Giveaways
This is the second part of my post 'From Hobbiton to Rocket Lab', of which the first part is here.
The last time I was in the East Cape region was many years ago, in the summer. It seems that there’s a lot less poverty now and a lot more employment. The growth of tourism, and the Waitangi Tribunal claims process whereby lands, money and natural resources were returned to local Māori who lost them in the nineteenth century, sometimes by outright confiscation, have both probably gone a long way toward achieving this turnaround.
Until the 1980s there was plenty of employment in the area, and this masked the fact that Māori had actually lost many resources. With the coming of neoliberal economic restructuring and mass layoffs in the 1980s, Māori were hit especially hard and it became clear that resources needed to be returned: something that’s just started to make a difference lately, and more effectively so in rural areas like East Cape than in cities like Auckland. It was in the intervening years of misery that I was here last.
The mānuka oil and mānuka honey industries have also brought new prosperity. Mānuka, a fast-growing shrub, was medicinally important to old-time Māori. After that it came to be regarded as weed. But now it is back in good standing and regarded as a serious earner.
The place where I finally ended up staying for the night, the Waihau Bay Lodge (NZ $60 a night), is owned by a local Māori incorporation.
Here’s the township and its beach in a video pan:
Cook’s expression, the Bay of Plenty, has a sound basis, as that stretch of coast is north-facing, warm and fertile with sandy shores, at least to the west of the East Cape peninsula.
Being open to the northern sun, and sheltered from southerly winds, is important for the cultivation of the kūmara. In local lore, a female hero named Hinehākirirangi brought the first kūmara from the tropical Pacific islands in the 1300s by the European calendar.
After first being shipwrecked in the Ōhiwa lagoon, Hinehākirirangi made her home at the Muriwai Cave at Whakatāne for a time and planted kūmara all round the region, from Manutūke near Matamata and Hobbiton today, through to Tūranganui-a-Kiwa / Poverty Bay, a locality she dubbed Oneroa (‘Long Beach’).
Reliance on tropical crops like the kūmara meant that Māori population dropped off quite sharply toward the south. Two maps on pages 86 and 87 of recent book called We Are Here show roughly seven thousand Māori pā, or villages, north of a line drawn close to the 39th parallel, but only a few hundred south of that line.
Tales of birds and flight seem to feature strongly in the stories of the ancestors of this region, especially among the Rongowhakaata.
One ancestor, Pourangahua was said to have returned to Hawaiki to fetch more kūmara and returned on the back of one of two great birds that belonged to another ancestor, Ruakapanga.
The founder of the Rongowhakaata iwi, himself named Rongowhakaata, was said to be a master maker of kites who could also shift his shape into that of a bird and fly. Did he build the world’s first hang glider, perhaps? That would really have been ahead of its time! And yet not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility either: I will come to that in a moment.
Kite flying was very popular among old-time Māori. It was both a hobby and a serious business, for kites were supposed to be able to look down on the land and provide information in a manner akin to water divining through their bobbing and weaving, or from where they came down if set free. It’s not known whether any early Māori rode aloft in really big kites to look down for themselves, but it’s possible. Kites that carried humans were being flown more than a thousand years ago in China, for example.
The hang-glider evolved out of human-carrying kite designs in which the weight of the pilot’s body was substituted for the pull of the kite string, a technique called single-point hang.
In theory the Māori could have invented a hang glider, an invention usually credited to the late-nineteenth-century German inventor Otto Lilienthal.
Lilienthal’s early efforts were perilous. He kept refining the design but was eventually killed by one of his contraptions all the same, a fairly common fate among inventors of flying machines. Nor did the Chinese seem regard going up in kites as something one should volunteer for. The mediaeval Italian European explorer Marco Polo recorded that as he heard it, the person sent up was generally either “a fool or a drunk.”
Interestingly enough, there seems to have been at least one incident in which an old-time Māori didn’t just go up in a kite but made an actual glide.
In the early 1800s, Māori society was convulsed by a series of conflicts called the Musket Wars. The wars got this name because Western firearms were being widely used for the first time in Aotearoa. And also because, in a wider sense, the old social order was suddenly being challenged by upstarts who could simply whip out a gun and shoot any practitioner of the traditional and ancient Māori martial arts, no matter how skilled.
In the course of the Musket Wars, a chief named Nukupewapewa found himself besieging a well-defended pā in the Wairarapa Valley north-east of Wellington. The pā was named Maungarake or, in some accounts, Maungaraki.
Maungarake could not be taken from the ground. The pā was, however, overlooked by a steep hill. Finally, in a story that seems by all accounts to be true and which appears on an official New Zealand Government website, Nukupewapewa attached a warrior to a huge kite and launched it from the top of the crag toward the village in the middle of the night, after having first told the warrior to open the gates of its stockade from the inside once he had, literally, dropped in.
The tactic worked and Maungarake would come to be referred to by later Māori as the Troy of the Wairarapa.
Interestingly enough, Maungarake is not far from Hood Aerodrome, where the Wings over Wairarapa airshows are held every couple of years, the next one in 2021. It might make a good theme for those shows if a connection were made with the Troy of the Wairarapa and its early airborne assault.
Turning back to Whakatāne, a nearby locality called Ōtuawhaki also has great importance to Ngāti Wai as a fishing ground and a place of learning. Nets were repaired there, and it was also known as the place where a demigod known locally as Tāwhaki had ascended to heaven to acquire the sacred baskets of knowledge for the people; a legend that exists in various forms but is generally important in Māori tradition.
There are lots of demigods in Māori tradition, people half human and half god, uneasy in the world and inclined to do things that get them into trouble as a result. The most famous, of course, is Māui, who dies after being punished by one of the honest-to-God gods for stealing fire and giving it to people, to go with the baskets of knowledge.
Anyway, it’s interesting to what extent Māori / Polynesian traditions stress knowledge, ingenuity, exploration and pushing the boundaries of things in various ways: habits of mind that are usually thought of as Western or the property of modern times and not the sorts of ideas that many people would have expected a technically stone-age culture to have upheld. We’re not so different as all that.
Another thing that Māori are famous for are the decorative arts. I was just blown away by the fabulous carving at many of the marae, or meeting houses, of the Bay of Plenty and the Tairāwhiti region.
One of my favourites was Whitianga Marae, near the Mōtū River mouth, which has an amazing gate-carving or waharoa and an equally amazing memorial to 2nd Lt Te-Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Ngārimu, one of two Māori to have won the Victoria Cross (VC), the highest military honour of the British Empire also and of modern-day Britain and some modern British Commonwealth countries, including New Zealand.
Ngārimu’s VC was awarded in 1943, at a time when, scandalously, no American blacks were being granted the equivalent American award, the Medal of Honor.
(There’s a good, short little 2009 blog post by on Whitianga Marae by Adrienne Rewi, here.)
Traditionally, mountains were seen as the abode of the gods. The highest and most prominent local peak in the East Cape region is Mount Hikurangi, a correspondingly sacred mountain from which some of the earliest sun rays of the new millennium were broadcast around the world. They were indeed, for New Zealand is ahead of just about every other country in terms of clock time and because January the First also falls in midsummer in New Zealand, the sun rising early on the country’s eastern peaks.
My cultural journey around East Cape included a visit to St Mary’s Church at Tikitiki, which was built in the 1920s as a memorial to Māori soldiers and other personnel who served in World War One. It was a masterful achievement, restored in the early 2000s.
The church looks like any other from outside, and the magic is contained inside. Unfortunately most of my photos taken inside didn’t come out very well what with the dim light and a fogged up mobile phone camera. The one above is about the only one I could salvage. But you can see more online, such as this set of four photos (including the outside) on Te Ara, the online encyclopaedia of New Zealand. And I did manage to make a passable video inside the church at any rate.
An article in New Zealand Geographic describes it as “the gift and inspiration of Sir Āpirana Ngata,” one of the most prominent Māori leaders, politicians and modernisers of the first half of the twentieth century along with the anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa, also known as Sir Peter Buck. Ngata used building projects like Tikitiki to revitalize Māori crafts and also to remind Māori that they weren’t fading away in the face of European colonization, as some supposed they might.
Alcohol has generally been banned on the Marae of the East Coast; this was another of Ngata’s initiatives aimed at restoring pride and emphasising the character of the marae as solemn places.
Further round the cape, I visited Te Puia Springs, healing springs where there is a hospital now run by the health board of the Ngati Porou Iwi, Ngati Porou Hauora, which Te Ara, the online encyclopaedia of New Zealand, describes as “the principal health provider on the East Coast.” Te Puia Springs is also a resort that anyone can visit, with an old and traditional-looking wooden hotel which is supposed to be haunted by a ghost, as well as a more modern motel.
All in all the Māori lore and history of this region is basically limitless. There is a useful website called Tupapa.nz which also comes with an app.
Māori culture really is a big draw for New Zealand tourism. To some extent it was ever thus: there are lots of old posters of Māori maidens boiling their food in a thermal pool, and so on. All the same, the confidence and ownership of indigenous culture is a new thing and its general comfortable acceptance by the wider society is a new thing.
Which makes it all the more jarring and incongruous that toward the end of the plaque in Whakatane we read that:
“As a result of the confiscation of Ngāti Awa lands, title of the site was transferred to the Whakatane District Council, which administers it as a special site to Ngāti Awa and for the whole community.”
Errrp! What? Administers it to this day?
Have we just slipped into some parallel universe where twentieth-century New Zealand was run on the same lines as one of those places where the whites got the best land, and a certain amount of paternalism was the best the ‘natives’ could hope for?
Well no. That’s the way it actually was and to some extent still is. For the fact is that Cook’s reference to a Bay of Plenty attracted covetous eyes and a pale of settlement in the low-lying and fertile parts of New Zealand established in part by a wave of confiscation in the 1860s, with Māori tending as a rule to be left with more rugged areas like East Cape.
Rugged areas that were also a long way from where most Europeans wanted to settle. And so, there’s a whole bundle of reasons why East Cape has such a strong Māori character, some natural and some artificial and enforced.
The confiscations and subsequent geographical separation of Pākehā (Europeans) and Māori were inspired by seventeenth-century repressive measures against many Catholics in Ireland, who were given the choice of ‘Hell or Connaught’: the Irish equivalent of New Zealand’s East Cape.
Or the misty Urewera mountains to which the Tūhoe repaired after the loss of its fertile lands on the Bay of Plenty shore. The Tūhoe have come to be known as ‘The Children of the Mist’. But on the whole they’d prefer to be in possession of coastal real estate, in the same way that anyone else would.
Reparations have been made, yet great inequalities persist. Certainly, the New Zealand land confiscations were not this country’s finest hour nor settler New Zealand’s greatest contribution to the world’s progress, though Kiwis like to think of themselves as progressive on the whole.
Dogged by unceasing rain, I took photos on the road that actually turned out to be a bit more artistic than they might have been in the sunshine.
Incredibly, accommodation was booked up even at this time of year and in this weather.
At Te Araroa, I saw a Pohutukawa tree said to be New Zealand’s oldest and biggest, Te Waha o Rerekohu, 600 years old, 21.2m tall and 40m wide.
Here’s a video I made as well:
I came across information about whales, including a grave where more than fifty sperm whales were buried after an epic stranding of these huge creatures.
And many freedom camping sites.
Tokomaru Bay is the site of an old (meat-) freezing works, now a piece of industrial archaeology.
I used to come here as a kid. There are old baches (or cabins), and a famously long wharf which now needs restoring.
At Tokomaru Bay I met a café proprietor named Rachel whose business was on leased Māori land. She was trying to sell the café for NZ $250,000 with 29 years still to run. She quipped that her pāua (abalone) pies, which get rave reviews online, earn a thousand dollars a minute in summer!
I headed through to Gisborne fairly quickly because of heavy rain that had dogged my trip so far. But not without noticing logs and wood waste from forestry operations washed into the sea at Tolaga Bay, a local eco-scandal that is making the beach unusable.
Tolaga Bay has a wharf that’s even longer than the Tokomaru Bay wharf. In fact it’s the longest wharf in New Zealand, 660 metres in total. Unlike the wharf at Tokomaru Bay, this wharf has been restored. Such long wharves date back to the days when local roads were very poor, so that direct shipping was the only way to get large amounts of produce in and out.
According to one account of the Tolaga Bay wharf, “It was ironic that much of the cargo that passed over the wharf was road-making material, used to construct the road through to Gisborne, soon providing an alternate means of transport.”
Here’s the last of my videos, which shows the wharf and also the wood waste choking the beach.
At Tolaga Bay there’s also the Cooks Cove Walk. The area is called Cooks Cove because Captain Cook pulled in here during his first voyage to New Zealand, in 1769. The voyage was massively commemorated on its 200th anniversary in 1969, though commemoration has been more controversial on the 250th anniversary in 2019.
The area near Gisborne was also the base of operations of Te Kooti, a charismatic guerilla leader who resisted European colonisers in the aftermath of the extensive confiscation of Māori lands in the 1860s. Te Kooti founded a sect called Ringatū, meaning Upraised Hand, which still exists to this day. In an earlier post I describe how Te Kooti was arrested and exiled to the Chatham Islands, before making his escape once more.
Te Kooti is the main inspiration for the character of Te Wheke in the 1983 epic Utu (‘just deserts’), which has lately been remastered as Utu Redux. You can see the whole of the old version for free on Youtube.
Just before you get to Gisborne there is a marine reserve at Pouawa Beach.
In Gisborne I wandered around the town, noting its prominent statue to Captain Cook but an absence of statues to commemorate Māori; though I saw a conspicuous waka prow sculpture, and the new Council administration building has been designed in such a way as to incorporate Māori themes.
Sticking with NZ Pocket Guide, it lists 10 Gisborne Walks you Can’t Miss. I did one of these in the form the Titirangi Domain up Kaiti Hill. There’s a whole heap of other things to do in and around Gisborne, including feeding stingrays (!) at Tatapouri and doing a natural luge at Rere.
Finally, this leg of the journey ends at the Māhia Peninsula, where the Rocket Lab launch site is located at its southern tip. It would be a good idea for a regional holiday if you timed a visit to see a rocket go off, with other activities before and after. The launch dates and times are announced on the Internet on various sites, including Rocket Lab’s Facebook page. One thing you could do to while away the time would be to freedom-camp at Opoutama, or Blue Bay, on the west side of the narrow neck of land that joins the peninsula to the mainland. And enjoy the bay and Mahanga Beach on the east side of the narrow neck of land, and climb Mokotahi Lookout, and visit the Morere Hot Springs.
I think a rocket launch would cap that off very nicely!
For more, see my book The Neglected North Island: New Zealand's Other Half, available from this website.
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