John Godley

Ah, it is you again, is it? Your curiosity stirred, no doubt, like a swirl of leaves amidst the bluster of a norwester. Well, yes, I am indeed pleased you have sought me out once more, for the tale is far from told. And you, I wager, are brimming with questions. Why, for instance, was Wakefield thrown into  a prison cell? Or, what peculiar inspiration led me to deem the colonisation of a swamp an enterprise most noble?

Well, I shall enlighten you.

I was born upon Irish soil—though do not mistake me for one of the locals, for I am of English stock, a gentleman by birth and a scholar of Cambridge's venerable halls. The Irish tenants who toiled upon my land in the 1840s, endured no small measure of hardship. There are those now who might whisper that they were but victims of the grand machinery of colonisation itself. Such a notion, I assure you, never darkened my contemplations. What I beheld, clear as the noonday sun, was that colonisation—conducted with precision and propriety—held the key to remedying such wretchedness.

As for Wakefield, well let’s just say that his ambition has always been far grander than his actions. So determined was he to find fortune that he concocted an elaborate plan to kidnap a teenage heiress and convince her to marry him based on a pretext of bold lies. He very nearly got away with it, but the father got wind and intervened just in time to send Wakefield off to Newgate prison.

It was there that he first turned his mind - or indeed his pen - to the idea of colonisation. His theory was of one primarily of economics. The “waste lands” of the colonies must not be given away for a song - instead, they must be offered at ‘sufficient price’ to fund the transport of workers and for the land to be just out of reach for those workers until such a time that they had offered their toil to the settlement.

Well it didn’t work in Wellington of course. Many of his so-called investors were just property speculators who never left the shores of England, and the poor souls who arrived found great disagreement with the Māori over land sales and there was not enough to keep them gainfully employed. The whole New Zealand company venture was failing. But Wakefield was nothing if not persistent. And he saw in me a gentleman who might be convinced of the moral value of his plan and activate my various connections to its success.

I suppose it’s curious that ‘sufficient price’ was not an idea applied to purchasing land from the natives. Let’s consider Kemp’s Purchase. It wasn’t so much negotiated as declared. The price was decided well in advance of any talks with Ngāi Tahu. There was a certain bit of theatre in the negotiations as well. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but the proposal was presented to the chiefs aboard a brig moored at Takapūneke. Was that a coincidence? Since the bay of Takpūneke in Akaroa harbour was the exact spot where Te Rauparaha orchestrated a surprise attack on the people of Banks Peninsula by filling a ships hold with

I must say the whole idea was underpinned by the firm belief that our capitalist and Christian ways of thinking were correct and the whole globe could only benefit from taking them on. I’ll admit it does seem incurious of us now to never have so much as enquired about the native ways of thinking or taking any time to understand their relationship with the land, by which me might have all benefited. I suppose it is too late now to look back and do anything different. Or perhaps it is not?

I was known as a liberal for my time - described even as weak for showing concern for my Irish tenants. Indeed, my whole life was marked by a determination to do what was I thought moral and proper and correct.