TAUPO - NUI - A - TIA

Taupo Times, Volume I, Issue 42, 29 October 1952, Page 7

TAUPO - NUI - A - TIA

TALES OF THE TAUPO ! COUNTRY Tauhara MoUntain, five miles east o£" Taupo town, is the outstanding feature of the whole northern Taupo area, and rises sorne eighteen hundred feet from the surrounding plain to a height of 3603 feet above sea level. By the pakeha it is often referred to loeally as marking the very centre of the North Island, while to the oider M^ori people it brings memories of their ancestors, such as Ngatoroirangi, high priest of the Arawa, whd in his explorations clirribed to the summit. He it was who from there hurled into the Lake severn! totara, trees, of which one may be seen to this day standing up in the Lake close to the end of the main street of Taupo township, the log known as Nukuhau, "Moving in the Wind." The name of Tauhara oe~ curs in ancient songs and stories, and one that is still known to the older people is a lament for Te Heuheu the Great, which begins "See you ftrst beams of day, They gieam upon the peak of Tauhara, Perhaps in those bright rays , My chieftain comes again."

Voleanic moimtains are numerous in the Rotorua-Taupo volcanic zone, but only a few of them show the typical conical form with a crater. Most of them are rounded domes, formed from rhyolite which has been forced upward into this shape without a crater, but a few, such as Tauhara, formed of less acid lavas, have built up the usual more or less symmetrical cones. Aprominent bench or shelf at about 3000 feet on the north-west of Tauhara, matched by shoulders on the adjacent flanks, may indicate that the mountain was built n two stages. The first phase was possibly the welling-up of tfce domeshaped hill of Te Hue, on the left of the mountain as seen from Taupo, following which the main cone was built up to the south-east, enveloping part of the dome. The small cones to the south-east, and that of Hipaua, on the north-east, are parasitic cones. rThe bush which covers the higher porfion of the mountain obscures the crater to some extent, but aerial mapping photographs takou in recent years show the circular crater rim plainly. \

In olden days the bush came low on the slopes, and was in the appropriate season alive with birds, as were the other forests in the Taupo Country. There was a pa 011 Te Hue, and another on the lower sqUaretopped hill known as Tau-waenga, * While another viilage was known as ,Te Morere. The soil of the mountain was more fertile than that of the pumice plains and grew good crops. A most valuable thing to the people who lived on the mountain was the water which wells up in the crater, and forms a small stream which flows down the gully along the eastern side of which runs the track from tlie Napier Road to the summit. This stream runs alongside the mountain track just inside the p^e^ent fringe of the bush, but lower down it disappears into the ground. In Maori phraseology, "I ngaro i te whenua," it is lost in the earth. One or two early writers have stated that the warm Onekeneke Stream, which enters the lake at Waipahihi, r'ises in the ■ crater of Tauhara, but this is not so.

As recently as twenty odcl years ago I saw on the summit of Te Hue, at the edge of the bush, a fine crop of potatoes grown there by the late Tukairangi Mohi, almost certainly the last occasion on which the ancient custom of cultivation on the mountain j had been followed. In addltion to j cultivations the trapping and snaring of birds in the bush on Tauhara was followed in the season, including that of the koko, as the Taup ^ people called the tui, that "manu-rangatira" of chief-like bird. From the summit ridge, bare of ibush, a magnihcent view rewards ■those who climb the track from near

| the hve-rnile peg 011 the Napier Road. From here in olden days the local people could see any movements by day on the plains below, and their name from this vantage point was Matairangi, a name combining the ideas of "gazing upon" or "keeping watch," and "sky." It is the place which provides "wide wandering to the greediest eye/s