Ann Tamairaki Palmer

Hannah Parera/Ann Holmes, married to former whaler William Palmer. William’s ‘half-caste’ daughters were all married to Pákehá men: Betty to James Crane, Mere to William Bryant, and Hannah to Peter Campbell (junior). Six Pákehá men had access to reserve land through their mixed-descent wives. The creation of ‘half-caste lands’ out of reserve land was thus a reality, and the presence of newcomers, married to women of mixed descent

Historic tree stumps
Some of the earliest evidence of a European presence in New Zealand is found in the far south-west of the South Island. When James Cook rested up in Dusky Sound in the autumn of 1773 after arduous voyages towards Antarctica, one of the tasks he had his party complete was accurately fixing the geographical position of New Zealand. So that the necessary observations could be made, about an acre (half a hectare) of land on Astronomer Point was cleared of bush. The stumps of trees felled by Cook’s men can still be seen beneath the regrown bush.
When Cook made his two subsequent voyages into the Pacific, New Zealand was no longer a place unknown to Europeans. The first voyage in 1770 had confirmed that it was not a vast southern land waiting to be discovered. Joseph Banks, the naturalist on board the Endeavour, had recorded that Cook’s rounding of Stewart Island’s South Cape had totally demolished ‘our aerial fabrick called continent’. Yet there still remained unexplored ocean to the east of New Zealand, where a great continent could lie. On his second voyage (1772–75) Cook used New Zealand as a base for probes south and east, which finally proved there was no such continent.