BORDER RIVER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 185, 6 August 1932, Page 6 (Supplement)

BORDER RIVER.

STORY OF THE PUNIU. MEMORIES OF A CLASSIC STREAM. (By J.C.) "Other roads do some violence to Xature, and bring the traveller to stare at hor," Henry Thoreau wrote in his •Week on the Concord," "but the river i-tenls into the scenery it traverses without intrusion, silently, creative and •idorning it. and is as free to come and u r i> as the Zephyr." This remark may be applied to river scenes of our own very different from Thorcau's placid Xew England landscapes. The Mokau is a perfect example of a river road stealing into a forest wild. A river of ours, different again, hut one that was a real road into the scenery it adorned is of an importance in history far transcending its size. This stream, the Vim hi, is a kind of New Zealand Tweed. It was a frontier, a llowing border dividing the pakeha-settled farm lands of the Upper Waikato from the unsubdued wilds of the King Country.

An insignificant stream to the casual traveller who crosses it by the railway a mile south of'Te Awamutu, or by the motor road a similar distance beyond Kihikihi township. Its lower narrowed course is impeded hy weeping willows, and it-would be difficult to navigate it now. But in other days large canoes were paddled and poled along it for many miles, and the native wheat growers and flour millers at Orakau and Kihikihi took their cargoes all the way down to Auckland, a journey of more than a hundred miles. The river voyage for the large craft began at a place wo used to call Anderson's Crossing, where wagon teams could conveniently ford the Puniu. The canoes entered the AVaipa, of which the Puniu is the largest tributary, near the foot of Mount Pirop'tja; then the at the Kgaruawaliia watersmeet, and the paddlers swept easily down the great river to the portage at To Awaroa; transferred to the Manukau canoes at Waiuku. and on lo Onehunga, where the far-carricd products were loaded into carts for Auckland town.

Children of the River. That clear gravel-bedded river, murmuring over its shallows, swishing the flax leaves that dipped in its waters, holding in its crooks and curves many a fortified mound and headlands where fern softened the ancient trenches and scarps—it was a stream of romance and adventure to- some of us borderbred youngsters. There were small canoes cut out of kahikatea logs iu use at the Maori settlements along its banks—the great war canoes of other (lavs had gone—and I used to speculate <- o \v long it would take us to reach the ocean which we had never yet seen, if ■ e set out to paddle down to Waikato nd far away. The Maori children must ('ten have had the same dream of a wonerful voyage. There is a small kainga i the Wairaka, a beautiful glass-clear tream which flows into the Puniu a ttle way beyond the slopes of Parawera nd Orakau. The youths of the village ocmed to spend most of their time on ■arm summer days splashing and sportng in the sun-warmed waters, and they nade little canoes of flax leaves, deftly twisted, put small stones in them to ■•cpresent crews, and set them sailing down the stream. "Sail away," the children called after the dancing toy boats, "sail away to Waikato." That little kainga of the Ngati-Rau-kawa is there still, sleeping in the sun. The thatched whares of old have given place to timber houses; but the clear stream still ripples by large enough to float dug-out white pine canoes. , A new generation of children, swim and dive and disport themselves joyously in sweet Wairaka. I wonder if they still launch their little flax boats. Maybe toy aeroplanes and hydroplanes are the fashion now in this machine-wise age. The Puniu draws its waters from the skyline ranges one sees from Kihikihi and Orakau and the road thence to Arapuni, the blue hills of Rangitoto and Wharepuhunga, which rise into the altitude of mountains. Up in those parts of the King Country there is rugged rhyolite for the country rock, and there is much bold cliffy scenery on the upper parts of the Puniu and its tributaries. The rivers tumble over frequent ledges of the dark grey volcanic rock, and this country supplies the gravelly washdown which settlers and roadmakers draw upon where the Puniu slows down and flows sedately through the grassy farm lands..

Tall columns and castle-like masses of rhyolite in places give dramatic punctuations to the long, ferny slopes and the valley bottoms where the action of ages of water flow has eroded away the softe» rock. Waters of Adventure. It is a fascinating little river this Puniu, not only in its variety of waterplay and its friendly way of coiling itself about the farms and the homes of pakeha and Maori, but in its history, the part it lias had in the local contact of the two races. It has for centuries bee na boundary river. It demarcated the territories of the Waikato and its hapus and the great Ngati-Maniapoto tribe. Except for a salient thrust into the northern or Waikato side at Kihikilii—which was I?ewi Maniapoto's home before the Waikato war, and the chief council-place of the tribe—the Ngati-Maniapoto people kept to the south side of the Puniu. The river bore a kind of honorific name, used occasionally in song and oratory, Pekeliawani, which seems to be a very ancient name imported perhaps from the traditional Hawaiki. When the Kingite Maoris in 1860 were excited to war-fever by the British attack on Wireruu Kingi at Waitaora, and the council of chiefs at Ngaruawahia found that- Kingi's cause was just and called for assistance, the aged King Potatau issued his decision to the assembly in these words:—

go you to Taranaki, as food for the birds of the air. As for you, Waikato, Pekehawani is my boundary; do not trespass upon it." 11l this manner tlie King, who was then a dying man, released the fiery Rewi and his tribe for the fighting at Waitara, but restrained Waikato and Ngati-Haua; Uiey must not cross Pekehawani, otherwise the Puniu. But a few months later all the young men of Waikato were into the fray. War-party after warparty crossed the boundary river, marched to the Upper Mokau and took canoe down the forest waterway to the West Coast. Now the Puniu came into the laments for the slain, which were chanted in every Kingite village when tlie news came of the defeat of the NgatiHaua warriors and their allies on the fatal field of Mahoetahi. ls swc Pt and desolate, k. tUc "de of Puniu, - «e waters sob as they flow.

Three years later there was even more tragic cause for weeping along the river, for Waikato was reft from its people and the Puniu became the frontier between the two races. The story of the King Country, the territorial term which then originated, is a familiar one, but there are some incidents of the border that may here be recalled. It was some years after the war before the old villages on the south side of the river were reoccupied; all the people had removed themselves many miles into the interior; and presently Tc Kooti was gathering around him many hundreds of followers and Ringa-Tu worshippers at his great camp. Blockhouses and redoubts went up on the pakeha side, and the Puniu itself saw fortified posts of earthwork made on its bank by a corps of friendly Maoris from the Lower Waikato, in Government pay. A patrol road was made for military use along that north bank; this road, or part- of it, along the lower part of the Puniu, still remains, and retains the uame Frontier Road. The Avenging Tomahawk. There was a tragedy of 1870 which set the frontier in a tense expectation of worse to follow. A farm worker named Lyon, employed by an ex-forest ranger, who had settled on a section bounded on tho south by the Puniu, was reported missing. Search parties went out along the river. Sub-Irispector Watt, in command of Kihikihi redoubt, and the writer's father, from Orakau, were riding through the fern near Martin's Crossing—a ford named after the settler who employed Lyon—w.ien they noticed a hawk fly up from near the riverside. They went to tho spot, and there they found the body of the missing man. He had been tomahawked in tho back of the head. This murder was at first thought to be of grave political import, as a prelude to a renewal of war by the Kingites. Soon, however, it was found to have been simply the settlement of a private "utu" account. The white man had had an illicit love affair with a young Maori woman. The husband, discovering this, laid in wait for the pakeha with his tomahawk. When this became known, the frontier breathed more easily. Nothing more was done about it; the tomahawk man simply went south to Te Kuiti for a change of air, and presumably also of wives. Tho murder of another farm employee, Timothy Sullivan, near Koto-o-Rangi, three years later, was a very different affair, an agrarian and political killing. The border had a warlike air for months; there were armings and drilling and | night patrols. Maoris, who did not want to be involved in possible fighting, came in across the Puniu. Tho old toliunga and warrior, Hopa, whoso home was at Tokanui, those round terraced hills that tho settlers called tho "Three Sisters, left tho King Country for the time being and stayed with a farmer friend until the trouble was over.

Barlow's Night Ride. Gradually the tense, anxious era of border life relaxed. In _ 1881 we saw the Maori King come in across the aukati line, as the frontier was termed (the word signified "stop—no admittance" so far as the pakeha was concerned). Now and again there were episodes that thrilled the settlement?, such as the capture of Winiata, in 1882, and the fanatic Mahuki's imprisonment of two surveyors and his futile raid on Alexandra township in 18S3. That was a daring night ride, the half-caste Barlow's dash in the dark small hours from Otorolianga to the Kihikilii redoubt with the outlaw Winiata "doped" with drugged grog and tied on a led horse. Not until he had forded the Puniu and reached the pakeha aide of the pale did Barlow feel secure of his prisoner and the £500 reward. Such recent happenings on the Rohepotae boundary gave a wonderful zest, a feeling that adventure lay just over the river, when freedom of passage came at last and we lads, like our elders, could splash through the Puniu on our own account and ride for long days j through the fenceless lands, exploring old pas, calling at the small villages i of friendly and always hospitable Maoris whom we knew. Now the classic stream of Pekehawani no \ longer sharply defines farm lands limit. There is no apparent difference between north and south, so completely has the hand of the settler transformed the Rohepotae. The aukati interdict nowadays only concerns strong liquor; and that prohibition rests as lightly on many habitants of the great dry land as it does on the population of the U.S.A.