William Mein Smith

William Mein Smith (1799 - 1869) was a key actor in the early settlement of New Zealand's capital city, Wellington. As the Surveyor General for the Wakefield's New Zealand Company at Port Nicholson from 1840 to 1843, he and his team surveyed the town of Wellington, after finding the land on the Petone foreshore unsuitable, laying out the Town Belt and other features and making provision for the much debated "tenth" share of the land for local Maori.

Born in 1799 in Capetown, South Africa, he was raised in Devon and the Scottish Borders, served in the Royal Artillery from 1814, in Ireland, Canada (where he met his wife Louisa and was married at Kingston) in Gibraltar, including being part of a diplomatic visit to Marrakesh in 1829-30, and at the Royal Artillery Academy at Woolwich where he taught as Master of Line Drawing, before being approached to assist the Wakefields New Zealand Company in 1839. He and his team of surveyors sailed to New Zealand on the New Zealand Company barque Cuba, arriving on January 3 1840 in the harbour of Te Whanganui a Tara (Port Nicholson). His wife and older children arrived two months later.

He was instrumental in the Wellington colony's early administration, the setting out of the town (including reservation of one tenth for Maori owners), and country acres, and later oversaw work in th Manawatu and Wanganui. He was gazetted as a magistrate. He also served on the short-lived (and controversial) Council established by the Company. His name survives today however only indirectly, in Mein Street, Wellington. His other contributions included helping to form the first library, designing the first light at the entrance to the harbour, exploring the route to Porirua and the Kapiti coast, and founding the Horticultural Society.

Though getting on the wrong side of Colonel Wakefield, the Company's Principal Agent, and cbeing dismissed as Surveyor General from early 1842, when he was replaced without warning by S C Brees, he was commissioned to sail down the East coast of the South Island in September 1842 to help locate another site for settlement by the New Zealand Company. He was thus an early visitor to what is now Christchurch, Akaroa, Port Chalmers and the Bluff but was shipwrecked in the course of the return trip. He still had the opportunity to visit and name Quail Island in Lyttleton harbour, after crossing the peninsular on foot, visiting whalers and Maori alike. Later he surveyed a number of other parts of the lower North Island, including some townships in Wairarapa (Featherston and Masterton in particular), the coastline as far north as Castlepoint, and the Taratahi plain. He also spent time in the 1850s seeking a better route through the mountains to Wellington.

He represented the Wairarapa district briefly on the short-lived Legislative Council from 1851, and then represented Wairarapa on the Wellington Provincial Council from 1858 to 1865.

He is probably as well known for his many water colours and sketches of early Wellington and Wairarapa, many of which are held by Wellington's Alexander Turnbull Library.

He was involved in operating a farming venture near Wellington at Terawhiti until 1846.

At about this time, he was responsible for establishing one of the earliest cattle and sheep runs in the Wairarapa, at Huangarua, near modern Martinborough, with his friend Samuel Revans in about 1845, when he seems to have left his first home under what is now Tinakori Hill, Wellington, driving some of the first cattle round the rocky coastline. They were among the first half dozen settlers in the valley. There he and Louisa raised their 5 children. He also carried on surveying and was a local magistrate and politician. He also had close dealings with local Maori, and his image is said to be preserved in one of the celebrated carved perimeter posts at Papawai marae, near Greytown.

He died in Greytown in the Wairarapa in 1869 after a lengthy illness, at his and Revan's home "Brierly" at Woodside. Louisa died there two years earlier. Members of the Smith family still live in the Wairarapa.
* [http://www.teara.govt.nz/1966/S/SmithWilliamMein/SmithWilliamMein/en Biography in the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand]