RAUMATI BEACH IN GRANDFATHER’S DAYS

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 133, 29 February 1936, Page 23

RAUMATI BEACH IN GRANDFATHER’S DAYS

When grandfather 'came to live at what is now Raumati Beach in the “seventies,” it was a wilderness of native bush. Some of it I know, such as flax bushes, toi toi. mtjnuka, tawhine and cabbage' trees. There were swamps and Sandhills nnd wild ducks, bittern and pukekos. who could rear their young unmolested. Wild cattle and horses roamed, too. The beach from Paekakariki to Foxton was the main highway, and the coaehes brought the mail and passengers. There was a Maori pa at the Wareroa stream, and one at'lVaikanae river on the north side and a little inland. The Maoris were friendly, and to-day there are houses, gardens, farms and roads where there were, in those days, useless swamps nnd very' poor looking sandhills. The -Whnrcmauku homestead is still standing; it is about seventv years old. What a tale it could tell if < lily it could spenk of the good old,pioneering days! When my they are quite big. There is a round, grassy hill just out from the old house where a Maori chief is supposed to be buried, according to tradition, and there is. also a piece of greenstone nuried in a swamp close by from the days when Te Rauparaha was raiding this coast. The sandhills along this coast have quite a lot of old Maori middens on. them, some containing many hundredweight of pipi and cockle shells where the old-time Maoris used to cook and dry the shellfish in the. sun to take away with them to their permanent pas.— Taniwha (10), Raumati Beach.