Tuparekura Origins in 19th–20th Century Drama

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Tuparekura, a small peninsula on the southern Kaipara harbour, has a chequered history from its inception. The enclave is where the Native Land Court's founding judge broke his own rules. Francis Dart Fenton, Chief Judge of the Native Land Court and the man who designed New Zealand's entire Maori land title system, personally acquired seven acres of the block for his own use — the very kind of informal, undocumented land deal his court existed to replace.

Fenton bought the seven-acre point from Patoromu Te Akiriri for £10 in 1881, releasing an earlier lease in the bargain. He built a home there, "Crosland," and pursued early viticulture on the site. But he never sought a Crown title for it — by his own admission to an 1891 government commission, he preferred it that way, since without a title he paid no rates or taxes. The transfer wasn't formally recorded until 1909, over a decade after his death.

Fenton also engineered a second, more calculated manoeuvre. A 20-acre strip was carved out of the same block as a separate "road" title, giving him a right of way to the Kaipara Harbour from his neighbouring Aotea property. That title passed briefly through Ihapera Nelson, a local Māori woman, before landing in Fenton's hands within the year — a pattern that let the Chief Judge secure exactly the access he wanted while keeping his own name off the paperwork until the last step.

What followed was decades of confusion baked into the system Fenton himself had built. Overlapping block names, splintering ownership shares, and partial sales meant one of Tuparekura's daughter blocks was long mistakenly assumed to be fully sold, when in fact Māori ownership interests lingered on paper. Successive settler families — the Monks, then E.G. Leighton — spent much of the 20th century buying up fragments of the remaining Māori-owned block, piece by piece.

By the 1960s, ownership had fragmented further among a shrinking group of Māori shareholders. E.G. Leighton, who farmed the adjoining land, gradually acquired shares from owners willing to sell. One of them, Mina Haaka Brown, a widow raising nine children after her husband's death, sold her shares in 1964 during a period of financial hardship — a decision her brother later said he would have tried to prevent, or bought her out himself, had he known at the time. In 1965 Leighton also gained approval to reclaim roughly 300 acres of adjoining mudflats for farming, a type of application the neighbouring Ōtakanini owners would later find was not approved for their own land.

A handful of shares were never sold. They passed instead to the descendants of Eruini and Wirihana Hawke — a family whose members include Joe Hawke of the 1977–78 Bastion Point occupation. Today their combined holding amounts to little more than an acre. A 1993 application to have the land reclassified did not go ahead after the Māori Land Court found the owners hadn't been properly consulted. What remains isn't worth much on paper. To the family, however, it's the last hold on a tūpuna whenua — the one piece of the judge's old enclave that stayed in Māori hands.