Early Memories of Gum-Digging

Te Ao Hou, March 1966, Page 5

Early Memories of Gum-Digging Born in 1895 at Waahi Pa, Bill is the second son of Kohi Takaro of Ngati Te Ata of Waikato, and Erana Kershaw of Ngati Ruanui of Taranaki. He has early memories of the fun, and the hard work, of the periodical gum-digging expeditions on which his parents took him and his six brothers and sisters. He well remembers the two packhorses on which his parents used to transport all their equipment and camping gear. They would pitch their camp in the marshy gumlands at the back of Puketapu below Waahi Pa, and often, as an added comfort for their week's stay, they would put up a nikau parau (shelter). This done, Takoro and Erana would leave the older children to cook the family meal in a camp oven while they speared and dug around in the vicinity for the kauri gum nuggets that added to their livelihood. ‘At night,’ Bill recalls, ‘we used to help Mum and Dad to clean, scrape and sort the gum, which was sold later to the storekeeper at Huntly, who was also the gum buyer.’ He added, laughing, ‘I remember one particular night when we kids made a big thick bed of fern beside a hole full of hot embers. We had two blankets, one for under us and one on top. After playing around for a while we drifted off to sleep under the starry sky. Somehow during the night we rolled, bed and all, over our open-air heater. We woke up with a start, stampeding out of bed — our prized blankets were scorched and burning!