A HIDING PLACE OF TE RAUPARAHA’S

Hokitika Guardian, 6 March 1930, Page 8

A HIDING PLACE OF TE RAUPARAHA’S

(By 1906.)

“iou follow along the beach at low water tor ;.uout a mile and a half, till you ionic to a place where the cliffs are overhanging. There you will find Liic whares up above the sea on a ledge of the cliffs, and nearly buried by the sand.”

• Such were, the directions given me by Malcolm Shera, a stalwart, hardbit pioneer, who, with his Maori wife and two children, unassisted by Governments or Banks, untrammelled by Land Boards, untroubled by Receivers practically cpt off from mankind, has for the last twelve years wrought with Nature, and found sustenance, and built a home in the lovely valley Nnkuhakari; the most inaccessible, but the richest and most fertile spot in all the wide mysterious King Country. The tide was still Half in, but, impatient oi delay I started on my quest. Sure enough, after a tiresome scrambh over huge boulders, and round waterworn papa fragments, I perceived upon rounding a point, that the cliffs towing above me were no longer' perpendicular, but suddenly leaned heavily outwards, massive and terrible. There too, eighty feet up from the sea. was a slanting ledge, the far end fallj ing away into the cliff while the end j nearer to where I stood widened out. gathering into a little round hillock crowned with ice plant, and descender somewhat abruptly to a level platforir of rock. This again dropped by a sheer fall of twelve or fourteen feet tr a roundish ledge, which fell away by an easy slope of eight or ten feet tr the level of the beach. The rocky platform which I have endeavoured to describe can be reached with easr when the tide is out, and I now remember my friend’s injunction tr wait till low water. Either I must scale the perpendicular face of rock, or wait a full two hours till the tide receded. A false step meant a fall backward, and possibly a broken neck. Somewhat dubiously I surveyed the wall, but a close examination showed me a number of water-worn grooves which promised a somewhat precarious foothold. Egged on by a native intolerance of delay, and also, perhaps bv a certain love of risk inherent in most New Zealanders, I flung my hook up in front of me, and clamering up to the lower ledge, and holding on, as the sayng is, by my eyebrows succeeded in working my way up foot by foot till I gained the top. My way now lay up a rather steep slope of blue clay, but a nearer view' of the ledge did not at all reassure me. For not only did it seen a wildly impossible place for any sane person to build a whare, but I could not see where the occupants could get their water Surely, I thought, the place must be further round. Still, to make sure, I ascended the slope, cutting my step s ' as I went, perfectly convinced that I was simply wasting time. This impression lasted a moment or two after reaching 'the top, when suddenly I perceived the object of my search.

One whare is more than half buried and all that remains to indicate the position of the other, is about a foot or so of totara post projecting above the surface. Though about ninety years old, this post is still sound, except where is eaten by insects, or “hcjneycombed” (Maori, tataraki). The framework of the other appears to have been built of kauri, puriri, an akeake, with purlins of kohekohe, and even of kawakawa. It is thatched with toe-toe, and lined inside, ven neartly with kakaho, the toe-toe stem.and though damp and brown with age the remains are in ‘a remarkably gooc state of preservatipn. The wall on the sea side has been crushed in; there is about four feet of wet, sandy de-, posite inside, and about three feet of the roof are still uncaptured by the ever-encroaching sand. Here the terrible Te Eauparaha, for once defeated concealed himself, with a small Following, from his foes. A splendid savage, crafty, resourceful, indomitable .treacherous, a conqueror and eader of men, this island Napoleon, or more than a quarter of a century, icourged the West Coast, and terrorsed its quaking inhabitants, from Cawhia harbour to Pencarrow Heads. what particular arrow of outragpuis fortune Te Rauparaha, or “Poiuller,” the white sailors called him ras compelled to seek seclusion on

this sea-girt cliff, this deponent knows not, but the locality is in keeping with the character of the man, and the accounts of his daring exploits. The coast is rocky and inhospitable, the surf breaks all day‘ on jagged rocks and huge boulders, and the surroundings are wild and rugged in the extreme. The only approach, is from the north, and then only at low water with safety. There is a view of the spur down which a war party would approach from the Waikato, and of a short section of thd beach along which a taua would travel. Three miles or so away rugged, bush-clad Moeatoa rises sheer out of the sea, massive -buttressed broad-shouldered; at its iron base the surf boils and thunders all day long. A stern and forbidding sea-hoard 1 sltretches away further northward, gradually, becoming more and more indistinct, but emerging from the haze to determine abruptly at Albatross Point, clear and straight like the bow of a man-o’-war. A mile out go sea is a fairly large reef of rock which the combers come curlingover, but never cover. Rund a projecting point to the south' a gull comes circling but catching sight of me swerves sudlenly, and with shrill cries disappears over-head.

The food of the refugees consisted probably of pawa, mussels, crawfish, crabs and fish, and, no doubt by occasional stealthy excursions into the hush, which fringes the sandy beach it Nnkuhakari, they would augment their scanty larder and vary their diet by a welcome kit of paratawhitei. Prom the cliff overhead there falls a tiny tricle of water. The name of one whare is Te Urunga-Paraoa, significant enough when I explain that it means “to use the greenstone mere (or hand-club) for a pillow!” The second whare is called Titi-Matarua.

From such a hardy, virile fighting stock are ye descended, ye earless happy brown-skins of these calm inglorious days.