Waikaremoana – Sir Rodney Gallen

Jim Watt: Well good morning, everybody. It’s my very great pleasure to welcome Sir Rodney Gallen this morning. Sir Rodney is well known in Havelock North; he‘s retired and he’s active in many organisations, a retired high court judge enjoying growing trees and nature study in Hawke’s Bay, and his historical interests too. Sir Rodney, we welcome you here today and we’re looking forward to hearing about one of your pet themes, I know, which is Waikaremoana and the history of the Tūhoe people in that area; and the history of the use of the lake and so forth. Thank you. [Applause]

Rodney Gallen: Well, you look a rather formidable audience; [chuckles] I hope not too many of you take advantage of the exits before it’s finished. [Chuckles] I suppose a fair number of you will know Waikaremoana and the place that I’m talking about, and there are probably some of you that don’t because it’s not one of the best-known parts of New Zealand, although I think it’s probably one of, if not the most, beautiful. The statistics of it, which really don’t reveal much about it, is that it’s approximately two thousand and fifty feet high. From me I’m afraid, you’ll have to put up with old style measurements; the new ones don’t really mean much. [Chuckles] When they say somebody’s fifty-eight centimetres or whatever it is high, it doesn’t really carry any weight for me. I like to say that that’s approximately twice the height of Taupō. Most people tend to think of Taupō as being a very high mountain lake. Well, it’s only half the height into the mountains that Waikaremoana is, so when you go up there you are getting very high up, and you won’t be surprised to know that there are times when there is heavy snow up there. And it also has magnificent bush completely surrounding it – I think it has some of the loveliest bush in New Zealand around that lake.

The other statistics that I’ll mention I had to write on my cheque book, because my memory doesn’t always remember them these days. It’s twenty-one square miles in extent which makes it quite a large lake; it’s twelve miles long and it’s six and a quarter miles wide at the widest point, and it is somewhere between eight-hundred and forty-six and eight-hundred and fifty feet deep. And again, using another skiting factor I suppose, that’s more than twice the depth of Lake Taupō. So you’re talking about a really quite special place. And it’s always been known as special, partly because of its statistics; but in 1895 the then Surveyor General asked Elsdon Best to go to Waikaremoana with a chief from Maungapōhatu called Tūtakangāhau, and to write down the story that he got from the place. I’m going to take some of it from that; but one of the interesting things he said – this is S Percy Smith, the Surveyor General – “Of all the New Zealand lakes Waikaremoana probably stands second for beauty, Manapouri taking the first place.” Now I think that’s quite wrong – I think [chuckles] Waikaremoana is much more beautiful than Manapouri. Manapouri’s lovely too, but it doesn’t have anything like the bush that is around Waikaremoana; it doesn’t have the great peaks and cliffs that surround the lake, and it doesn’t have the history.

So I’m going to talk to you a little bit about the history. I should also say before moving on to that though, that in 1925 the previous editor of the Wairoa Star – not a newspaper that many of you will be familiar with anymore – he wrote a book. His name was Lambert, and he wrote a book on the history of old Wairoa and the East Coast, and he included a number of chapters on Waikaremoana. Some of the material contained in that is not really very accurate, but people can say that about any sort of history. There’ll be some of you who’ll leave here today saying, “He was quite wrong about some of those things.” But Lambert said, amongst other things – and I didn’t bring Lambert along to read to you – that “Waikaremoana was comparable with any beauty place, anywhere in the world”, and I think that’s true. There is probably no view like the view from Panekire when, having climbed up there, looking down suddenly over the lake which appears before you, because you get no view until you get to the top. It’s quite remarkable, and it would be difficult to find any part of the world where there was anything quite so beautiful. And there are a lot of Hawke’s Bay people who’ve never been there, and even more New Zealanders who haven’t been there; and in some ways you’re a bit inclined to say, “Long may it stay that way”, [chuckles] because one of the attractiveness [attractions] of Waikaremoana is that it is a place which is remote; and it isn’t spoiled, and let’s hope it stays that way as well.

Now one of the things which people tend to say about our country is that it doesn’t have much visible history. I suppose there’s some truth if you use the word ‘visible’, but Waikaremoana is absolutely thick with history. It’s hard to think of the right word to use. There is almost no part of that lake, no part of the shore, no part of the mountains around it which doesn’t have a very ancient and very important history. And a lot of that is still available to people. Some of that came from the trip which Elsdon Best made with Tūtakangāhau, and some of you will know that there’s recently been a book come out on that. It’s called ‘The Best of Both Worlds’; I don’t immediately recall the name of the author, but it’s about the long-standing relationship between those two men – Best, who was the Pākehā surveyor, and Tūtakangāhau, who was the old-style Māori chief, and a lot of the information we have comes from that association. But it’s as well to perhaps put a slightly warning note – Tūtakangāhau was related to people from the lake but he did not come from there himself, and there are people up there who would take exception to some of the things which he says about its history. Nevertheless, we’re lucky somebody took the trouble to put down material which might not otherwise have survived.

We don’t know very much about the very early history of the lake, but most of it is Māori history, and most of that history is oral in nature, and most of it is passed down and has been passed down within families. That means that it’s often family history, and it means that it’s mostly coloured by the family history from which it comes. And it also means too, that a lot of it is private and has never perhaps been mentioned outside the families. So you need to remember when you think about the history of a place like that, that there’s a lot of it which most of us will never know, and sometimes we’re lucky enough to have older people who are interested in talking about it.

The history of the lake starts, in Māori terms, with the mythological foundation of it. Some of you will know the story of Hau-Mapuhia. Hau-Mapuhia was the only child at that stage of a chief named Maahu. There’s a lot of controversy about where Maahu came from and where he went to. It’s not for me to try to come down on one side or another in any of that; I know people have very strong views both ways. It is said that Ōmahu here was named for him. He was a very important chief in his time; [cough] he certainly went to Waikaremoana, and it is said that there was then no lake there. And he had his child, Hau-Mapuhia, with him. Hau-Mapuhia, according to the local people of Waikaremoana, was female. According to Tūtakangāhau he was male, but [chuckles] I think we can probably stick with the local view really … it’s almost certain I think that Hau-Mapuhia, as local people tell it, was certainly female. They lived at a place which is still noted, although I notice myself that it doesn’t show on the lake map, but it’s called Te Pā o Maahu Bay. And at the head of the Bay there is a little lump which is said to’ve been where his pā was. And it is said that one day he said to his daughter, “Go and get me some water”, and his daughter who was at that stage like most teenagers, busy with other things, didn’t actually say, “Go get it yourself”; it would’ve been very dangerous to say that to a chief of his standing. But she didn’t go. And in the end he went and got water himself from the spring, which is still there, Te Punaataupara … [there’s] some doubt in my mind about the naming of the springs around that part of the lake … but while he was down there getting the water Hau-Mapuhia had second thoughts, and went down, and he was so angry when he saw her that he pushed her under the water with the intention of drowning her.

She changed into a taniwha, and needed to escape before she was caught by the sun rising; and it’s said that she couldn’t get through the hills to the south or the west or the north. And eventually she got to the outlet at Onepoto, and that’s at the point where the sun came up and caught her. She was turned to stone and still lies there, but covered over now by a slip. Until comparatively recently she could still have been seen, and local people used to talk about her, because it was said that when the wind was in a certain direction it whistled through her body and they could know what the conditions were on the lake.

Now I’ve brought with me this morning – which some of you may have speculated about – a painting which I’ll show you now, and then I’ll leave it for people who want to look at it afterwards. Only those who are close to the front will be able to see it. It’s a painting of the myth of Hau-Mapuhia and her father. It was painted by a sixteen-year-old boy from Waikaremoana, who was a pupil of Lindisfarne. The original painting is held in the school. He took four prints of it and that’s one of the prints. And I think it is quite a magnificent piece of work. You can see how she’s changing into the taniwha; you can see the waves and the water coming, and you can see the old chief. So I brought that because that’s the way a local person who goes right back to the beginning of people up there, was able to talk about the [??]. [Inaudible, microphone noise]

There are Māori people who don’t really see it as a myth at all. Some of you will remember, or have known Tamati Cairns … did any of you know Tamati? Tamati was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and a very nice man, and he believed implicitly that the myth was the proper true story of how the lake came to be there. Now of course, Pākehā people have different views on how geological events occur. Lambert, whom I’ve mentioned before, was sure that it was an old volcano, and the reason he thought that was because all round the lake there is pumice. And the pumice of course, came not from Waikaremoana at all; some of it came from Taupō, some of it came from Tarawera, and some of it from Ōkataina, all at Rotorua; so that was no good way for finding out what it was.

There was a lot of argument over the years about how geologically the lake had been formed because it’s comparatively recent, and they can of course age it by knowing the age of the pumice showers. But it seems likely that in fact what happened was that there was a large slip which came off Ngāmoko. Those of you who know the area will know that Ngāmoko is the mountain which is to the east of the lake, above the lake. And that slip was five miles long, which means it was pretty big. And it came right through to Onepoto, blocked the lake and some of it ended up in Whakaihu, which is the hill behind Onepoto. That’s a geological explanation of it; it’s not actually very different from the Māori version of the story. It’s exactly what Hau-Mapuhia is supposed to have done, to have thrashed through the lake and caused its formation by the thrashings which she made as she tried to escape to the ocean to the east. So that what it says is what Professor McCraw, who was a professor of earth sciences at Waikato, said; that most Māori myths as to geological origins have a very strong element of truth in them, and I think we can say that about Waikaremoana.

There’s a lot of stories about Maahu. There’s still two or three places named for him at the lake; there’s Te Whatakai o Maahu where he’s supposed to have stored his food – that’s a rock which sticks out of the lake not far from his pā. There is the place where his hair was cut, and we’ll come back to that for [in] a moment, called Te Waikotikoti o Maahu – very important and very tapu, because the head of a chief was a very sacred place. And it’s said that in the old days people went there before they undertook any kind of military expedition. And it is also said that Maahu’s children went there when they should not have done, and were all turned to stone because of it, and there’s a place around the lake where you can see where those stones still exist.

Now there are local people who say that he had no other children, and there are people in other parts of the country who say that he did have children and they’re descended from them. And I’m not going to try and make any decision about any of that either, but it is also thought that Maahu left the lake after the death of Hau-Mapuhia, and went to Pūtauaki, which is now generally known as Mount Edgecumbe. And there are other places – there’s a place where the flax on the cliffs above the lake is said to be his hair, Ngāmākawe o Maahu. All of those are there, and if you’re interested enough to follow round, if you get hold of Elsdon Best’s book, he’ll tell you exactly where those places can be found.

But the one you should not go to look for is Te Waikotikoti o Maahu. That is still regarded as sacred. Some years ago I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to go with two of the most knowledgeable elders of that area, and a number of other people who were doing research into history on a tour of the lake. We had two boats, and each day we went around the lake with these people, and they came back to the cottage at night and talked about it for two or three hours. All that was recorded and the tapes are still extant, and hopefully are being transcribed. But the reason I mention it is because before any of this started the whole expedition went to the place where Te Waikotikoti o Maahu is; they didn’t go to the spot itself; they stopped on the edge of the lake, and prayers were said there to help with the expedition itself. And there’s a long tradition up there, that people who go there may never return. There’s a story of a young man at the beginning of the twentieth century who is said to have taken the view that all that old stuff didn’t mean anything any more; to have gone there and never to have returned. So I suggest to you that if you go looking for these places, you don’t actually go looking for it; it’s still there and wouldn’t be that difficult to find.

There were other very early people who went there – Tāneatua, who was the tohunga from the Mātaatua canoe, is said to have gone all the way up from the Bay of Plenty up through the Waimana Valley up to Maungapōhatu, right along the Huiarau Range, and to have gone as far as Whakatakā. Whakatakā is the mountain you look at if you look across the lake, down further to the south than the Hopuruahine arm. And it’s called Whakatakā because his dog who went with him died at that point and fell down the cliff on the far side. So that’s one of the very early explorers of the area.

Tradition says that the first Māori people to live there were Ngāi Tauira. But there were other more supernatural people and places and things in the lake; a lot of them. I’m not going to talk too much about that or you’ll be here for hours, but [chuckles] it is said that in the Huiarau Range there were at least two different kinds of supernatural beings. There were the Tūrehu; they were the ones who are [cough] said to have snatched people from their houses at night. And probably there is some kind of an explanation for that because in the cold of the Urewera – and sometimes those people were two and a half, three thousand feet above sea level – they tended to build houses with hollows in the ground to try to keep them warm. And sometimes the fires in the middle when they got down to the charcoal stage, put out fumes which meant people didn’t survive until the morning. But the traditional explanation for that was that they were taken by the Tūrehu.

And there were also the Patupaiarehe. People call them ‘the fairy folk’; I’m not sure that that’s a very good word. But Tamati, whom I mentioned before, told me that when he was quite a young man, he was out hunting in the Huiarau Range with a friend when they were overtaken by fog. Lot of mist up there; that’s why Tūhoe people are often called ‘the children of the mist’, and of course there are much stronger myths than that. They couldn’t find the track so they stayed where they were, which was the sensible thing to do, until they could see their way to get back to Ruatāhuna. He said that they realised after a while that there were people close to them who were speaking a language which they could not understand. They couldn’t see those people; they were unable to get near them, and he was absolutely sure for the whole of his life that that was the Patupaiarehe.

And a year or two ago, I was telling the chief ranger that story, and he said to me, “That’s interesting, because we had an American tourist visitor who went on his own along the track, along Huiarau, and was caught in the mist and so didn’t return.” They had the whole of the search and rescue people out after him and eventually they found him and he was all right. But he said to them, “You’re not the first people who’ve been here. There’ve been people all round me speaking, but I couldn’t get near them and I don’t know what language they were talking.” So you can make what you like of that story. [Chuckles] They’re both from impeccable sources.

The Ngāi Tauira people came right down the east coast. They were themselves displaced at a comparatively early stage; when I say displaced, they were defeated by people who came in from further north. There were the Kahungunu people who came down here, and the Ruapani people who were related to the Kahungunu people … Ruapani’s child and Kahungunu’s child married. But is likely that the Tauira people remained there and intermarried with the people that came in. In the early days, the kind of genocide which unfortunately Europeans are accustomed to was not practiced by Māori people, and those people who remained were very often simply absorbed into those who took over.

The Ruapani people are still there. You won’t perhaps hear quite as much of them now as once you might have done. There were three children of Ruapani who went to the lake, and the first time that I had any association with the people up there they tended to regard themselves more as Tūhoe than as Ruapani, because they were related to both, and we’ll come to that in a minute. But Ruapani are still there, and recognisably so. They haven’t had an easy time of it; they came before the Māori Land Court in 1915 in a dispute as to what tribal groups actually had rights in the area, and they gave a boundary which took in the whole of the land which Ruapani claimed. The judgment in the Land Court largely accepted that, but in later years that was appealed. There are long delays in the law now as then, and in fact it wasn’t until the 1940s that the appeal was heard, when the appeal court said Ruapani was not a separate tribal group, but was a sub-tribe of Kahungunu. That is not accepted by any of the Ruapani people who are up there and I think it might be rather a dangerous thing to say if you’re in the middle of them.

Ruapani named a lot of the areas around the lake. A lot of the names, however, go right back to Tauira, and nobody now knows exactly why they were named, or what the incident was from which they were named. Most of you will know, I suppose, that Māori names tend to be after an incident; sometimes after a person, but generally relating to something which happened.

The Tūhoe connection with the lake – and there’s been some fuss about that, to which I’ll also return – goes back also to warring conditions. Tūhoe lived in the middle of the Urewera. They claimed descent from the [cough] Mist Maiden, and claimed ascent from the Murakarake, who was himself later known as Urewera, and therefore they are very close to the earliest people who were there. But they weren’t the earliest people who were there, the earliest people were the Pōtiki people, who probably came from the same general area, but we don’t need to go into all those things at the moment.

Tūhoe were not initially involved with Waikaremoana at all. But there were troubles in around the [cough] 1820s, as far as one can guess; and again we need not perhaps go into any detail. But I had a man who came to do some work for me at home earlier this year whose name was Te Umu; and I said, “Te Umuariki?” And he said, “Yes.” He came from Rūātoki, and it was his forebear who caused some of the difficulties, because he was killed by Ruapani people in the Hopuruahine arm of the lake. And Tūhoe weren’t going to let that go, so they came over and gradually took over – again in a series of incidents – took over that part of the lake in the Hopuruahine arm which some of you will know.

There’s a lot of stories about that and again, it would take hours … days to go through them all. Perhaps one of the most significant, however, occurred later. There is a place there called Te Anaotikitiki, which is a cave, and it is near an ancient Pa called Pukehuia. Now there were troubles with fights at Pukehuia and the pā across the lake from that, called Whakaari. And eventually the people who lived in that part of the lake would’ve been related to Ruapani but generally saw themselves as Tūhoe; and that is of course why Tūtukangāhau was able to come over from Maungapōhatu, because people from Maungapōhatu were involved in that, as were people from Ruatāhuna. And a lot of the people trace their ancestry back through that.

There was a time when the local Tūhoe people were fighting with people at Tūtira. And the men were away at this and the women and children and old people who were left took refuge in Te Anaotikitiki, which is one of those shelf caves which are common around Waikaremoana, which means it’s a great shelf which extends out and it was open at either end. And people from the other side of the lake saw this as an opportunity; they came over and blocked both ends, and every man, woman and child in that cave were killed and their bodies were thrown into the lake, and it’s still named for that. Now that area was a very sacred place on the lake, because there are of course many people still whose forebears were killed there, and others who were involved in the killing. The tapu has been lifted; there is no objection to people going there, but I personally take strong exception to the fact that some people who’ve gone there have put graffiti on the walls of a place which should not have been desecrated in that way.

However, that was [cough] a starting point for what occurred later. The people who were at Tūtira got a message to say that there was trouble at home. I’m not sure how that message was sent … people probably ran to take that message … and they came back, and they were so angry with what they found that they took every canoe they were able to get on the lake and they went round and attacked every strong point where the previous people were living, or had taken refuge. And from that point on, there was a Tūhoe domination at the lake itself, but as had occurred on earlier occasions, that did not mean that the people who’d been there before left. They tended to intermarry and form part of the same group; they were known as the Taharua, the people of both sides. And as I mentioned to you earlier, there was a time when a lot of those people would have seen themselves as being primarily Tūhoe. I think you might found now that quite a lot of them tend to remember their Ruapani lineage, and that came out at the time of the Waitangi Tribunal hearings at Waikaremoana, when people got up and told what their family histories were and the way they aligned themselves; because people generally make some choices as to which side of their family they see as being the prominent one, and that is really what occurred there.

The Māori history of the lake is very extensive. It is interesting and serious and some of it is well known and some of it is not known, and individual families will have a lot more memory of it than I’ve been able to give to you, or is in any of these books. But it is there, and I think it adds a great considerable dimension to a place which is not only beautiful, but historic in itself.

Now the first of the Pākehā people to go there was William Williams. That was forgotten for a long time. You’ll find in this map I’ve brought … it’s a map of the Urewera National Park – it’s a second edition. And it says that the first person to get there was the Reverend Father Baty, which is wrong; it was William Williams. And it was discovered that it was William Williams when his diaries were published, and some of you will have a copy of that book. One of the fortunate things we have for those of us who are interested in history, is that the early missionaries were required to keep diaries; they were required to report to their centre which sent them out, and all of those have been retained. And fortunately the Williams diaries are still available, and it is clear that in 1840 William Williams went to the lake, and he’s the first recorded Pākehā to get there. I say recorded, because of course there were Pākehā people in Wairoa who may have gone up that nobody knows about; but he’s the first recorded Pākehā. And it’s interesting that he recorded that the people he met up there, many of whom had never seen a European before, were already able to read and write. They were able to read and write because they had sent some of their number to the coast to learn, and they had come back and taught the people back home. And he was being asked, not for muskets or war material, but for books. He walked from his station at Tūranganui near Gisborne, down to Mahia, to Wairoa, into Waikaremoana, crossed Huiarau and went right back round through the Bay of Plenty to go home. Missionaries in those days were rather more … not just peripatetic, but probably more physically active than some of our religious people today. [Chuckles] He was followed by Father Baty.

Father Baty’s story is interesting in itself. Father Baty came with Bishop Pompallier and was dropped off at Mahia, because the Bishop understood that there were Roman Catholic congregations in the area, and the idea was that Father Baty would visit these people and then be picked up at Mahia on a named date. Well he did all the visits he was required to do, and went back and of course there was no one at Mahia. And the reason why there was nobody at Mahia was because there had been a martyrdom in the Islands to the north, and Bishop Pompallier had to go and there was no way of getting a message to poor Father Baty. But he decided he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity; he went back to Wairoa and he went in to Waikaremoana and was therefore the second European to get there.

William Colenso, who has so much history around here, took his summer holidays that year – and that was 1841 – by travelling by ship to East Cape. He got off the ship at East Cape, and he had Māori guides from then on. And he went down all the way to Mahia, to Wairoa, collecting as he went … collecting geological specimens; birds, plants, everything he could pick up – I expect he probably got most of his Māori guides to carry these sorts of things. And then he went inland to Waikaremoana and arrived there one day after Father Baty, which didn’t please either of them; and it didn’t particularly [chuckles] please Colenso, who felt he should have been there first and was not. Colenso doesn’t say very much about this in his own accounts which were later published; Father Baty does refer to them. Father Baty was required to report as well, and as he was a Frenchman he wrote in French, and he sent his reports back to the head of his order in France. They’re available, and I understand that they’re at present being printed; I haven’t seen them. Well, I’ve seen copies of them, because we got information from them.

When they got to Waikaremoana the wind was blowing. Nobody could get across the lake in a canoe with the wind because as you probably know, it screams down from Hopuruahine, comes right across the lake and becomes extremely dangerous for small boats – probably for quite large ones too, actually. So neither of them could go any further, and they were stuck there for a period.

Colenso made full use of his time. He certainly climbed Panekire; he looked at various botanical things; talked about the pōhutukawa that you find up there, which surprised me quite a lot because I would’ve thought you didn’t find pōhutukawa up that high. But in fact he was probably right, because at Waimako Pā and at Kūhā Pā which are down in Tuai, there are pōhutukawa growing which local people say were brought down from the lake.

There was a lull in the wind after some days, and Father Baty’s people took advantage of it and got across the lake. Unfortunately for Colenso, he couldn’t because his people had gone to a tangi at Te Awaawaroa, which is now generally known as Rosie Bay; and by the time they came back the wind was up again and he couldn’t get across. Father Baty had made it across, and he went on to Ruatāhuna. A short time later he was followed by Colenso, and Colenso also found that people across the lake, and particularly at Mōkau as Williams had reported, were reading and writing and asking for books. Not necessarily the books he had with him, but any sort of books.

He then got a guide from there to cross Huiarau. Now some of you will’ve been up the track which goes across Huiarau and eventually goes down to Ruatāhuna. It is quite a long way – I haven’t walked up it, I’ve walked down it, and walking down from [?] took us hours, and it was steep and difficult going. Colenso went up there with his guides including the local guide. When they got to the top they were actually in snow, and they decided that they would camp the night there, which they did. When they got up the next morning the local guide had disappeared. [Chuckles] Nobody with Colenso knew the way on; they didn’t know where they went to get to Ruatāhuna, and they were starting to get a bit worried about what they should do when their local guide arrived. He had run all the way back down the hill because he didn’t think they had enough food, and he came back with bags of potatoes which they were able to take with them as they went on to Ruatāhuna. Bear in mind that this was Colenso’s summer holiday. [Chuckles] They then walked to Ruatāhuna; he walked on from there to Rotorua, and then he walked right through the centre of the Island back to the Bay of Islands. [Murmuring] So it was an interesting way of spending your summertime. I’m not sure how many of us would be prepared to consider anything like it, although as I was saying to somebody earlier today, Doctor Fox, who would also be known to some of you as a boarder at the Napier Boys’ High School, at the age of fourteen and before 1900 walked for his first holidays from Napier to Gisborne; up tracks, stopping at farm houses on the way, and then walked back. So not too long ago people were still doing these things.

Colenso went there again later; Father Baty probably did not. They had another confrontation at Ruatāhuna, and I just mention that – it’s not referred to at all by Colenso, but it is by Father Baty. They had an argument about who was right and who was wrong on their religious beliefs, [chuckles] and according to Father Baty, at one stage Colenso threw a New Testament on the ground and said, “Let that be the witness between us”; and Father Baty says, “Unfortunately for him, it remained mute.” [Laughter] I don’t suppose he meant exactly what he puts in his report. [Chuckles]

Some of you will remember the time when we still had the Mission library at Taradale. All this material, or a lot of this material, was there and unfortunately that library has now been shipped to Auckland. I think it’s a pity we couldn’t’ve kept it here.

There were of course, other missionaries involved. Mr Hamlin was the missionary sent to Wairoa; and some of you will know about James Hamlin. There’s a book on him too. The Hamlins are quite a significant family, both Māori and Pākehā, in all parts of Hawke’s Bay. Hamlin, like Colenso, he was not ordained. And he wasn’t ordained because in those years, to be ordained in the Anglican clergy you were expected to have both Latin and Greek, and the reason for that was so that the New Testament in the Bible could be read in the Vulgate versions and in the Greek. But they realised that it was necessary to have people who had the qualifications to take the sacraments, and so a note came from the Bishop to Hamlin in Wairoa to say, ‘You will be ordained in Auckland on a particular date; be there’. Well unfortunately that was a very bad winter in Wairoa; Wairoa has never been a particularly good port as some of you would know, and the bar of the Wairoa River was not passable for months. So when Hamlin finally got to Auckland a week late, the bishop turned round and said to him, “You didn’t come when you were supposed to – go home.” [Chuckles] And that was what occurred. He was, however, later ordained.

Hamlin’s diaries are interesting, too. Waikaremoana was part of Hamlin’s parish, and to get there in his day he went by canoe up the Wairoa River, the Waikaretāheke River, and then climbed up onto the ridge which runs well above the road [cough] now on the south side of the river, and walked right along there. And he complains that he sometimes had only one or two hundred people at his services when he got to [chuckles] Waikaremoana. [Laughter] Local people were not doing their duty and attending as they ought to have done. Hamlin unfortunately, had to leave at the time of the wars, because it was considered unsafe for the missionaries to remain.

Hamlin had one very unpleasant duty to do, and I suppose it’s worth referring to it although it’s got nothing to do with Waikaremoana. When Colenso fell foul of the church, Hamlin was directed by the Bishop to go down and tell him that he was being excluded. And that was a very hard thing to have put on a man when he was his only European neighbour for [the] whole of that distance. I suppose we should give a thought to Mrs Hamlin too. I’m not sure of the exact number of children, I think she had thirteen children. Most of those would’ve been born at Wairoa with only local help. So life was not particularly easy for the missionaries.

At the time that – Hamlin went first – and certainly at the time of Colenso, Baty and Williams, [background beeping] the relationship with local people was very good. There were no problems then; they came later with the wars. And I think it is worthwhile reading some of the books which have recently come out as to the causes of the wars, which are not those we were given when I was at school, and I suspect they’re not the same ones that many of you were given. Tūhoe people for example – and there is a very interesting book by Judith Binney; some of you will have seen it and perhaps read it. It’s called ‘The Encircled Lands’, and it shows, and it is completely incontrovertible, that land was taken and confiscated from those people for no reason at all. Tūhoe were not early involved in the wars; they were not involved in the murder of the Reverend Mr Völkner, but because of the murder of Mr Völkner something like thirty thousand acres of the only cultivable land that Tūhoe had were taken. They have never been compensated for that.

Now it’s no great help today to go into the issues of the wars, especially in a short talk like this, because there’s a lot of things to consider. However, that was what sent Tūhoe in the way that it did, and when Te Kooti [Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki] escaped from the Chatham Islands – and incidentally the Hamlin family said the reason he was called to Te Kooti, which was not his name, was because he demanded to be taken to court when he was arrested.* But he wasn’t taken to court, he was simply taken to the Chathams without any trial at all. When Te Kooti returned, he was welcomed by some sections of Tūhoe and by other people of course, all the way through here. He didn’t have general support from them but he certainly had some; and there were a lot of military operations which went through the Urewera. Some of you will know the Urewera apart from Lake Waikaremoana. The Urewera is very wild, rough country, still today, even more so in those years. It wasn’t easy to fight wars through it on whichever side you happened to be. And I don’t want to go into all of that either – there’s dozens of books about all of that. But eventually of course, Te Kooti was driven out.

Hawke’s Bay had its share of involvement; Colonel Herrick took an expedition to Waikaremoana, which was designed to be part of a tripartite expedition, one lot went in from here, one from the Bay of Plenty side, and one from the Rotorua side. The idea was they’d meet at Ruatāhuna having conquered the Urewera; well it didn’t sort of work out quite like that. Colonel Herrick never really became engaged. Now he’s been criticised for that, and I think, very unfairly. He didn’t think it was safe to take his troops around the lake and I think he was right in that. It would’ve been easy to’ve been ambushed. They had no idea where the tracks were so they built boats, and by the time they’d built the boats, they were recalled. Some of those boats were sunk in the lake; some were retrieved by Māori people; and some have since been refloated. And when there was still a museum and an exhibition centre at the lake you could see them.

There was an earlier occasion which I suppose is worth mentioning, and I should’ve mentioned it before I spoke about Colonel Herrick’s trip. There was an expedition from the Wairoa side which was largely … there were certainly European officers. Ropata Wahawaha … Major Wahawaha from the East Coast … was involved in that. They were ambushed by local people before they got to Waikaremoana. You might remember those of you who know the way there, that the last part of the road goes up through a valley fairly steeply; that’s just above Tuai. That was all then scrub and fern, and as the invaders came up they were attacked from entrenched positions within that, and had to retreat, but the wind was blowing from that direction. They set fire to the scrub and fern and the defenders had to retreat. They retreated to the top of Raikāhu [now Kaitawa] where they were defeated, and a lot were captured. They were taken down to the shore of the lake, lined up on the shore and shot, and they were thrown into the lake. And it didn’t matter that they’d surrendered.

Now some of these stories are not particularly attractive, and they could’ve been said either way. There are plenty of critical things said about Te Kooti, but we should remember that both sides didn’t always do the kind[s] of things we would be proud of today. That too, is an explanation why local people were to some extent supportive of Te Kooti. Te Kooti had a principal pā there on the little … it’s called Matuāhu; it just sticks out into the lake on the opposite side of Hopuruahine. There was an old pā just beyond it – the one called Whakaari – but he fortified Matuāhu itself, and you could see it across the lake. It was quite a menacing thing. He also had an outpost that not many people know about, not far from Onepoto, round to the left, under Panekire, there is a cave which was previously at water level. It was possible to draw a canoe up into that cave and it is almost certain that Te Kooti had people watching the activities of the troops while they were there.

There were quite a number of incidents around the lake. Eventually the troops, led by a Mr Hamlin – who was a distant relation of mine by marriage – crossed the lake, and by the time they got down to Matuāhu … they had an engagement on the way … Matuāhu was empty. They [then] went around the lake, and they were determined to ensure that there would be nothing to bring Te Kooti back there. Now if you remember that only a small number of local people had any involvement in this. They went around the lake and at every settlement and pā they destroyed all the foodstuffs … everything, so that there was nothing left for those people. And this was done not only there, but throughout the Urewera. Doctor North, who died not so long ago really, said that at Ruatāhuna when they destroyed the food supplies there, two hundred people died of starvation that year. There was no way those people could get any food; there were no benefits – nothing. And that too is remembered, which is why one should have some sympathy with some of the claims which are then made. Now Te Kooti left the Urewera and never went back there.

Some of the people from Tikitiki were taken down to what would today be called a concentration camp I suppose, at Frasertown; I don’t think they were ill-treated there, but they were made to leave their home and they were later able to return, but there are very few people who continued to live around the lake. There was one family which farmed there. The [?] family had a farm which went across from Te Puna over to the other side in Hopuruahine. They farmed that, and it wasn’t easy farming. [? ?] told me once that they used to bring their sheep across the lake by canoe; now that must’ve been a pretty difficult thing to have done. He told me that at times the water was so rough that they had to take shelter in the place where Te Kooti had his outposts, and wait there until the lake was calm enough to either get home or get into Onepoto. And for that reason, the actual residents of the lake gradually changed, ’cause local people were always a bit peripatetic anyway. Sometimes they lived at the lake; sometimes they went over to their eel traps and to the fishing in the Waiau [River]. They had gardens at [?], and sometimes they stayed down at Tuai.

I think Māori people should get credit for the fact that in spite of the things which were done to them, they tended to remain welcoming to people who came into that area. And that’s one of the reasons why I think it is very unfortunate that the government has adopted the attitude which it recently has. And again, I’ll come back to that.

After the second world war, the level of the lake was lowered. It was lowered by twenty feet, which is a lot, and these days if anybody tried to do that there’d be an uproar, with thousands of people marching in the streets. Nothing was done then; local people protested, and they were told that the level would be restored, because you can imagine what that did. From a bush-edged area … the lake was completely surrounded by bush which actually touched the water … it went back because of the twenty feet, to bare areas of mud and dirt, and the like. It was done because they wanted to make sure that the leaks in the lake where the hydro scheme was established were plugged, and it was possible to do that when the lake was lower. Local people were told that the level would be restored; it never has been and it could not be, because a road was built at the lower level. And that too, is the subject of a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal.

But it had an interesting effect which I think the government ought to take into account, and I’m sure they have not. Suddenly, the Māori people were left as the owners of the lake bed; and I’m sure that was because people at the time thought there was no way anybody could ever get any use out of the lake bed. You couldn’t get at it with eight hundred feet of water over the top of it, so that nobody particularly wanted it. But in fact, once the lake level was lowered, a large area of land, highly desirable to developers, became available around its edges. Now when the question of what should be done with the lake occurred, Māori people were determined that that was not going to be developed. They have never had credit for that. It was the only asset which most of those people had. They leased it to the National Park at a rental, but it was a minimal rental and the rental did not reflect the real value of that land. But they did so, and said so at the time, because they wanted it to be preserved forever as a part of the National Park. The National Park then was just the Urewera National Park; it consisted entirely of local people. There were Māori members of it from all sides of the Park, and there were Pākehā members who were mainly local farmers. It was very much a local-based body, and I think that that too, was one of the reasons why they agreed to do what they did. Since then of course, the government, without any consultation has abolished the Urewera National Park. The new Park board, which covers a whole lot of areas other than that, is not nearly so representative of them as it was, and the relationship which previously existed has to some extent disappeared.

When the question of negotiating Tūhoe’s claim came up, I think it could reasonably have been taken into account that the major part of that park – and Waikaremoana is the major part of the Urewera National Park – is Māori land; it is owned by Māori, as it always has been. The Urewera, where Tūhoe lived – and of course there are Ruapani and other people who have interests in Waikaremoana – but the Urewera, where Tūhoe have always lived and still live, have mostly been taken and was used as the basis of the National Park. And when it was suggested that the claim could be settled by returning the National Park to the people who live there, as all of you know, without any consultation again, the government announced that that was not going to be done. I think that very unfortunate. I suppose this is intruding into politics and I don’t propose to go any further than that; but I feel extremely sorry for those people who seem to me to have dealt with what was a major setback with dignity, [who] have been pushed into that position.

Now I’ve been talking to you for an hour. Waikaremoana [cough] can justify talking for hours and hours; and without getting into the Urewera, about which I know much less, I think that’s probably quite long enough to have people sitting there. None of you are wriggling which [cough] I find highly surprising. [Chuckles] So I’ll finish at that point and ask if any of you have any questions, which I don’t guarantee to answer but I’ll have a go at it.

Question: The original stories that you gave us at the beginning, can you put a time onto that? A century, rather than a decade?

Rodney: Not really. Well, ‘course there are problems here, because people don’t know precisely when the main migrations of Māori occurred. I think now it’s generally thought that they occurred over a period, and that seven hundred years is a reasonable time span. I don’t know enough of that to be certain, but I would think that the Urewera would’ve been settled later than other parts, because of its inaccessibility. So we’re talking about hundreds of years, but probably not thousands.

Question: Where’s the Ureweras?

Rodney: It runs from where Lake Waikaremoana is, thirty miles inland from Wairoa, right across to Murupara, and it’s the area if you’re driving through the Bay of Plenty from here, you’ll see as you go down towards the Bay of Plenty, on your right the whole way there are very obvious mountains covered with bush. And they go back through to Maungataniwha, and there’s a great huge area of land, which fortunately has never been developed. That’s the Urewera, and it’s the area where that people has lived.

Question: Was there always a lake there?

Rodney: It’s generally thought now that there was probably a river valley and that it was the river which gradually made it a lake. It’s not thought there was a lake there earlier.

Rodney: Again, that’s not known; probably about three thousand years ago. It’s relatively recent; I shouldn’t say it’s not known, it is known, because the geologists know exactly what the age of the ash showers are. I just don’t recall it myself.

Question: So the trees that are sticking up there ..?

Rodney: Some of them have been carbon dated at about two thousand years, and I think that probably comes from the fact that it would’ve taken a very long time for the lake to form and fill, you know – if the slip came down three thousand years ago, then there wouldn’t’ve been a lake for a long time after that, and it would’ve gradually risen. As far as I know that’s the position, but I’m no geologist and there are people here who could probably tell you much better than I could what that is. But certainly the old trees are there; they had to be cut off because they were a danger to boats in some areas. Some are fossilised too.

Question: The pre-European Māori people who lived in that area – what on earth did they eat? What were their food supplies?

Rodney: Well there were lots of birds of course. They got some food out of the lake, it’s not clear – Elsdon Best doesn’t think there were any eels in the lake. They certainly got eels from the Waiau River, but there were two kinds of fish in the lake, which they did [coughing] get, and there were freshwater shellfish in the lake. Mainly it would have been birds, I suppose. There were a lot of foods like hinau berries which they could use too, and there was fern root which was used. But they also traded. If you go to Wairoa, where you turn down by the river there, you’ll see there’s a sort of tongue of land that extends down quite close to Huramua Station; well the Carroll family told me that Tūhoe people used to come down from there and trade the birds, which they’d captured and killed, with Kahungunu people for fish from the sea and for seafood. So they probably had some of that as well.

Comment: Must’ve been very precarious.

Rodney: Oh, it certainly was. I think at the time when [coughing] [?Colenso?] was there those people were very short of food; and I think there must’ve been times when they were really short. But there was a lot more trading than people realise, and the people in the Urewera did have access to the sea. They went down to the Ōhiwa Harbour [Ōhope] in one long, narrow tongue of land, and they could get down there to get seafood. That land too was confiscated.

Question: What sparked your deep interest in Waikaremoana?

Rodney: Well, I was working on a dreadful old Jeep that Peter Lattey and I had bought to go out bush with, and my grandfather came out and he had a newspaper which had ‘Sections Available at Waikaremoana’, and he said, “Why don’t you apply for one?” And because they were leasehold you didn’t have to pay for them – none of us had very much money at the time – so I did apply for one. Peter Lattey did as well, and we both got them. And then [I] put a cottage up; and once you’ve got the cottage, of course, you started to look around and it became clear to me that you could not understand the place. You could not understand the feeling of the place without having some knowledge of its history. And I suppose it’s also worth saying that some of you will know what I mean by the ‘feeling of the place’; it is a most extraordinary part of the country. The feeling of it is like nowhere else I know; the things that worry you just sort of drift away. It doesn’t matter what the weather is like, and it can be very severe up there as well as lovely. The day we went up to look at the sections there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and there wasn’t a breath of wind, and it was in August. [Chuckles] But it was cold. But I think the place tends to take you over really, is probably the way I’d put it. To Māori people it is a very sacred spot; there are a lot of things which are still seen by people up there. I didn’t talk to you about things like Tutaua. Tutaua was a log that used to drift around the lake, and it actually disappeared – it went over the outlet. But it used to sing; and it presumably sang because it had holes in it that the wind came through. Now there’s lots of things like that at Waikaremoana, and once you’ve got there, if you spend any time and think about it, it’s got you too really. I hope that’s an answer.

Jim Watt: Rodney, there’s one book there that you didn’t refer to, and I think you should.

Rodney: Well years ago with Doctor North, we did a small booklet on the lake history. It’s never been reprinted and that’s partly my fault, because there was an offer from the old Electricity Department to reprint it, which I said ‘No’ to, because they wanted the right to put a chapter in which nobody else could touch. And Doctor North was dead by then and I just thought, ‘We’re not going to have somebody putting in something that we may not agree with’. But that booklet … there are things in it which need updating and things which are wrong … and it’s no longer, I’m sorry or glad to tell you, [cough] available. But it is a history, and some of the things I’ve told you are in there.

Jim Watt: That’s great, Rodney – I’ve got to ask Paddy Crowe to propose a vote of thanks.

Paddy Crowe: I came here expecting an interesting talk; [cough] I found it, and I’m sure everyone in this audience is the same. Utterly absorbing. In the 1960s my wife and I were suggested a holiday to Waikaremoana. We went there, and as Sir Rodney has just said, came under its spell. And through the sixties, on six or eight occasions through the year, we went there and fell under its spell – so much so that [coughing] at the end of the sixties when we went to visit our relatives in England, contemplating the air flights and imagining we might very well not return to New Zealand, we ordained in our will that our ashes were to be scattered over Panekire Bluff. We did think it a damned good idea. [Chuckles] We spent so many happy hours there that going around we used to wander up the Bluff collecting lichen for a friend of ours to use as dyes in material … wools … that she wove into fabric. A wonderfully fascinating place, wonderfully described by Sir Rodney. And I think we are all absolutely lucky that in our society grow historians who draw all the threads of our society together, and paint a picture which becomes utterly fascinating for us. You’re in the line of Herodotus and Gibbon and [cough] Trevelyan, and we are so much in your debt. Thank you.

[Applause]