Plate 18. From the Book. Pictorial illustrations of New Zealand

This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024) on pages 51-52.
This extract was authored by Matiu Baker and Rebecca Rice.

Maraenuku pā, in the vicinity of the present-day Melling Bridge area of Lower Hutt and pictured below by the surveyor-artist Samuel Brees, was one of those Māori residences destroyed during the occupation of the Hutt Valley.1 The pā had been built by Te Kaeaea in about 1842 to assert Ngāti Tama’s claim to the land.2 When Brees drew the pā in about 1845, he noted its recent construction as well as the extensive potato fields cultivated around it.3 In his view he details the palisades of the pā topped with carvings. A group of Māori appear to be leaving, bags slung over their backs, while five red-coated soldiers look on. Given that Ngāti Tama abandoned the Hutt Valley earlier in February, Brees may have updated details of his drawing in London in preparation for the engraving to reflect those events. The resulting view reinforces the righteousness of colonial opinion that Māori should vacate their land for Pākehā setters. No trace of the pā remains today.

1 Leslie Adkin, The Great Harbour of Tara: Traditional Maori place-names and site of Wellington Harbour and environs (Whitcombe & Tombs, Wellington, 1959), pp. 126–27. 
2 ‘Maraenuku pā’, New Zealand History (nzhistory.govt.nz/ media/photo/maraenuku-p%C4%81, accessed 21 August 2023). 
3 Samuel Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand (John Williams, London, 1849), p. 30.