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
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