TAUPO-NUI-A-TIA

Taupo Times, Volume II, Issue 56, 11 February 1953, Page 1

TAUPO-NUI-A-TIA

TALES OF THE TAUPO COUNTRY

(By

R.H.

W.)

When Lieutenant Meade, with his companions William Mair and Brenchley, arrived at O manui (January 5t;h., 1865) they were received with discharges of musketry and songs of weleome as they entered the gate of the pa, where they were entertained by the chief, Hohepa Tamamutu. Meade's notes are intereslting today, eighty-eight years after they were written, in the details they give of conditions of life in the Taupo country at th,at time. The pa was situated on the crest of a siuall hill, surrounded by a stockade consisting of a double row of slab-stake fencing, with flanking angles and lined with a chain of open a:? d covered rifle pits. The chiefs hcuse had rnany little signs of civilization, such as a standing bedstead, glass windows, neatly-matted floors, and on the table in his bedroom two glass tumblers full of flowerS. But rnany of the whares, which were of wood and roofed with totara bark, were built with most of the structure below ground level for warmth. The roofs were covered with a foot or more of earth and the only communication with the open air was through the narrow door. Meade's party spent the night, before proeeeding to Tap ua e-h aruni , as guests of Dr Hooper, whose whare was outside the pa. This pioneer doctor of the Taupo country had then been two years at Oruanui, prior to which ihe fiad been stationed at Orakau. The visit must have brought poignant memories to Mair. Dr Hooper's wife was half Maori, and she was a daughter of Hine-i-turama, ninth in direct descent from Hinemoa, a high chieftainess of the Arawa people, whose first husband had been Hans Tapsell, th.e trader of Maketu. With her second husband, a man named Ropata, Hine-i-turama had been in the Orakau Pa when it was besieged and taken by Imperial and colonial troops nine months before Mair's arrival with Meade at O ruanui i Mair had. been with the troops who had stormed the pa, and had found some regulars about to ■b&yonet a wounded woman, who had seraped away the light layer of earth covering her slain husband, weeping as she brushed the soil from his face for a last look at him. It was Hine-i-turama. Mair had beaten the nieft back with his carbine, carried the wounded woman to an angle and gone to attend to another wounded woman. When he returned Hine-i-turama had been bayoneted to death by some soldiers. Meade records that in addition to Dr Hooper there was a second white man living at Oruanui, but he does not give his surname, describing him as a pakeha-Maori named Frank, and stating that he was a first cousin by msarriage of Rewi Maniapoto, the fighting chief who had been the leader at Orakau. Altihough the defeat of the Kingite Maoris at OraWu had been the decisive battle of the Wraikato War, the Hau-hau campaign was still to come, and the uncertainty prevailing in tlie district was emphasised when Meade and his party rode into Te Poihipi's kainga of Tap ua e-h a;r uru , overlooking the Waikato Outlet, on the day following their visit to Oruanui. They found that Poihipi's people were binlding a pa of ambitious dfmensions, close to the kainga, "on the crest of a cliff overhanging the lake." The site of this - pa is on the pfoperty owned by the Misses Moody, a

little above the Taupo Wharf on the opposite side of the river. Despite these warlike pieparations, however, Meade and his party were unperturbed and for some fhree weeks remainecl at Taupo as weleome guests of Te PoihipL