Walk 5: Mount Pohaturoa, 8th Sept 2018

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Travelling home from our holiday at the Chateau in the early spring of 2018, we pulled off SH1 at Atiamuri, the site of a dam and a prominent hill called Pohaturoa Rock.  I’d zoomed past it for years without realising its significance.

The hill brooded over the flowing dark green water of the Waikato river.  Eventually we found a trail along the river bank but the history from the sign board didn’t say a lot.  Reading it I understood some people got killed;

“Ngāti Kahupungapunga (possibly a surviving Moa hunter tribe) occupied this site as their final stronghold but lack of food finally forced them to abandon their refuge and only five escaped with their lives.  The tribe were killed by invading Ngati Raukawa of the Tainui tribe, and by 1840 the site was left empty.”

I had to dig to find out more about the tribes of this area.

The information board on the South Waikato trails informed us of “Talking poles,” a series of carved poles located throughout the shopping centre at Tokoroa (the next town north along SH1) where a fierce looking pou or pole represented Raukawa, the main Tainui tribe of south Waikato.

Even though the town of Tokoroa is named after a chief of the Ngāti Kahupungapunga, there is nothing to learn of them.  It goes to show history is written by the victors.

A newspaper article from 2001 proclaimed the Kahupungapunga to be a people of mystery who were cut down like pines;

NZ Herald, Pohaturoa: a historical site of rare significance

“In 1995 it was decided to harvest the pines from the hill.  Before work started, however, CHH staff consulted the local iwi and sent Perry Fletcher, a local historian who had first climbed the hill in 1972, to investigate the site: 

“Fletcher, well, he stumbled on a historical site of rare significance.  What he found were 31 whare sites, plus gardens and numerous storage pits estimated to match the number of families that once lived in the pa – a well-preserved insight into New Zealand’s pre-colonial past. Fretting that trees could fall at any time due to old age, he warned that “if these trees are not removed they will cause significant damage to the historic features.”

At last, someone was paying attention to Pohaturoa’s story.”

Source: The NZ Herald, Pohaturoa – the story of a New Zealand hill, 12 Jan 2001 

The pine trees date from 1927.  A photo from 1923 shows it looking quite bare.  It would be nice to see the land set aside as a reserve, with a sign board about the Ngāti Kahupungapunga people and the slopes of the mountain replanted with native trees.

Walk: Central North Island 33

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Who were the Ngati Kahupungapunga?

“The first people believed to have arrived in the region, says local historian Perry Fletcher, are known as the Tini o Toi. “That was just a loose name for these ancient people. They were spread throughout the country from one of the original peoples – you had Kupe and you had Toi,” he says.

Some say that Arawa explorer Tia came there and his children lived in the area, but the first people known to occupy Pohaturoa were a people of mystery, the Kahupungapunga.  None can say where they came from, and in a final stand at Pohaturoa 400 years ago they were cut down like today’s pines, suffering what the Waitangi Tribunal called “their final extinction as a tribal identity.”  Source: NZ Herald, Pohaturoa – the story of a New Zealand hill.

It appeared the Ngati Kahupungapunga were just a small, transient bunch of hunter gatherers.  But were they?  The following year one of our walks took us to the Lake Okataina.  The information board at the start of the track stated the first people to settle in the area were the myriads of Maruiwi followed by myriads of Ruatamore, who were later to adopt the name Kahupungapunga. Myriads meant an innumerable number of these people. 

So the Kahupungapunga tribe weren’t just a small group at Atiamuri. Where did they go?  In the quiet of the lockdowns of 2020 I decided to do some research.

Here’s what I found: Ngati Kahupungapunga

Related walks:

The name Pungapunga only exists now as the names of localities and a river.  The Pungapunga once lived around Lake Okataina in the Rotorua Lakes area. There’s a track from the Outdoor Education Centre which we explored called the Waipungapunga track.

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Links

Sidestep: Atiamuri Stones

Gilbert Mair’s account of the Atiamuri Stones

Atiamuri

Roadside Stories: Hatupatu’s Rock

Roadside Stories: Tokoroa, timber town