Pioneers Of The Pumice

Te Ao Hou, March 1963, Page 44

Pioneers Of The Pumice Photographs and text by Ross Annabell At the foot of the craggy Horohoro bluffs, 10 miles south-west of Rotorua, there nestles the homesteads and meeting-houses, the haybarns and cowsheds of the first Maori land settlement scheme to pioneer the pumice country. The Horohoro Bluffs rise abruptly as a giddy, 500 foot high escarpment to form the rugged bushclad plateau that runs back to the Mamaku Range. At the foot of these bluffs the land is gently contoured, but in the twenties the hummocky plains were deep in fern and stunted manuka. Horohoro's three ancient settlements, summer homes of the kumara-planting Ngati-Tuara, were deserted, overgrown, and tumbledown. The tribal meeting-house ‘Kearoa’, built in 1888, was shifted in 1922 to Rotorua, whence most of the tribe had gone after a gum-digging exodus earlier in the century.