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By
G.R.Crocombe. The Maori in Hoe-o-Tainui: As the name indicates, Hoe-o-Tainui is closely linked with the Tainui canoe, one of the Great Fleet that brought in a new wave of Polynesian settlers to New Zealand in the 1930’s. The North Island had been settled at a much earlier date by people of Polynesian, and perhaps Melanesian, descent and the Tainui settlers were confined to the Kawhia area for about two hundred years, intermarrying with the people there known as the Kahu-pungapunga. It was not until the sixteen hundreds that the situation changed when the Tainui tribes were numerous enough to spread out from Kawhia and take over the Waikato assimilating, as well as ousting, the Kahu-pungapunga. By the end of the sixteenth century the Tainui tribes had finally defeated the Kahu-pungapunga and the tribes commenced quarrelling among themselves. It would be in this era that I would place Paoa the founder of the Ngatipaoa tribe to which the Maori population of Hoe-o-Tainui belongs. The earliest reference to Hoe-o-Tainui, apart from the legends that preface this booklet, is to be found in Sir George Grey’s Polynesian Myths and Legends in the chapter titled –“The History of Paoa, The Ancestor of the Ngatipaoa Tribe”. Paoa was the founder of the Ngatipaoa tribe coming originally from the East Coast. Having marital difficulties, Paoa journeyed over a large area of the North Island in search of his wife who had left him. His journeying led him into the Waikato where he settled down with new wife and established a family. However, through a combination of his own indiscretion and problems with Maroon traditional hospitality as related to a man of his rank, he felt he had no alternative but to set off for areas new. Here I will quote from the legend: “Thus Paoa started in the night, and he went straight from the Waikato for Hauraki, up the valley of the Mangawhara Creek which runs out into the Waikato at the base of Mount Taupiri, on its eastern side. When the day dawned Paoa was still pushing hurriedly on; and at last he reached the hills of Tikitikimaurea, where the Mangawhara has its source; and ascending these, he rested there, and saw the Waikato lying far behind him and Hauraki lying before him: and then he wept for sore grief at leaving his children, and his people, and his place. He wept long as he thought of these things; and when tears has somewhat assuaged his grief, he bid them farewell, and ceased sorrowing”. In Hauraki Paoa met and married a young chieftainess, Tukutuku. Her father’s influence reached as far as the mountains of Moehau (at Cape Colville) round the Cape and along the coast to the eastward as far as Katikati. The influence of Tukutuku and Paoa grew with the years and they collected a large tribe with Tukutuku bearing ten children the youngest son being Horowhenua of great renown. When Paoa was old and needed the support of a stick and was renowned as a sacred person, whose blessing of the sweet potato plantations caused them to bring forth abundantly, he yearned again to see his first family in the Waikato. He journeyed once more over the route he had taken many years before and reaching the top of Tikitikimaurea range he beheld his own former abode and the abode of his children. He dwelt once more among his children in the Waikato and blessed their sweet potato plantations and when he wished to leave they detained him. Horowhenua set out to persuade the Waikato family to let Paoa return to Hauraki. From the summit of the Tikitikimaurea range they looked over the district of Waikato and there they could see the fires of the village Waitawheta. There in the village was Paoa dwelling with his sons and six hundred of their warriors. Horowhenua and his followers descended from the mountain range and slept at its base at the head of the river Mangawhara. Next morning, when Paoa rose to bless the sweet potato plantations, Horowhenua met him and he consented to their taking him home to Hauraki once more. When day had fully broken and the people of the fortified village saw, by the footprints left behind by Horowhenua, that Paoa had been taken off, the sons of Paoa and their six hundred warriors set off in pursuit. Horowhenua and the whole hundred and forty warriors of his party made a stand on the Tikitikimaurea hills, where in single-handed combat, Horowhenua slew his two half brothers, Toawhenua and Toapoto. When the Waikato warriors saw their two leaders slain, they fled in confusion, but were pursued and slaughtered: four hundred of them were slain, two hundred of them escaped: and then Paoa was carried off in triumph by his children.
NGA PA KAIKIRI Situated 1-½ miles up the Waiti Road, this is traditionally the site of the battle between the two branches of Paoa’s family. “Kiri” means kin.
The story of the Maoris of Hoe-o-Tainui from the time of Horowhenua to the time of the Europeans is recorded in the Hauraki Minute Book, No. 21, pages 17 – 24, 30 n- 34 and in the Hauraki Minute Book, N. 24 starting at Page 91 and taking up most of the book to page 390. The minutes are records of claims, in 1890, by several prominent Maoris on land in Hoe-o-Tainui, by right of being descended from Horowhenua and of their having held the land against attempted invasion by Waikato tribes. These claims contain proud claim that from the time of Horowhenua, Hoe-o-Tainui has never been conquered. The minutes abound with stories of combats and war parties, one party crossing the Paranui, proceeding over Hangwera Mountain and on to some destination slaughtering as they went. One claimant, N Paoa, settled in Hoe-o-Tainui in 1867 when he returned from fighting the Europeans. There appears to have been a continual coming and going between Hoe-o-Tainui, Kerepehi, Waharoa and many other places in the Hauraki Basin. Other claims consist of having an eel weir on the Mangawhara and a burial ground in the Mangawhara Valley, in use from the time of Hiko to the then present day – 1890. One claimant used a reference point Puketionga, freely translated as the hill with the rumbling stomach. This hill, situated on Keith McDonald’s farm up the Mangawhara Valley, was popularly thought, in Maori lore, to be of volcanic origin, and was said to rumble when the thermal areas in the North Island were active. These records, kept at the Maori Affairs Department in Hamilton, are a priceless record of the pre-European Maori at Hoe-o-Tainui and should, some day, be thoroughly researched to draw up a cohesive history of those times. In the early days of European settlement of New Zealand, Sir George Grey was a frequent visitor to the Ngatipaoa tribal lands. He was known as Horekerei and one of the chiefs of Ngatipaoa named his eldest son after him. As Winei Kerei he later became a prominent chief. Sir George Grey encouraged the Maoris to grow wheat, some of it along the banks of the Piako but mainly at Hoe-o-Tainui. The wheat was transported in two separate halves of a large canoe. The ends of the halves were boarded up to form two barges. The reason for this being that the whole canoe was too long to be used for the purpose. Possibly this was one of the canoes that the Ngati Haua, when the abandoned their pas at Waharoa in 1840 and having no further use for their canoes, presented to the Ngatipaoa at Tahuna. The canoes were met at the mouth of the Piako River by sailing ships, which took the wheat and other produce to Auckland and Australia. Mr. W J Collins, who settled in Hoe-o-Tainui after World War 1, recalls that one of the older Maoris told him that he could remember as a boy seeing practically all the flat land in the valley planted in wheat. He pointed out to Mr. Collins certain earthworks consisting of ditches and sod walls which, he said, were constructed to keep stock and pigs from straying onto the crops. The women were responsible for seeing that none got through the fences and the boys were expected to help in herding the pigs. Naturally, some of the pigs strayed away into the bush, thus accounting for the numerous wild pigs that roamed the hills up to very recent times. These ditch and bank fences can still be traced on the land that was occupied for a long period by Mr. Dudley Twining and this type of fencing accounts for numerous hawthorn bushes that used to be a feature of Hoe-o-Tainui. One such fence is recorded on an early survey map showing the Mangawhara Stream. Referring once more to W J Collins, Hoe-o-Tainui and Tahuna were about the most southerly part of the Ngatipaoa tribal lands. These extended down the Piako River and the hill country to the west of the Piako Swamp – now the Hauraki Plains – and the Firth of Thames and included Ponui and Waiheke Islands. At one time they held land along the Tamaki River with two notable pas on Mount Wellington and near to Panmure Basin where Hongi and his Ngapupi warriors armed with guns attacked them and that portion of their tribe was practically annihilated. They had close relations with the other two main Hauraki tribes in the district, the Ngatimaru around Thames and the Thames Valley, and the Ngati Whanaunga along the Cormandel Peninsular with some land in the Ngatipaoa area at Kaiaua and Wakatewai on the western side of the Firth of Thames. Sir George Grey met and talked with several of the chiefs of the tribe and, from them, he gained much of his knowledge concerning the legends and traditions of the Maori, which knowledge he made use of in his writings later, including his Polynesian Mythology. An explanation given to Mr. William Joseph Collins, the first settler in Tahuna and father of W J Collins previously referred to, gives the reason for the minor Maori population in Tahuna when he arrived in 1903, and the extensive Maori population in Hoe-o-Tainui. It appears that when the “Waitoa Drainage Board” was formed sometime in the sixties or seventies of the last century to drain a large tract of swampland between the Piako and Waitoa Rivers, the main outlet drain on the northern boundary of this area, known as the Waharoa Drain, flowed into the Piako River about three miles above Tahuna. When it was first opened it brought in a quantity of dark-coloured swampy water thus discolouring the Piako which had previously been clear. The Maoris were horrified, especially when soon afterwards an epidemic, probably a kind of influenza, broke out. A Tohunga asserted that the sickness was caused by the swamp water that he said had poisoned the river. He advised a move to a locality where the water was pure. Accordingly, most of the people mover to the Hoe-o-Tainui Valley and built a Kainga on a low ridge overlooking the Mangawhara River. This village they named Waiora (meaning healthy or wholesome water because the water there was clear and pure). There, or thereabouts, the majority were still living when the Collins and White families first came to Tahuna and for the eight years after when they sold the land to a syndicate. There was a fair-sized meeting house with some interesting carving and painting close to where the Harrison brothers later built their house, two or three long sleeping houses and several whares. Some of the Maori families were living on their land about the valley and also along the Waiti Stream. At the turn of the century, the whole of Hoe-o-Tainui apart from an area of Crown Land in the bush-covered hills around the headwaters of the Mangawhara River as far west as the Confiscation Line which was also the boundary of the Waikato County, was still owned by Maori. The Confiscation Line was the eastern boundary of the large area of land confiscated from the Waikato tribes after the war of 1863 – 65. It was said to have been selected by drawing a line on a map of the district from a survey trig station on Mount Eden, Auckland, to another trig on Maungatautari Mountain, south of Cambridge. For a long time land speculators had looked with envious eyes on the fertile Hoe-o-Tainui land and many had attempted to persuade the School Jubilee book that Mr. Taku informed him that in 1900 Tametakupu, a powerful chief from Hoe-o-Tainui, sold Tahuna to Queen Victoria for fifty pounds i.e.$100.00. In 1912 the Hoe-o-Tainui Syndicate, backed by a considerable amount of capital, under the leadership of Mr. W Eddows made a determined bid to purchase the Hoe-o-Tainui lands from the Maori owners. Using the methods then considered appropriate to convince the Maoris that the sale of the land would be in their best interests, they persuaded a few of the land-owners to sell at least part of heir holdings. Once started, it was not long before most of the others followed suit. Most families retained a portion of their land for their own use but the greater part of the valley land had changed hands by 1913. It is to be regretted that the Maori population has dwindled, due to a combination of factors that have operated to their disadvantage, in Hoe-o-Tainui. Epidemics of influenza, especially the one following the 1914 – 18 war which took such a heavy toll of the European population, took a toll on the local Maori population – as indeed have many of the European diseases especially T B. In recent years, the lack of job opportunities in country districts has encouraged the Maori Affairs Department of successive governments to build houses for Maoris in towns and cities, thus removing them from their tribal land accelerating the drift from Hoe-o-Tainui. However, the Waiti Marae is becoming increasingly important as a gathering place of these uprooted people. It is to be hoped that this will continue so that as long as a Maori lives who wishes to acquaint himself with the land and traditions of his ancestors, a place will be preserved where Maoritanga is treasured. Hoe-o-Tainui without the Maori would lose its unique character and, as I think back, I can see in the bearing, the graciousness and the pride of the many of my neighbours, the echo of that proud, universally acclaimed noble chief Paoa who founded the Ngatipaoa tribe. |
