Waitara was the site of the outbreak of the Taranaki Wars in 1860 following the attempted purchase of land for British settlers from its Māori owners.

Prior to European colonisation, Waitara lay on the main overland route between the Waikato and Taranaki districts.

Some Te Āti Awa were taken to Waikato as prisoners and slaves, but most migrated to the Cook Strait area in pursuit of guns and goods from whalers and traders.

Pākehā settlers who came to New Plymouth (founded in 1841) in the 1840s and 1850s viewed nearby Waitara as the most valuable of Taranaki's coastal lands because of its fertile soil and superior harbour.

The company claimed that Te Āti Awa had either abandoned the land or lost possession of it, owing to conquest by Waikato Māori.

[4] (The Land Claims Commission later upheld this view, but subsequently Governor Robert FitzRoy (in office 1843–1845) rejected it, as did the Waitangi Tribunal in 1996.)

A year later 100 men, women and children sat in a surveyors' path to disrupt the surveying of land for sale.

[4] Between March and November 1848 Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke, a Te Āti Awa chief who staunchly opposed the sale of land in the Waitara area, returned to the district from Waikanae with almost 600 men, women and children and some livestock to retake possession of the land.

[4] Teira's 600-acre (240 hectare) Waitara block, located on the west side of the Waitara River and known as the Pekapeka block, became the focal point of a dispute between the colonial government (chiefly representing settlers) and Māori over the right of individuals to sell land that Māori custom regarded as owned by the community.

[5] The dispute ultimately led to the outbreak of war in Waitara on 17 March 1860, when 500 troops began a bombardment of Kingi's Te Kohia pā, which had been built two days' prior.

[6] Imperial troops established Camp Waitara to the south of the Pekapeka block, at the former location of Pukekohe pā, which became the base of the 40th Regiment, and was one of the largest redoubts in the country.

[4] Later campaigns during the war included the major British defeat in the Battle of Puketakauere, close to Te Kohia pā, on 27 June 1860 which cost the lives of 32 Imperial troops and of five Māori.

A major British sapping operation at the strongly defended Te Arei pā up the Waitara River began in February 1861, but was abandoned when a ceasefire was effected the following month.

[8][9] The government immediately renounced the earlier Waitara purchase, abandoning all claims to it, and instead created a plan for the confiscation of greater tracts of land under new laws, supposedly as a reprisal for the Oakura killings.

In 1989 the land was transferred to the New Plymouth District Council, which in turn voted in March 2004 to sell it to the Government with the intention of it being passed to Te Āti Awa as part of the Waitangi Treaty settlement.

In its report, the tribunal observed that to the offence of local Maori, many street names in Waitara honoured the architects of the illegal land confiscation, including chief crown purchasing agent Donald McLean, Land Purchase Commissioner Robert Parris, Governor Thomas Gore Browne and military officers Charles Emilius Gold and Peter Cracroft.

It is when leaders like Kingi, who understood the prerequisites for peace, are similarly memorialised on the land and embedded in public consciousness that those names will cease to stand for conquest and the Waitara war will end."

In November 1999 the New Zealand Government signed a Heads of Agreement with Te Āti Awa to settle its claims, a process that would provide financial compensation and an apology for the confiscation of land.

By the time the line opened on 14 October 1875, the town had a harbour board, two printing houses, a soap and candle factory, an iron foundry, a boat-building yard, two breweries, a wool-scouring plant and a tannery.

From 1887 the economy of Waitara became dependent on the frozen meat trade – first to Great Britain and since the creation of the European Common Market, to Asian countries.

The loss of jobs affected Maori workers disproportionately because they were heavily represented in the work's labour force.

ANZCO Foods Group subsequently built a plant to manufacture smallgoods such as salami, sausages and hamburger patties on the site of the freezing works.

Even after an ocean outfall was built in collaboration with the town council's sewerage system, at Waitangi Tribunal hearings in Waitara, local Maori gave evidence that they had "…historic associations with the coastline in this area and depend upon the sea resources to provide them with the diet to which they have been accustomed for many centuries…..thus the contamination of one reef would deprive hapu which customarily was entitled to the sea food from the reef".

The high cost of synthetic petrol production and low market prices made the process uneconomical at the time.

Motunui has the two largest wooden structures in the southern hemisphere and they are only exceeded in size, anywhere in the world, by the Buddhist temple Tōdai-ji in Nara, Japan.