The Tuhoe Join the Battle
Yet there was one more act to be played. Joined by zealous Tuhoe tribesmen from the mountainous Urewera, the rebel chief Rewi Maniaporo wearily decided to dig out a fortress at Orakau among peach trees and wheat fields to the west of Te Awamutu and there wait upon Britain's wrath.
The ensuing siege has been romantically celebrated as 'Rewi's last stand'. It was less than that, and more. The fight seems to have been against Rewi's better judgment, but his mana would have been diminished had he not hospitably offered a battle to the Tuhoe.
For three days, in the most awesome pitched battle of the Waikato War, three hundred Maoris, soon starving and thirsty, held out against two thousand troops and a rain of shot and shell. When offered surrender, they answered, 'We shall fight you for ever and ever'.
When mercy was offered to women and children within the fort, the reply came that women and children would fight and die too. And most did die. Their courage melted even hardened martial hearts.
On the third day a hundred or more weak survivors charged out in a phalanx through British lines. Though many were shot down in the pursuit that followed, many others, including Rewi himself, escaped through swamp and forest and across the Puniu River into territory thereafter known as the King Country, a sanctuary for Maori dissidents.
In that sense Orakau can be seen as a Maori triumph - Maori spirit there helped persuade the British ro press no further.. But the Waikato was no longer a Maori domain.
In the ruthless confiscations that ensued, the colonial government rook land as far south as Kihikihi.
So began the European history of the region.
Maori land was surveyed, subdivided and distributed among the colony's militia: fifty acres (twenty hectares) for soldiers and up to four hundred (one hundred and sixty hectares) for officers.
Many were drifters and misfits recruited in Australia on that mercenary basis. Until peace was assured, they were expected to win a living from the land. They were little more effective as farmers than they had been as soldiers. Worse still, their holdings were often under water.
The government soon reneged on promises of financial support. Few militiamen had capital ro develop their land, and their debts mounted.
The clearing of fern and draining of swamp took further toll and, sick of slaving waist-high in mud, many reached for the bottle.
Most of these soldier-settlers finally fled the field, lucky if they could sell off their allotments to land speculators for ten shillings (one dollar) an acre. Gold strikes on the Coromandel Peninsula offered more wholesome prospects.
Storekeepers shut their doors and garrison towns like Te Awamutu, Cambridge and Hamilton all but died.
Colonists Move In
More colonists moved into the region, taking up the land militiamen had bitterly abandoned, this time with a little"more capital and a little more rural experience.
They struggled too, as the colony itself reeled from depression. Even large landholders - like Josiah Firth on his twenty-two thousand hectare estate at Matamata - came to grief. Settlers of lesser substance survived by flax dressing and gum-digging.
Yet scrub was cleared, swamps were drained and once bleak hills and once dank plains took on a green glow. Dairying, in place of sheep-raising, began to spread through the region, its appeal immediate to smallholders who needed quick returns.
Directly to the south of Auckland, especially on volcanic soil round Pukekohe, market gardening was favoured.
Dairy Industry Thrives
After 1908 drainage of the sodden Hauraki Plains opened up a large new dairying district.
Following the First World War production increased with effective use of fertilisers, better roads and better breeding techniques.
Taranaki was outstripped as New Zealand's principal dairying region.
About half New Zealand's population of dairy cows are now located in the South Auckland-Waikato area. But rural diversification, especially into deer farming and horticulture, has been pursued since the ninety seventies.
Giant fields of corn now flutter where tides of grass once washed to the roadside; kiwifruit plots and vineyards hug sunny slopes.
Hamilton, always the Waikato's first town, became its first city in 1945, when the population exceeded twenty thousand.
It had taken eight years, but in the next forty, with the growth of industry, it increased five-fold to more than a hundred thousand, finally edging out Dunedin New Zealand's fourth city in 1986.
Industry changed the South Auckland region too, with growth of the Glenbrook iron and steel plant near Waiuku on the south side of the Manukau Harbour.
The demand for energy has reshaped landscape, and great hydro-electric dams and lakes have grown along the Waikato River.
The coal of the lower Waikato basin, an energy source since the days when it fired the boilers of British gunboats, remains precious.
Large coal-burning power stations have risen at Meremere and Hundy; more coalfields are opening, and older fields are being reworked.
Mooloo Reigns Supreme.
Waikato, with Taranaki, is home to one of the most native species of New Zealand fauna: the 'cow cocky'. Dour in feature and casual in dress, terse in wit and aggressive in stance, he is best observed on market days and at agricultural shows.
He has made the Waikato what it is today and New Zealand too, and isn't slow to say so.
In no other part of New Zealand have human beings imposed themselves more durably and more comprehensively than in the peaceful Waikato region.
Of the land of the moa hunter and Tainui tribes, of the swampy wilderness the soldier-sealer knew, just scraps of scrub and shreds of forest remain. Most of the Waikato is serene tapestry of shelter belt, farmhouse, prosperous small town and dairy factory.
The voices of the past are faint.
