WAITARA.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 16050, 7 February 1918, Page 6

WAITARA.

FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT. “MOK/'U” JONES. The following interesting article by “Crakau,” which appeared in the Auckland Star last week, will be read with interest by Herald and Budget readers, dealing as it does with a man so well known throughout the Dominion, and especially ui this district. The article is printed in full The news of the death at New Plymouth of dir. Joshua Jones brings up many memories of that pertinacious old Welshman and Ids interminable litigation over his backblocks lands, and of the lively early days of settlors’ enterprise in the Hanhan country about tho Alokau River mouth. “Alokau” Jones was the nickname that distinguished him a full quarter of a century ago, and it stuck to him through all his wearisome pilgrimages from law court to law court, in New Zealand and in tho Old Country, a heartbreaking succession of suits and pleas and counter-pleas that ruined the plucky old colonial hand apd left him in his seventies with a pathetic sense of life’s lost endeavour. If ever there was a man who had reason to curse tlie law’s Iniquities and the law’s delays it was Joshua. Jones. His series of suits for possession of the Mokau Native land to which he claimed the title outdid in length, if not in costli- , ness, an almost as famous case over Samoan plantations—Frank Cornwall and his wife Alanaoma versus a big Auckland firm, a suit which ran its tedious course from Apia to Auckland, from Auckland to Wellington, and then to the Privy Counfcil in England and back again, over and over a^nin. , It was about in the middle sixties, the story goes, that Joshua Jones, through a fortuitous—or unfortuitons, according to the point of view—series of happenings on the Victorian golddiggings, conceived the idea of trying his fortunes in New Zealand, On the Ballarat fields he met a party of Maori gold-seekers who were down on their luck, and the story is that he befriended them,'.and thus, though not foreseeing it, laid the foundation of a long friendship with the Maori people. The brown diggers came from tho West Coast of the North Island. Many an adventurous Waori went a-digging for gold those days—some even went off to California—and some of tho Natives of the North had schooners, at least one of which voyaged as far ns Sydney. It was sonic years later that young Jones made tho*acquaintance in Sydney of Wetere tc Rerenga, the head chief of tho Mokau country. Wetere had a small schooner, called the Pari-nimhl “Lofty Cliffs’’—the Maori name of the celebrated White Cliffs on the North Taranaki const. The little fore-and-after had taken a cargo ot wheat and other produce to “Poihakene"— Port Jackson—and there the enterprising Wetere met tho man who was to make tho name of .Mokau a synonym for protracted land-titlo legislation even half a world away. Joshua Jones was told of the vast areas of land lying waste about the Mokau Heads, and ho was warmly invited by Wetere and other chiefs to settle among them and open up their bar port to pakehn trade. It was not until about 1879 that the way lay clear for the long-lookcd-for opening of the Mokau. a,s the result of a Maori meeting at Waitara, where Sir George Grey mot Epiha and other big men of shawl kilt and blue tattoo and spent a failround sum of Government money in the ‘/sweetening” operations necessary in the pakeha-Maori diplomacy of those days- . , Wetere tc Rerenga, as it happened, lay under a ban in the seventies. He was the man who was popularly credited with having planned and executed the wiping-ont of the constabulary post at Pukoanilie, the outermost frontier redoubt of Taranaki—the affair usually referred to as the A\ bite Cliffs massacre. That was in 18119. More than thirty years afterwards I met at a little cliff-top settlement, near Mokau Heads, an old Maori, whom I asked, rather incautiously, if he had. been' anywhere near the White Cliffs at the time of the redoubt-taking. In an instant the grim old follow’s eyes took on a curious speculative glare. He was thinking, “Now, I wonder whet this pakcha is after?” His hard warrior features presently relaxed in a cold grin, but he said not a word in reply. At the Mokau kainga i found that this same blanketed veteran was tho man who had used a tomahawk to give tho last dispatch to at least one white man in the redoubt. But Wetere « as generally regarded as the loader of the murder party, and until the general amnesty was proclaimed in 1883 he was practically an outlaw from white settlements, with a price on his head. Ho actually visited Wellington while still under the ban on a political mission, and there is a legend that ho had to bo secretly hurried out of the town by the West Coast coach to avoid arrest on a charge of murder. But it was a political murder, and this set the White Cliffs tragedy in a different light. Certainly Wetere and the Ngati-Maniapoto and Ngati-Taraa tribes regarded it as a necessary act of war, this extinguishing of the Government fires on. the history-haunted Puke-aruhe. AA’ETERE AND HIS PEOPLE. Wetero was really an enlightened, energetic follow, with a genius for lead-ership-and for tribal organisation. In his days at Mokau Heads tho local Maoris were inspired to habits of regular and profitable industry. They grew wheat on -a level fringe of good land between the cliffs and tho bush-clad ranges; they had a flour mill at the Heads, driven by a little stream—the old mill stones are there in the grass to-day, trailed over by Isabelle grapevines. They had famous groves >of peaches and other fruits; they traded peach-fattened pigs_ to the pakehas at Waitara and New Plymouth. They had a fleet of big sea-going canoes, in which they caught shark and schnapper, and hapuku in tons outside the bar; those were the days when the first fish caught in each canoe had to be cast on a certain sacred spot on the beach near the north head as a thankoffering to the gods of the fishery. It is not many years since this custom was abandoned. Mokau always bail abundance of food, and Wetere prided himself on his well-stocked stares of “kui” and tho comforts of the kainga which enabled the tribe to show a respectable face to visitors. He toot the tribe together, kept them drilled in habits of regular work and self-respecting independence. Mokau was a centre ot Maori life and activity in tho seventies and eighties; one of the most remote parts of Maoridom and a headquarters of Kingite nationalism. Many a. pakoha, though, had to thank Wetere for kindnesses, and at least twfo owed their lives to him—Wilson Hurstbonse, surveyor (later he came to bo well known as the Dominion’s chief engineer for roads and bridges), and a. companion; they were capsized on Mokau bar while

taking soundings, in a. dangerous sea, and would have, been drowned but, for AVeter© and several of his men, who put oft in a' canoe and saved them at tho risk of their own lives. That was the man who took “Mokau” Jones under his protective mana in tho late seventies, and it was he who really lifted the rfingite ban which had kept pakeha traders and settlers out of the Mqkau. FROM THE HEADS UP. Since those history-making years, when the full flavour of wild .Maori life was still enjoyed by the tribes beyond tho frontier, and when tomahawk had not yet given place to the Queen’s writ in tho Rohepotae, the Mokau Heads country has become a highway between the two provinces, Taranaki and Auckland, and the chin-tattoed daughter of tho soil joy-rides in her motor-car over the routes that her bare-logged grandfather trudged with double-barrelled gun on 'shoulder and tomnh.Twk in belt. But take the river for it and you are back in the real old Alokau of AVetere’s and Joshua Jones’ era. Four of us—two pakehas and two Maoris—once took a canoe right up from the sea to the head of navigation near Totoro, and in tho four days’ inland voyage we had more than a taste of tho savage, untrimmed old Mokau. The Mokau, ns wo found, was still almost whoily In its wild state so far as the navigation and the forest surroundings were concerned. There were only two breaks in the vast and glorious bush that walled the river in and that stretched its green arms over our heads until in many a narrow run they met in a riotous tangle of foliage—ft solitary deserted sawmill a few miles up the amber-coloured winding waterway, and a dingy’ little coalmine settlement twenty miles from the sea. At that coalmine wo saw a Maorified old white man with a curious story. He had lived with the Natives since the mid-’sixties, and had seen many a strange happening,in this heart of theKingite country. Then On we toiled, into waters where never a steamer had floated—up and over our first rapid, where one of our poles slipped as we were laboriously working up over the snag-made fall of water, and wo came flying' down the “taheke” again stern first. “ALL MOKAU JONES.” Between the rapids—they occurred about every half-mile—we steadily plunged our paddles, with big Hnuraki sitting placidly right astern with his steering paddle. Between times he told legends of the river—now and again contradicted by dour Piko. tho bow paddle—explained place-names, and talked about “Alokau” Jones, i “Whose land is this?” one of ns pakehas would ask. taking .occasion for a brief spoil from the shoulder-aching task, of helping to drive tho heavy 30foot river canoe upstream, and waving a paddle vaguely along the lofty forested banks!

“Oh. all Alokau Jones’, I think,” Hauraki would say. “Everywhere Alokau'Jones’, perhaps, but ho can’t get it from tho lawyers. Too many lawyers —too much for Alokau Jones!” “Aye,” . Piko would break his warrior silence to echo; “too many lawyers, too much Gov.’mint; Alokau Jones he go lose, my word!” A kind of chivalrous sympathy for Mr. Jones, and a corresponding antipathy for the Law and its devious ways seemed to be general along the Alokau.