The walk starts off at the rock of Pohaturoa. Matters of war and peace were discussed and debated here. The rock now serves as a World War 1 memorial.
Most of the original cave in the rock has been replaced by a road. The remaining arch has an ugly frame under it.
Desecration is the word that comes to mind when I look at what remains. It’s a pity there wasn’t any forethought about preserving the landmarks when the town was planned out. They should have listened to the Maori.
The town is pretty. There’s a marina behind the main street where you could get on a tour for White Island. (You can’t go there now because the volcano erupted in Dec 2019.)
Pohaturoa rock
left: Me at Pohuturoa rock and right: the entrance to Muriwai’s cave
History:
In local Māori tradition, the Mātaatua waka (ocean-going canoe) was the first to land at Whakatane, approximately 700 years ago and many iwi can trace their origins to ancestors on the Mātaatua canoe.
Toroa, the captain of the Mataatua canoe, had been instructed by his father to look for three landmarks in his search for Whakatane – the Wairere Falls, Muriwai’s cave, and Irakewa rock.
“There is a land far away that is a good place for you to go to. There is a waterfall at that place and a cave in the hillside for Muriwai. The rock standing in the river is myself.”
Te Toka o Irakewa (Irakewa rock) was destroyed in by the harbour board in 1924. The rock’s remains can be seen by the riverbank – but we did see Wairere Falls and Muriwai’s cave.
Pōhaturoa, a rock in the centre of Whakatāne, is now a memorial to those who fell in the First World War. But long before this the rock was a sacred place for Ngāti Awa. In its tunnel (once a cave) young warriors were tattooed, and in the nearby Waiewe Stream newborn children were immersed in a form of baptism. Twelve Ngāti Awa chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi here on 12 June 1840.
“Ngāti Awa are the descendants of Te Tini o Toi, the original inhabitants of the region, and the people of Mataatua waka.”
According to Elsdon Best, the task of Ngati-Awa when dwelling at Whakatane, Ohiwa, and Opotiki was continuous fighting against Maruiwi and Ngati-Ruatamore.
Unfortunately this iwi, along with other Maori, believe they own the water. Their website contains this statement in Maori: “We, the indigenous people of Mataatua, believe that the freshwater of this country is a legacy from our ancestors, down to the generations that live in this changing world, and to the rising generations.”
In New Zealand, no-one owns the water. If we tried to make it so all New Zealanders owned the water, the Maori will say the water is theirs, and ownership would turn into a political hot potato.
Chinese bottling plants like Nongfu Spring take advantage of “no-one owning the water.” They take it for cents on the dollar and turn into plastic. This is how the Resource Management Act is exploited by foreigners.
“It’s really, really difficult for an everyday New Zealander to navigate this kind of system when the government is relying on us, as citizens, to uphold the RMA. If you look at it, they spend $30 million a year enticing overseas companies to come here, but only spend less than a million supporting everyday kiwis who are fighting gross consents like this in court. It’s diabolical really.” Source: Community takes fight against water bottling plant to High Court
1818 – Bay of Plenty Ravaged: Episode 25 (Musket Wars #7) In January 1818 Te Morenga, a Ngapuhi chief, lead a war party to the Bay of Plenty. A month later, Hongi Hika lead another war party to the same area. The Bay of Plenty became a killing ground as the musket armed Ngapuhi wreak havoc on local Maori.
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.”
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
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.
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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