IWI / HAPU AFFILIATIONS

Little is known about Anehana but for remarks made by James Cowan in Pictures of Old New Zealand and the photography of George and Elizabeth Pulman. Cowan noted that Anehana was a familiar figure in nineteenth-century Auckland and lived north of Auckland at Silverdale, in the settlement formerly known as Wade. In his 1900 publication New Zealand Illustrated Cowan published a Pulman Studio photograph of Anehana as one of his Frontispiece illustrations.¹

Historians associated with modern-day Silverdale note that Anehana would have lived at Weiti between 1860 and 1880 and that few Māori remained there after 1880.² The original name for Wade was Weiti, as it was located near the head of the Weiti River, a major waterway that joins the Waitemata Harbour south of the Whangaparaoa Peninsula. Weiti was of strategic importance to Māori for it was the entranceway for all canoes navigating up the river with easy access to an overland walkway to the eastern side of the Peninsula.  The lived Māori history of the area is sketchy, yet oral and archaeological history tells us the Whangaparaoa region was covered with kauri trees that formed a dense and extensive forest. After the trees were felled for Pākehā settlement and milling in the 1830s, the land was bounteous with kauri-gum, which was extracted for export to Europe to make paint and varnish.

Lindauer's portrait of Anehana is based on a photograph by Elizabeth and George Pulman. From 1867 the Pulman's operated a photography studio in Shortland Street in Auckland specialising in scenic photography and portraits. Today, their photographs are of huge historic interest to historians, researchers and descendants of ancestors for their portrait subjects.³ It is not known when the Pulman's took Anehana's photograph, but can be estimated to be between 1867 and 1871.

NM