Māori workers strike for equal pay on Sumner Road

Captain Thomas, back in July of 1849, thought he'd found a good way to get from the port to the plains here in Waitaha Canterbury. He saw a route through a 600-foot pass, suggested by Master Evans, and believed a four-mile road over what's now Tapuaeharuru Evans Pass, with a tunnel, to Matuku Takotako Sumner, and then another seven miles to the city site, could be built before the first immigrants arrived.

They brought in laborers from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, about half of them Māori. At first, the local Māori seemed hesitant to join the road gangs, but after a few weeks, Thomas wrote that they were joining in considerable numbers because they were pleased with how the working Māori were being treated.

There was a moment in November when one gang stopped working because their supervisor, Joseph Compton, swore at them. He ended up leaving his job. Another gang was blasting rock to make the uphill road from Ōhinehou Lyttelton’s Oxford Street towards Officers Point, a very hard rock spur. They got as far as Sticking Point, which we now call Windy Point.

The day before the settlers arrived, Chief Agent J.R. Godley had to deal with a pay dispute. The European workers objected to Māori getting the same wage as them – sixpence an hour. Godley fired the European dissidents and hired more Māori. The European men came back to work the next day. Godley described the Māori working, saying they "struck, shovelled &c., altogether, keeping time to a song." He called them "most civil, good-natured fellows, laughing immoderately at our questions and chattering broken English very fast in reply.”

It was clear by late 1850 that the road wouldn't be finished in time. Charlotte Godley wrote that the "great road is still very unfinished; several shoulders of rock that come in the way, and have to be blasted, stop it up completely, and in some places along the line even the path is quite a climb, with a rope to pull yourself up by." When the immigrants arrived in December 1850, the Bridle Path to Ōpāwaho Heathcote was the only land route to the plains.