Crosbie Wells and Te Rau Tauwhare's friendship over meals and conversation

Crosbie Wells and Te Rau Tauwhare become friends through repeated visits, conversation, and shared food in the Arahura Valley. Their connection brings together two different ways of understanding wealth and land: Wells seeks the rewards of work and considers gold a possible equivalent to greenstone, while Tauwhare’s attachment to the valley is inseparable from his people’s history and relationship to the land. Their friendship takes shape in a cottage built on territory the British Crown had purchased from Poutini Ngāi Tahu, and endures in Tauwhare’s efforts to return to the home that Wells has left behind.

Meeting in the Arahura Valley

Wells had purchased one hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley for fifty pounds, a transaction made possible by the Crown’s purchase of a far larger tract of Poutini Ngāi Tahu land six years earlier. The Crown had paid three hundred pounds for that territory, reserving only the Arahura River, parts of its banks, and a small parcel at Mawhera. As thousands of prospectors arrived, they paid for licences and land, while the gold in the rivers and sands remained beyond any reckoning. Tauwhare understood the sale as a profound dispossession; Wells’s property, however, was legally conveyed to him by the Crown.

Wells built a one-room cottage overlooking the river, cleared a garden, and began a timber mill. Tauwhare travelled through the valley as a hunter of greenstone, which he could identify by sight and carry back to Mawhera for ceremonial treatment. Their first acquaintance began when the sound of Wells’s axe drew Tauwhare to the cottage. It developed into a regular practice: whenever he was nearby, Tauwhare called in. Wells’s interest in local life and lore gave them a subject for conversation, and the visits became a tradition.

Companionship and conversation

Wells’s letters to Alistair Lauderback record how much the new friendship meant to him. After moving west from Otago, estranged from his wife and determined to leave prospecting behind, Wells intended to try the timber trade instead. He described his growing companionship with Tauwhare as a source of lifted spirits. The letter also filters their relationship through a colonial, romanticizing description of Tauwhare. That framing sits uneasily beside the more particular friendship shown in their shared time: Tauwhare is not merely a figure in Wells’s account of his new life, but a regular visitor with his own knowledge, commitments, and judgments.

A later evening at the cottage shows them drinking spirits and talking at close quarters. Wells recalls a man whose severed arm had borne a tattoo of a ship, and wonders whether it would be a shock to see oneself after a long time away from a mirror. Tauwhare answers that he would not forget his own markings. Wells then tells him that he once cut a man’s face, leaving a scar from eye to mouth, and asks whether Tauwhare’s own facial marking bled. Tauwhare confirms that it did. The exchange places bodily marks and violence within an otherwise familiar conversation: Wells asks directly about painful experience, and Tauwhare responds without disclosing more than he chooses.

Different understandings of land and wealth

The friendship does not erase the unequal conditions surrounding Wells’s home. Tauwhare regards the Arahura Valley as belonging to his people even though they cannot claim it under the law. He objects to land being bought for profit rather than lived upon and used. Wells’s own cottage and timber ambitions occupy the same landscape, but his friendship with Tauwhare gives him access to a companion who understands it through a history and belonging that the purchase papers do not recognize.

Their difference emerges again over food. At a meal cooked in an earth-covered fire pit, Wells suggests that greenstone and gold might be exchanged as equivalent forms of treasure, imagining the possibility of a greenstone rush to match the search for gold. Tauwhare considers the comparison and rejects it. The disagreement is brief, but it prevents their companionship from being mistaken for sameness: they can eat and talk together without sharing an account of what makes a resource valuable or what a land’s wealth means.

The cottage after Wells

After Wells’s death, the friendship is carried forward in Tauwhare’s attachment to the cottage and valley. He plans to spend a night in Wells’s deserted home but conceals that intention from Benjamin Löwenthal, who knows Edgar Clinch, the man to whom the property now legally belongs. Tauwhare’s hesitation reflects the precariousness of his position: although the cottage lies in a valley he still regards as his own, he cannot claim it through the law.

Clinch has bought the acreage without, as far as Tauwhare knows, spending meaningful time there. He has not tended the land or developed it; instead, he has had saleable belongings stripped from Wells’s cottage. Before Wells’s body is buried, the property has passed to another profit-seeking purchaser. Tauwhare’s anger at this transfer is bound to his affection for Wells’s home and to his broader conviction that land is not simply another currency. The friendship therefore outlasts their regular meetings as a contested inheritance of place: Wells’s cottage remains both a record of their companionship and evidence of the legal dispossession that keeps Tauwhare from claiming the valley as home.