Printing He Whakaputanga, The Declaration of Independence, 1835, at the MOTAT Print Shop

By Makyla Curtis

In September 2025, the Print Shop team welcomed staff and volunteers into the workshop to get up close and personal with He Whakaputanga, The Declaration of Independence, by setting some of the type that would go towards its printing. 

He Whakaputanga debated and agreed by 34 rangatira (leaders) in the Bay of Islands on 28^th October 1835. It was signed by a further 18 rangatira from the North Island in 1839. It was sent to King William IV and formally acknowledged by the Crown in 1836.

He Whakaputanga can be translated to ‘an emergence’ and spoke to “the birth of a new nation” in which rangatira (Māori leaders) and their iwi and hapū looked to unify their forms of governance amongst themselves. The declaration asked for support from the crown as they developed and asserted their independence.

Of course, the document was originally handwritten and signed, however a printed version was handset in moveable metal type and printed on a Stanhope printing press in Paihia by William Colenso.

William Colenso was a Cornish printer hired by the Church Missionary Society to travel to New Zealand and print a Māori translation of the Bible: Te Paipera. He arrived in December of 1834 with a stanhope printing press, and a full set of type purchased by the Church Missionary Society. However, there were no other supplies provided. Colenso brought his own composing stick, but there were no type drawers to distribute the type into, so he commissioned a cabinet maker in Kororāreka (Russell), a man named R. Brown, to build some for him. Colenso designed his own typecase layout. He knew he wouldn’t need all the letters in the English alphabet to print Te Paipera, so his layout was designed specifically for the Māori alphabet.

In 2019, I commissioned some cases be made by a cabinetmaker in Kaiwaka, Janos Panyoczki, based on Colenso’s cases. I filled those cases with type and used Colenso’s cases to set He Whakaputanga in September of that year. With Graham O’Keeffe and Willy Coenradi, we printed around 200 copies.

I wanted to spread more awareness about both the history of printing in New Zealand, as well as the importance of He Whakaputanga, a declaration of Independence that came almost 5 years before the Treaty of Waitangi. It worked well in 2019, so perhaps we could do it again.

So, last year in 2025, designed to run alongside the exhibition about Māori language in print, Tō Ao ki Tōku Ao at the Walsh Memorial Library, we in the Print Shop, thought it was an opportunity to get people even closer to the document by hand-setting it themselves. Over 40 people in the MOTAT team contributed to the process.

When a large number of people contribute to hand-setting type, the tension varies from phrase to phrase, which resulted in a very tricky ‘lock-up’ which took me several days to get right. Finally, after months of hand-setting with the team, and perfecting the lock-up, taking multiple proofs and editing errors, the forme was ready to hand over to Denis Wadsworth who set it up in the Heidelberg cylinder press (a much more modern machine to the Stanhope in 1835!) and brought the document to life in print, while members of the public gathered to watch the process in action.

Copies of He Whakaputanga are available in The Print Shop. Drop by on a Wednesday, Thursday, or Sunday to get a copy, or drop Maryam Alhaseny an email Maryam.alhaseny@motat.org.nz

William Colenso also printed Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840. In September of this year, to mark Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, we will be welcoming the MOTAT team to begin the process again, but this time we will be hand-setting the treaty. Keep an eye out for invites to join us.

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the project so far, and to the Print Shop team!