From issue: May 2002

Kerikeri: A Pocket Parramatta

by Fergus Clunie

The earIy years of the missionary settlement at Kerikeri can only be understood by looking across the Tasman Sea to Parramatta.

Founding links between evangelical Kerikeri and penal Parramatta were so strongly forged and express themselves so tangibly in the Kerikeri Mission House and Stone Store that those buildings might be said to form part of the built heritage of New South Wales.

Augustus Earle's panorama of "Kiddy Kiddy New Zealand, a Church Missionary Establishment" in 1827. Though romanticised, the detail is accurate. Kororipo Pa is at the extreme left and the Mission House of 1822 to the right. Painting: Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia

From the outset the two settlements had much in common. Both lay at the heads of inlets of great harbours: the Bay of Islands and Port Jackson. Both began as farming settlements. And British interlopers soon displaced their native populations. The destinies of these twin spearheads of colonisation became entwined because London Missionaries fleeing Tahiti, and roving Maori rangatira, were befriended by the Rev. Samuel Marsden of Parramatta, chaplain of New South Wales.

A George Evans watercolour of Parramatta Landing, showing the new stone store of 1809. Picture: Mitchell Library

Besides juggling ministerial, magisterial, commercial and farming interests, by the early 1800s Marsden was Pacific agent for the London Missionary Society (LMS), synchronising its attack on Tahitian religion and society. As captivated by the evangelical potential of Maori as he was by trading prospects, he determined to do the same by New Zealand.

By 1808 he had talked the Church Missionary Society (CMS) into Anglicising the Maori, but the cutting off of the Boyd in 1809 disrupted New Zealand trading prospects and left the first Church Missionary "lay settlers" marking time at Parramatta for five years. Marsden made good the time by taking stray rangatira in Port Jackson home to Parramatta to verse them in the simpler "Arts of Civilised Life".

Marsden's mill at Parramatta, forerunner of the proposed water mills at Kerikeri and Waimate, painted by Joseph Lycett. Picture: Mitchell Library

In 1815 Marsden at last managed to ensconce his CMS settlers at Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands. But Ruatara, the mission's patron, sickened and died. This stranded the settlers on a forbidding shore amidst "savages" who had a keen interest in their property but none in their Christian message. Apart from wedging a foot in the door, the Rangihoua mission failed. It operated less as a mission than as a trading station for Marsden's merchant brig, the Active, and other ships. Here, British goods were exchanged for Maori produce. The guns and powder that were the hard currency of the trade changed hands circumspectly.

As this went on, the chaplain persisted in Parramatta with his so-called New Zealand Seminary. There, chiefly youths from the Bay of Islands tilled the soil in return for broken English and basic literacy spiced with smatterings of farming, gardening and British crafts. Well into the l820s well-bred Nga Puhi and Ngare Raumati youths were as familiar a sight at Parramatta as Church Missionaries were at the Bay of Islands.

The Kerikeri Mission Station in 1844, from W. C. Cotton's "Journal". Picture: Dixson Library

By early 1819 Marsden was planning to move his seminary into more "commodious" Rangehoo (Marsdenese for Rangihoua), a house he was building on the north bank of the Parramatta River. Tragically, the young chiefs he quartered there from late 1819 through early 1820 sank so fast and were bundled into their graves in such quick succession that even Marsden, who rarely checked the hand of God, was moved to close it. But Maori in any event were not intended as Rangehoo's sole tenants; with an influx of Church Missionary settlers pending it was also meant to house "any missionary who may visit Port Jackson".

Rangehoo is, like other wooden buildings of its day, long gone from Parramatta. But its younger sister and uncanny look-alike still stands on the banks of the Kerikeri River. Which is no coincidence.

View across the Parramatta River in 1836 from Marsden's cottage, built in 1819. Picture: from Taylor, "The Early History of New Zealand"

Rangehoo was brand new when the incoming CMS contingent arrived at Port Jackson in June 1819. It was surely where the Rev. John and Mrs Hannah Butler, James and Charlotte Kemp, and Francis Hall stayed before embarking for the Bay of Islands a month later. Likewise, the carpenters who had just built Rangehoo for Marsden were as surely those whom he engaged at Parramatta to go with them to build, among less lasting things, the Kerikeri Mission House.

Marsden and his new settlers landed at Rangihoua in August 1819. A creeping colonisation had been planned since 1817, when the CMS sounded Marsden out about founding a self-sufficient "colony of select characters composed of agriculturalists and mechanics" to salvage their stalled Bay of Islands investment. He had responded by suggesting that the colony grow in stages to evade Maori suspicion. He was so sure of success he had cattle shipped to the Bay of Islands for his own commercial herd. Impressed by such commitment, the CMS despatched the Butler-led contingent for New Zealand.

Drawing of the stone granary at Parramatta, built in 1809, in a style similar to that used later for Kerikeri's Stone Store. Drawing: Historical Records of New South Wales, vol 7

It was vital that this second CMS thrust not get pinned on Rangihoua's barren shore. If the dependence of the CMS missionaries on "depraved" but redeemable "New Zealand savages" was to be broken, the mission had to become self-suffient. Having drifted at rudderless Rangihoua, it had to align itself behind a truly powerful chief, one who might follow the precedent set by Pomare, patron of Marsden's London Missionaries in Tahiti. Pomare, with missionary backing, had overthrown rival ari'i nui to become the first King of Tahiti. This time Marsden knew just what and whom he wanted. He had coveted Te Kerikeri since 1815 and Kororipo Pa there was the coastal stronghold of Hongi Hika, Nga Puhi's most formidable fighting chief. "The KiddeeKiddee" was thus selected as the "principal settlement" of the new CMS colony, with the "new town" to be built by its "fine fall of water", well suited to turning corn and saw mills. By September 1819 fern and scrub were being cleared from the "town" centre. In October it was christened "Gloucester Town".

Apart from his purposeful repition of the word "town", nothing reveals the scope of Marsden's colonising intent more tellingly than the size of his Kerikeri purchase of November 1819. Upwards of 50 square kilometers were bought for the CMS, so his deed of purchase says, for four dozen felling axes.

Samuel Marsden's cottage at Parramatta, "Old Rangehoo", in 1836. It was built in 1819 as a "seminary" for the sons of Maori chiefs, evidently by the same team which three years later built the Kerikeri Mission House. Picture: from Taylor, "The Early History of New Zealand"

But there was more to it. Butler, not speaking Maori, had little inkling of what was really afoot, so was taken aback when Marsden pledged the deal in gunpowder. Two who did know what was what, the illiterate Hongi Hika as principal vendor and Thomas Kendall as Marsden's interpreter and co-negotiator, understood a pivotal unwritten clause to include a trip to England for Hongi Hika in Kendall's care, garnished by a double-barrelled gun and a dozen muskets.

Back at Parramatta, the chaplain was questioned by Commissioner John Bigge about rumours of missionary gun trading in Tahiti and New Zealand. Marsden had been quietly profiting from and advancing LMS and CMS interests through covert missionary gun trading for years. He was now in a shocking quandry. Luckily for him, Bigge had bigger fish to fry and needed his cooperation. He was also loath to attract the career-crippling ire of the evangelical lobby at Westminster by discrediting so favoured a son as Marsden. So Marsden was allowed to save his skin by denying personal involvement in gun trading, scapegoating rogue missionaries, ostensibly withdrawing the Active from island trading and actually cracking down on Church Missionary arms dealing.

But his near unmasking so shook him that it was a stridently born-again anti-gun campaigner that he returned to the Bay of Islands on H.M.S. Dromedary in early 1820. Even so, he strove to bribe Hongi Hika into foregoing his pre-arranged voyage to England by proffering a double-barrelled gun. But the chief also wanted his dozen muskets. With quizzical British officers on hand, Marsden could hardly satisfy him on that score. As it dawned on Hongi Hika that he was being defrauded, relations between the mission and neighbouring Kororip Pa broke down.

Spurning Marsden, but blaming Butler, whose opposition to mission gun trading was notorious, Hongi Hika sailed for England with a disgusted Kendall. The outraged chief, in the coy wording of the CMS, "by some means… when in England" got his hands on a large consignment of muskets and gunpowder. So large that when he and Kendall got home in mid 1821, musket numbers at the Bay of Islands trebled overnight, from perhaps 600 to nearly 2000. Hongi Hika wa sable to field a thousand instead of a few dozen muskets and proceeded, for a start, to depopulate the Auckland isthmus.

At Te Kerikeri, the resentment caused by Marsden's gun trading volte-face, aggravated by the gathering of unruly Nga Puhi war parties, bred scares and disruptions for the Church Missionaries. Despite this, Butler had crops in the field, cottages and outbuildings standing, and his Rangehoo-like mission house rising by the time Hongi Hika got home from England. Marsden, recognising he had lost control of his champion and glimpsing the appalling consequences of the Bay of Islands gun trading at first hand, began sending pointed "hints" to the CMS to lobby for a British military force in New Zealand.

By 1823 even Marsden had realised that in courting a dedicated fighting chief rather than a lofty ariki, he had backed the wrong horse. Hongi Hika would not and could not be king: the duty he owed his ancestors was to destroy clan enemies. Thanks to the firepower acquired through his association with Marsden and his Church Missionaries he was doing that on an unprecedented scale. Facing a propoganda disaster, the CMS scrambled to distance itself from its Maori patron and its agent's potentially damning Kerikeri purchase. Te Kerikeri lost its favoured status. Rather than expanding Gloucester Town, the CMS formed a new "principal settlement" at Paihia in 1823.

Amidst all this turmoil, as he had promised, Hongi Hika withdrew from Te Kerikeri in 1826. Thenceforth, the heat came off at Kerikeri. By 1830 Kororipo Pa was no more and Kerikeri was effectively an English enclave, the only resident Maori being schoolchildren and mission servants. The Girls War then enabled the Church Missionaries to close on the long-coveted Ngai Tawake planting heartland a Te Waimate. With the spectre of Hongi Hika fading and his people removed, it seemed Gloucester Town might yet flourish. With wheat farming in mind, a road was built to Te Waimate. Kerikeri was at last to have its cherished water mill, akin to Marsden's old mill at Parramatta, not to mention its own Stone Store-cum-granary, like the one at Parramatta Landing, and a boys' school.

But it was not to be. An ex-convict stonemason from Parramatta did build the Stone Store at Kerikeri Landing, but the mill was forsaken as the Kerikeri settlers supposedly recognised, in the very act of laying the mill's foundations, a wheel-stopping tidal factor. The mill went to Te Waimate and the school to Paihia.

Thereafter Kerikeri, mission without Maori, lagged. As Marsden aged, ties with Parramatta grew more tenuous, finally being cut by the old man's death in 1838. It would be a century before a back-watered Kerikeri could again aspire, with successive influxes of Pakeha settlers, to become what the grand manipulator of New Zealand's colonisation always intended it to be: a pocket Parramatta.

Fergus Clunie works as a Heritage Adviser for the Historic Places Trust. He has been involved with the restoration of both Pompallier and the Stone Store.