100 YEARS AT MANUTAHI

Taranaki Daily News, 18 October 1933, Page 6

100 YEARS AT MANUTAHI

TARANAKI’S OLDEST WOMAN MARRIED TO HAU-HAU WARRIOR. STELL ABLE TO CHOP FIREWOOD. HER AGE POSSIBLY 115 YEARS. Tuwehirangi, Taranaki’s oldest woman, has lived at Manutahi, near Hawera, for over 100 years. No one can tell her exact age, but all the natives in the little Manutahi pa agree that this remarkable old woman, who still tends her garden, chops firewood and walks a mile to the store, is over 100 years old. A common estimate is 115 years. The most definite date that can be established is that of her second marriage, which occurred about 1864, at the close of the Hau-Hau rebellion. She was first married to Tupito, a distant connection of the present chief Tupito at Patea. Her husband and his younger brother Tutangi, fought in the rebellion and, when it was over, were arrested and taken as prisoners to Patea. Tupito died there and some time later Tutangi, who had become a “Government man” returned to Manutahi and married his brother’s widow, Tuwehirangi. Both marriages were performed by Wesleyan missionaries.

Tutangi died 20 years ago, and all Tuwehirangi’s children are dead. The old woman lives on at the pa with a handful of her people, the Ngati-takou, a subtribe that has become sadly depleted in number through the sale and individualisation of the tribal lands. She can neither read nor write, and she speaks no English, but she is in possession of all her faculties and is remarkably active for one who was probably past her childhood when Queen Victoria came to the throne and who was a married woman at the time of the Indian Mutiny.