Crosbie Wells and Te Rau Tauwhare's partnership

Crosbie Wells and Te Rau Tauwhare’s partnership joined a practical undertaking in the Arahura Valley to a sustained friendship. Wells’s cottage and timber mill became a regular meeting place for the two men, but their connection was also shaped by the land around them: Wells held title to acreage purchased from the Crown, while Tauwhare understood the valley as part of a homeland from which Poutini Ngāi Tahu had been dispossessed.

Meeting in the Arahura Valley

Tauwhare travelled frequently up the Arahura Valley to seek pounamu in the riverbed. His first encounter with Wells came when the sound of Wells’s axe drew him to the cottage. Their acquaintance began cordially and grew through repeated visits. Wells was keen to learn about Māori life and lore, and Tauwhare’s calls at the cottage became a tradition.

The setting carried a history neither man could set aside. Six years before their meeting, the Crown had purchased a vast stretch of the western coast from Poutini Ngāi Tahu for three hundred pounds, reserving only the Arahura River and certain other parcels. Wells later paid the Crown fifty pounds for a hundred acres at the eastern end of the valley. His purchase was legal, but the land adjoined territory to which Tauwhare’s people had been confined after the sale.

A shared undertaking

Wells built a one-room cottage overlooking the river, cleared a garden space, and began constructing a timber mill. A later account by shipping agent Thomas Balfour recalled that Wells had been building a sawmill in the Arahura and that he and Tauwhare were partners in it. Wells had arranged equipment shipments through Balfour, who knew him by sight and remembered the two men’s association.

The partnership thus had a material basis in the mill, while the routine of Tauwhare’s visits gave it a more personal life. Wells’s interest in the knowledge Tauwhare shared helped turn an initial meeting into a continuing tradition. The available account establishes their joint involvement in the mill, but does not specify the terms of their arrangement or how its proceeds were divided.

Friendship beside contested land

For Tauwhare, Wells’s cottage became a familiar landmark within a landscape he knew intimately. He had travelled the length of the West Coast and regarded the Arahura River as central to the country of Te Tai Poutini. The cottage, halfway between the mountains and the ocean, held a corresponding place in his mental map. His attachment to the valley did not mean he could claim Wells’s property under colonial law; it sharpened the contrast between a lived relationship to land and the conversion of land into saleable acreage.

That contrast became more painful after Wells’s death. Before his body had been buried, the hundred acres had been purchased by Edgar Clinch. Tauwhare resented that Clinch had bought the property for profit without settling there or making use of it, and that Wells’s cottage was stripped of items that could be sold. Tauwhare had planned to return to the deserted cottage, but kept that intention from Benjamin Löwenthal because Löwenthal knew Clinch, the new legal owner. The friendship left him with a continuing tie to a home he could no longer enter as its owner.

Significance of the partnership

The relationship offers a counterpoint to accounts that reduce the Arahura Valley to property and extractable wealth. Wells’s purchase and mill belong to the history of settlement and commercial development; Tauwhare’s recurring visits, knowledge of the land, and sense of belonging place the same ground within a much longer Indigenous history. Their partnership brought the men together in work and conversation without erasing the unequal claims surrounding them. After Wells’s death, the cottage’s transfer exposed how easily legal title could displace personal attachment and longstanding connection to country.