KAINGAROA ROCK CARVINGS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 246, 17 October 1925, Page 21

KAINGAROA ROCK CARVINGS.

THEIR PROBABLE ORIGIN. THE OLD-TIME THIBES OF THE PLAINS. (By JAMES COWAN.) Xo. 1. The discovery of those relief carvings of ancient canoes on the walls of a shallow cave beneath a cliff buttress, where the Kaingaroa Plain dips down to the lower levels, is of interest not alone to ethnologists, but to all New Zealanders w ho take intelligent concern in the story of their country. A definite opinion as to their origin must be postponed until one has had an opportunity of seeing the actual work of tho long-gone artists. But, judging from a number of photographs and sketches which Mr. E. Earle Vaile, of "Broadlands," Waiotapu, has kindly sent mc, there is no need to go back into the mists of time when the ancestors of the Maori or his forerunners in Xew Zealand dwelt on the shores of Asia, or to imagine, as some seem to have done, that there is a Greek or Egyptian connection. Canoes, such as some of those pictured, were common all over Polynesia and Melanesia, and the discoverers of Tahiti, Tonga and Samoa saw exactly such large ocean-going canoes, called in Tahiti "pa'i," or "pahi" as our Maoris lave it. These carvings represent vessels of a type familiar all over the Pacific and to us in New Zealand, and tiie olden carvers cut them there in memory of their seagoing history just as the Maori to-day adorns his carved house with effigies that commemorate ancient tribal heroes. Such' carvings in Telief are rare in New Zealand. Twenty years ago an old Maori took mc to see a beautifully carved little figure, the goddess-Horoira-ngi. in a cliff recess at Tihi-o-Tonga, south of Rotorua; of its existence no pakeha had been aware up to that time. It was the finest example of rock carvings in situ then existent in the Dominion. But these canoe carvings of the Kaingaroa are by an earlier tribe. Our First Settlers. Who were the people that dwelt in those remote refuge places and left their obsidian-chiselled art designs there, to be discovered centuries, afterwards and marvelled at by the pakeha? There is no want of evidence about _ome of those predecessors of the present Maori tribes, their appearance, habits, and the long tragedy of their life and their extinction as clans at the hands of the more vigorous newcomers, the Arawa and other people of the historic canoes. More than a thousand years ago, centuries before the Arawa and other canoes from the Eastern Pacific made landfall on these shores, there were people here—not of a negroid race, as some have supposed, but of a race closely resembling the Maori, in fact, Polynesians of an earlier and more primitive stage of culture than the Hawaikian Maori. Many years ago a member of the tribe, a very. well-inforjnecj old man, naiped ■ Tamati Hapimana, who __V«? on Mokoia Island, gave mc these names of the aboriginal tribes who were found in possession of the Lakes Country, the plains, and the Bay of Plenty Coast, when the Arawa canoe arrived from the Pacific Islands: — Waiohua.. Pakakdhi. Kokomuka-tutare-whare. Tururu-mauku. Raupo-Ngaoheohe. Haere Marire. Te Ngaru-Tauwharewharenra. Te Pirita. Kahu-pungapunga. Te • Aruhe-toro-rararo. Some of these clan names arc curiously descriptive and poetical, such as Te Ngaru-tauwharewharenga, which refers to ■ the curling over of . a wave jrtist before it breaks. Others, such as Te Pirita ("the supplejack"), and Tururu-mauku ("fern" seedlings"), are taken from the vegetation of the country. Pakakohi is . a kind of edible fern root. Kahu-pungapunga, as the old legend keeper explained, meant garments died yellow -with th© raupo-reed pollen. It .is with this tribe of the brightly dyed mats that we are chiefly concerned just now. Another is the Ngati-Hotu, an aboriginal tribe like the ten above listed.

Several of these names are mentioned "y the late Judge J. A. Wilson, who was, I think, the first to place on record definite evidence about the pre-Maori inhabitants. ' But I don't think he gave the last two names. The Ngati-Hotu were written of lately by Mr. George Graham in his interesting speculations as to the origin of the carvings. I agree with him as to the possibility of these carvings being of Ngati-Hotu origin, •nut I imagine it is just as probable that tne artists who chipped them out there «o long ago were the Tribe of the Yel-low-dyed Garments. I will place on record some of ' the evidence I have gathered about this ancient people whose name is never heard in the lists of the present day tribes of the island.