After a short retirement to Kawau Island and a visit to England, where he failed in an attempt to enter Parliament as a Gladstonian Liberal, he re-emerged in New Zealand politics in 1874, as Superintendent of Auckland Province and member of the House of Representatives, in an unavailing effort to prevent the abolition of the provincial system of government. He continued in the House of Representatives for nearly 20 years, and was Prime Minister (1877–79), but his administration was defective and his leadership poor. He announced many of the principles of the later Liberal and Labour Parties (electoral reform, land tax, breaking up of large estates, regulation of wages and hours, education, etc.), but his ideas were too radical for his contemporaries and he failed to build up a party to implement his programme. His oratory was impressive, but often unduly maudlin and petulant, and too much given to declamation. “This,” he said, “is a revolt against despotism…. What I am resolved to maintain is this, that there shall be equal justice in representation and in the distribution of land and revenue to every class in New Zealand … equal rights to all — equal rights in education, equal rights in taxation, equal rights in representation … equal rights in every respect.” He would utter bitter personal recriminations against his political opponents, whom he was forever accusing of land jobbery, and he defied parliamentary etiquette by making personal attacks upon the Governor and the Secretary of State. “Keep your rank; keep your wealth; but do not send us out men who care nothing for us, with high titles, to make great fortunes out of us, and who refuse us dissolutions when constitutionally we are entitled to them. I say that of the Secretary of State we absolutely know nothing — for the Secretary of State we absolutely care nothing … He could confine himself to his own business.” His frequent lack of self-restraint earned for him Tancred's famous description of “a terrible and fatal man”.

In the realm of world affairs, Grey entertained visions of New Zealand expansion in the Pacific islands, and forecast with uncanny accuracy the development of the modern British Commonwealth as a group of autonomous States in friendly association with the United States of America.

He had a shrewd insight into the Maori mind, and his published collection of Maori legends is a classic. He bequeathed his large collection of writings on the African language, together with his library of incunabula and manuscripts to Cape Town in 1861, and later donated a second valuable collection to the city of Auckland. An amateur natural scientist of repute, he sent thousands of specimens of the flora and fauna to the British Museum and to Kew Gardens. His island domain of Kawau became a botanical and zoological experiment in the acclimatisation of plants and animals. Always keenly interested in education, his name is connected with many schools and institutions whose foundation and advancement he assisted, including Bloemfontein College, Auckland Grammar School, and Wanganui Collegiate.

Grey died in London on 19 September 1898, and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. He was a strange mixture — a philanthropist impelled by altruistic motives, a visionary and a prophet, and a man of resolute, often dramatic, action. He made a real impression on those colonies in which he lived and ruled, especially in New Zealand where he spent the greater part of his life. In the final analysis, he fell short of greatness because he was too autocratic and egotistic in manner, lacked true self-control, and could never recognise his own mistakes. He pronounced judgment upon himself when, in November 1845, he boasted to the Maori chiefs assembled at Kororareka, “I never alter what I once say”. Yet, for all his failings, he earned the affection and respect of the colonists over whose destinies he presided, and especially the love of the Maori people, whose farewell message at his death was, “Horei Kerei, Aue! Ka nui matou aroha ki a koe” (“George Grey, alas! Great was our love for thee”).

by James Rutherford, M.A.(DURHAM), PH.D.(MICH.) (1906–63), Historian, Auckland.

Grey Collections (MSS), Cape Town, South Africa, and Auckland, New Zealand; Sir George Grey, K.C.B. (1812–1898), Rutherford, J. (1961); Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, McLintock, A. H. (1958); Origins of the Maori Wars, Sinclair, K. (1957).

Meanwhile, the first Taranaki war (1860–61) had broken out in New Zealand, and Grey was sent back in the hope that his influence with the Maoris might enable him to restore peace, or, if there were to be war, that he could win it quickly and dictate a humane settlement afterwards. The task proved beyond him. Certain tribes had lost faith in British justice and even Grey could not restore their belief. The settlers' demand for land was insatiable, and Maori resistance groups in the Waikato, Taranaki, and elsewhere were determined to prevent any extension of white settlement and white man's law. Grey wanted the Maori King party to recognise his authority as Governor, and offered them local self-government through their own runangas (councils). But he also urged them to open their lands to roads and white settlement, which made his offers suspect. And while he proffered peace, he prepared for war by moving troops into the lower Waikato and building military roads. His equivocal behaviour provoked renewed hostilities in Taranaki, Waikato rebelled, and the war spread through most of the North Island.

Grey was tired, overwrought, and too aware of his personal responsibilities. Moreover, he was now handicapped by having to deal with an elected General Assembly and a responsible Ministry. His efforts to retain direction of native policy and military affairs strained relations with his responsible advisers and produced complete deadlock during the Whitaker–Fox ministry (1864). He was on somewhat better terms with his next Prime Minister, F. A. Weld, but he became involved in a most acrimonious quarrel with the General Officer Commanding. When General Cameron set out deliberately to thwart the Wanganui-Taranaki campaign (1865) by “go-slow” tactics, Grey had the effrontery to come to the field of battle himself and capture Weraroa pa by means of colonial troops and friendly Maoris, after the General had said that attack would be too costly. Cameron criticised Grey and his Ministers in “secret” letters to the War Office, and the Home Government, accepting Cameron's view that the war was being fought at British expense for the profit of the colonists, ordered Grey to curtail the amount of land confiscation, stop the war, make the colony pay its share of the cost, and send the troops back to England. Grey believed that the colony was still in danger, and with the connivance of his last Prime Minister, E. W. Stafford, defied the Colonial Office and retained and employed the troops till the British Government had no option but to terminate his appointment (1868). “I do not imagine,” wrote the Duke of Buckingham, “he is likely to be re-employed!”

In 1854 he was appointed Governor of Cape Colony and High Commissioner for South Africa. Here his principal task was to protect and pacify the eastern Cape frontier against a surging mass of disorderly Kaffir tribes. Supported by a large British army and a small annual parliamentary grant of £40,000, he planned to reorganise the tribal life of the buffer province of British Kaffraria under European Magistrates, civilise the African population by means of schools, hospitals, and employment (his old New Zealand formula), and introduce several thousands of white farmers to stiffen the defence of the frontier and provide work, and a good example, for the natives. But he miscalculated the amount of agricultural land available — the province was already over populated — and he seemed not to appreciate that amalgamation of the races must jeopardise white predominance. He wanted British immigrants, but South Africa did not attract them. After the Crimean War, the Colonial Office sent out 3,000 men of the German Military Legion, but they proved quite unsuitable as colonists and the venture was a fiasco.

Meanwhile, the Kaffirs became excited. War was pending between Basutoland and the Orange Free State. Prophets arose predicting the resurrection of defunct tribal ancestors and a new era of youth, beauty, and plenty for all black people who killed their cattle and stopped planting corn. Grey suspected that those chiefs who ordered obedience to the prophet were plotting to use famine as an excuse for war, and he instituted not only relief schemes but also stern police measures. The result of this fantastic episode (1856–57) was the devastation of British Kaffraria and the adjoining Transkeian country, the reduction of its native population to one-third, and the arrest and disgrace of the offending chiefs, and the abject submission of the others. Some 30,000 refugees were removed into the Western Province of the Cape, the Gcalekas were driven out beyond the Bashee River, and white farmers moved in to occupy the “empty” land. Grey's dispatches persuaded the Colonial Office that this was civilisation, and he wanted the system extended throughout Kaffraria, Natal, and Zululand.

Grey incurred official displeasure by sending too few regiments to India during the Mutiny (1857–58), keeping the German Legion mobilised at British expense, and overspending his British Kaffraria account during the 1856 crisis. He did not take kindly to criticism. The tone of his communications to London became curt, truculent, and defiant, and he lost the confidence of one Secretary of State after another. His crowning fault came when, contrary to orders, he broached the question of confederation with the Orange Free State. The idea had much to commend it, but he was trying to initiate a forward policy when the British Government was resolved on economy and withdrawal from responsibilities. He was recalled by Lytton in 1859, but was reinstated by the Duke of Newcastle with a warning that he must obey orders — a thing he never learned to do graciously. He once told his General that his duty to the Queen impelled him “to disregard or to act contrary to orders issued from the other side of the world, in entire ignorance” of local circumstances, and to treat them merely as “general indications of a line of policy” to be interpreted and modified at his discretion. But his independence went beyond any reasonable discretion that the Colonial Office could tolerate. As one Under-Secretary later wrote, it was impossible to let Grey “claim to hold his authority from the Crown on such terms that he was entitled to refuse obedience to the Home Government”.

His first New Zealand governorship (1845–53) was his greatest success. Reinforced by troops and money from England and aided by loyal Maoris, he suppressed the northern rebellion of Kawiti and Hone Heke by capturing Ruapekapeka pa (1846). A desultory campaign in the Wellington region ended with the arrest of Te Rauparaha (1846), and there was some indecisive fighting at Wanganui in 1847. Thereafter Grey kept the peace by establishing friendly relations with the leading chiefs and by scrupulously respecting their land rights. His cautious land-purchase operations opened up ample areas for colonisation in the South Island and in the Wellington and Hawke's Bay districts, but the needs of Auckland and Taranaki were less well satisfied. He dealt harshly with some of the pre-1840 land claimants, particularly James Busby and the missionaries Henry Williams, George Clarke, and James Kemp, and his animus and unscrupulousness marked him as a petty tyrant.

His wilfulness was again evident in 1846 when Earl Grey proposed to introduce representative Government. Grey warned him that this would precipitate a general Maori war as the colonists were still only a minority and unfit to be trusted with powers of self-government. The British Government drew back in alarm, awarded him a knighthood, and left him in unfettered control for another five years. By then, he had drafted his own proposals for a quasi-federal constitution with elected parliaments both at provincial and at colonial levels, and these ideas were substantially embodied in the 1852 Constitution Act. He brought the provincial institutions into existence, but left New Zealand in December 1853 without having convened the first General Assembly.

Grey's reputation in London rested chiefly on his apparent success with the Maoris. Many colonists, especially in the Cook Strait and Canterbury settlements, alleged that his philanthropy was all humbug and that Maori advancement was a myth created by clever dispatch writing. But in this respect his critics did him less than justice. Grey had, after all, won the confidence of most of the principal chiefs of New Zealand. His benevolence was genuine and practical, and his contribution to the progress of the native race was real. The peace he established and maintained was a valuable breathing space in which Maoris and Pakehas could take stock of one another, and think and act in terms of mutual welfare. Grey encouraged and subsidised mission schools in town and country. He set up Magistrates' Courts in native districts and persuaded the Maoris to resort to them for remedy instead of taking the law into their own hands. He encouraged them to grow corn, mill flour, and engage in peaceful trades.

In favoured areas like the Waikato, Otaki, and Nelson, their progress and prosperity proved beyond doubt the capacity of the Maoris to adapt themselves to western ways. The transformation, of course, was very far from complete. The means at Grey's disposal were woefully scanty, many Maori tribes remained untouched by the new developments, and the colonists were for the most part ominously hostile to his benevolent plans, especially when it came to paying for them. Grey was unduly optimistic and did not sufficiently realise either the limits of his achievement or the danger of a relapse. A little self-praise might be forgiven, though it was in bad taste; but his task had only just begun and there was no room for complacency.

In 1840, at the age of 28, he was appointed Governor of the newly founded colony of South Australia, and here he had to learn the art of public administration by painful experience. Confronted with the task of bringing the public expenditure within the small local revenue, in the next 18 months he cut down Government disbursements from about £150,000 a year to 40,000. His rigorous economies averted a financial crisis, stopped the mania of speculative land buying, and drove the colonists to the tasks of productive farming. But his methods gave grave offence to the settlers, and one Adelaide newspaper printed at the head of each issue the Shakespearean text, “Think upon GREY and let thy soul despair”. But being unhampered by an elected parliament, Grey and his nominated councillors could go their own way, outwardly unaffected by the public clamour. By 1845 the development of wheat farming had produced self-sufficiency, and copper mining outside Adelaide was bringing prosperity to the settlers. Grey's efforts to civilise the aborigines, however, by providing schools and fostering employment under the Europeans, made little headway.

(1812–98).

Colonial Governor and politician.

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

Sir George Grey was the son of Lieutenant-Colonel George Grey, who was related to the Greys of Groby and the Earls of Stamford, and of Elizabeth, née Vignoles of County Westmeath, Ireland. He was born at Lisbon (14 April 1812) a few days after his father was killed at Badajoz. Educated at Guildford and Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he served in Ireland with 83rd Regiment (1830–36), gaining the rank of captain, but he found military life mentally and socially irksome. He made two exploratory expeditions in north-western Australia (1837–39), one to Hanover Bay and the other to Shark Bay, revealing great bravery and fortitude but poor judgment, and accomplishing little of geographical significance. Nevertheless they stimulated Grey's interest in the aborigines, and his report on how to civilise native peoples (1840) attracted favourable notice at the Colonial Office.

In 1839 he married Eliza Lucy, daughter of Sir Richard Spencer. Their only son died young in 1841. Husband and wife subsequently became estranged; they separated in 1860 and were not reconciled until 1896.

(1809–1901).

Judge of the Supreme Court of New Zealand.

Henry Barnes Gresson was born in County Meath, Ireland. He was educated privately and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated B.A. before reading law in the Irish capital. He was called to the Irish Bar in the Trinity Term of 1833 and went to London for a period for experience. On his return to Dublin he practised for eight years as an equity barrister at the Chancery Bar, where he quickly made a considerable reputation as a diligent and reliable practitioner. He found, however, that competition at the Irish Bar was very fierce and in 1854 he decided to emigrate. His standing in the profession at the time is demonstrated by the fact that, before he left Dublin, he was presented with a testimonial signed by at least a score of Irish Q.C.s, half a dozen doctors of law, and most of the rank and file of practitioners.

Being an enthusiastic churchman, Gresson chose the new Canterbury Settlement in New Zealand for his destination, and he was 45 years of age when with his wife, Anne, daughter of Andrew Beatty of Londonderry, and his three children, he sailed from London in the ship Nelson (688 tons). He arrived at Auckland after a voyage of four months and went straight to Christchurch. The family took the bridle path over the Port Hills, but their heavy baggage, all their household goods, and personal possessions were dispatched by small steamer from Lyttelton to Sumner. The craft, however, foundered on the Sumner bar, and everything was lost, even Gresson's complete law library, a rare possession in New Zealand in those days. As his marine insurance covered only the voyage to Lyttelton, the family suffered a severe blow and started life in a strange country in a house in Madras Street, Christchurch, where the rain poured in through the kitchen ceiling and the children slept in the loft. With the population of Christchurch only 710 (46 fewer than that of Lyttelton), and with that of the Canterbury Provincial District a mere 5,347, Gresson was appointed Crown Prosecutor. While in practice, he associated himself closely with the life of the community. He was one of the first fellows of Christ's College, Christchurch, being “nominated, constituted, and appointed” in the Deed of Foundation. He was also intimately connected with the movement for the erection of the Christchurch Cathedral.

It was barely three years after his arrival in New Zealand that he was invited to accept a Judgeship, and in December 1857 he received his Commission. He forsook the Bar with some diffidence but, as he said on his retirement 18 years later, his lively sense of personal inadequacy was stifled by the realisation that there were then only two Judges in the colony, the Acting Chief Justice, Sidney Stephen (see alsoDuels), and Mr Justice Daniel Wakefield, both of whom were very much in arrears with their work and in indifferent health. Indeed, these Judges died within a week of each other in January 1858, the month after Gresson's appointment. Thus it was that Mr Justice Gresson carried out his duties in splendid isolation for two months as the sole Judge in the colony. Even after the appointment of Sir George Arney, in March 1858, it was to be eight months before a second puisne Judge, Mr Justice Johnston, took his seat on the Bench.

Gresson's outstanding qualities were courage and singleness of purpose and a consuming sincerity. He was completely modest, an indefatigable worker, and his legal attainments were beyond question. Independence, personal and professional, was to him a sacred cause, and he eventually sacrificed his career to it. Once when he was the guest of the Chief Justice, Sir George Arney, after a Court of Appeal sitting, his host, over dinner, described him as “the most extraordinary Irishman I ever saw”. When Gresson asked him to explain, Arney's reply was: “Because you are sober, hard-working, contented, moderately economical, and you never blow your own trumpet”. In the light of that candid contemporary opinion it is interesting to recall Gresson's determination on the point of judicial independence. In 1875 he resigned his Commission when, as he said himself, “it was my desire to continue my work as long as I could discharge my duties efficiently”.

The trouble arose out of the adoption by the Government of an irrelevant recommendation by the Ward-Chapman Committee of Inquiry that a periodical shifting round of Supreme Court Judges was desirable. Gresson objected because the Committee had been set up to investigate allegations of partiality on the part of Mr Justice H. S. Chapman. Chapman was completely exonerated, but Gresson maintained that the public could hardly be blamed for interpreting the Committee's recommendation after its investigations as a reflection on the Judges as a whole. But his principal objection was that such a policy must be a retrograde step as it placed Judges at the mercy of the Minister of the day, notwithstanding that the legislation of the colony for the previous 16 years had been in the opposite direction. He argued that the change was particularly inopportune and described it as “a foul and most unjust imputation against the Judges”. When he was ordered to transfer from Christchurch to Nelson he protested and, after discussion with other Judges who were also under orders to move, he took the matter up with the Government at the highest level. He was ignored, and immediately he asked to be relieved of his Commission as from 31 March 1875. It was significant that the resignation of two other Judges, the Chief Justice, Sir George Arney, and Mr Justice H. S. Chapman, took effect from the same day. Explaining his retirement at a farewell sitting of the Supreme Court in Christchurch on 31 March 1875, he said, after traversing the events leading up to his decision: “What then becomes of the independence of Judges if they may be ordered by the Minister for the time being, as often as he pleases, to remove from one part of the Colony to the other? It is obvious that such a power is open to gross abuse, and if these be the terms under which they hold office, the Judges are not better off than when their Commissions were only during pleasure, a form which was wisely altered by the Legislature to a good conduct tenure as long ago as 1858”. One of the results of Gresson's action has been an official realisation ever since of the necessity for preserving unimpaired the independence of Judges.

After leaving the Bench, Mr Justice Gresson paid a visit to England and Ireland in 1876–77, and on his return retired to his farming property in Canterbury and devoted himself to sheep raising and agriculture. Like a later Chief Justice, Sir James Prendergast, he was keenly interested in breeding and exhibiting livestock, the first show of the Canterbury Agricultural and Pastoral Association being held in his paddock in Latimer Square, Christchurch. Mr Justice Gresson died at Fendalton on 31 January 1901, but the Gresson legal tradition is being carried on by his grandson, Sir Kenneth Gresson, the present president of the Court of Appeal, and by his great-grandson, Mr Justice T. A. Gresson, one of the resident puisne Judges for the Auckland judicial district.

Gresson always took a keen interest in education and, until his appointment to the Bench, he was a fellow of Christ's College. He was an original governor of Canterbury College (1873–76), and chairman in 1875. In 1872 he was president of the Canterbury Philosophical Institute. As a keen churchman he was a moving spirit in the erection of Christchurch Cathedral, was for many years synodsman of the diocese and, for a time, gave his services as diocesan chancellor.

by Ronald Jones, Journalist and Script Writer, New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, Wellington.

• Family Letters (MSS)
• New Zealand Law Journal, Vol. 34, p. 165 (1958)
• New Zealand Jurist (1875).

Greenstone is the name commonly used for the predominantly greenish-coloured rock from which the Maori made many adzes and chisels as well as a famous weapon, the patu pounamu. They also used greenstone for ornaments such as the renowned hei-tiki and ear pendants. New Zealand greenstone is either the mineral nephrite (Maori: pounamu) or bowenite (Maori: tangiwai.) Nephrite is obtained from the Taramakau-Arahura region as river boulders washed down from the parent rock in the Southern Alps; bowenite is found as beach boulders and pebbles at Anita Bay in Milford Sound. Some nephrite is also obtained from the Wakatipu region.

The value of greenstone lies in its beauty and its toughness and hardness, a result partly of mineral composition, but primarily of a characteristic felting and interweaving of minute mineral fibres. On the whole, bowenite greenstone is inferior to nephrite. The main varieties recognised by the Maori are Kahurangi — green, translucent, highly prized; Kawakawa — green, semitranslucent; Inanga — whitish, opaque; and tangiwai — translucent bowenite.

The Maoris have an interesting legend concerning the bringing of greenstone to New Zealand. Originally, it is alleged, there were two stones, Poutini (the greenstone) and Whaiapu, which belonged to Ngahue and the chieftainess Hina-tua-hoanga respectively. The latter became jealous of Ngahue's stone and drove him from Hawaiki.

Eventually his canoe, Tahirirangi, reached New Zealand and Ngahue hid his greenstone near Arahura on the west coast of the South Island. It was very well hidden and lies there to this day; however, small portions are occasionally broken off and carried down the river. These pieces provide the Maori with his source of greenstone.

From the gold workings on the west coast of the South Island much greenstone was secured, and lapidaries, both in New Zealand and overseas, found a ready sale for it as curios, at first to the Maori and afterwards to tourists and collectors. This trade has continued, but the use of greenstone by the Maori declined so rapidly that by the end of the nineteenth century its fashioning was a lost art. With the virtual cessation of gold mining, greenstone is becoming increasingly more difficult to obtain; hence, to conserve stocks and also to encourage local manufacture of imitation Maori ornaments, jewellery, and souvenirs, an embargo on the export of raw greenstone came into force in April 1947. At the present time high-quality greenstone artefacts are in keen demand as collectors' pieces and fetch high prices on the open market.

New Zealand greenstone is composed of either nephrite or bowenite, whereas the term jade is restricted to nephrite and another distinct mineral, jadeite, which is not found in New Zealand. Most New Zealand greenstone, the nephrite variety, is therefore jade.

by John James Reed, D.SC., New Zealand Geological Survey, Lower Hutt.

Great Barrier Island, known to the Maoris as Aotea — the land like a white cloud — is a detached piece of the Coromandel Peninsula; the subsidence that separated it from the mainland has given it an intricate rocky coastline with several offshore islets and pinnacles. Some 110 sq. miles in area, the island lies 55 miles north-east of Auckland. Discovered by Captain Cook in 1769, it has been exploited since for timber and minerals but its present permanent population is scarcely 300. Though its highest point (Mt. Hobson) is only 2,038 ft, its surface is extremely rugged with rocky bluffs rising steeply from the sea, especially along its western shore. Its few bay-head lowlands are scattered and small. The drowning of its margins has made some fine sheltered anchorages as at Whangaparapara, Port Fitzroy, and Port Abercrombie, but none of these has much easily accessible hinterland.

The structure of the island closely resembles that of the Coromandel Peninsula. The oldest rocks are sedimentary greywackes and argillites best displayed in the extreme north, while over these lie at least two series of volcanic rocks. The older and more widespread of these are andesites of various types, while acidic rocks, both rhyolites and rhyolitic tuffs and sinter, are found in the high interior around and south of Mt. Hobson. All these main rock systems are penetrated by a complex of dykes and sills. It is with these especially that ore bodies of gold, silver, and copper were found by the early prospectors and miners who worked over the island. In all this the Great Barrier Island closely resembles the Coromandel Peninsula, but the total mineral production of the island has been relatively small.

The island surface is very rugged, each rock type having its own characteristic surface forms. In the somewhat lower northern zone of greywackes and shales, surfaces are more subdued though the valleys are narrow, steep, and deep and the coastal cliffs precipitous. In the andesitic zone of most of the west and south, gentle hill slopes end abruptly in steep bluffs or are broken by turretlike pinnacles. It is about Mt. Hobson, however, that the more spectacular forms have developed from the weathering of the light-coloured (white and pink) acidic rocks. Here are deep ravines, steep cliffs, and jagged pinnacles making the centre of the island difficult to traverse. The east coast, exposed to the open ocean, is much simpler in outline than the west. Spurs have been trimmed back, bays are often closed by barrier beaches or spits, and bay-head beaches are common.

In pre-European time the whole island was clothed in the northern type of podocarp, mixed hardwood forest with magnificent stands of kauri. These latter have been completely cut out, but there is still a remnant of native forest covering most of the north, with some patches in the more rugged interior and south. Here, too, are areas of regenerating native forest, but over most of the rest of the interior is a secondary growth of manuka-kanuka scrub. It is this widespread cover of scrub that gives so much of the island an appearance of rather drab monotony.

Pasture grasses have been established in some extensive areas near the coasts, but most of these may be classed as “reverting deteriorated” or as danthonia. Patches of good-quality grassland are minute. Some undrained swamps (behind Kaitoki Bay and the Whangapoua estuary) account for 1,000 acres of the area. This is reflected in the limited amount of productive farmland. Sheep are grazed (for wool), and there are some dairy farms on the little flats around bays and river mouths. Settlement is restricted to scattered clusters on the margins of this rugged island, notably at Port Fitzroy and Okiwi in the north-west, and at Awana, Oruawharo, Okupu, and Tryphena in the east and south. Some 40 miles of metalled road provide the only communications between them apart from those by sea. Proximity to metropolitan Auckland makes the island attractive as a holiday resort.

by George Jobberns, C.B.E., M.A., D.SC., Emeritus Professor of Geography, University of Canterbury.

• Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, Vol. 53 (1921)
• “Notes on the Geology of Great Barrier Island”, Bartram, J. A.;New Zealand Geographer, Vol. 13 (1957), “Outlying Islands of Northland”, Cochrane, G. R.
• Descriptive Atlas of New Zealand, McLintock, A. H. (ed.), (1959).

(Prototroctes oxyrhynchus).

New Zealand's “mystery fish”, the grayling (upokororo of the Maori) was extremely abundant in many rivers and streams until late last century, but from 1870 onwards it declined rapidly in numbers until in 1920 it occurred in only a few isolated localities. Very few have been recorded since then. Several theories have been put forward to explain their disappearance: that the early settlers over-exploited them (vast numbers were taken out of some rivers); that destruction of the bush in some way adversely affected their river habitats; or that the introduced trout proved too successful as a competitor. Grayling reach 12 in., occasionally 18 in. in length. Silver in colour when they enter rivers from the sea, they later darken to a greyish brown, sometimes becoming almost golden. Few details are known of their life history. Formerly they migrated up rivers in large shoals in late summer, spent the autumn and early winter up-stream (perhaps spawning), then disappeared again in early spring, presumably returning to the sea. The early Maoris used basket traps to catch the upokororo in large numbers as they ascended the rivers; large fish were called tirango; small fish, repe. “Grayling” is a misnomer for this New Zealand fish, which is not related to the European or American grayling, but belongs in a separate family with one other Australian species.

by Lawrence James Paul, B.SC., Fisheries Division, Marine Department, Wellington.