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THE Bay of Islands is the birthplace of Aotearoa twice over. A range of hills called Rākaumangamanga, on the nearby Cape Brett Peninsula, was an early rendezvous point for Polynesian voyagers. The bay also contains Waitangi, the place where the Treaty of Waitangi was composed and signed in 1840.
It is also a lovely place to visit for a holiday.
One of my very first blog posts is called Cape Brett: Hiking to the Birthplace of Aotearoa. In it, I talk about how, by tradition, the oceangoing craft by which the Māori first settled Aotearoa New Zealand used to rendezvous at Cape Brett. They did so under Rākaumangamanga, a seven-peaked row of hills at the end of the peninsula.
Here’s a map of the Bay of Islands, showing those localities on the Cape Brett Peninsula along with the local townships of Russell, Waitangi, and Paihia, which are right in the middle of the map, as well as towns a little further afield like Kerikeri and Kawakawa.
This February, 2025, I decided to venture to Waitangi for the annual celebrations of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, often referred to by its Māori name, Te Tiriti, at Waitangi on the 6th of February 1840.
The grounds where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, with the famous waka taua (war canoes), marae, and Treaty House, are across a bridge from Waitangi itself, in the Waitangi National Reserve.
2025’s Waitangi Day (6 February) celebrations had something of the quality of a festival. They also went on for several days in reality, as Waitangi Day was, in fact, the culmination of a festival that began three days earlier.
There was food on sale, performers, educational workshops, and an opera. As of the time of writing, there is still a full programme on the website waitangi.org.nz/whats-on/waitangi-day, called the ‘Waitangi Festival Programme 3–6 February 2025’.
The coverage of the event was far and away the best on Māori channels, which had drones flying overhead.
Here is a video I made of scenes taken on Waitangi Day, starting with an early morning flotilla of waka, or canoes.
Everybody seemed to treat it like an event, like a church service, with many turned out in their Sunday best.
In Waitangi, you can stay economically at the Waitangi Holiday Park, or Te Tii Waitangi, which is right on the water. I stayed there a couple of years ago for NZ $20 a night on an unpowered tent site, though they are $26 now. I imagine that you would have to book well in advance for the Treaty festivities, however.
Next door to Waitangi township is the much more touristy town of Paihia, which also has a wider range of accommodation. Paihia is an old Mission Station, one of several in the area, as the following plaque sets out.
These days, though, it is more a shrine to hedonism. Many holidaymakers base themselves at Paihia, next to the village of Waitangi and just across a bridge from the Waitangi National Reserve.
You know you are in Paihia if you can see the giant bronze statue of a marlin on a specially built section of the waterfront.
Here’s a restaurant and bar in Paihia called Zane Grey’s, in homage to Zane Grey, an early populariser of the legend of the Wild West, who lived and fished in this area as a sort of second home a hundred or so years ago, in much the same way that Ernest Hemingway would later end up hanging out in 1950s Cuba.
It’s funny to think that it was to some extent, in Paihia, that ‘the West was won,’ at least on paper and in myth and legend.
From Paihia, you can then catch a local ferry to Russell, the first capital of colonial New Zealand. It is also possible to get to Russell from Paihia by car, but the journey is very roundabout because Russell is built on a peninsula.
More exactly, Russell spreads across an isthmus or neck of land just before Flagstaff Hill, also known in Māori as Te Maiki, where the peninsula ends.
In Russell, the waterfront facing Paihia is dominated by the amazing wooden gingerbread façade of the Duke of Marlborough Hotel.
Founded before the Treaty, at a time when Russell, or Kororāreka as it was known then, had something of a piratical reputation, this pub is nearly 200 years old. That wouldn’t be a big deal in England but probably makes the Duke of Marlborough the oldest pub in New Zealand: “refreshing rascals and reprobates since 1827” as its website has it.
In those days, as depicted in the recent film The Convert, life in New Zealand was exceedingly rough-and-ready and, for many people, rather short as well.
For its first twenty or so years as a European settlement, Kororāreka, a name that means ‘how tasty is the little blue penguin,’ was rougher still than the fictitious town of Epworth in The Convert.
Indeed, the Kororāreka of that era was known as “the hellhole of the Pacific,” a title for which there must have been fierce competition at the time.
Charles Darwin visited the Bay of Islands for a few days in 1835, in the course of his famous voyage on the Beagle, and judged Kororāreka to be a place frequented by “the very refuse of society.”
Darwin was referring to the town’s British and European inhabitants, primarily. In a book written some sixty-odd years later, an Italian-born priest named Father Vaggioli also characterised that first generation of settlers, some of whom had escaped from penal colonies in Australia, as people who had slipped the noose and as “lifers on the run.”
The first European settlement at Kororāreka was eventually burned down in 1845, by a missionary-educated Māori warrior-chief named Hōne (i.e. ‘John’) Heke, of the great northern Ngāpuhi iwi (tribe).
Heke’s actions in so doing were praised as a job well done by some of New Zealand’s other colonists, even though he was at war with the British by that stage and kept chopping down their flagpole at Kororāreka, which came to be replaced by one encased in steel.
It was, in fact, Heke who had erected the original flagpole in Kororāreka, for hoisting the 1834 flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand, the first nation-like entity to have been established on our shores.
Much like the Scottish clans in the days when Robert the Bruce and William Wallace were confronting the English king Edward I (‘Longshanks’), so the Māori had come to realise that their tribes could not hope to face the outside world one at a time.
Interestingly enough, in those days, the name Aotearoa was not yet commonly used in Māori to describe the whole country, though it is now.
Another fact I discovered was that Māori used to fly chiefly cloaks as flags to begin with, and that the more Western-looking United Tribes flag was designed by a missionary named Henry Williams.
Williams created the United Tribes flag so that commercial sailing ships built in New Zealand — an industry that had already developed well before the Treaty— would have a flag that other nations would recognise as the sort of flag they were familiar with and thus not be impounded, as had already happened once in Sydney.
An 1835 declaration signed by 34 chiefs called He Whakaputanga or the New Zealand Declaration of Independence, which, among other things, formalised an understanding of Williams’s United Tribes flag as no mere flag of convenience but the actual flag of a nation.
When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, the United Tribes flag, which you can see in some of the photos of the Treaty festivities above, was seen by the new power as having outlived its purpose and was hauled down and replaced by the Union Jack.
Heke thought the two flags, that of the United Tribes and the Union Jack, should be flown alongside, which would seem a harmless enough request these days. But the new administrators of the colony proved intransigent, and things went downhill from there.
There is a historical display around the flagpole explaining all this, including Heke’s disagreements with a more conservative chief of the same Ngāpuhi iwi, Tāmati Wāka Nene, who sided with the British in what came to be known as the Flagstaff War.
After its destruction by Heke and his risen clans, or factions thereof, the European township at Kororāreka was rebuilt and renamed Russell. No doubt, taking into account all the things that people had said about the former settlement, a new name made it easier to start again.
Today, there is some pressure to restore the old Māori name. ‘Who on Earth was Russell?’ is something people may well ask these days.
Located in more swept-up premises than in the days before Heke lit the fires of urban renewal, the Duke of Marlborough, looks quite respectable these days.
Some of the photos were from the Zane Grey era, with proud anglers holding up huge fish (probably bigger than what you can catch now) or standing beside even bigger marlins on a hoist.
Just slightly to the south is the Pompallier Mission and Printery, a sort of working museum of old-fashioned bookmaking techniques named after the early colonial-era Roman Catholic missionary and bishop, Jean-Baptiste Pompallier, which had been spared at Heke’s order along with several other culturally important sites.
Disreputable and drunken as many of them may have been, Heke also spared the settlers of Kororāreka from any kind of retribution.
After the Duke of Marlborough, I joined a tour of Pompallier’s printery. The tour was really well done by local Māori women and other guides. The tour shows you how they used to make books.
They would start by curing the leather for the covers, which took about 14 months in itself.
The tour guides demonstrated how people used to make the books out of the materials they had prepared. They used to sew the pages by hand and stretch the leather for the covers. In the old days, they would have used these methods to make Māori bibles and Māori dictionaries.
You could also see how they used to print the books on the printing press, placing the letters by hand.
But that’s not all: my ramblings around the Bay of Islands will be continued next Friday!
If you liked this post, check out my award-winning new book about the North Island, available from this website, a-maverick.com.
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