TAUHARA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 39, 15 February 1935, Page 6

TAUHARA.

TAUPO'S TREASURED MOUNTAIN

(By J.C.)

The Maoris of the Taupo district, as represented by Judge MacCormick, who interviewed the Prime Minister at Waipahihi, are seeking the permanent reservation of Mount Tauhara as a tapu sanctuary. They are anxious that nny alienation of the land should be prohibited. This is the familiar solitary extinct volcanic peak that rises from the pumice plain a few miles east of Taupo township, the one bold landscape feature that relieves the eternal monotony of the manuka and tussock levels. Its eastern Bide presents a tall, unbroken sweep; the motor traveller from 'Napier sees it from many miles away, rising in a blue castle of a cone abruptly from the grey deeert. From the Lake Taupo side one sees the inside of the wonderful old mountain; it ie deeply riven into bush-filled valleys, the ancient lava craters and flows. Crumpled hills and ridges slant down westward and southward; and there are email forests of totara and other timbers and many of the small berry-bearing trees of the native bush, a home for the tui and the bellbird and their mates. Tho area of the mountain is given as 3500 acres. There is a large tract of native land spreading around its base; this merges into the Botokawa thermal area extending towards the Waikato River, a region which the boiling springs and sulphurous pools makes it dangerous to explore. . Tauhara certainly should be made a Maori sanctuary, with all'the protection that legislation can give it against invasion by timbermillers or other buyers who may already have set envious eyes on its lower parts. I know of no mountain that is more valued by the elder people of the race. Song and legend give it a poetic charm; it is one of the famous peaks of the Tongariro folk tale, the epic of the battle of the mountains. Tauhara, according to the legend, originally stood about where Lake Rotoaira now glimmers beneath Pihanga's wooded slopee; lie was one of the lovers of lovely Pihanga. But, apart from its treasury of legend and song, Tauhara was, and is, a greatly-prized mountain. There were villages within its sheltered valleys, and a fortified pa stood on one of the foothills which you may see from Taupo township. The rich volcanic soil of the ancient dilapidated peak gave the Maoris the best cultivation ground; it wae an oasis of fruitfulness in a pumice desert. Two of the old men of Taupo told me that they grew their best potatoes and melons in the sheltered valley there. The forest was full of birds, and in the autumn and winter people snared and speared great numbers of pigeon and kaka and tui there. These birds were cooked and preserved in calabashes and totara-bark containers; they filled many a storehouse in the Taupo villages. There* is a never-failing spring of water high on the mountain; it gushes out and flows in a little stream a short distance and vanishes again. The clear summit of the peak, some 3000 feet above eea level, is called Matairangi, a combination of the words for "gaze upon," or "keep watch," and "sky." It fits this lofty place, where in olden times the people living in the valley and plain below sent scouts to keep watch for war parties crossing the . Kaingaroa prairie from the east or north. Truly, as, old Tamati Kurupae, of Taupo, once described it to me, Tauhara was food-store and sen try-place. "It was a place of shelter and safety for us long ago—the mountain and the forest protected us. Tauhara was our parent."