Tragedy of the Forests

Forest and Bird, Issue 91, 1 February 1949, Page 10

Tragedy of the Forests

Tree-Love: Maori and Pakeha Versions

By

“AOTEAROA”

A LITTLE over half a century ago the forested north-east shoulder of the North Island of New Zealand was unroaded. From Waikaremoana to the East Cape the Huiarau range stood remote in its forested grandeur; the Urewera was a primitive, almost primeval, tract; the sacred mountain, Maungapohatu, was unvisited by whites, feared by Maoris. From the Huiarau highlands rivers—then all surrounded with waterflow-regulatiing bush—ran down to the Bay of Plenty on one side, and to Poverty Bay and the East Coast bays on the other. Between Gisborne and Opotiki, via the coast, many (perhaps most) of the rivers were unbridged. Early in the century the writer had to hire a Maori guide, with two Maori ponies, in order to ride from Te Whaiti (on the Whirinaki tributary of the Rangitaiki) to Waikaremoana by Maori tracks. The travelling time taken over this portion of the Huiarau was two days, with a night camp on top of the range. Maori life then was almost unspoiled. Pigeons, kakas and tuis were abundant.

ELSDON BEST’S UREWERA

From the Whirinaki watershed the track passed to the upper Whakatane and then on to the streams running to Lake Waikare, where the Government accommodation house had not long been built. Elsdon Best had just published his excellent story-guides to Waikaremoana. The tourist traffic would follow the promised road, and hydro-electric power would come in its turn, even then envisaged by engineers. ' A few years later, but well within the first decade of this century, the same trip was made on foot; but reversely, that is to say, from Waikaremoana to Te Whaiti, Murupara (then generally known as Galatea), Waiotapu and Rotorua. From Murupara to Waiotapu the unmetalled pumice road passed across the Kaingaroa Plains, then almost treeless, but today carrying one of the most closely packed exotic (man-planted) forests in the world. Over the Maori tracks between the open Rangitaiki- Whirinaki country and the Waikare-moana-East Coast open country, a guerilla warfare was carried on in the ’sixties and ’seventies between Te Kooti’s Maoris bn th? one

side, and on the other side white forces aided by the. Arawa native allies under Captain Gilbert Mair, whose memorial is in the Ohinemutu churchyard (see “Camp-fire at Te Tapiri,” in the late James Cowan’s “Tales of the Maori Bush”).

SOME OF THE BIRDS

No bird attracted more attention in the Urewera in those days than the North Island kaka. A detailed description of the colours and shades of colour of any bird as wonderful as the kaka belong to a text-book, not to a story of bird-beauty. Kaka colours are indescribable, but the greatest moment of all was when the bird took flight, and the colours suddenly revealed by the upraised wing flashed through the green forest trees. That was a great moment, quite distinct from what one felt as he watched the bird step parrot-like along a branch digging into the wood with its incisive bill. For a while kakas were snared or otherwise killed in the Urewera forest by the thousand, by Maoris, including Rua’s Maoris. Their one-time plenitude made the arts of Maori fowling profitable. From crown to tail the native pigeon represented a great length of bird — tail far below a branch, and the head far above, and in between the wonderful white shirt-front of kereru. Yet if the bird sat quiet you could stare into the tree and not see it. Seven in a tree was nothing unusual.

The kaka and the pigeon and the well-known tui (has his song deteriorated in modern times?) all let you observe them, and in those days were certain to attend your walks; but, then and now, to clearly observe the long-tailed cuckoo, koekoea, was a most difficult thing. This fair-sized visitor’s call was sometimes heard. The writer has yet to hear anyone describe that call faithfully, and he will not' attempt to represent it in words, believing that to be impossible. But it is one of the most elusive, mystical calls of the bush, for the bird seems to be a ventriloquist, and the call apparently comes from anywhere and everywhere. Only once was the long-tailed cuckoo clearly seen. The other cuckoo, pipiwarauroa,

on bush outskirts, would sit for his photograph if you were quieta wonderful vision of barred under-surface topped with a bronze-green.

ENTER THE SMALL RIFLE

With the twentieth century visitors to the Urewera came the .22 calibre rifle, ruthless enemy of wild life. On his second trip over the divide the writer saw a young Maori fire at a pigeon in the breeding season. The bird flew off (as often happens when struck, by a .22 calibre bullet) and may have crashed and died far beyond reach. When this incident was mentioned to Elsdon Best, he deplored the indiscipline that was spreading among the Maoris, and said that in older (an even in recent) times bird-taking by the Maoris was regulated, and reinforced by the tapu. One reads in Volume I of his book “The Maori”: “Tapu pertained to the forests, and, prior to the opening of the bird-snaring season, such tapu was lifted by an adept.” Tapu belonged to the nineteenth century; the twentieth century replaced it with gunpowder, and small arms, and the motor car.

ANIMATISM*

Heathendom must be given its due; and one must admit that the decay of tapu and of animatism, with all their paganism, is entitled to a few tears. For instance, a Christian can feel a real companionship in treesthough our deforestation record in New Zealand seems to deny the factbut can a Christian give trees personality and regard the needless spilling of their sap as approaching the spilling of blood? Let us glance at Elsdon Best’s account of how “the old-time Maori,” being imbued with the doctrine of the anima mundi, looked upon the trees of the forest, even when he entered the forest with timber-hunger. Having been begotten, equally with the trees, from the god Tane, “when the Maori entered the forest he felt that he was among his own kindred, for had not trees and man a common origin, both being the offspring of Tane? Hence the Maori in the forest was among his own folk, as it were; and that forest possessed a tapu life principle even as man does. Thus, when the Maori wished to fell a tree from which to fashion a canoe or house timbers, for two reasons he was compelled to perform a placatory rite ere he could slay one of the

offspring of Tane. In the majestic trees he saw living creatures of an elder branch of the great family; he felt the strange, old-world influences that spring from a belief in animatism; he heard the voices of unseen beings in the rustling of branches, in whispering winds, in the sound of rushing waters.” The naturelover today also hears these voices, but without the aid of animatism, which Best regarded as “The attribution of life and personality to things,” but not the attribution to things of “a separate or apparitional soul.”

“WHERE ANGELS FEAR, FOOLS . .

Animatism clearly is not compatible with commercial timber-cutting. Even a surviving ember of animatism in a man would cause him to marvel at the impudence with which he fells a kauri tree a thousand years old, or even the rimus aged 400-600 years, which are still being cut down to approaching extinction. It is to be hoped that we moderns are all good Christians. We are certainly not animatists, not even bad animatists.

BIRD-TREE CO-OPERATION

Tane is father of birds as well as trees. Parauri is the wife by whom Tane begot the bellbird, the native crow, and the tui. These birds nearly died in infancy because the right food could not be found for them. They were related to miro and maire through the common paternity of Tane, and these trees’ berries turned out to be the food which the birds needed. Thus the birds of the forest, says the legend, “acquired a permanent food supply.” In gratitude, the birds disseminated the treeseeds and helped the seed-carrying winds to extend the forested area.

It is said that the Maori found New Zealand, up to the natural bushline, one great forest. Volcanic eruptions covered millions of acres with pumiceous matter, under which the charred totara trunks are still found. But what volcanoes destroyed is nothing to what the white man has destroyed. The happy partnership of bird of forest has been brought close to its end. Their cousinship in the Tane genealogy cannot survive steel and fire and introduced enemies. They have fallen before an age which knows not animatism. Before an age in which culture is preached but not practised.

HAKUTURI REFORESTATION

Thus in the olden days the trees were protected by a living personality, but not a

separate apparitional soul. Trees were also protected by forest elves called the Hakuturi. “The Hakuturi folk re-erected the tree felled by Rata because he had not placated the forest deities ere felling it.” In the last hundred years hundreds of thousands of trees have been felled quite without ritual, and the Hakuturi are at least a century behind their job.

Man and the tree belong so close to each other, it is natural (though not practical) to correlate the berries of the tree with inhabitants of the human head. Thus: “Rehua seems to have represented forests or trees. Birds are said to have eaten the parasites of the head of Rehua; such parasites, we are told, were the berries of trees.” Laments Elsdon Best: In these days “the forest of Tane has largely disappeared, torn from the breast of Papa the Earth Mother by an intrusive and utilitarian people.”

Maori tribalism was a check upon trespass on a tribe’s forests by unauthorised persons of another tribe. “Many such trespassers have been slain.” The tameness of native birds when the white man came to New Zealand seems to throw light on the Maoris’ care for bird survival, and on the silent nature of their bird-taking (snares, spears, etc.) in the absence of gunpowder. “Old fowlers have told me (Best) that, when attending snares at a creek, they have occasionally had pigeons settle on their shoulders. The pigeon was one of the least shy in the days when the shotgun was little used, or not at all.” By covering creeks with thick branches, but leaving access points set with snares, the Maori snared thirsty birds. Sometimes water was put in wooden troughs erected in the trees, and there the birds, thirsty with berry-eating, again met the Maori fowler’s snares. The spear could also be used from platforms in trees. A wooden spear might be 30 feet long.

EVEN WHALES KNOW EROSION

it is a far cry from the .Urewera of the nineteeth century to the man-made erosion of today. Man-made erosion is seen at its best (or worst) on the Waioeka Gorge road between Opotiki and Gisborne. Futile attempts to make farms in this gorge serve to underline the evils of deforestation and the madness of trying to grass steep slopes. The autumn of 1948 brought record floods to the lowlands on both sides of Hurarua range, to Gisborne on Poverty Bay, also to Opotiki and other Bay of Plenty townships. The hinterland of Poverty Bay and. other bays has special mass movements of earth peculiar to the district. These were probably in slow motion before the white man, but he has been an accelerating agent. Cumberland (“Soil Erosion in New Zealand”) states, with fair reservations, the case concerning man-made erosion. And it is a convincing case. “Natural movement,” writes Cumberland, “was not sufficiently rapid and disruptive widely to disturb the indigenous bush cover.” With fire and steel man more effectively disturbed it. After him, the deluge. Of course, the north-east shoulder of the North Island has no monopoly either of deforestation or erosion. The daily Press even announces that the Tory Channel • whalers in August— for the first timewere hindered in their search for whales through “flooded rivers again discolouring the waters of Cook Strait.” It may be remembered that a generation ago Cook Strait navigation was rendered temporarily impossible by smoke from the great Raetihi bush fires. The smoke disappeared soon, but erosion in the denuded headwaters of the Wanganui and other streams in the fire area goes steadily on. Cook Strait feels it still; and if, as the daily Press suggests, the whales have benefited, they surely are the only beneficiaries.

The Forest and Bird Protection Society of N.Z. (Inc.), invites all those who have respect for our wonderful and unique native birds, all those who realise the great economic and aesthetic value of birds, all those who wish to preserve our unrivalled scenic beauties, to band together with the Society in an earnest endeavour fully to awaken public interest and secure efficient preservation, conservation, and intelligent utilisation of our great heritage. The subscriptions are—Life members —Endowment members £l, Ordinary members 7/6, . Children 2/6, per annum. Endowment members comprise those who desire to contribute in a more helpful manner towards the preservation of our birds and forests. Besides this, we ask for your co-operation in assisting to conserve your own heritage. Is it not worth while? This Magazine is issued quarterly to all subscribers without further charge.

* Elsdon Best’s word animalism is used in the above outline of his observations in “The Maori.” Fowler in “The Concise Oxford Dictionary” spells the word animism.