THE WATER WHEEL

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 75, Issue 6442, 5 November 1947, Page 3

THE WATER WHEEL

MILLS THAT GROUND MAORI AND PAKEHA WHEAT EARLY DAYS AROUND TE AWAMUTU ( In a recent issue of the School Committee Journal appeared the following article written by the late Janies Cowan. Water and the wind, the cheapest forces the gods gave us, the mightiest and tameless yet turned so easily to man’s account. The winds that roved the world turned the old mills for corn-g.’iriding and filled the sails of the ships; and the waters impounded for the old millwheel give the power for that modern triumph of science the hydro-electric power station. First of all, give a thought to the Old Country mills. I have always taken delight in the pictures and the poetry of the mill-wheel. What a subject for a book, the old mill-wheel! Songs and traditions, stories of the old lands.and the new. Some of the most delightful of Old-World pictures too, have had the old mill and the mill pool for their subject. Constable made the mill the central feature of some of his most characteristic paintings of English landscape.

Some of our sweetest old songs are those that bring up a vision of the old rustic bridge by the mill, the rushing or quietly gliding 'waters, the mill dam, the beautiful maid of the mill. A sea song heard in the old-time American sailing ships, “Adieu to Maimuna,” went to the air of “The Mill Wheel,’’ a German folk song. The verses of Kipling and Gilbert Chesterton picture the Old-World antiquity and peace as they knew it, the touch of age that is ever young, of which the mill wheel was an active symbol: See yonder little mill that clacks So busy by the brook? She has ground her corn and paid her tax Ever since Dodesday Book. yfe have nothing like that in New Zealand; yet some of the early-day water-mills acquired in time a pic-ture-like character. There was that flour mill that ground the missionaries’ wheat at Waimate North, standing boldly on the. edge of a sudden drop over the edge of the volcanic rock belt, just where the sharp line of clay country begins on the east side of the rich Waimate country. The old mill building was standing thgre lately, seemingly hanging on by its teeth to the cliff, but the wheel no. longer turned, though the mill stream still ran, from its raupo-edged pool across the road, which crosses the water by a culvert,, There was another which survived till a more recent day, the Kaukore mill at Pipiriki, up the Wanganui River. The stream which turned the big wheel there, in a narrow cut like a canyon, on the bank of the river close to the Pipiriki township, was used after its wheel-grinding days to supply electric light for the local hotel. Historic mill sites are many all over the country.

The water-driven flour mill, which was so necessary an industrial feature of early-day settlement in New Zealand, was quickly adopted by the Maori also, wherever the cultivation of wheat was carried on. The first flour mill was built in the north of .Auckland in the early missionary days. It was well within the memory of many of us that the water wheel gave place entirely to steam power; windmills persisted later. I remember seeing two windmills, their tall sails revolving rapidly in the fresh breeze on a ride long ago from Te Awamutu to Hamilton. They stood on breezy hills closely overlooking* the road, on the west or left-hand side of the road. Partington’s Old Mill in Auckland is a relic dating back to the beginning of* the Fifties. But water-driven mills were more numerous. ,

There was the flour mill that was known as Percy’s in the western part of the Lower Hutt Valley, Wellington. Tne big wheel was driven by a stream that came over the western hills and flowed into the Hutt River. The Percy family combined farming* with milling for many years. There were numerous other mills in the Wellington district, and much of the grain supplied for flour-making came from the Maori cultivations. Some wheat that came to Percy’s mill was brought in large canbes all the way round from the valleys on the eastern side of the Wellington Harbour entrance.

At Mokau Heads are the ruins of a Maori-owned flour mill in a beautiful situation. On the beach slope below the now tapu hill and the township, I came across in the grass and ferns the burr stones that once were the grinders turned by the agency of strongly-rushing water. The water sluiSe still flowed, where it fell from the hill Pukekiwi and ran along* a shallow clear channel to the Mokau. Grape vines long neglected grew tangled with the bushes. This was once a scene of busy Maori industry. The old men tofd me that the head of all the food* producing work in the years of the Sixties to the early Eighties was the chief Wetere te Rerenga,

who was under a Government ban after the rttack on Pukearuhe (on the coast, near the White Cliffs) in 1869, and the murder of the missionary, John Whiteley; in fact, there was a standing reward for his capture. But Wetere was a good and patriotic Maori in his world, and certainly he kept his tribe together and kept them usefully employed until the pakeha's influence spread over the land. A great deal of wheat and other food was grown around the Mokau, and the little mill below Pukekiwi clacked away busily until pakeha interests spread over the land and new occupations absorbed Maori energies This was the case in many other Maori districts all over the North Island. Mills of the Old Waikato The Maoris, as was natural with such a poetic and music-loving people, had their songs about the wonderful “raira paraoa” brought by the pakeha mechanics and set up for them on their streams. When the first flour mill was built on a stream near Rangiaowhia, through the efforts of the missionary John Morgan, the proud proprietors composed a vociferous haka of welcome. Mr Morgan was a very practical missionary; he sowed an'd planted all kinds of seeds and cuttinge to increase the food supplies of the tribes; and his Waipa people by the year 1850 had several water mills, which ground the crops covering many hundreds of acres. Some of the flour milled at Rangiaohia by the Maori farmers there was sent to Queen Victoria by the Governor, Sir George Grey, with a message of aroha and loyalty. A little later, when the great gold rushes began in California and in Victoria, there was Maori-ground flour in some of the cargoes of food-stuffs shipped from Auckland. According to the late Mr H. E. R. Wiley, of Mauku, who wrote the South Auckland Centennial History, water-mills to drive flax-stripping machinery were erected all over the country. Almost every stream that could turn a water-wheel was harnessed.