NEW ZEALAND CENTENARIES.

Evening Star, Issue 20133, 25 March 1929, Page 8

NEW ZEALAND CENTENARIES.

The anniversary of Otago's foundation was observed with fitting seriousness and honour on Saturday. There were some among those! least mindful, perhaps, of the associations of the occasion who regretted that it could not have been observed to-day, which would have meant a full day’s instead of a halfday’s relief from customary toil. But a more general conviction must have been that Anniversary Day, before most of our holidays, is one that ought to be celebrated on the correct date, and not on some other chosen on mere grounds of general pleasure or convenience. It is our own day in a very special sense, fraught with more signifianco than mere ordinary holidays. A debt of remembrance is duo then which should not be deferred. The story of the Otago settlement has been told and retold, and full justice to its memories and heroism was done by the .gatherings of Saturday. But a thought that is worth considering is how different tho history of tho settlement must have been if the attempt had been made to found it twenty, or even ten, years earlier, before an environment peaceful, however primitive, had been prepared lor it. Tho colonists had difficulties enough to face when they arrived in their two ships—difficulties of isolation, of tho bush, of unbridged rivers, of an unsubdued soil, absence of any means of transport except tho simplest. But they came to a land which was empty for them, except for a very few inhabitants who did not add in any way to their troubles. A few years earlier they would have met with very different conditions. A hundred years ago and some years that followed were a time ol ferment and upheaval in tho South Island of New Zealand. That time will he worth recalling in tho centenary period which is approaching.

Te Rauparaha’s name was a name el dread in the South Island as well as in the North. Ho had led his tribe from Kawhia, in Auckland, to the mainland opposite Kapiti, and made that island his stronghold after a series of bloody campaigns. It was armed with tho new firearms, which made it terrible to tribes nob so equipped. A century ago this'" year occurred his first descent on tho South Island that extended further than tho shores of Cook Strait. Ho bad beard that a c-bief a) Kaikourn, lines of whose old pa can be still discerned, had threatened to rip him open with a barraeouta’s tooth if lie ventured to set foot within Ins territory. The northern force landed from their war canoes at Omihi, and, as they found their destined victims expecting friends, were able to effect a surprise massacre, which left Kaikoura a place of desolation and wailing. The invaders then made their appearance before Kaiapoi, oi Kaiapohia, the strongest and richest pa of the South Island, where theii pretence of friendship was not credited, and some of their chiefs, including the famous To Pehi, who had been to England, were killed by a forestalling of treachery. The seizure of the Akavoa chief, Taimaiharanui, and tho burning of that pa were To Rauparaha’s first revenge for that miscarriage of his plans. In that atrocity ho was aided by the unspeakable Captain Stewart, who placed bis brig, the Elizabeth, at his disposal. The next year saw tho siege and sack of Kaiapoi, a story as dramatic, as it is told by Canon Stack, as any in Greek or Roman, or, for that matter, British annals, and then followed the attempts of the South Island Natives, making successive journeys to Cook Strait, to take their revenge, upon To Rauparalui. Even Otago was disturbed by those commotions. Taiaroa, then tho principal chief of the' Ngai-tahu, bad his headquarters at Taiaroa Head. The repercussions in this district are a story still to be unravelled by the historian, but there are references to. them in Familiar records. In 1835 the Sydney Packet, trading with Johnny Jones’s whaling stations, reported an outbreak of inlluenza in these parts so disastrous that it was said to have arrested preparations of the Natives for a fresh burst of hostilities. Two years iatei the same vessel brought news that mutters had developed in connection with the Maori disturbance. A Cloudy Piny war party had come overland and fought an engagement (at Tutiirau, on tho banks of tiro Matanra), in which their leader, Te Puoho, was killed, and a large number ;vere taken prisoners. It was lucky for the Otago, and also for the Canterbury, settlers that they did not arrive till after these disturbances, when the Maoris of this island were no more than a peaceful remnant, and the most engaging of their later chiefs, Tuwhaiki, had repented of his name of “Bloody Jack.”