History
Point Britomart was the site of at least one Māori pā (fort), and considered an important site in the Auckland Isthmus, with several known battles fought over it, such as by the Ngāti Whātua in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The point received its European name in 1848 from the HMS Britomart, whose crew undertook a detailed survey of the Waitemata Harbour after it had been decided to base the new capital here. It was the site where the Union Jack was first raised in Auckland on 18 September 1840 by Felton Mathew after a preliminary agreement had been signed for the purchase of Auckland, and the point soon became the site of one of the first British military fortifications in New Zealand, Fort Britomart.
Later on, in the 1870s and 1880s, it was quarried away for fill in Mechanics Bay, its spoils providing the land for a new railway station. The removal also made Official Bay more easily accessible by foot.
The original Point Britomart area later also held a railway station and the General Post Office. At the turn of the millennium, in 2001 it became the site of the new Britomart Transport Centre.
Read more about this topic: Point Britomart
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)
“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)