 billion of export earnings flow into the New Zealand economy from the pastoral industries’. Other activity within the Ōtuataua Stonefields landscape included industrial-scale quarrying of Ōtuataua pā and related works for the Māngere Sewage Treatment Plant to the north, which included heavily modifying the shoreline.
Concern about the impact of these works, and urban redevelopment elsewhere, helped stimulate more substantial interest in the ancestral, archaeological and other importance of the area. In 1991, much of the lava flow area was formally classified by the then New Zealand Historic Places Trust - now Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga - for its archaeological values. An overlapping, but not identical area was subsequently purchased by Manukau City Council site for the creation of a historic reserve, which was formally opened by Prime Minister Helen Clarke in 2001, with the Kīngitanga Queen, Dame Te Atairangikaahu in attendance. In 2007, this land was included on New Zealand’s Tentative List for World Heritage status as part of the Auckland Volcanic Fields proposal.
Subsequent attempts by Manukau City Council and its successor Auckland Council to restrict the development of farmland immediately to the south and east of the lava flow were opposed by its private landowners. Both Makaurau Marae, based at Puketāpapa papakāinga, and Te Kawerau Iwi Tribal Authority opposed urban development, emphasising the cultural importance of the land to tangata whenua. After an Environment Court case ruled in the landowners’ favour, a large area visually and physically connecting the papakāinga with the maunga at Ōtuataua and Puketāpapatanga ā Hape was designated a Special Housing Area and proposed for a major residential project. A community group - Save Our Unique Landscape (SOUL) - based at Puketāpapa, subsequently took direct action and occupied part of this land.
In early 2019, SOUL delivered a petition with some 18,000 signatures to Parliament, and later with 20,000 signatures to Auckland Council, requesting that these bodies buy the affected land or mandate a process ‘that will enable all affected parties to work together to produce an outcome everyone can live with’. A stated purpose of the action was ‘protecting this landscape for all New Zealanders and future generations’. After campaigners occupying the land were served an eviction notice in July 2019, direct support for the group and its aims came from a large number of New Zealanders from different cultural backgrounds. In August 2019, a hikoi from the site to Auckland took a further petition with over 20,000 signatures requesting that the Prime Minister visit the site. Raising the Kīngitanga flag on the whenua, also in August, Kīngitanga leader King Tūheitia, subsequently mediated discussions among tangata whenua groups. A national news site editorial has stated: ‘Even those who dismissed the Ihumātao occupation as “woke Woodstock” were impressed by the sheer scale and speed of support…It was a peaceful and culturally powerful movement that became a national cause celebre’.
Most of the Ōtuataua Stonefields site is in public ownership. The area designated a Special Housing Area and other land bordering the Ihumātao Road are (10 February 2020) privately owned.
