Manukau Harbour - History

History

The harbour was an important historical waterway for the Māori. It had several portages to the Pacific Ocean and to the Waikato River, and various villages and pā (hill forts) clustered around it. Snapper, flounder, mullet, scallops, cockles and pipi provided food in plentiful amounts.

Cornwallis, beside the Puponga Peninsula, was the first site for the future city of Auckland. However because of fraudulent land sales and rugged conditions, the settlement was abandoned in the 1840s. The surrounding bush clad hills had vast amounts of kauri removed for milling and shipped from a wharf on Paratutai to either the other end of the harbour at Onehunga for use in house building in the new city of Auckland, or along the coast to other New Zealand settlements. The last mills were abandoned in the early 1920s.

European settlement of the area was thus almost often an outgrowth of the Waitemata Harbour-centred settlement, as these settlers spread south and west through the isthmus and reached the Manukau Harbour. One of the few separate earlier European settlements was Onehunga, from where some raiding of enemy settlements occurred during the New Zealand wars, and which later became a landing point for kauri and other products landed by ship and canoe from the south, the shipping route being shorter than the one along the east coast to the Waitemata Harbour. However, the combination of the difficult entry into the harbour, which limited ships to about 1,000 tons maximum, and the extension of the railway to Onehunga in 1873 made naval traffic on the harbour less important again, though the Port of Onehunga can trace its origins to this time.

Construction of a canal between the Manukau and the Waitemata was considered in the early 1900s, and the Auckland and Manukau Canal Act 1908 was passed to allow authorities to take privately owned land for this purpose. However, no serious work (or land take) was undertaken. The act is technically still in force as of 2008.