Waitara Attractions

16km northeast of New Plymouth is Waitara (pop. 6000), where the land wars began in 1860. The main cause of the wars was the land hunger of the settlers, who, squeezed between the volcano and the sea, looked to the Maoris' farming land. The local tribe, the Te Ati Awa, had fled south in the 1820s before the better-equipped Waikato tribes. They gave up land in the Wellington area to the settlers so that they could return to their tribal territory around 1848. But the settlers wanted this land too. Thereupon the Maoris united in opposition to a renegade Maori leader who had gone over to the settlers' side. Government troops then intervened in order to secure the land for the whites.