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Raglan (1975)
During World War II, the government took land
from the Tainui Āwhiro at Raglan in the Waikato for
a military airfield forcing local Māori to leave their
marae, homes, cultivations and urupā. After the war,
25 of the original 34 hectares was given to the Raglan
County Council which leased it as a public golf course.
In 1972, Tuaiwa (Eva) Rickard, a post office worker,
and materfamilias mother of nine led a campaign
to have the land returned. The family of a Pākehā
official, who had negotiated the wartime use of the
land and promised to return it after the war, publicly
supported Ms Rickard.
The police arrested Rickard during an occupation
of the golf course in 1975. Two years later, the police
arrested 17 protesters for trespass, only to have the
charges dismissed. Tainui Āwhiro declined three
subsequent Crown offers to purchase the land back.
The government finally relented and returned the
land in 1987. Rickard passed away 10 years later.
When Māori activist Annette Sykes stood to speak at
her tangihanga she met cries from Māori men to ‘sit
down’. Ms Sykes challenged Māori men to recognize
the mana of Māori women in honour of one of
modern Māoridom’s most stalwart kuia (Poata-Smith,
1996, pp. 97-116; Waikato Times, 30 May 2008).
Takaparawhā | Bastion Point (1978)
Takaparawhā | Bastion Point was a sordid saga of
the colonial oppression of Ngāti Whātua ki Ōrākei.
After selling 1,200 hectares on which the Auckland
Central Business District now stands, the Crown and
the Auckland City Council spent the next century
pressurising Ngāti Whātua to sell more. Ngāti Whātua
retreated to their central papakāinga at Ōkahu
Bay and Bastion Point. The long-running struggle
included the taking of land for defence against a
supposed Russian invasion in the 1850s. Ngāti Whātua
took eight actions in the Māori Land Court, four
in the Supreme Court, two in the Court of Appeal,
two in the Compensation Court, six appearances
before Commissions or Com¬mittees of Inquiry, 15
Parliamentary Petitions seeking the restoration of
tribal ownership of their land. All failed. There were
also two reports from the Stout-¬Ngata Commission
of 1907 and the Kennedy Commission of 1939
Human Rights Commission
condemning the Crown. By 1929, the landholdings of
Ngāti Whātua ki Ōrākei were reduced to 1.2 hectares
at Ōkahu Bay (Walker, 2004, pp. 215-217).
In an act of ‘shitty’ racism by infrastructure the
Auckland City Council, in 1912, piped sewerage
across the front of the marae pouring effluent onto
traditional shellfish beds at Ōkahu Bay and Bastion
Point. Adding insult to insanitation, the council never
connected Ngāti Whātua to the system. The sewerage
pipe was covered with a road to the new luxury
suburbs of Kohimārama and Mission Bay, and cutting
off drainage to the sea, turned the papakāinga into a
quagmire. Ngāti Whātua were evicted in 1951 because
of the “filthy conditions they chose to live in” and to
tidy the route Queen Elizabeth II would take during
her visit to Auckland in 1953. Homes and the meeting
house were bulldozed and burned. Only the church
and urupā remained, the Crown stopping short of
evicting God and the dead.
In 1976, the government announced plans to subdivide 24 hectares of the land for luxury housing.
In January the following year, the Ōrākei Māori
Action Group led by Joe Hawke, who had witnessed
the 1951 evictions as a boy, began a 507-day
occupation demanding the return of all Crown land
at Bastion Point, including the Savage Memorial
and Takaparawhā Reserve, a total of 72 hectares. In
a repeat of history, on 25 May 1978, 600 police and
army personnel re-evicted Ngāti Whātua and their
supporters making 222 arrests and bulldozing the
temporary settlement built by protesters. The Police
dropped all charges against several protesters and
the Courts quashed all convictions on appeal.
Attempting to appease Ngāti Whātua, the Crown
granted 5.3 hectares, 27 state houses and $200,000 to
the newly constituted Ōrākei Māori Trust Board. Two
further occupations took place in 1982 with 11 and 100
arrests respectively.
Ngāti Whātua then lodged a claim with the Waitangi
Tribunal whose subsequent report condemned
Crown actions. This led to the 1991 Treaty settlement,
the first of the modern era, comprising $3 million
in compensation, return of 16 hectares and joint
management of a further 48 hectares mainly in
Ōkahu Bay. Years later, the superintendent who had
coordinated the 1978 arrests spoke movingly of how