New Zealand - Matamata - Matamata College - Form 6 - 1973 Do you have more information about the school or the people in this photo? Please use the comment section below to share. To search for other photos from this school, please type the schools name in to our search engine. Matamata College - The college was declared open on 11 February 1924 by the Minister for Education, James Parr Matamata - In the early nineteenth century, the area including and surrounding the present-day Matamata township was part of the territory of the Ngāti Hauā. The Matamata pā itself was actually located near the present-day settlement of Waharoa, approximately 6 kilometres (4 miles) to the north. - The first European thought to have visited the Matamata area was the trader Phillip Tapsell in about 1830. In 1833 the Reverend Alfred Nesbit Brown visited the area and in 1835 opened a mission near Matamata Pa, but this closed the following year when intertribal warfare broke out. In 1865 Josiah Firth negotiated with Ngāti Hauā leader Wiremu Tamihana and leased a large area of land, including the future site of the town which he named after the pā. Firth constructed a dray road to Cambridge and cleared the Waihou River so that it was navigable by his (small) boats. - Peria, on the outskirts of Matamata, was the scene of the Kīngitanga meeting of 1863. - Firth's estate later failed and by 1904 had been wholly obtained by the Crown and was subdivided into dairy farm units to take advantage of the new technology of refrigeration. It became a dependent Town District in 1917, an independent Town District in 1919 and was constituted a borough in 1935. With the re-organisation of territorial authorities in New Zealand in 1989, Matamata became part of the Matamata-Piako District. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matamata)