First Instalment

Te Ao Hou, September 1959, Page 11

First Instalment Among the women of our race there is not a more captivating, romantic and talented figure in the colonial history of New Zealand than the poetess Rihi Puhiwahine Te Rangihirawea. She knew personally most of the notable chiefs and leading women among the tribes of her eventful and colourful times—when tribes still fought their wars of revenge and conquest; when whalers, adventurers, missionaries, traders and colonisers of the Pakeha race found the country to their liking and began settling in Aotearoa; ‘when the patu opposed the sword and gun’, as the poetess herself has described the wars against the Pakeha; when some of the greatest poets of the race were in their prime; and, inspired by the exciting events which followed one upon the other in rapid succession, they composed and sang their songs of love and hate, and of peace and war—and Puhiwahine was among the most colourful of them all. Her birthplace was on the left bank of the Taringamotu stream opposite the now abandoned pa of Petania. She died at Ongarue on the 18th of February 1906, and was buried in the Ngati-Raerae cemetery at the northern end of the township. In 1944, following the construction of the main road alongside the cemetery, her remains were removed and brought to Oruaiwi in the Taringamotu valley, fifteen miles from Taumarunui by the Waituhi Road. At the junction of this road with the Pungapunga Valley Road is the little family cemetery called Te Takapu-tiraha, the last resting-place of Puhiwhine. The names, Oruaiwi (The Place of the Two Tribes) and Te Takapu-tiraha-o-Tutetawha (The Place where Tutetawha lay face upwards)—to give it its full name—commemorate an important pact between famous ancestors; Te Kanawa of the Maniapoto tribe, and Tutetawha of the Tuwharetoa. Puhiwahine was descended from both these ancestors and on this account, and because the cemetery is only three or four miles up-stream from her birthplace, no more fitting spot in the Maori mind could have been chosen for her last resting-place: ‘on the couch from which there is no rising, and on the pillow that slips not.’