Tomika Te Mutu, chief of the Ngaiterangi tribe, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
? – 1867Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāi Tuwhiwhia
- Date
- c 1880
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Takiwā / region
- Waiariki
- Credit line
- National Library of Australia
- Accession no.
- 2282975
Ngāti Tuwhiwhia and Ngāi Te Rangi rangatira Tomika Te Mutu was the paramount chief of Tauranga. His tribal areas extended out from Tauranga to include the islands of Matakana and Motuhoa (where he lived), around Mauao Mt Maunganui and Katikati Athenree.1
During Tomika’s time as leader, Ngāi Te Rangi’s homelands were frequently invaded by musket-bearing Ngāpuhi from the Bay of Islands and, thereafter, Ngāti Maru war parties of Hauraki Marutūāhu into the 1830s. He and his people endured the further conflict that came to the Bay of Plenty in the 1860s, resulting in the loss of land for many of the local iwi.
As a response to the perceived threat of the Kīngitanga, in 1860 Governor George Bowen invited many rangatira to Kohimārama in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland for a conference. Tomika accepted the governor’s invitation – and it was at the conference that one of the earliest known images of Tomika was made, taken by photographer John Crombie and displayed in 1862 at the International Exhibition, London. At the conference, Tomika became a signatory to resolutions that affirmed Queen Victoria’s sovereignty and ultimately dismissed the Kīngitanga as ‘a cause of division and strife, and [which] is fraught with troubles to the country’. So committed, Tomika sided with the Crown during the subsequent fighting in the Bay of Plenty. Unlike the dissenting tribes, Tomika and other allies of the Crown were compensated for the land they lost in the 20,250-hectare allotment that the Crown acquired in the peace settlement.
While another, undated Lindauer portrait of Tomika in the Partridge Collection presents him in Māori garments, in this version he is dressed in entirely European clothing offset by a remarkable ear ornament. He wears a pōhoi, which includes the bird’s beak, wattles and skull intact, inserted beak first through his earlobe. This accessory would have transmitted a striking show of power and is completed by the two huia tail feathers in his hair.
Te Raupatu o Tauranga Moana: Report on the Tauranga Confiscation Claims, Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington, 2004, https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_68361657/Te%20Raupatu%20o%20Tauranga%20Moana.pdf, accessed 28 August 2026.
