#The last bastion cast full#

The smoke was billowing and swirling and illuminated from all sides by the flames of collapsing buildings. 'I remember the smoke drifting across Tamaki Drive. Many years later he gave the Waitangi Tribunal a graphic account:

The night the village was burned an Aucklander, John Broadbent, was repairing his yacht in Okahu Bay. The the royal tour of 1952-53 was about to begin and the Queen would pass along Tamaki Drive. When all the residents had been moved the village was to be burned, urgently. Only a tiny cemetery was left of the land Ngati Whatua called their own. It took the land under the Public Works Act, moving the residents up the hill to state houses in Kitemoana St on the eastern side of the bay. The council's health committee ruled the hovels unsuitable for habitation and asked the Government to take action. In 1944, European residents petitioned the council to get rid of the insanitary shacks that many of the tribe, with the backing of Princess Te Puea, had been negotiating with the Government to upgrade. Ngati Whatua lived on the lowland behind the beach, the last 3 acres of their 'papakainga'. The City Council planned an Orakei 'garden suburb' on the west side of Okahu Bay rising to Paratai Drive. Orakei had become valuable real estate after the new Tamaki Drive crossed Hobson Bay in 1929. They had intended always to keep the 700 acres of Orakei recognised as theirs by the Maori Land Court in 1896 and declared inalienable by the Crown in 1873 but most of it had gone.

They had given Remuera to the Tainui chief Kati Te Wherowhero in return for Tainui protection in earlier years, and now it too had gone. They had relinquished most of the western isthmus the following year when they were overwhelmed by the arrival of 3000 more settlers in the new capital. They had given the area that was now downtown Auckland to Governor Hobson's officials in 1840. Ngati Whatua had once had all the land in sight, and more.

#The last bastion cast full#

Click here to view the full series.īastion Pt in 1976 was a quiet place, a sward of open grassland between the Savage memorial on the headland and the marae of Ngati Whatua o Orakei. As Auckland merges to create a supercity, the Herald looks back at how Auckland has changed over the years.