The impact of the Wairau Affray on the New Zealand Company settlement of Wellington, 1843 to 1846

The Wairau Affray was much more than a clash or conflict about land between the Nelson settlers and the local Ngāti Toa iwi. The Wairau Affray of 17 June 1843 has become known as a forerunner to the later New Zealand Wars. Instead of the usual military history association, this thesis focuses on the impact that the Wairau Affray had on the settlers in Wellington, as the principal settlement of the New Zealand Company. A focus on the emotional landscape and ideologies of the Wellington settlers helps to tell a story of disruption and adjustment to change resulting in their growing independence from the New Zealand Company. Ultimately, the Wairau Affray turned the English New Zealand Company emigrants into independent Wellington settlers. 

Another dimension to the Wairau Affray, this thesis suggests, is the tug-of-war for power as the settlers strived to control their own destiny. Marginalised by the growing number of settlers and officials, the local Māori iwi were not contenders in this power struggle located in the New Zealand Company Cook Strait settlements. Instead, on one end were the official British Government representatives endeavouring to enforce British laws on the new colony, and on the other end were the settlers, who were in fact living in the Cook Strait settlements of Nelson and Wellington. In 1843 and the following three years, the shock and horror of the Wairau Affray reverberated through settler community because a ‘Wakefield’ had been killed, but not just killed, ‘massacred’, along with twenty-one other Nelson settlers and four Māori. 

Two approaches are used to analyse the impact that the Wairau Affray had on the Wellington settlers. First, an analysis of the ‘emotional landscape’ of the settlement before and after the Affray reveals more about the intensity of the impact, which changed from a sense of hope and the anticipation of a better future, to gloomy stoicism after the fear and excitement raised by the threat of warfare dissipated. Secondly, an assessment of the ideologies of the settlers explores how a ‘struggle’, in this case the Wairau Affray, challenged the established ideas of the settlers. The dual purpose of the New Zealand Company, colonisation and enterprise, provided the foundation for the settlement to survive this time of trial by relying on colonial capitalist endeavours despite the collapse of the colonisation scheme.