OLD RANGITIKEI.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 9452, 29 March 1913, Page 2

OLD RANGITIKEI.

LECTURE BY MR J. G. WILSON

AN EARLY TRAVELLER

MARTON. March 27. Mr J. G. Wilson, president of the New Zealand Farmers' Union, has just delivered an address on "The Early History of Rangitikei," and in the course of some interesting reminiscences, he said that the first white man who looked on the fair land of Rangitikei of whom lie had been able to find record was Mr Colenso. He was a printer, who came out to the Bay of Islands in the '3o's, where he printed a Maori Bible. There he fell in with Mr Williams. Mr Williams and his brother had come to the Ba.v of Islands with the Rev. Mr Marsden. Mr Marsden first came there from Sydney, and preached the first sermon in New Zealand in 1814, and preparations are now being made to celebrate this centenary.

Mr Colenso was sent as missionary to the East Coast by Mr Williams in 1844, and two years later he determined to visit the natives in Mokai and Patea. Taking with him several natives, he travelled over the ranges, but food fell short, and although he looked down upon the promised land, he had to return to Hawke's Bay. The following year, however, he determined to go in by Taupo, and this he did. In his description of the journey, Mr Colenso says that after crossing the desert he came to some burnt trees, and, the weather breaking, the company had to pass two days in miserable shelter. The party then went down the bank of the Moawhango (land-pounding moa, he says this moans), and for the last day had to subsist on raw potatoes until he was welcomed by the natives at a pa called Maketu, on a hill in the Pukeokihu country.

After recuperating for a few days here, and becoming acquainted with the natives, he went along the ridge to Pukeokahau, and so on to the Rangitikei river. To get down to the bed of the stream he had to clamber down a precipitous cliff, so steep that it was only by clinging to the bushes and bits of flax the Maoris had tied on to them that they could get down. Half-way down he became so afraid that the Maoris had to carry him down. After crossing the river he came to Te Awana, a well-known pa, on what is now Mr Riddiford's grazing run. From here, Mr Colenso went up to the ranges, past what is now called the Mokai-Patea trig, and crossed over into Hawke's Bay, near where Hampden now is. He tells the story of how the Maoris at Te Awarua came to grow tobacco. Selling their pigs and everything saleable they could lay their hands on, they went to "Wanganui and purchased some tobacco seed. They then cultivated with great care land to receive the seed, and sowed it, watching it eagerly, the expectation of their coming joys growing day by day. They were doomed to disappointment, for it turned out to be docks, and no doubt the etror of the Wanganui merchant is the origin of the docks in the Rangitikei. Although this visit took place in 1847, Mr Bidwell, a naturalist, had ascended Ruapehu in 1839, but he entered the district from Taupo, and returned that way. so he did not come into Rangitikei. The speaker gave a description of the geological position of the Rangitikei river and the formation of its beds, from its first trickle to the mouth. The Hautapu sprang from the desert, and the Moawhango came out of the eastern slopes of the Kaimanawas, and the Rangitikei from the western slope of the same range of mountains. Most of the land had been raised up from the bottom of the sea, and the papa rock was the accumulated deposit of the animalculae and fishes of countless ages that died and sank to the bottom. In some cases the formation was known to be 1600 feet deep, and when this became soil it made very valuable land, because of the phosphate contained in it. Lower down the river the formation is a mixture of clay and papa, and just below Hunterville the river has laid its own foundation of silt mixed with clay. A variety of soils is therefore brought down by the Rangitikei from the different formations, and this made the soil much richer nearer the mouth.