Thousands Lived on Wanganui River

Te Ao Hou, June 1962, Page 44

Taketake, a chief who lived at Atene and Koriniti. Thousands Lived on Wanganui River In the beginning, all the mountains in the North Island lived peacefully together in the centre of the island, until a time came when they began to quarrel. In one of these quarrels Taranaki, which is known now as Mt Egmont, attempted to carry off the mountain Pihanga, the wife of the mountain Tongariro. He was defeated in battle by Tongariro, and fled in the night, his weight dragging in the earth a deep furrow which became the Wanganui (or Whanganui) River. Later, the great navigator Kupe is said to have stayed at the river for a time, and then came the canoe Aotea, with its captain Turi. The people of this canoe intermarried with tribes already there, and it is mostly from them that the tribes of Wanganui trace their descent. It was soon after the coming of the Aotea that the taniwha Tutae-poroporo lived; his story is told on page three of this issue of Te Ao Hou. There used to be many other taniwha as well; every pa had one, and many of them were tame. But it is said that most of them were frightened away when the pakeha steam-boats came to the river at the end of last century. There used to be thousands of people living along the river, in places where only hundreds, or none at all, live now. There were pas on every important hill, with the river as the road between them. The river was full of eels and fish, and the up-river people would often paddle down to the coast in summer to fish and garden. There were great slopes of kumara plantations high up the river, too, for it is very sunny there, and protected from frost. As in so many other places in New Zealand, when you go there you are shown hill-sides covered with scrub and bush, and told, ‘the old people used to have kumaras all the way up those hills once. But nothing grows there now’. There were a great many battles on the Wanganui, but until the pakehas came the people were fairly well protected, because they could always

Tamarere, a chief who lived at Tawhitinui and Hiruharama. escape into the rugged country inland from the river. Their first encounter with pakeha weapons was in 1819, when Nga Puhi came with muskets. As Nga Puhi, under the chief Tuwhare, advanced up the river, many of the Wanganui warriors closed in at their rear, attempting to cut them off. ‘But,’ an old man said many years later, ‘what was that to Tuwhare? He cleared a path for his party by the terror of his guns. When we heard the sound of those guns we thought they were pu-tatara [trumpets], and our old men said, “does this man think to conquer Ngati Hau with his war-trumpets? Are the descendants of Ao-kehu, Haupipi and Pae-rangi flying from a sound?” So said our warriors: but when we saw our men falling dead around us, struck from far off by an invisible missile, then the knowledge came to us that this was the new weapon of which we had heard, and we saw that our weapons were of little avail against the pu-mata, the muskets. Still we resisted the advance of Nga Puhi, and attacked them whenever the opportunity offered’. In 1840 Colonel Wakefield visited Wanganui, and bought large areas of land in return for goods such as firearms, blankets, red nightcaps, lead slates, beads, razors, pocket handkerchiefs, shirts, umbrellas, and fish hooks. A further payment of money was made some years later as compensation for this. An Anglican mission was established at Putiki, and a Roman Catholic one up the river; flourishing orchards were planted, and the pas there had new names: Jerusalem (Hiruharama), London (Ranana), Corinth (Koriniti), Athens (Atne), and so on. Then, in 1864, the Hau-haus came down the river, paddling through the great gorge below Taumarunui, where the high cliffs go straight up from the water, and the river flows very slow and deep—travelling to attack the pakehas in the new town at the mouth of the river. They were defeated by the Wanganui Maoris at Motua Island, at Ranana; this was the last battle to take place on the river. They were led by Major Kemp (Keepa Rangi-hiwi-nui). This occurred at the same place as the old soldiers' meeting described on pages 36 and 37 of this issue of Te Ao Hou. Down by the river, a few hundred yards away from the modern hall at Ranana, Major Kemp's old carved meeting-house is still standing. The two chiefs who are shown above were photographed in the 1880s.