TARANAKI / WANGANUI – The Way We Were Pictorial Memories Of Early New Zealand

Text by Valerie Davies

Published by Moa Beckett, 1994

Oblong card cover, 80 glossy pages, black and white photos

Very good condition

THIS HISTORIC REGION STRETCHING through Taranaki to Wanganui was one of the earliest settlements in New Zealand. Captain Cook sailed past in January 1770, and seeing the great white peak of the extinct volcano, called it Egmont, after a First Lord of the Admiralty. In spite of the recent change of name to Taranaki—meaning “barren mountain" —to people who grew up in its shadow, it's still Egmont.

First European settlement of the area began at New Plymouth in I841, when the New Zealand Society sent 920 emigrants in six ships to New Plymouth. They had bought land from the Society, and though Taranaki was a thickly populated Maori region, the settlers, shareholders in the Plymouth Company, found only about 50 Maori dwellers around what is known as New Plymouth.

The province of Taranaki was one of the first six provinces established in New Zealand, in 1853, and with only 2,000 settlers, was the smallest. Though there had been some European traders involved in the -Wanganui area, it was not till 1840 that the missionaries Williams and Hadfield came to collect signatures for the Treaty of Waitangi, anal there is great doubt that the chiefs knew what they were signing. A few months later, Colonel William Wakefield negotiated the sale of the land for the settlement of Wanganui, under very dubious circumstances.

These murky negotiations were the basis for the constant disputes over land, which ended in open warfare some years later. Since those early decades of dispute, the region has developed into prosperous farmland, and Wanganui, a busy port.

Wanganui was the home of one of the most remarkable early settlers, the missionary Richard Taylor, and his wife Caroline. Building on the work of the first missionary to the area,