Aotearoa--Land of Magnificent Rivers

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 786, 5 October 1929, Page 21

Aotearoa--Land of Magnificent Rivers

Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiifiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiii cWritten for THE SUN by T. WALSH) “There is a mist-moistened land in f ar away ocean region.''—Fragment from the narrative of Kupe, the Eastern Polynesian voyager to Neyp Zealand describing his discovery of this land.' in the 12th century. HE Polynesian voyay j gers who cruised 6 ' southward in I i Kupe's wake were 1 | impressed by the SjfpH|§s=g| j | appearance of this £sgßsgS§j| | j mist - moistened j | land as they api£-—■ ~ proached it, after having fearlessly crossed the great Ocean of Kiwa and Braved southern seas above which circled strange birds. They christened it Aotearoa —the long cloud batik. Gleaming white and billowy on sunlit heights and fixed in the heavens, it was a welcome sight to their eyes, wearily looking for newer land. The name of the symbol was therefore applied to the object.

band of Running Waters

Mist-moistened New Zealand will be, so long as the Pacific laps its island shores and because it is mist-moi3tened the snow will glisten on its mountain lops in white stillness, and rills will trickle from the icefields on high, and through the rain-forests rippling down

the valleys until —grown strong—they leap onward, and ever downward as rivers rushing to lose themselves in the oceans from which the mists arose. Tor New Zealand is a land of running waters. Waitakerei—the euphonious appellation of the wooded range that Js held in affection by all Aucklanders, signifies "the place of the music of trickling waters.” It typifies the Dominion. Silvered Surfaces The volume of water that hourly pours into the sea from all our rivers *uust be enormous —all of it draining away the mists and rains in this Land of the Sea. The average discharge of the Waikato is 800,000 cubic feet a minute; that of the Northern Wairoa 250,000; the Wanganui, 500,000; the Clutha, 2,000,000; and the Buller, 1,000,000. These are but a few of our 75 important streams. And the length of silvery surfaces that extend back to the mountains, winding and twisting through plain and upland, is measured by thousands of miles. Twenty-five of the longest rivers in the North Island have a total length of 2,000 miles while 49 in the South Island have a combined length of 3,100 miles ■ —a grand aggregate of 5.000 miles, equal to nearly one-fifth of the world's circumference; vet they flow In but a fragment of land in the South Pacific. Geology s Story of Change North, south, east and west run the streams. Most of them have run in other directions. Primal forces have changed the face of the land. Such changes have been frequent in geological time. At times the sea level risen; at other times laud has Bunk or been elevated. We have sunken rivers. The drowned terminal °f the Northern Wairoa forms the Kaipara Harbour. The Hokianga, with * ts 20 mile estuary, has been

All the photographs on th is Page have been supplied by courtesy of the Government Publicity Office.

“drowned” also. Restless subterranean forces have thrown up ridges; ponding back streams to form lakes. Mountain ranges have been riven asunder, and rivers race through the hearts of rocky barriers, their erstwhile courses becoming dry land, as in the Manawatu. The tilting of the land about Cook Strait has affected,

and will continue to affect., the fall of the waters from the long mountain rib that extends from the Strait to the Bay of Plenty. Waikato Lord of All The Waikato, Wanganui and Mokau are North Island rivers of notable scenic beauty and all are navigable. Waikato, the longest and most lordly of our streams, springs to life on the fire-born rocky flanks of Mt. Ruapehu. It dashes, a lusty river into Lake Taupo that gigantic, stone-ringed

goblet, 1,200 feet high, in the centre of the island. Hurrying out, at the opposite side of the lake, it sweeps in a vast half-circle to fall over stonv stairs at Aratiatia and Huka, only' to he pent up by the man-made barrage of cement at Arapuni (Maori, gorget. For ages untold it fought and struggled to widen the

' narrow gap of Arapuni, into which it I’had been trapped by a subtle earthmovement. • Before that, it had cut canyons through the far spread pumice blanket tossed out of the Taupo crater; had swirled this way and that, carrying and spreading out the debris to form the floor of the Waikato valley. Historically, the name Waikato (“the stream that

.Mercer, have beds 10 or 11 feet below sea level. Mokau s Glory The Mokau has etched a deep groove through limestone beds that were laid clown in times when the salt waters washed over that piece of our lands. The river has cut through geological history and revealed an easily-read story of the ages with its entombed whales, sharks and marine creatures. Its banks, towering upward, are clad with feathered pungas and pronged nikaus, and all the glory of our low-

| land forests—a picture designed by Nature in her most fanciful mood. i World-Famous Wanganui The world-famous Wanganui gathers , j several streams that meander across I the Waimarino Plains, forming one

discharge sluice looping, twisting and cataracting over rocky ledges in a trench-like course eaten deep into the lands that stretch in a long slope to the coast. The trench walls are essentially North Island in their bush grandeur, with Maori villages in the dips, and the relics of old-time fortresses on the high papa cliffs. Rivers Obey Man The rivers flowing into the Bay of Plenty include the Whakatane, the Rangitaiki and the Tarawera, which traverse 90,000 acres of drained swamp that has been made up of detritus and sea mud, filling a vast semi-circular depression, known as the Whakatane fault. The Rangitaiki and Tarawera rivers wandered at will through the swamp until in 1910 it was decided that they must obey man’s eds and where the two met to form

a combined outlet, one branch of which ran to the sea at Matata and the other at Whakataue, far-visioned engineers cut new channels for them and guided the seething streams to the sea. The Tarawera has another peculiarity. Its bed was raised several feet by mud brought down through centuries. When the swamp lands were drained, and the land, being dewatered, gradually sank to a permanent level, the Tarawera was left with its self-built banks and bed some feet above the surrounding country. A cheese factory nearby obtains a water-

j supply by the simple device of driving | a supply pipe into the elevated river I Hume. Tumbling Cascades Beyond the East Cape is the Waikaretaheke, which tumbles in a series of ! cascades from the 1,000 feet high exit

of Lake Waikaremona, and is now being harnessed to generate electric energy. Farther south the Wairoa has laboriously, during extended time, moved down huge deposits of gravel and shingle, spreading them out to form flats. Ice-Born Waters The rivers of the South Island are unlike the northern rivers. The North Island streams are practically all rain fed. The South Island rivers flood in summer when the snow’ melts, while at that time of the year the North Island rivers are drying up. Excepting the streams that run into Cook Strait, and in the more northern portion of the island, the South Island rivers are ice-born. The Southern Alps, thrust diagonally across the island, rise to a height that is sufficient to hold hack the westerly prevailing winds that,

moisture-laden, roll in from the Tasman. The mountains anchor the mists to ice and snow. Curiously the snow line on the east side of the Alps is 600700 feet lower than on the west side. The imprisoned and entrapped mists slide down the mountain heights as glaciers and avalanches; melting into icy-cold trickles and bands of crystal across the alpine meadow lands that separate the snow* fields from the lower down scrub land. Remarkably uniform, too, are these ice-born rivers in their infancy. Silver-blue they reflect the sunlight in wide shinglefloored valleys, whose often perpendicular sides are veneered -with dense bush which faded away into the perpetual snow fields far above. The valleys are relics of glacier action, when the solid rock of the mountain masses was gouged out. In remote ages, New Zealand was a type of Antarctic waste —quite possibly a polar region when the earth’s axis leaned at an angle different from the present one. The ice blanket was thousands

| of feet thick and only the tops of the j highest mountains? were bared to the t blizzards that, swirled over the icy • plains. Changes in the temperatures j caused the ice-cap to recede and the j glaciers, during unnumbered millen- | iums, bit away the mountain sides. I depositing gigantic moraines and ! drifts. The glaciers have not quite ] vanished: their pigmy progeny still exist in the valley heads and the rivers born of these ice-parents are walled back by the moraines and drifts to form lakes and ponds that overflow in bubbling, gurgling torrents gushing over stones and terraces to the plains below carrying drift matter and building up the plains. Canterbury plains country has river deposits 1,000 i feet thick. , ! On the Westland side of the Alps | this formation of the rivers may be ' followed and studied more readily, j since the fall to the sea is shorter and

more precipitous. The valleys, framed in forest-clad, rock, form gorges in the foothills, and the glacier-fed streams become torrents issuing into V-shaped valleys, over the boulder floors of which the waters wander aimlessly in winter, but, swollen and insolent in summer, rush headlong to the ocean. World’s Greatest Ice-River

Westland is famous for the finest and biggest ice-river in the world—the Franz Josef glacier. Direct descendant of the monster ice-rivers of prehistoric times it is half a mile wide and reaches from snow line to the sea level, so that the least energetic

tourist may view it in comfort, and admire its ice terraces and minarets while standing beside the hot spring that exists at its terminal wall. It stretches a . glimmering white band into the descending forest green, a ribbon of white reaching to the clouds. It is one of our Dominion’s most beautiful assets.

Streams With Golden Beds

111 Otago the biggest river is the Clutha (so named from the Gaelic word for river), and encircling Inch Clutha (the isle of the Clutha). Its tributaries reach back to the Haast Pass and Mt. Aspiring. Down its

channel run the amassed waters of Lakes Wakatipu, Wanaka and Hawea. In point of volume of discharge it is three times the size of the Waikato. It shares with the Westland rivers the honour of being gold-bearing, flowing through deposits of glden alluvia! drift. In far distant primeval days the gold bearing strata in the mountain ranges were pulverised, as thoroughly as in a stamper mill, by the relentless glaciers. Crushed, frozen, carried down with infinitely remorseless determination, the rock detritus and gold fragments were released into the grasp of the gleeful mountain torrents and scattered over the wide valley beds, each rivulet a huge natural sluice. The gold was caught in the eddies ol the creeks, stranded behind bends in the rivers, stored in the crevices of the rocks. The Maoris knew that the yellow metal existed along the banks of these streams, but knew nothing or its value. Wandering by the Pomhaka river a Maori picked up a lump of gold the size of a potato, and his curiosity satiated threw it into the stream to see the big splash it would make when it hit the water. Stories of his action, carried to European ears, set alight a fierce desire to reap the harvest of the sands: townships sprang up over the weekend, and streams of gold began to pour into Dunedin, then an infant city. In August, ISG2, two prospectors came in to Dunstan from a secret working in the hills. They carried a bag of gold weighing S 7 pounds. Before the end of the year, more than 70,000 ounces of the precious metal had been despatched from the same district. The gold boom has faded away hut the rivers of Central Otago like the rivers of South Canterbury—wind through the countryside, irrigating broad acres, creating new wealth by causing arid lauds to smile in verdure.

THE ANGLER’S PARADISE—Trout fishing near the Waihaha Falls, Ixike • Taupo. One Canterbury irrigation scheme has constructed over 2,000 miles of channels. The Canoe Ways In the days before the pakelia the rivers were the main highways of the Maori travellers. Lusty paddlers forced canoes upstream, the while they chanted their canoe sosigs. The Waikato was the most famous of these highways. Travellers from the East Coast and Hauraki Gulf converged ou the Tamaki River. The canoes were often transferred across to the Manukau whence the journey would be continued to Waiuku, where the narrow strip of land was crossed and the river followed to Cambridge, or to Pirongia. From here the overland route led to Kawh'a and Taranaki beThe Wanganui and the Northern Wairoa, along with the Waikato, still serve the white man for navigation as they did the Maori. Others of the rivers lend their aid for transport ing commerce, too, or in ministering to aesthetic needs of pleasure seekers.