TO HAUKARETU.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 15, 19 January 1931, Page 6

TO HAUKARETU.

Wellington people have not the wide choice of pretty country driving roads that Aucklanders enjoy; they are so hemmed in and ringed about with steep hills and ranges. There is a coaetskirting motor road which visitors praise for its fine pictures of land and sea, albeit the breezes from Cook Strait are over-robust for many. But one main route out of the city has a quiet gardenland charm that in places rather reminds one of some rural scenes on our Tamaki plain. This is the way up the Hutt Valley, parallel with the Wellington-Wairarapa railway line. Once industrial Petone and the Lower Hutt are left behind there is a succession of little residential suburbs and orchards and small farms for twenty miles or so, with the Hutt River, the Maori Heretaxinga, winding through over its gravelly bed. About the Taita and Silverstream and up past Trentham there are places much behaunted by Wellington artists. One painter in particular has" specialised in Silversteam scenes, and as one goes past it i<3 tolerably certain that the customary cow or two will be there posed in exactly the right place, Iby the side of a killow-fringed, skyl- - bit of a creek, a meandering tributary of the Hutt, a group of tall poplars as a background. It is a long, narrow valley between the roughly-trimmed sheep-grazing hills. Some of Wellington's, moneyed people have made beautiful homes on those rather rugged places, and some professional men retire to the solace of the heights and the bush for their week-ends. I know one very beautiful home, a doctor's, approached through nearly half a mile of native woodland, a jungly, mosey, fragrant little forest where the fern trees touch fronds over the motor road. Even down in the well-tilled valley there are many fragments remaining of the olden forest that once filled these Heretaunga levele and gave Wellington its building timber for half a century. Here and there is a tall kahikatea tree that the sawmillers fortunately passed over; there are clumps of the native beech, the tawai, with its lower branches growing close to the ground; its symmetrical, tapering shape and the way in which it seems to arrange itself about the landscape give some of these tawai-dotted levels a planted, park-like aspect.

Hietory has been made here and there along the Heretaunga, as, in particular, that great boulder set in monument form testifies, a couple of miles above the Lower Hutt, where a side highway called the Old Military Road turns off. This marks the approximate eite of Boulcott's Farm Stockade, the ecene of a little battle of 184G, when Rangihaeata's warriors laid low several Imperial soldiers, one of them that herotale young Briton, Bugler Allen, who with hie last gasp eounded the alarm. Higher up, near Trentham, there is an old two-storey blockhouse of the early 'sixties etill standing; you turn off to it along a leafy lane where roses ramble along the hedge. Roses, indeed, are all the way for miles along the main road through this Upper Hutt; roses and honeysuckle, and in the spring the flowering may.

And then, with the air perceptibly freshening, and the dark beech bush covering much' of the highlands, on each side, we bring up at Maori Bank, the Haukaretu of the old-time Ngati-Awa tribesfolk. Here there ie a picture that blends bold scenery with the results of generations of Maori and pakeha tillage. The river sweeps round in a great arc between high banks, willowbordered, that in places rise in a succession

terraces. There is one broad terrace, low down, a smooth, velvety pasture land; thie is the Maori Bank. Long ago a village stood there, a thatched kainga of Ngati-Awa; canoes were drawn up on the little ppit3 of gravel, for this was the head of navigation from Wellington Harbour twenty odd miles away. They canoed potatoes and wheat from here to the town eighty years ago and more. Pretty homes are here nowadays. On one wayside dwelling, among its tawai trees and rose beds, the name "Connecticut" betokens it an American-bom's house; it ie the home of a veteran retired sea captain.

But nowhere appears the beautiful Maori name of this ancient cultivation ground with the river wound about it like a ehining, sheltering arm. Hau-karetu (with the accent on the syllable "ka") means the wind that brings the scent of the karetu grass. This karetu is a fragrant plant which the Maori women often gathered to scent the houses and to make the aboriginal equivalent of the pakeha sachet. They say that the sweet grass wae particularly abundant here in the olden daye, and that when the breezes blowing down the valley set the vegetation waving the fragrance of the Maori Bank was borne far and wide. Haukaretu —it is as sweet a phrase ae our "incensebreathing morn." —J.C.