Taranaki

Taranaki is a region in the west of New Zealand's North Island. It is named after its main geographical feature, the stratovolcano Taranaki Maunga, formerly known as Mount Egmont. The main centre is the city of New Plymouth. 

Mount Taranaki is the second highest mountain in the North Island, and the dominant geographical feature of the region. A Māori legend says that Mount Taranaki previously lived with the Tongariro, Ngāuruhoe and Ruapehu mountains of the central North Island but fled to its current location after a battle with Tongariro. A near-perfect cone, it last erupted in the mid-18th century. The mountain and its immediate surrounds form Te Papa-Kura-o-Taranaki (formerly known as Egmont National Park).

The area became home to a number of Māori tribes from the 13th century. From about 1823 the Māori began having contact with European whalers as well as traders who arrived by schooner to buy flax. Organised European settlement at New Plymouth gathered pace in the early 1840s. European expansion beyond New Plymouth, however, was prevented by Māori opposition to selling their land, a sentiment that deepened as links strengthened with the King Movement. Tension over land ownership mounted, leading to the outbreak of war at Waitara on 16 March 1860.  Although the pressure for the sale of the Waitara block resulted from the colonists' hunger for land in Taranaki, the greater issue fuelling the conflict was the Government's desire to impose British administration, law and civilisation on the Māori.

An uneasy truce was negotiated a year later, only to be broken in April 1863 as tensions over land occupation boiled over again. A total of 5,000 troops fought in the Second Taranaki War against about 1,500 men, women and children. The style of warfare differed markedly from that of the 1860–61 conflict as the army systematically took possession of Māori land by driving off the inhabitants, adopting a "scorched earth" strategy of laying waste to the villages and cultivations of Māori, whether warlike or otherwise. As the troops advanced, the Government built an expanding line of redoubts, behind which settlers built homes and developed farms. The effect was a creeping confiscation of almost a million acres (4,000 km2) of land.

Armed Māori resistance continued in South Taranaki until early 1869, led by the warrior Tītokowaru, who reclaimed land almost as far south as Whanganui. A decade later, spiritual leader Te Whiti o Rongomai, based at Parihaka, launched a campaign of passive resistance against government land confiscation, which culminated in a raid by colonial troops on 5 November 1881.

The confiscations, subsequently acknowledged by the New Zealand Government as unjust and illegal, began in 1865 and soon included the entire Taranaki district.

The region is exceptionally fertile thanks to generous rainfall and rich volcanic soil. Taranaki’s economy is centred around dairy farming, hydrocarbon exploration, and manufacturing (including agricultural and energy based manufacturing).