Full Report

Part I examines whether the historical evidence supports a distinct customary interest of Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia at Te Aro, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, rather than merely establishing that members of those groups happened to live there. The inquiry is deliberately place-specific. It asks who held ahi kā at Te Aro in the period immediately before and at 1840, how that interest was understood by Māori, and whether it can be followed through the colonial land records.

The principal evidential base is the Wai 145 Wellington inquiry: the Waitangi Tribunal’s district findings, Penny Ehrhardt’s commissioned customary-tenure report, Angela Ballara’s translation of Wellington Native Land Court Minute Book 1H, Stephen Quinn’s report on the McCleverty arrangements, and the later Port Nicholson Block Urgency Report, which reproduces the 2003 Tribunal’s customary-right findings. These are supplemented by contemporary Spain Commission and McCleverty material reproduced in the Wai 145 casebook.¹

The report gives greatest weight to: (a) explicit Waitangi Tribunal findings; (b) nineteenth-century evidence recorded by the Native Land Court or land-claims processes; (c) Tribunal-commissioned historical reports that identify their primary sources; and only then (d) later synthesis. Particular care is taken not to translate Māori customary relationships automatically into English fee-simple concepts.

The Tribunal itself adopted a functional definition of ahi kā for Port Nicholson. It treated ahi kā as arising where a group resided, cultivated, or continuously used surrounding resources, and where that occupation or use was accepted by other Māori. This is the appropriate test for Te Aro because the central issue is not simply conquest, but the conversion of wider take raupatu into an established, localised and socially recognised right.²

The strongest independent conclusion is the Waitangi Tribunal’s. In its Wellington inquiry, subsequently quoted in full in the 2012 Port Nicholson Block Urgency Report, the Tribunal distinguished between the groups holding ahi kā at particular places around the harbour.

That finding is short but decisive. It does not say that Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui merely visited Te Aro or shared a general conquest right over the Port Nicholson block. The Tribunal expressly classified their Te Aro interest as ahi kā.³

The Tribunal also distinguished ahi kā from the broader take raupatu held by the conquering migrant groups. It found that Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui had developed ahi kā around Te Aro Pā while also participating in the wider conquest of the Port Nicholson block. This distinction is central: it places Te Aro in a different evidential category from areas where a group possessed only a wider conquest-based potential to develop rights.⁴

Penny Ehrhardt’s Wai 145 report, Te Whanganui-a-Tara: Customary Tenure 1750–1850, provides the clearest Tribunal-commissioned reconstruction of the movements into Te Aro before 1840. She records that Te Heke Paukena included Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia, together with Ngāti Ruanui and further Te Āti Awa migrants.⁵

Ehrhardt then identifies a specific act of emplacement by Ngātata-i-te-rangi after Haowhenua: the newcomers were permitted to move to the area between Te Aro and Waitangi Stream. The location is important. It places the relevant community not vaguely in Wellington but within the Te Aro–Waitangi landscape, broadly corresponding to the eastern central-city area extending toward the Basin.⁶

This is evidence of recognised settlement rather than opportunistic squatting. In customary terms, permission by a person or group with recognised authority, followed by occupation and cultivation, is capable of creating a durable local interest. The later record shows precisely that sequence.

The departure of most Ngāti Mutunga for Rēkohu/Wharekauri in 1835 is the pivotal event. The sources are not identical in their description of what occurred at the departure meeting, and that variation should be preserved rather than flattened. Mohi Ngāponga later told the Native Land Court that there was no single formal disposition of all land; other witnesses recalled a pānui or allocations to particular people and groups.⁷

The most important evidence for Ngāti Haumia is Hēmi Pārai’s Native Land Court account, preserved by Ehrhardt. He identified himself through Ngāti Haumia (Taranaki) and described Ngātata, Pōmare and Te Poki allocating the land on the Wellington side of Ngāūranga to Pārai, Pakuahi and Mohi.⁸

This evidence matters for two reasons. First, it identifies named Ngāti Haumia recipients. Secondly, it shows that the division of land after the Ngāti Mutunga departure was being remembered in terms of recognised allocations, not simply later physical occupation.

Ehrhardt’s overall assessment is even more direct. She states that Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia, together with Ngāti Ruanui, had moved onto the lands between Waitangi and Te Aro streams on Ngātata’s invitation and later maintained that Ngāti Mutunga confirmed the gift before leaving for Rēkohu.⁹

The careful conclusion is therefore not that every witness gave an identical legal formula. Rather, the evidence converges on a customary process of invitation or allocation, followed by confirmation and continuing occupation.

By the time of the New Zealand Company’s arrival, the Te Aro community was sufficiently established to be described by its constituent groups and named chiefs. Ehrhardt records Ngāti Ruanui remaining at Te Aro alongside Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia. She identifies the principal Ngāti Ruanui chiefs as Toko, Puihi, Pukahu and Marangi, and the principal Taranaki chiefs as Ngāponga, Tamati Weremu and Pārai.¹⁰

That evidence provides a valuable corrective to overly broad labels. It shows Te Aro as an organised kāinga with recognisable iwi/hapū components and named leadership. It also supplies a stronger Ngāti Ruanui/Ngāti Tupaia strand than is sometimes apparent in later individualised land records.

The Tribunal’s own ahi kā test emphasises residence, cultivation and use of resources. Te Aro meets that test squarely. The later McCleverty record repeatedly refers to the Te Aro people’s cultivations, and in 1847 they still required additional land specifically because they lacked enough suitable ground for kūmara. Such evidence is inconsistent with a merely nominal or transitory presence.¹¹

The New Zealand Company deed of September 1839 did not resolve the Te Aro interest. Ehrhardt records that Te Wharepouri divided the purchase goods among several settlements but initially omitted Te Aro. At Te Aro, Ngāti Ruanui at one end of the pā divided goods among themselves, while the Taranaki people at the other end were reported as angry because they had not wanted to accept them.¹²

More importantly, Ehrhardt records that no one from Te Aro had taken part in the shipboard discussions or the Pito-one and Ngāūranga negotiations. The Te Aro people later characterised the goods they received as an unsolicited gift associated with kinship rather than as purchase consideration.¹³

The 2003 Tribunal ultimately found the 1839 Port Nicholson deed invalid and incapable of conferring rights on the Company or its settlers. For present purposes, this reinforces the more local point: the Te Aro ahi kā interest cannot be treated as extinguished merely because wider harbour leaders purported to transact with the Company.¹⁴

The historical record contains contrary assertions, especially claims by some Te Āti Awa leaders that Te Aro was subject to their authority and that its residents possessed lesser status. A persuasive report must confront those statements rather than omit them. Ehrhardt records that Te Puni and Mahau challenged the standing of the Te Aro people.¹⁵

However, those assertions were themselves contested. Ehrhardt notes that other Te Āti Awa witnesses recognised Te Aro rights, and that the actions of Pōmare in relation to payment for Te Aro were consistent with recognising the community’s capacity to deal with its land. The Tribunal, after hearing the competing evidence, did not adopt the proposition that Te Aro was merely subordinate land of another group. Its final finding was Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui ahi kā at Te Aro.¹⁶

The conflict is therefore evidence of a complex and recently reconfigured customary landscape, not evidence that Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia lacked rights. The Tribunal expressly acknowledged that Port Nicholson rights were still developing when the Company arrived.¹⁷

The 1844 release provides a further documentary bridge from collective customary interest to named Te Aro rights-holders. Quinn’s Wai 145 report reproduces the Te Aro release signatories, including Mohi Ngāponga, Hēmi Pārai, Puihi, Te Teira and Pukahu. The list is especially significant because it contains both the Taranaki/Ngāti Haumia leadership identified elsewhere and leading Ngāti Ruanui names.¹⁸

The presence of Puihi and Pukahu is important for the Ngāti Tupaia/Ngāti Ruanui side of the case. Ehrhardt had already identified both men among the principal Ngāti Ruanui chiefs at Te Aro. Their appearance in the formal 1844 process demonstrates that the Ngāti Ruanui component of Te Aro was not merely demographic; its leaders were parties to the Crown’s attempt to regularise title.

The McCleverty material is particularly powerful because it repeatedly treats Te Aro as a distinct community with identifiable landowners, chiefs, cultivations and a pā. McCleverty’s 1847 census counted 186 people living at Te Aro, the largest population of any pā in his survey.¹⁹

The deed itself describes those participating as landowners and chiefs residing at and belonging to Te Aro. Although its tribal terminology reflects colonial usage and is not always precise, the wording is unmistakably proprietary and residential.

The signatories again include Ngāponga and Hēmi Pārai, as well as Pakuahi, Tamati Wiremu, Ngāpaka, Te Teira, Hori Pipi, Te Retimana Pukahu and others. This continuity of names across customary, 1844 and 1847 records is one of the strongest features of the case.²⁰

The deed also guaranteed the Te Aro Pā itself, and a further deed in October 1847 provided another 50 acres after the Te Aro people said they lacked suitable kūmara ground. This is direct evidence that cultivation remained a core component of the community’s land requirements.²¹

It would be misleading to describe McCleverty as the source of the Te Aro people’s rights. Quinn’s analysis emphasises that much of what was presented as an “award” was land Māori already owned, had been promised, or had retained from previous arrangements. The McCleverty process translated and constrained customary rights within a colonial title system; it did not create the underlying ahi kā.²²

That point is important to the present research question. The later appearance of individual names on grants does not prove that Te Aro rights were individual or Crown-derived before 1840. Rather, the grants are evidence of the colonial individualisation of an earlier collective customary estate.

The post-McCleverty record continues to identify the same Te Aro people. Quinn records that by June 1866 the Te Aro Pā reserve had been surveyed into 28 lots and Crown grants were issued to individual Māori occupiers. The later record still contains Hēmi Pārai, Mohi Ngāponga, Te Munu and Te Teira Whatakore.²³

A particularly useful entry records consents associated with Hēmi Pārai and Te Munu, Mohi Ngāponga and Te Teira Whatakore. This provides a documentary link from the earlier customary leadership into the later individualised land administration.²⁴

Angela Ballara’s translation of Native Land Court Minute Book 1H also preserves testimony from Ihikirere Te Waikapoariki, who stated that he lived at Te Aro and referred to Mohi, Hēmi Pārai, Hakaraia and Marangai as people from whom he had heard news of Te Kepa Ngāpapa’s death.²⁵

This late nineteenth-century evidence should not be used by itself to prove title at 1840. Its value is continuity: the same network of Te Aro names remains socially and territorially visible decades after the Company’s arrival.

The Ngāti Haumia case is exceptionally strong because multiple independent strands converge. The Wai 145 customary-tenure report identifies Ngāti Haumia in the migration and settlement at Te Aro; Hēmi Pārai is expressly identified as Ngāti Haumia (Taranaki); Pārai’s evidence describes an allocation to himself, Pakuahi and Mohi; Mohi Ngāponga and Pārai are later identified among the principal Taranaki chiefs at Te Aro; both names recur in the 1844 and 1847 documentation; and the Tribunal’s final iwi-level conclusion recognises Taranaki ahi kā at Te Aro.

The evidence therefore supports more than residence. It supports a customary interest grounded in recognised emplacement, named leadership, occupation, cultivation, inter-group recognition and continued assertion through successive colonial processes. Confidence: HIGH.

The Ngāti Tupaia case must be stated with slightly more historiographical care because the surviving sources sometimes use overlapping or inconsistent iwi/hapū labels. Ehrhardt refers in places to “Ngāti Tupaia of Taranaki” while also distinguishing Ngāti Ruanui; later authoritative heritage synthesis identifies Ngāti Tupaia as the Ngāti Ruanui hapū occupying the eastern part of Te Aro. The safest approach is not to force every nineteenth-century label into a modern taxonomy.²⁶

What is secure is that: Ngāti Tupaia are repeatedly placed at Te Aro; Ngāti Ruanui are repeatedly placed at Te Aro; Ehrhardt identifies Toko, Puihi, Pukahu and Marangi as principal Ngāti Ruanui chiefs there; Puihi and Pukahu appear among the 1844 Te Aro signatories; and the Tribunal itself finds Ngāti Ruanui ahi kā at Te Aro. The combination is compelling even where the exact hapū label of each named individual still requires further genealogical reconstruction. Confidence: HIGH for the collective Ngāti Ruanui/Ngāti Tupaia interest; MODERATE–HIGH for allocating every individual Te Aro owner to Ngāti Tupaia specifically.

Five propositions emerge from the evidence. First, the right is place-specific: the Tribunal locates Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui ahi kā at Te Aro. Secondly, it is community-specific: the evidence repeatedly identifies Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia/Ngāti Ruanui there. Thirdly, it is behavioural: people lived, cultivated and used resources there. Fourthly, it is recognised through dealings: the Crown and Company were forced to negotiate separately with Te Aro in 1844 and 1847. Fifthly, it is continuous: many of the same names recur through later land and succession records.

This combination makes the description of Te Aro merely as a generic “Te Āti Awa pā” historically inadequate. That broader label may describe relationships within the wider Taranaki migrant community, but it obscures the Tribunal’s more precise finding and the place-specific hapū evidence.

16.1 Competing Te Āti Awa assertions — Some Te Āti Awa witnesses asserted superior authority over Te Aro. Those claims are genuine evidence and should be acknowledged. They demonstrate that customary rights were contested and developing in the 1830s. They do not, however, displace the later Tribunal finding after consideration of the full evidential record.

16.2 Variation in the account of the 1835 allocation — Mohi Ngāponga’s statement that there was no single formal disposition should caution against presenting the 1835 events as one simple deed-like transfer. The stronger formulation is that Ngāti Haumia, Ngāti Tupaia and Ngāti Ruanui were invited or allocated to Te Aro, that some witnesses remembered confirmation by Ngāti Mutunga, and that their subsequent occupation converted those arrangements into ahi kā.

16.3 Hapū nomenclature — The precise relationship between the labels Ngāti Tupaia, Ngāti Ruanui and Taranaki is not consistently expressed in every historical source. This report therefore separates the secure conclusion — Ngāti Ruanui ahi kā at Te Aro and Ngāti Tupaia occupation there — from the more detailed task of assigning every named nineteenth-century owner to a modern hapū classification.

16.4 Individual title is not identical with customary title — The 1866 grants, later leases and Native Land Court successions are useful for tracing continuity, but they are not a transparent copy of the pre-1840 customary order. They must be treated as evidence filtered through Crown survey, reserve allocation, individualisation and succession law.

1. By 1840 Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui held ahi kā at Te Aro. This is an express Waitangi Tribunal finding.

2. The local communities through which those interests were principally expressed were Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia/Ngāti Ruanui.

3. The interests were grounded in recognised settlement arrangements followed by residence, cultivation and resource use.

4. The 1839 New Zealand Company deed did not validly extinguish those interests, and Te Aro was not represented in the original negotiations as a consenting seller.

5. The 1844 and 1847 processes identify a continuing Te Aro body of landowners and chiefs, including names already visible in the customary evidence.

6. Later grants and Native Land Court material show continuity of the Te Aro community, while also reflecting colonial individualisation of title.

The most persuasive conclusion available on the present evidence is that Te Aro was, at 1840, a distinct centre of Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui ahi kā within the wider Port Nicholson customary landscape. At the finer-grained hapū level, that interest is repeatedly associated with Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia.

The case does not rest on a single late tradition. It is cumulative. A Tribunal-commissioned customary-tenure study identifies the migration, invitation and subsequent settlement; Native Land Court evidence identifies Ngāti Haumia participants and remembered allocations; Spain-era and 1844 documentation identifies named Te Aro leaders; the McCleverty process addresses Te Aro as a distinct body of landowners and chiefs and recognises its pā and cultivations; later land records retain many of the same names; and the Waitangi Tribunal ultimately classifies the interest as ahi kā.

Accordingly, a historical narrative that collapses Te Aro into an undifferentiated “Te Āti Awa” occupation does not adequately reflect the Wai 145 evidential record. The more accurate formulation is that the wider Taranaki migrant community contained distinct localised interests, and that Te Aro was particularly the place where Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui ahi kā — expressed through Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia — was established and maintained.

Part II examines the geographical extent of the customary interests associated with Te Aro in the period immediately before and around 1840. It builds directly on Part I, which concluded that the Waitangi Tribunal’s Wai 145 evidence supports Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui ahi kā at Te Aro, expressed at hapū and community level principally through Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia.

The question addressed in Part II is different. It asks whether Te Aro should be understood narrowly as the small later surveyed pā reserve, or as the centre of a wider customary landscape that incorporated residences, gardens, freshwater, transport routes, resource areas and outlying lands. In particular, Part II tests the proposition that Te Aro interests extended across the central harbour-side landscape between Kumutoto and Waitangi and southward through the cultivation hinterland toward Paekawakawa at Island Bay.

The answer requires care. Nineteenth-century Māori customary interests were not cadastral parcels bounded in the same way as later Crown grants. A place might be the residential centre of a community while its cultivations, fishing places, pathways, wetlands and seasonal resource areas extended well beyond the settlement itself. The question is therefore not whether a nineteenth-century surveyor could have drawn one continuous Te Aro boundary from the waterfront to Island Bay. The question is whether the historical record identifies a coherent pattern of Te Aro occupation and use across that wider landscape.

The principal evidential base remains the Wai 145 Wellington inquiry: the Waitangi Tribunal’s district findings; Penny Ehrhardt’s customary tenure report; Angela Ballara’s translation of Wellington Native Land Court Minute Book 1H; Stephen Quinn’s report on the McCleverty arrangements; and the later Port Nicholson Block Urgency Report. Part II also draws on Volumes 1–4 of Nga Tupuna o Te Whanganui a Tara, which assemble biographies from Native Land Court minutes, land-title documents, archival material and local historical research.

Those Nga Tupuna volumes are used as secondary syntheses, not as substitutes for the primary records on which they rely. They are particularly valuable where they identify the underlying minute-book or archival references and where several biographies independently preserve the same allocation tradition.

The hierarchy of evidence follows the approach adopted in Part I: greatest weight is given to explicit Tribunal findings and nineteenth-century evidence; next to Tribunal-commissioned research grounded in primary material; and then to later historical synthesis. Modern heritage material is used only to clarify place names and geography, not to create customary rights that are not otherwise evidenced.

The starting point is the Tribunal’s own functional conception of ahi kā. In the Port Nicholson context it treated ahi kā as arising where a group resided, cultivated, or continuously used surrounding resources, and where that occupation or use was accepted by other Māori.³⁰

That formulation is decisive for the geographical inquiry. It means that the customary interest associated with a pā cannot safely be reduced to the palisaded residential area. Cultivation and continuing resource use are themselves evidence of ahi kā. A community that lived at Te Aro Pā but cultivated on the flats behind it, maintained gardens in nearby valleys, and held an allocated resource area at Paekawakawa was exercising customary rights across a landscape rather than inside a small residential compound.

The Tribunal’s place-specific finding is that Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui developed ahi kā around Te Aro Pā while also participating in the wider conquest of the Port Nicholson block. That distinguishes the localised Te Aro interest from a merely general take raupatu claim.³¹

The colonial record progressively narrowed the meaning of Te Aro. The pā was surveyed, subdivided and ultimately represented as a small set of individual lots. That later cartographic object is useful evidence of residence but is not a reliable measure of the extent of the earlier customary estate.

Quinn’s analysis of the McCleverty arrangements is important on this point. He emphasises that substantial parts of what were described as McCleverty “awards” were land Māori already owned, retained or had been promised. The awards translated and constrained pre-existing customary relationships; they did not create the underlying rights.³²

The same caution applies geographically. A Crown grant of a Te Aro Pā lot records the individualisation of one component of Te Aro land. It does not prove that all other places cultivated or used by the Te Aro community lay outside its customary interest.

5.1 The strongest allocation evidence: Kumutoto to Waitangi — The clearest geographical statement located in the Nga Tupuna material appears in the biography of Hēmi Pārai. It records the 1835 gathering on Matiu/Somes Island and states that Mohi Ngāponga was awarded “the area of Te Aro between Kumutoto and Waitangi streams, and Paekawakawa.”³³ That is exceptionally significant. It does two things at once. First, it describes Te Aro as an area larger than the pā. Secondly, it places Paekawakawa in the same allocation tradition. The statement therefore provides the most direct textual bridge between the central Te Aro landscape and the southern coast. The allocation is independently consistent with the Rawiri Matangi and Manihera Te Toru accounts in Volume II, which distinguish the areas allocated to different leaders after the Ngāti Mutunga departure and state that Mohi Ngāponga was given Te Aro and Paekawakawa.³⁴

5.2 Waikoukou as a supporting place-marker — Kumutoto is the historically supported western endpoint of the express 1835 allocation. The older Nga Tupuna biographies do not use Waikoukou in that express 1835 allocation formula; they use Kumutoto. That distinction should be preserved rather than silently harmonised. Nevertheless, later Wellington heritage mapping identifies Waikoukou as a historic stream immediately west of Te Aro and separately identifies Waimapihi and Waitangi. A National Library catalogue record for Johannes Andersen’s map of Wellington streams also lists Waikoukou as a named central-city stream, confirming that the name is historically attested.³⁵ Accordingly, this report uses “Kumutoto to Waitangi” as the principal geographical description of the Te Aro harbour-side landscape. Waikoukou remains relevant as a historically attested stream immediately west of Te Aro, but it does not replace the stronger historical wording “Kumutoto to Waitangi” where the allocation tradition is being quoted or relied upon. This is an important evidential distinction.

5.3 Waimapihi: an internal boundary within the Te Aro community — Volume I supplies another unusually precise piece of geographical evidence. The biography of Te Retimana Pukahu states that Ngātata-i-te-rangi divided Te Aro Pā into two parts, one for Taranaki and one for Ngāti Ruanui, and that “The Waimapihi stream was the border.”³⁶ This evidence is important because Waimapihi is not presented as the outer boundary of all Te Aro rights. It is an internal organising line between two constituent communities at Te Aro. That reinforces the picture of Te Aro as a socially structured customary settlement with identifiable sub-group areas, rather than an undifferentiated village.

5.4 Waitangi and the eastern side of Te Aro — Ehrhardt’s Wai 145 reconstruction places Ngāti Haumia, Ngāti Tupaia and Ngāti Ruanui in the area between Te Aro and Waitangi Stream following Ngātata-i-te-rangi’s invitation. Part I treated that evidence as a specific act of emplacement within the Te Aro-Waitangi landscape. Waitangi is therefore supported by both the allocation tradition and the Tribunal-commissioned customary-tenure research. It is not merely a modern cartographic convenience.

The geographical evidence gains weight because the same named people recur across customary accounts, the 1844 releases, McCleverty documentation and later land records. This continuity allows apparently separate places to be read as components of one community’s customary geography.

Mohi Ngāponga is central. Volume I identifies him as Ngāti Haumia o Taranaki, records his movement from Waikanae to Ngāūranga and then Te Aro, and states that at the 1835 gathering he was given “the areas of Te Aro and Paekawakawa (Island Bay).”³⁸ Hēmi Pārai is likewise identified as Ngāti Haumia. His biography preserves the more detailed Kumutoto-Waitangi-Paekawakawa formula, while the Wai 145 evidence records his account of recognised allocations involving himself, Pakuahi and Mohi.³⁹

On the Ngāti Ruanui/Ngāti Tupaia side, Te Retimana Pukahu and Ihikiera Te Waikapoariki provide the strongest geographical continuity. Te Retimana is identified as Ngāti Tuwhaia/Tupaea of Ngāti Ruanui and is associated with the Waimapihi division; Ihikiera is identified as Ngāti Tupaea of Ngāti Ruanui and later held both Te Aro Pā land and interests at Ōhiro.⁴⁰

These are not random individuals with disconnected holdings. They are members and leaders of the same Te Aro community whose names recur in the customary accounts, the 1844 releases, the 1847 deeds and later title records.

The evidence is not confined to remembered allocations. Volume IV records that Hori Patene Ngāpaka, of Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Koropanga, was cultivating at Te Aro in 1834. He later became one of the Te Aro signatories in the McCleverty process and continued to live at Te Aro at different periods.⁴¹

Cultivation in 1834 is particularly probative because it predates the New Zealand Company’s arrival. It demonstrates that the Te Aro community was already converting settlement rights into the practical acts that the Tribunal later treated as hallmarks of ahi kā.

The 1836 episode concerning Mohi Ngāponga’s potatoes at Ngāūranga similarly shows that cultivation rights and political authority were closely connected. Mohi’s ability to cultivate there became a point of conflict precisely because customary use had territorial consequences.⁴²

The pā itself could not sustain a population approaching two hundred without a substantial productive hinterland. The relevant historical landscape was therefore not simply a waterfront village. It consisted of the pā, adjoining streams and wetlands, nearby cultivation flats, routes into the valleys, and more distant gardens and resource areas.

The McCleverty record confirms the continuing importance of cultivation. In 1847 the Te Aro people required additional land because they lacked sufficient suitable ground for kūmara. The Te Aro deed recognised the pā, while the later October arrangement supplied another 50 acres for cultivation purposes.⁴³

That evidence is inconsistent with the idea that Te Aro rights ended at the palisade. The colonial administration itself had to address the community’s need for land outside the residential pā.

Modern Wellington historical synthesis, drawing on earlier mapping and heritage research, describes extensive Te Aro cultivations immediately south toward Pukeahu and further cultivation areas at Omāroro and Paekawakawa. This evidence is secondary and is used here as geographical corroboration rather than as the foundation of title.⁴⁴

Polhill Gully is particularly important because it provides a documented landholding connection between prominent Te Aro people and the inland/southern landscape.

Volume I records that Mohi Ngāponga’s section in the Polhill Gully Māori Reserve passed after his death to Wi Tako and Ihaka Te Rou. Volume III records multiple Te Aro people with Polhill interests, including Te Munu Te Ohiro, Teretiu Paora, Akanihi Himiona and Ahipane Marangai.⁴⁵

Polhill should not be treated as proof, by itself, of a continuous exclusive Te Aro corridor. Its significance is cumulative: the same people who formed the Te Aro community also possessed and succeeded to land immediately inland from it. This is exactly the pattern expected if Te Aro operated as a wider customary landscape.

The evidence becomes still stronger at Ōhiro. Ihikiera Te Waikapoariki, a Ngāti Tupaea/Ngāti Ruanui Te Aro owner, held interests in Ōhiro Sections 19 and 21 in addition to Te Aro Pā lots. He also stated that before the McCleverty awards he had cultivated in Port Nicholson and carried food from the cultivations down to the beach.⁴⁶

The image is a functional one: residence at or identification with Te Aro, cultivation inland, and movement of food between garden and coast. It demonstrates how a customary community could be spatially extensive without requiring continuous residential occupation of every intervening acre.

Ahipane Marangai provides a second strand. Volume III identifies him as a Taranaki leader who came to Te Aro with Toko and Pukahu, later received a Te Aro Pā section, and also possessed interests in Ōhiro Rural Sections 1 and 2, Wiremutaone and Polhill Gully.⁴⁷

These holdings are later, individualised expressions of land rights and must not simply be projected backwards as an exact 1840 map. But they provide continuity between the people of Te Aro and the southern valleys through which a Te Aro-Paekawakawa customary landscape would operate.

Paekawakawa is not merely inferred from later cultivation patterns. It is expressly named in the remembered 1835 allocation.

The Mohi Ngāponga biography states that he was given “the areas of Te Aro and Paekawakawa (Island Bay).” The Hēmi Pārai biography states that Mohi received Te Aro between Kumutoto and Waitangi streams “and Paekawakawa.” Volume II independently repeats that Mohi Ngāponga was given Te Aro and Paekawakawa.⁴⁸

The repetition across biographies matters. These accounts draw on overlapping bodies of land-court and archival material, so they are not wholly independent primary witnesses; nevertheless, the recurrence shows that the Te Aro-Paekawakawa association was a stable feature of the historical reconstruction, not an isolated editorial remark.

Paekawakawa therefore stands in a different evidential category from places that can be linked to Te Aro only through later ownership. It is an expressly named southern component of the allocation tradition itself.

Part I established that no Te Aro person participated in the shipboard, Pito-one or Ngāūranga negotiations leading to the 1839 New Zealand Company deed, and that the Tribunal ultimately found that deed invalid. Te Aro people did not therefore lose their customary interests merely because wider harbour leaders dealt with the Company.

This is relevant geographically. If the 1839 deed did not validly extinguish the Te Aro interest, there is no proper basis for using subsequent settler occupation or surveying to assume that the customary Te Aro landscape had already contracted to the pā reserve.

The 1844 Te Aro release identifies a continuing body of Te Aro rights-holders including Mohi Ngāponga, Hēmi Pārai, Puihi, Te Teira and Pukahu. In 1847 McCleverty’s census counted 186 people at Te Aro and the deed described its parties as landowners and chiefs residing at and belonging to Te Aro.⁵⁰

The importance of these documents is not confined to the land eventually granted. They establish that colonial officials encountered a distinct Te Aro community capable of collective dealing, with identifiable leaders, a pā and extensive cultivation requirements.

By 1866 the Te Aro Pā reserve had been surveyed into individual lots. The later record still contains Hēmi Pārai, Mohi Ngāponga, Te Munu and Te Teira Whatakore, while Nga Tupuna traces several of the same Te Aro figures into Polhill, Ōhiro, Wiremutaone and other lands.⁵¹

This later record should not be treated as a transparent copy of the pre-1840 customary order. Survey, Crown grant, reserve allocation, leasing and succession all altered the legal form of the land. Its proper use is to demonstrate continuity of people and association, not to convert later legal parcels into supposed ancient boundaries.

The evidence supports a connected landscape, but the word “connected” requires explanation. It does not necessarily mean that every piece of land between the harbour and Paekawakawa was exclusively owned by Te Aro people, free from overlapping rights. Māori customary tenure could accommodate layered, shared and activity-specific interests.

The evidence instead shows a spatial system with several mutually reinforcing components: a principal residential community at Te Aro; an eastern relationship to Waitangi; a western endpoint at Kumutoto; a central-city landscape in which Waikoukou and Waimapihi were significant waterways; extensive cultivation behind the pā; inland holdings and resource use at Polhill and Ōhiro; and an expressly remembered southern allocation at Paekawakawa.

That is consistent with the Tribunal’s approach, which treats residence, cultivation and continuous resource use as the practical foundations of ahi kā rather than demanding a modern surveyed perimeter.⁵²

16.1 Kumutoto is the stronger western endpoint — The strongest allocation wording says Kumutoto to Waitangi. This report therefore treats Kumutoto, rather than Waikoukou, as the principal western endpoint. It does not claim that the two names are interchangeable. Waikoukou is a historically attested stream west of Te Aro and remains a useful supporting landscape marker, but the 1835 allocation tradition and the report’s principal geographical framing should remain in its Kumutoto-Waitangi form.

16.2 The Waimapihi evidence concerns internal organisation — The statement that Waimapihi was the border is evidence of a division within Te Aro Pā between Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui. It should not be enlarged into a claim that Waimapihi marked the western or eastern limit of every Te Aro customary right.

16.3 Paekawakawa does not prove exclusive ownership of every intervening parcel — The express allocation of Te Aro and Paekawakawa is powerful, but it does not by itself prove that the whole intervening landscape was one exclusive, continuously bounded estate. The stronger and more historically appropriate conclusion is that Te Aro possessed a connected network of residential, cultivation and resource interests extending southward to Paekawakawa.

16.4 Later individual titles are filtered evidence — Polhill and Ōhiro titles strengthen the continuity argument but are products of colonial individualisation. They should be used as corroborating links between people and places, not as exact replicas of the customary geography of 1840.

1. By 1840 Te Aro was a distinct centre of Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui ahi kā, expressed principally through Ngāti Haumia and Ngāti Tupaia/Ngāti Ruanui.

2. The customary Te Aro interest was not confined to the later surveyed pā reserve. Under the Tribunal’s own test, residence, cultivation and continuing resource use form part of ahi kā.

3. The strongest remembered allocation describes Te Aro as extending between Kumutoto and Waitangi streams and expressly includes Paekawakawa.

4. Kumutoto is the strongest evidenced western endpoint of the remembered Te Aro allocation. Waikoukou is historically attested as a stream immediately west of the Te Aro central landscape, but it should not be substituted for Kumutoto in the 1835 allocation evidence.

5. Waimapihi had an internal organising role at Te Aro, being remembered as the boundary between the Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui portions of the pā.

6. Pre-Company cultivation is directly evidenced at Te Aro, including Hori Ngāpaka’s cultivation in 1834.

7. The McCleverty record confirms that the Te Aro community depended on cultivation land beyond the residential pā and required additional suitable kūmara ground in 1847.

8. Later land records connect prominent Te Aro people with Polhill Gully and Ōhiro, providing an evidential bridge into the southern hinterland.

9. Paekawakawa is the most securely evidenced southern endpoint because it is expressly paired with Te Aro in the remembered 1835 allocation.

10. The evidence supports a connected Te Aro customary landscape extending from the central harbour-side area south toward Paekawakawa, but does not justify describing every intervening parcel as exclusively owned by Te Aro in a modern fee-simple sense.

The accumulated evidence supports a materially wider understanding of Te Aro than the footprint of the later pā reserve. Te Aro Pā was the residential and political nucleus of a community whose customary life extended outward through waterways, cultivation grounds, inland valleys and outlying resource areas.

At the central-city level, the clearest historical allocation places Te Aro between Kumutoto and Waitangi streams. Kumutoto should therefore be treated as the principal western endpoint in the report’s geographical formulation.

Waikoukou and Waimapihi further illuminate the physical and social geography within and adjacent to that central landscape: Waikoukou is historically attested immediately west of Te Aro, while Waimapihi is specifically remembered as the internal boundary between the Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui portions of the pā.⁵³

Southward, the case is cumulative. Te Aro required extensive cultivations; named Te Aro people held or succeeded to land in Polhill and Ōhiro; Ihikiera Te Waikapoariki described carrying food from cultivations to the beach; Ahipane Marangai combined Te Aro Pā ownership with Ōhiro and Polhill interests; and, most importantly, the remembered 1835 allocation expressly paired Te Aro with Paekawakawa.

The most persuasive formulation is therefore that Te Aro was a connected customary landscape, with a central harbour-side core and a southern cultivation and resource hinterland extending to Paekawakawa. This formulation accords with the Tribunal’s functional understanding of ahi kā and avoids the anachronism of treating the later Crown-surveyed pā reserve as if it had been the boundary of Te Aro customary rights in 1840.⁵⁴