Rev. Samuel Marsden is believed to have been the first European to see the Manukau. Unlike the Rev. J. G. Butler who, after climbing Mount Wellington the day previous to Marsden's effort in 1820, described only the Maori settlements and plantations he had seen, Marsden specifically described the harbour itself. A few days later both missionaries crossed the harbour in a Maori canoe but could not navigate the entrance because of the heavy seas breaking on the bar.

The Manukau remained an important communications route throughout the early days of European settlement. During the Maori Wars local naval volunteers raided territories on the south side of the harbour from their base at Onehunga, established in 1847 as a defence outpost. Following the wars the harbour became important for its timber trade, kauri from Awhitu Peninsula and other timber from the Manukau lowlands to the south being rafted to the sawmills at Onehunga. Despite the treacherous nature of the entrance, the harbour was a regular call both for overseas ships and for coasters. Many ships have been lost here, the best known being HMS Orpheus, wrecked on 8 February 1863 with the loss of 189 lives. The early boom days of the harbour passed away with the construction of the railway south from the deeper and safer Waitemata Harbour. The first 10 miles were opened for traffic in 1873 and it is ironical that the puriri sleepers for it almost certainly came from the Manukau lowlands, across the harbour and through Onehunga. Growth of trade around the harbour has been slow and the urbanisation of the Tamaki Isthmus and the Manukau lowlands to the west of the harbour have been mainly related to the development of Waitemata Harbour. Most of the bush to the south has been cleared to make way for dairy and sheep farms, and the Waitakeres have been almost depleted of kauri. Today the harbour carries coastal shipping in slowly increasing tonnages to and from the industrial centre of Onehunga. An international airport, to be completed in 1965, is being built mainly on land reclaimed from the harbour near Mangere, where an extensive residential area is being planned. The Manukau waters still attract fishermen, and small but growing communities, such as Weymouth, which mainly depend on the recreational facilities of the harbour, have become established around the shores. Waiuku, on the south side of the harbour, is an important farming centre. Future development of the harbour will depend largely on the construction of a canal linking it with the Waitemata, where the tides are approximately two hours later. The canal would also shorten the sea route from the Waitemata to the west coast ports.

by Frederick Ernest Bowen, B.SC.(DURHAM), New Zealand Geological Survey, Otahuhu.

• Auckland – City of the Seas, Reed, A. W. (1955)
• South Auckland, Wily, H. E. R. L. (1939)
• New Zealand Geographer, Vol. 12 (1956), “Aspects of the Pleistocene and Recent History of the Auckland Isthmus”, Searle, E. J.

Maori traditions of the Great Migration tell of the canoe Tainui being hauled across the Tamaki Isthmus to become the first of the great canoes to reach the Manukau. The anxiety of Hoturoa, Te-Manuka-O-Hoturoa, as he steered Tainui towards the breakers at the harbour entrance, has been suggested as the origin of the name Manuka, first applied to the heads, then extended to cover the harbour, and since corrupted to Manukau. Other suggested derivations include “bathing place for sea birds” (manu, “bird”, kau, “a swim”), “place of the wading birds”, “nothing but birds”, and a corruption of the name of the ubiquitous scrubland plant, manuka.

With portages both to the Pacific Ocean and to the Waikato River, the Manukau was an important natural waterway to the Maori. Snapper, flounders, mullet, and shellfish such as scallops, cockles, and pipis, made it a valued fishing ground. Many villages were established around the shores and forts built on most of the volcanic cones. The effects of Maori settlement around the harbour are not certainly known, but quite considerable areas must have been cleared by fire to make room for cultivation. By the eighteenth century the Tamaki Isthmus was largely covered by ferns, manuka, and tussock, apart from the areas under cultivation; but to the south large areas of bush survived, and to the north-west the Waitakeres were bush clad. The principal trees were totara, rimu, matai, and puiriri, with kahikatea on the swamps. Kauri trees were scattered throughout, but were plentiful only at the northern end of Awhitu Peninsula and in the Waitakeres. Cabbage trees, nikau palms and the various tree ferns gave character to the bush, whilst colour was provided by the giant rata, the clematis, and, close to the water, the pohutukawa.

Manukau Harbour, second largest on the west coast of the North Island, has an area of about 150 sq. miles contained within some 240 miles of shoreline. The harbour originated in events that commenced less than 10 million years ago, when sea invaded much of the North Island. A large bay formed in the Manukau – Port Waikato area, possibly the result of northward tilting of the land toward a fault passing east through the present harbour entrance. Although this drowned area may have been connected by narrow straits to the Pacific Ocean, its development was essentially that of a bay into which the ancestral Waikato River flowed, depositing sediments and slowly extending the coast northwards. At the same time the current sweeping northwards along the west coast of the island was depositing sand in the quieter waters as it passed the threshold of the bay. The resultant bar grew until it emerged as Awhitu Peninsula, which, because of the scour of the ebbing and flowing tides, has not connected with the resistant volcanic rocks of the Waitakere Ranges. About 3 million years ago lava flows, erupted from centres in the Pukekohe-Bombay area, diverted the Waikato River to the west and, although at times it almost certainly followed the course of the present Waiuku River, the Waikato has since mainly discharged into the Tasman Sea. The strong, dominantly westward winds have drifted sand dunes up to a present height of nearly a thousand feet along Awhitu Peninsula. Within the last half million years the Manukau has been effectively sealed off from the Pacific Ocean by volcanism around the Tamaki Isthmus, except for transient connections at times of high sea level. Puketutu (Week's Island) and the neighbouring hills along the eastern side of the harbour, many since destroyed by quarrying operations, were formed in this period. Even since the Waikato River was diverted to the Tasman Sea, many small rivers and streams have continued to deposit sediments within the harbour so that it has long been shallow, with many changing sand bars, extensive mudflats, and fringing mangrove swamps. At low water only the larger channels are navigable, but the main restriction to navigation is due to the bars at the narrow harbour entrance where the mean spring low-water depth is only 3½ fathoms. Here shifting sand bars, combined with the heavy swell and breakers caused by the prevailing westerly weather, make navigation hazardous.

(Leptospermum scoparium), Kanuka (Leptospermum ericoides).

The tea trees conjure up in the mind a picture of New Zealand shrubland more than do any other plants. They are by far the commonest shrubland constituent and have undoubtedly increased greatly under the influence both of Maori and of Pakeha settlement. The English common name is derived from the fact that early white settlers did occasionally make infusions of tea from the leaves, which are aromatic. Leptospermum belongs to the Myrtaceae and the plants of this family almost invariably have gland-dotted leaves. Of the 35 species belonging to the genus, most are Australian, a few grow in Malaya and New Caledonia, and three occur in New Zealand. Besides the two given here, the third species, L. sinclairii, is confined to the Great Barrier Island.

Manuka is a bushy shrub seldom more than 12–15 ft high, but kanuka grows into a small tree up to 40 or more feet high. Both species are, however, extremely variable, especially manuka, and require critical study. Their bark sheds in long papery strips. Leaves are narrow, thick, and less than ½ in. long. Those of manuka have sharp pointed tips, while the leaves of kanuka have rounded tips. Both species flower in profusion. Manuka has showy, white flowers about ½ in. across but kanuka has much smaller flowers. The fruit are woody capsules containing numerous small, linear seed. The wood is the best known firewood in New Zealand.

The variation, including pink and reddish flower colour, found particularly in L. scoparium, has enabled a number of horticultural cultivars to be selected. These in turn have been crossed, particularly by nurserymen in California, who have introduced a number of varieties on to the market.

by Alec Lindsay Poole, M.SC., B.FOR.SC., F.R.S.N.Z., Director-General of Forests, Wellington.

The headquarters of the federation, with a permanent secretariat of eight, are in Wellington. The secretariat includes a public relations department of two, which distributes manufacturing information; it also helps to organise industrial fairs, exhibitions, and special promotion weeks for retail groups, for school teachers, and for the general public.

More than 2,600 manufacturing firms are members of the federation through four provincial manufacturers' associations – Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury, and Otago-Southland. (Manufacturers are the largest single employing group in New Zealand and, at present, employ about 232,400 people out of the total work force of 901,900.) There are 49 trade groups working within the federation and association framework. These groups relate, for example, to textiles and garments, footwear, plastics, furniture manufacturing, frozen foods, biscuit, chocolate, engineering, and radio and television manufacturers. Each of these organisations is entirely autonomous, but the executive work is carried out by the federation, which is recognised by the Government and other organisations as the official voice of industry. The federation is also widely represented on a number of outside bodies and committees such as the Standards Council, Immigration Advisory Council, Industrial Advisory Council, Council for Technical Education, and the National Safety Association.

by Arthur Oman Heany, General Secretary, Associated Chambers of Commerce of New Zealand, Wellington.

The New Zealand Manufacturers' Federation, founded in 1897, acts as the “mouthpiece” and the advocate of most New Zealand manufacturing industries, and is concerned with aiding, fostering and encouraging their establishment and development. It deals with the New Zealand Customs Tariff as it affects rates of duty and classification of goods, and also with import licensing, both of raw materials and of plant for industry, as well as with imports of manufactured goods. All legislation which affects manufacturers is studied and, where necessary, representations are made to protect or further the interests of manufacturers. The federation watches, among other things, labour and factory legislation, price control, and the Trade Practices Act, health regulations, and shipping and transport problems.

(1820–95).

Land Purchase Commissioner, scientist, and politician.

A new biography of Mantell, Walter Baldock Durrant appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

W. B. D. Mantell was born at Lewes, Sussex, on 11 March 1820, the son of Dr Gideon A. Mantell, the noted English geologist. After studying medicine for a brief period he decided to visit New Zealand and, in association with George Duppa, arrived in Wellington on the Oriental in 1840. He was appointed Postmaster and Clerk to the Bench of Magistrates in January 1841, which position he held for some three years. In 1844 his geological background and curiosity led him to investigate a fossil marine bed at the mouth of the Waingongoro in South Taranaki. In addition to moa bones and quantities of eggs were the bones of the fossil prototype of the notornis – Notornis Mantelli. Some years later Mantell also acquired and sent to England the first two specimens of the takahe, Notornis Hochstetter.

In 1845 he became an overseer on road construction in the Porirua sector of the North Road, where his knowledge and sympathy with the Maori brought him to Sir George Grey's notice. In August 1848 he was appointed Commissioner for “extinguishing native claims in the Middle Island”. His main duties were to reconcile the Ngai Tahu tribe to the purchases largely effected by H. Tacy Kemp and to set aside Maori reserves.

In August and September 1848 he was engaged on these duties on Banks Peninsula and at Kaiapoi before making a journey south to Moeraki, Waikouaiti, and Purakanui, Otago. His notebooks and correspondence give the most understanding account of Maori life in Otago at the time. In January 1849 he returned to Wellington for consultations with Eyre before completing the negotiations leading to the purchase of the Port Cooper Block, which assured the port of Lyttelton to the Canterbury settlement, the Port Levy Block, and the demarcation of the Nanto-Bordelaise purchase at Akaroa. Mantell, from the outset, was deeply aware of European responsibility for the future of the Maori and made specific promises, on the authority of Eyre, of social services and other assistance to the Ngai Tahu.

Grey, in 1851, appointed Mantell Commissioner of Crown Lands for Otago and a Justice of the Peace. In Dunedin his light-hearted bantering cynicism and contempt for the more puritanical elements in the settlement caused much friction. Ever mindful of Maori claims he set aside the Princes Street Reserve in Dunedin and, during 1852–53, negotiated, on his own responsibility, to avoid illegal squatting, the purchase of the Murihiku Block, covering most of Southland.

In 1855 he obtained leave of absence and arrived in England in 1856, where he attempted to enlist the support of the British Government for dishonoured Ngai Tahu claims. Soon after his return to New Zealand in 1859 he entered politics, being elected for Wallace in March 1861. In July of the same year he was appointed Minister of Native Affairs, resigning five months later. For a fortnight in August 1862 he was Postmaster-General in the Domett Government. His ministerial career ended with a further term as Native Minister in the Weld Ministry from December 1864 until July 1865. The following year he was appointed to the Legislative Council, in which he served until his death. Strongly, almost idiosyncratically independent, with an epigrammatic, caustic manner, he appeared to take a detached enjoyment in the political spectacle and was reluctant to commit himself to work towards a common policy.

Throughout his life he maintained a lively correspondence with noted English writers and scholars. He was a founder and the first secretary of the New Zealand Society and a supporter for the establishment of a New Zealand Institute. He married, first, in 1863, Mary Sarah Prince, who died in 1873; and, secondly, Jane Hardwick, in 1876. Mantell died at Sydney Street, Wellington, on 7 September 1895. His extensive library and collection of family papers were donated to the Alexander Turnbull Library by his daughter-in-law, Mrs W. G. Mantell, in 1927.

by Austin Graham Bagnall, M.A., A.L.A., Librarian, National Library Centre, Wellington.

• Mantell Papers (MSS), Turnbull Library
• History of Otago, McLintock, A. H. (1949)
• Evening Post, 9 Sep 1895 (Obit).

(1888–1923).

Short-story writer, critic, and poet.

A new biography of Mansfield, Katherine appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

Katherine Mansfield, pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Murry, née Beauchamp (1888–1923), was the daughter of Sir Harold Beauchamp and Annie Burnell, née Dyer, Wellington. All her grandparents came to New Zealand by way of Australia; her maternal grandmother was born a Mansfield. Kathleen was born on 14 October 1888 at 11 (now 25) Tinakori Road, Wellington, and educated at Karori School, Wellington Girls' High School, Miss Swainson's (Wellington), and Queen's College, London.

A disturbed childhood caused Kathleen Beauchamp to develop sensibilities that were evident in early attempts to write stories. Her first appearance in the High School Reporter at the age of nine coincided with the success in England of Elizabeth and her German Garden by her father's Australian cousin, Countess von Arnim (later Countess Russell), an accident that undoubtedly helped to shape her future. Happy phases of her childhood were connected with Karori (then a semi-rural village) and holidays at Days Bay, Wellington.

In 1903, with two of her sisters, she was sent to finish her education in London, and at Queen's College was influenced by the romantic figure of Walter Rippmann, and by reading Ibsen and Wilde. She also formed there her friendship with Ida Baker (“L.M.” in the Journal and Letters) who became her devoted follower, financial supporter, and attendant in times of need, until her death. She returned reluctantly to Wellington (“Philistia itself”) and the social life her family enjoyed in the colonial capital. She read and was profoundly influenced by the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, retired with it to her room in (now 47) Fitzherbert Terrace and poured out her longings in “huge complaining notebooks” of her own (“I do not care at all for men, but London – it is Life … I am longing to consort with my superiors”). At this time she adopted as her pseudonym the maiden surname of her maternal grandmother, the beloved mother-figure of her early years; and E. J. Brady published her first paid work in The Native Companion (Sydney). After 20 difficult months her father, with understandable misgiving but influenced by Brady's praise and his own cousin's successful example, agreed to her returning to London on an allowance of £100 a year. (All his three other daughters also left New Zealand; but did so by way of happy marriages.) Katherine took her 'cello, and lived in a music students' hostel in Paddington, but before long had sold her 'cello and recklessly married George Charles Bowden, a singing teacher 11 years her senior (see her story, Mr Reginald Peacock's Day), whom she left the day after the marriage. A destructive period of Bohemian living followed, during which she conceived a child (not by her husband) which was miscarried while she was in Woerishofen, Bavaria. The compensating outcome was a number of short stories set in Woerishofen, some of which A. R. Orage published in the New Age. Under the title In a German Pension (1911), these became her first book; and it was through his interest in it (especially in its element of protest) that Katherine Mansfield met the Oxford undergraduate John Middleton Murry, slightly younger than herself, who was editing an avant-garde magazine called Rhythm. Upon her third invitation he went to live in her flat in Gray's Inn Road, where their Rhythm friends nicknamed them “The Tigers”. After an initial period of shaking hands each night, they lived as man and wife, but were unable to be legally married until 1918.

Katherine Mansfield now began to develop as a writer (three New Zealand stories, including The Woman at the Store, appeared in Rhythm) and Murry's more disciplined educational background was an influence for the better. Although they continued in Bohemian ways that were wasteful of emotional energy (and of Katherine's small allowance, and her health), the attachment to Murry caused her to think more, and to read more fruitfully. With the collapse of Rhythm, in 1913, however (and her spurning of the New Age), she had nowhere to publish her best work for several years, and by 1915 her fortunes (and her relationship with Murry) were in low state. A grievous bereavement then affected the whole course of her development. Her young brother Leslie, with whom she had a close attachment, came to London before going to France. Under the inevitable shadow of their fears, the two recalled their childhood days; and Leslie was killed soon after reaching the front. Finding the loss unbearable, Katherine Mansfield herself went to the South of France, to Bandol, where, as “a debt of love”, she wrote the first of her mature New Zealand stories, Prelude (1916), with a Karori setting. It marked her turning back to her lost and much-needed New Zealand background. But four years were to pass before it was published in the collection called Bliss. In that time Katherine Mansfield wrote briefly and unsatisfactorily for the New Age once more, and her life with Murry was unsettled, both emotionally and physically. They continued their constant housemoving in search of an idealised “peace” that was not attainable by them (and not only because of the war). An important and disturbing factor in their lives throughout this time was D. H. Lawrence, Murry's closest friend. Early in 1918, during another visit on her own to Bandol, it became evident that she was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis. She returned to England, to Cornwall and Hampstead, and the remaining five years of her life were spent in hopeful wanderings, in search not only of “peace” now but of a cure as well. She lived (usually with the faithful “L.M.”) in Italy, the South of France (Menton), Switzerland, and France again, but refused to enter a sanatorium. Meanwhile she was writing the finest of her stories, and filling her own notebooks, and letters to her husband and her friends with the brilliant and beautiful perceptions of life immediately around her that now stand equally with her stories in the affections of her readers. Prelude and At the Bay, The Doll's House and The Garden Party are doubtless her most enduring stories. All are set in the Wellington of her childhood. In them her art is, to adapt Wordsworth's phrase, tranquillity recollected with emotion.

With the published collection called The Garden Party (1921), Katherine Mansfield won the acclaim of some of the best critics of her time, and popular success as well. Henceforth she could live by her work. But by then the very disease that was heightening her perceptions and stimulating her fevered bouts of inspired writing (she wrote in “flashes”, and her best pieces were not reworked) was destroying her now fragile body. None of the various “cures” available at that time offered any degree of certainty, and she began to hanker after a miracle. For her it must be a spiritual rather than a bodily cure. (There was indeed reason for feelings of guilt and she expressly wished to make atonement for the “destruction” of her Bohemian years.) Towards the end of 1922 she attended some of P. D. Ouspensky's lectures in London. At that time she was undergoing a medically useless X-ray treatment at the hands of a Russian doctor in Paris; and from the two things it was a short step to G. I. Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, “that factory of magic at Fontainebleau”, as one of her enemies called it, where her friend Orage was already a disciple. Gurdjieff prescribed for the advanced consumptive the odour of cows, and a rigorous and perverse regime of kitchen duties, which she endured in the winter of 1922. By day she lay on oriental cushions on a platform above the cowbyre. On 9 January 1923 Murry arrived to visit her at the institute. She had recently told Orage that when she recovered she was going to write “different” stories, freed of cynicism; and Murry now found her “a being transfigured by love”. After watching some dancing with him that evening she ran upstairs; she began coughing, suffered a massive haemorrhage, and died within half an hour.

For more than 30 years Katherine Mansfield was New Zealand's best known writer, the “one peacock in our literary garden”, as A. R. D. Fairburn once put it. As such she has been a potent influence. In respect of the quality of her work, and her dedication to it, she has been a fortunate example, but in respect of the kind of writing she excelled in it is another matter. Her manner was personal and unique, and not for imitation by those in good health; and the short story is a restricted medium. Her permanent place in English literature is assured, but it is an odd one; nearer perhaps to the lyric poets than to the novelists.

Katherine Mansfield's work is readily accessible in the Collected Stories, the Journal, and the Letters, and is discussed in Sylvia Berkman's Katherine Mansfield – a Critical Study (1952). There are two biographies, by Ruth Mantz (1933) and A. Alpers (1953). F. A. Lea's biography of Murry (1959) throws further light. The only portrait painted of her (by Anne Estelle Rice) is in the National Art Gallery, Wellington, and the Alexander Turnbull Library has a large collection of manuscripts and letters, including the notebooks, etc., purchased from the estate of J. M. Murry.

by Antony Francis George Alpers, Editor, Caxton Press, Christchurch.

• Journal of Katherine Mansfield, Murry, John Middleton (ed.) (1954)
• Katherine Mansfield, Alpers, A. (1954)
• Katherine Mansfield – Life and Stories, Friis, A. (1946).

(1862–1947).

Mountaineer.

A new biography of Mannering, George Edward appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

George Edward Mannering was born at Birch Hill, North Canterbury, on 31 July 1862. His father, T. S. Mannering, arrived in New Zealand from England in 1852 and took up sheep farming. Mannering was brought up at Fernside Station from 1867. His education at Christ's College was interrupted during 1876–77 by a visit to England, in the course of which he attended King's College, Taunton, visited Switzerland and met his cousin, Harry Fox, a mountaineer afterwards killed in the Caucasus. As a boy, Mannering acquired his exceptional skill and knowledge of shooting, riding, and fishing, but his love of the open air did not encourage him to take up farming which he tried briefly after leaving school in 1877. In 1878 he entered the Union Bank of Australia at Rangiora, and remained in its service until his retirement in 1924, serving as manager of the Hastings, New Plymouth, Timaru, Napier, and Christchurch branches.

Mannering was the moving spirit in a group of young New Zealanders who were fired by the example of the Rev. W. S. Green, whose party had nearly reached the summit of Mount Cook in 1882, to make ascents in their own highest mountains, teaching themselves how to climb largely by trial and error. He began on the outer ranges of Canterbury in winter, climbing Mount Torlesse in 1885, with Marmaduke Dixon, often his companion in later years. In 1886 he made his first visit to the Mount Cook area with his cousin, C. D. Fox, who had scrambled a little on Swiss glaciers. Mannering thereafter made a number of attempts on Mount Cook by Green's Linda route: the nearest to success was in December 1890 when he and Dixon turned back, late in the day, only 140 feet from the summit.

If they failed to climb the higher peaks, Mannering and his companions accomplished a great deal of exploration of lesser mountains and added with their growing experience to the self-confidence of New Zealand mountaineers, among whom in that generation only A. P. Harper had the advantage of overseas experience. With him in 1890 Mannering made the first crossing of the Ball Pass and first explored the Murchison Glacier (reaching Starvation Saddle which they had hoped, vainly, would lead them to the Tasman Glacier). Other achievements of Mannering were ascents of Hochstetter Dom, Mount Blackburn, the first crossing of Rutherford Pass from the Cass to the Murchison, and of Sealy Pass from the Godley to the Whataroa, the first ascents of Mount Rolleston (low peak) and Phipps in the Arthur's Pass district, and the first attempt on the difficult Cameron face of Mount Arrowsmith. His mountaineering was curtailed after his transfer to the North Island in 1897.

In 1891 Mannering joined with Harper, Dixon, and Ross in founding the New Zealand Alpine Club, in which he held office as editor, secretary (1895), and president (1932–34). In 1891 Mannering published With Axe and Rope in the New Zealand Alps which gave a graphic account of the difficulties of climbing in New Zealand; this helped to stimulate local as well as overseas interest in alpine work. In 1891 he was elected a member of the Alpine Club (London); in 1935 both the Alpine Club and the New Zealand Alpine Club made him an honorary member.

Mannering was twice married: in 1894 to Lucy Harvey Lean (d. 1913 – one son, one daughter), and in 1921 to Dorothy Margaret Samuel (two sons, one daughter). In 1922 he visited Europe and at 60 climbed several Swiss peaks, including the Matter-horn. In 1932 he climbed Mount Torlesse on his seventieth birthday, and in 1941 Fog Peak on his seventy-ninth. In the meantime he had introduced his younger children to the mountains.

In 1943 Mannering published his genial memoirs, Eighty Years in New Zealand, which has value for its sidelights on social history (especially in Christchurch in the eighties and nineties) and for its evidence of the breadth of Mannering's sporting interests, which included tennis, golf, lacrosse, and canoeing, besides those already mentioned. In both his books he describes the adventurous journeys he and Dixon made down the Waimakariri and the Waitaki by canoe.

Mannering (who died in Christchurch on 29 October 1947) was a reserved, modest man who made a stronger impression in print than in his own person. He was the doyen of those mountaineers whose object was peaks rather than exploration. He was always enterprising and deserved greater success than he enjoyed. He had a gift of description which makes his first book especially highly interesting to a modern reader. To his contemporaries it was an inspiration, and he, more than any other individual, kindled the enthusiasm of succeeding generations of mountaineers.

by David Oswald William Hall, M.A., Director, Adult Education, University of Otago (retired).

• New Zealand Alpine Journal, No. 35 (1948)
• Canterbury Mountaineer, No. 17 (1947–48)
• Evening Star (Dunedin), 30 Oct 1947 (Obit).

(1811–83).

Writer, and Judge of the Native Land Court.

A new biography of Maning, Frederick Edward appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

F. E. Maning was born in Dublin on 5 July 1811, the eldest son of Frederick Maning and grandson of Archibald Maning, a Dublin citizen of some means. With his parents and two younger brothers he left Dublin in late 1823 in the Ardent, arriving in Hobart in May 1824 where his father took a position in the Customs Office.

Though Maning may possibly have first visited New Zealand in 1831 or 1832 with Major Henry Oakes, he did not take up permanent residence at Hokianga until July 1833, when he arrived from Hobart in the Mary and Elizabeth. Oakes followed him to Hokianga in October and obtained an option on land at Kohukohu. The older man then left Kelly (also from Hobart) and Maning in charge and went back to Hobart to raise the purchase price. But when Oakes returned to Hokianga in February 1834 the Maoris refused to sell to him, and in March the Kohukohu was bought by Kelly and Maning. Kelly soon faded out, but Maning remained for some years, trading in timber, pork, and potatoes. In 1837 he sold up and, after a visit to Hobart, settled at Onoke, at the mouth of the Whirinaki. On 3 September 1839, after being in possession for some time, he made a formal purchase of the property from Kaitoke, Hauraki, and 14 others, for £4 in cash and £80 worth of goods. At Onoke, his home for over 40 years, Maning's four children were born: Susan, in 1838 or 1839 (died Onoke, 6 March 1880); Maria Amina, in 1842 (died Auckland, 15 March 1892); Hauraki Hereward, in 1845 (died FitzRoy, Melbourne, 8 August 1923); and Mary, in 1846 (died White Cliffs, Hokianga, 15 April 1893). Their mother was Moengaroa, sister of the Hikutu chief, Hauraki.

Maning clashed publicly with Governor Hobson at the treaty meeting at Mangungu on 12 February 1840, Hobson later informing Gipps that Maning had advised the chiefs to resist the Treaty of Waitangi. (Hobson also reported that Maning had purchased “a considerable portion of land”, was a Catholic, and “the active agent” of Pompallier which was all complete nonsense.) On 28 March Maning sailed in the Superb for Hobart and, after his return to Hokianga, applied in January 1841 for employment in the Public Service. His application was coolly received. Rumours had reached Hobson that Maning was the cause of “disaffection amongst the Kaipara Tribes” and had displayed a “Tri-colored-Flag” at Kaitaia “in defiance of Her Majesty's authority”. After further inquiry, Hobson allowed that “no just grounds for suspicion” could attach to Maning, “although the circumstance of the flag still remains to be explained”. Shortly before his death Maning categorically denied to Rusden that he had attempted to dissuade the chiefs from signing the treaty and claimed that Hobson had written him a letter acknowledging his error on that point. It seems Maning had persuaded himself that the letter about the Kaipara and Kaitaia tarradiddle applied also to the Mangungu allegations. But no trace has been found of any letter from Hobson to Maning which so much as mentioned, far less retracted, those allegations; and it is significant that his brother-in-law Hauraki did not sign the treaty.

When the Hikutu took the field against Heke in 1845 Maning was a prominent member of the war party. Hauraki's death from wounds suffered in a skirmish at Waikare was a keen personal loss to Maning, who named his son after the dead chief. Moengaroa was also greatly affected by her brother's death and died in 1847. No named reference to her has been found in Maning's writings, but from the context one may assume it was she whom he described in Old New Zealand as “a fine stately, and really handsome woman”, and that hers was the lament for Hauraki quoted in War in the North. After her death, on what was probably his last visit to Tasmania, Maning arrived at Hobart in the Ganges in December 1847, with his five-year-old Maria who was to be brought up by her grandparents.

In January 1850 Maning began sawing operations in the Hokianga, the following decade being his most active period commercially. Documentation of this side of his career is scanty but a local Maori tradition that he had a store at Rangiora, in the Narrows, seems likely enough. His affairs apparently prospered and by 1863 he was “endeavouring to get out of what is called ‘business’”, though he claimed he was owed “some few thousand of pounds” by the Maoris. His brothers, Alfred Henry and Archibald Thomas, had established a shipping business in Hobart with a subsidiary company at Invercargill and an agent at One-hunga. F. E. Maning was not a partner, but he supplied his brothers with cargoes of timber. The Invercargill firm, Maning and Whitton, failed in early 1864, followed shortly by the bankruptcy of Maning Brothers, of Hobart. Frederick Maning senior died in June 1864, a recent will providing for Maria but leaving the bulk of his estate to his eldest son. Thereafter Maning financially assisted the Tasmanian branch of the family and, at his death, left a nephew, Henry Thomas Maning, as his principal heir.

In 1862 The History of the North was published, followed by Old New Zealand in 1863. Both appeared anonymously by “A Pakeha-Maori” (q.v.), but their authorship was not long a secret. Replying to a congratulatory note from Sir George Grey in February 1863, Maning claimed that Old New Zealand 'was merely written to pass some very wet days last winter”, and said that Grey would perceive he was also the “perpertrator” of the earlier work.

Maning several times toyed with the notion of entering Parliament, but jibbed at the annoyance of electioneering. In November 1865 he was appointed Judge of the Native Land Court. Two of his judgments, in the Rangitikei-Manawatu (1869) and the Aroha (1871) cases, were later published. He was also a member of the Hawke's Bay Native Lands Alienation Commission of 1873. Though forever complaining about the Land Court, Maning found stimulation as well as frustration in the work, and the descriptions of tribal warfare in his Aroha judgment are perhaps the most evocative of anything he wrote. He resigned in August 1876 and retired to Onoke. In accepting his resignation the Government expressed its appreciation of the great and important services he had rendered and acknowledged that the success of the Native Land Court in the northern part of the North Island was due mainly to him. An expert assessment of his adjudication of Maori land titles, in the light of subsequent events, has yet to be made.

Family problems marred the joys of retirement. Susan was delicate and perhaps partially crippled from birth. Maria, separated from her father as a child, had returned to New Zealand in August 1865, a young woman of modest but independent means. Of the early life of Hauraki and Mary nothing is known. In his letters of the sixties, Maning's affection for and pride in his young people is clearly evident, but this state of affairs did not last. Maria and Mary were as strong willed as their father, who quarrelled with them both. Hauraki, a handsome philanderer of much plausibility and little inclination for steady employment, was a constant worry. Though at first perhaps over-indulgent, Maning finally washed his hands of him and, plagued by tales of Hau's mounting follies, came to fear the son who had once been his pride. Finally, in late January 1880, came the breach with Susan, who by then was completely paralysed. In the grips of a nightmarish but probably groundless obsession that all kinds of malevolence were being plotted against him, Maning left her to the care of neighbours and fled to Auckland. Less than three weeks after his departure Susan died.

Despite aches and pains and complaints about landladies and other nuisances, Maning enjoyed the next two and a half years of town life. But in July 1882 he had a fall and, three months later, cancer was diagnosed. He sailed immediately for London, but on arrival was told his case was hopeless. For seven months he lingered on, and died on 25 July 1883. His body was brought back to New Zealand and, on 8 December, he was buried in Symonds Street Cemetery, Auckland.

Maning is chiefly known by War in the North and Old New Zealand. Besides official reports and judgments and a number of anonymous contributions to the newspapers, his only other published writings are a few slight pieces on Maori traditions. The manuscript of Young New Zealand, said by von Sturmer to have been “very good”, he destroyed in November 1882 in the few frantic days between diagnosis and departure for London, when other manuscripts possibly shared the same fate. But to the student of Maning and of his times his most valuable literary legacy is the great mass of letters written during the last 20 years of his life, racy in style, though tinged with bitterness.

Virtually nothing is known of Maning's boyhood. During his early years in New Zealand he was nothing if not an adventurer, as Hobson stigmatised him, while Edward Markham, who lived with him briefly at Kohukohu in 1834, called him “a double faced sneaking Thief”. (Maning's opinion of Markham is unlikely to have been any more flattering.) Certainly in his later years, both in conversation and on paper, Maning would unblushingly exaggerate and distort, at times from sheer exuberance and devilry, but on occasion, particularly in his blacker moments, with an intensity of self-delusion which was surely abnormal; and he was so unpredictable and devious, not least in his commercial undertakings, that even one of his closest friends was driven to complain that he was “but a rotten stick to trust to”. Nonetheless he had great power of attracting people to him, and retained the affection of many, despite all his vagaries. But he was quick to take offence, often for the most trivial reasons. His bête noire was Grey, who committed the unforgivable sin of cutting Maning short in a peroration on “a subject of the very greatest public importance” and who, in retaliation, was bombarded by Maning with the most astounding cock-and-bull stories. Himself much given to rodomontade, Maning's intolerance of what he regarded as humbug in others knew no bounds. When T. M. Hocken visited him in Auckland in 1881 Maning appears to have revenged himself for a rather cool proposition which the Dunedin collector had made concerning a sketch donated by Maning to the Auckland Museum. In a flood of talk Maning hinted he had been initiated as a tohunga. Hocken swallowed the bait, but was unable “to penetrate that sacred arena”: Maning's lips were sealed. The possibility that in his younger days Maning had acquired some esoteric Maori learning cannot be entirely disregarded; but this hinting at “initiation” looks suspiciously like another piece of Maning hocus-pocus.

So much about him is conjectural, not least the effect on his character and personality of the disparagement and discomfiture he suffered at Hobson's hands. Maning's longing for recognition and, one suspects, vindication was never assuaged by later success and he constantly courted flattery, though affecting to despise it. Over the years his love for the Maori, always slightly shamefaced, turned to distaste and then to hate, and the letters of his later years are studded with violent and bitter anti-Maori ravings. The one stable and lasting influence in his life seems to have been his friendship with John Webster and, latterly, with Spencer von Sturmer. After Maning's death the latter commented: “what a grand fellow he would have been, with different surroundings”. But in other surroundings the Maning of War in the North, of Old New Zealand, of the Aroha judgment, and of his letters, would not have existed.

by Ruth Miriam Ross, School Teacher and Authoress, North Auckland.

• Sir Donald Maclean, Cowan, J. (1940)
• Important Judgements …, Fenton, F. D. (1879)
• Old New Zealand, Maning, F. E. (1948)
• The History of the War in the North, Maning, F. E. (1862)
• O.L.C. files (MSS); G. 36/1 (MSS); M. A. files (MSS), National Archives
• F. E. Maning Letters and other Maning Papers (MSS); S. Von Sturmer Letters, (MSS), Auckland Public Library
• F. E. Maning Letters (MSS), Turnbull Library
• F. E. Maning Letters (MSS), Hocken Library
• New Zealand Notables 3, Burdon, R. M. (1950)
• New Zealand or Recollections of it, Markham, E. (1963)
• History of New Zealand, Rusden, G. W. (1889)
• Reminiscences of an Old Settler, Webster, J. (1908)
• G.B.P.P. 311 (1841); 108 (1845);
• New Zealand Herald, 28 Jul 1883 (Obit).