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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).
This extract was authored by Rebecca Rice.
The English naturalist William Swainson decided to immigrate to New Zealand in 1839.1 He joined the Church of England committee established to appoint a bishop in New Zealand, and Wakefield’s Committee of the First Colony of New Zealand, applying for land in the Wellington region. He arrived in New Zealand in 1841 and in 1843 moved to a 150-hectare property in the Hutt Valley, which he named ‘Hawkshead’ after an ancestral home.2 As well as farming the land, Swainson made copious pencil sketches in the Hutt, scenes that revealed how colonists’ houses and roads were slowly transforming the forested valley into a pastoral paradise.
Almost immediately the reality was not so bucolic. The local chief Te Kaeaea disputed Swainson’s ownership of the land, driving his labourers off and cutting boundary lines across the farm. In 1845, as challenges by Māori to settlement in the Hutt Valley increased, Fort Richmond was erected and manned by the Hutt Militia until a detachment of the 58th Regiment marched in on 24 April.3 Swainson’s house overlooked the stockade. His daughter, Mary, was pragmatic about the real versus imagined threat posed by Māori, and described the occupation of the fort by the redcoats in a letter to her grandparents in England:
The natives never made an attempt on the fort after all – few I think expected that they would. The soldiers were much disappointed when they found nothing was to be done. Mr Petre was waiting for nearly four hours on the Petoni [sic] beach to bring up some ammunition and baggage in his cart – not very comfortable on a cold night, though it was lovely moonlight. Mrs Petre described the silent march of the men along the bank as beautiful. I can fancy it giving one a lively idea of ‘Not a drum was heard’ etc. We being above the fort, were in no way disturbed by the event but slept soundly through it all. Can you fancy my having learnt to load a gun, and fire one?! Pray do not let this alarm you – the natives have never uttered a threat against the settlers and have always deprecated the idea of war and say that they will never be the first to begin it.4
1 Not to be confused with his namesake, William Swainson (1809–1884), attorney-general of New Zealand.
2 ‘Swainson, William, 1789–1855’, in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. AH McLintock [1966], Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand (teara.govt.nz/en/1966/swainson-william-1789-1855, accessed 16 July 2020).
3 Cowan, The New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 96.
4 Mary Swainson to her grandparents, 1 May 1845, cited in Charlotte Macdonald and Frances Porter with Tui MacDonald (eds), My Hand Will Write What my Heart Dictates: The unsettled lives of women in nineteenth-century New Zealand as revealed to sisters, family and friends (Auckland University Press with Bridget Williams Books, Auckland, 1996), p. 111.