Mangaweka is a sleepy place where the Rangitikei River flows past cliffs of white papa. The very grandly named main street of Mangaweka is now devoid of traffic since State Highway 1 bypassed the main street in the late 1970s.
It’s a town where time seems to have stopped. The unaltered buildings in “Broadway” are from a previous century.
Many buildings stand empty, but Mangaweka still has a school, library, hotel, and a DC3 plane on the main highway which operated as a tearoom.
Manga means stream and weka means woodhen.
Mangaweka was one of the first towns on the North Island Main Trunk Railway to get electricity. The Mangaweka Power Station project commenced in 1911, originally it was intended to serve as a water resevoir.
Little remains of the tiny power station and a small building containing historic photos shelters the site. The walk to the resevoir intake is across the road. The path is through a beautiful small gorge which follows the Mangawharaiki River. The resevoir is intact but the brick-lined intake tunnel to the right is blocked by a log which wedged there in 1937, causing the power station to finally close down.
Broadway, Mangaweka
Walk: Manawatu 22
Mangaweka Scenic Reserve
I think there was supposed to be a viewing point by a Kahikatea tree but we couldn’t find it. The track is not well maintained. The walks are not clearly marked but there’s a good view of the town of Mangaweka from the road by the entrance. Part of the walk is on the old main trunk railway line which is littered with broken pieces of the white papa rock. There’s a large matai and other trees like rimu, tawa and titoki trees in the reserve.
Walk 18 – Karangahake Gorge, 1st / 2nd September 2019
The Karangahake Gorge is actually two picturesque gorges with two rivers; the Ohinemuri and the Waitawheta rivers. It’s a historic goldmining area and the land is interspersed with old mine tunnels, artifacts and ruins.
A century ago the bush was cut down and the rivers polluted with arsenic. Nature has recovered from the mining assault and battery but sadly some of our birds like the kiwi are gone from this area forever.
History
Gold was discovered in the 1860’s.
From the info board: “Local Maori opposition to mining in the Ohinemuri delayed the opening of the field for eight years. After protracted negotiations and pressure to repay money borrowed from the Crown the field opened in 1875.”
We’ve been here twice, in the summer of 2006 and spring of 2019.
2006
Digital Camera
Digital Camera
M4031M-4208
Walk: Waikato 1 & 2
Sept 2019 holiday, stayed at the Karangahake Cottage
Links
History: Ngati Maru
During the 1850s Ngati Maru were one of the main tribes providing large supplies of food to the new capital Auckland. Gold was discovered near Thames in 1852 which quickly changed from a small Maori kainga to a large European town of 40,000 people. Initially opinion was divided among the tribe whether they should allow Europeans access but they decided in favour when a government agent agreed to confine miners to one area, create a Maori police force to enforce this and pay Ngati Maru for every licence sold by the government. When gold was found by the sons of a chief he sent them to Auckland to spread the news and create a rush. Tension was created because under New Zealand law land on which gold was found could be purchased by the state. In some cases land was leased directly from Maori by large mining firms. The early gold diggers found alluvial gold which they could obtain by simple tools but quickly this ran out and was replaced by firms installing stamper batteries crushing gold bearing quartz.
Ngati Maru did not get involved in the 1863-64 land wars conflict.
In pre-gold rush period the Ngati Maru population was estimated at about 310. Afer that, the population increased to 800 and by 1903 census the iwi had 1,350 members.
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 seemed more interesting. There were five Waikato trails and we could have followed this path to the Whakamaru Dam if we’d had time.
As well it informed us of “talking poles,” a series of carved poles at Tokoroa, the next town north on State Highway 1, 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.
NZShortWalks 