The Rough Places Plain

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 8

The Rough Places Plain

by

LAWRENCE

CONSTABLE

N 1892 there died at Waiokura Pa in South Taranaki a tattooed old Maori chief, Hukanui Manaia, in whose veins flowed the blodd of the great chieftains of the north, Manaia had lived in stirring times. He remembered the advent of the pakeha, and the Bibles, bullets and influenza that accompanied him. He had seen the Maori wars and the savage Hauhau campaign of Titokowaru. And he remembered Taranaki as a forest. He had seen the white people chopping their bridle-paths . across it, and the smoke ‘over ‘thes, face of the mountain ‘whenever, new settlers fired the bush. enaia died;. but his name remained. _ the pake plain that was once a forest is: the township of Manaia, a sleepy, scattered farming community, scarcely more significant todey than it was seventy years ago. March was turning to April when I visited Manaia. It was a-windswept Sun‘day, and Egmont was fugitive in cloud. Straight as a die, three nmidcadam ‘roads converge on the town~ between’ breakwind hedges of boxthorn; from Hawera, from Opnake, from Kaponga. They &rfive in Manaia broadside on to the band rotunda, whose red patch of roof can be seen" Yrom a long way off. The rotunda® stands in the Octagon with the press of commerce around it. Manaia is the Octagon; and at four o'clock of a windswept Sunday it was a place without charm. Cows were browsing 6n the broad. green borders of Main Street. John "Mills was showing "Saturday Saturday" in Scott of the Antarctic. The

Post Office clock said two minutes to eleven. Once installed in one of the town’s three gaunt hotels, I. took a walk with my old Taranaki guidebook. It was published in 1935, reprinted 1941, ‘but I do not find that. perengig _ dates bt 4 : ¥ : ,e # Yt z a 4 7 "was: utes at its: best for either of them, Like many

another small town, Manaia seems to have been activated from time to time ‘by .a consciousness of its history, The alocal. swimming baths were erected ‘asa monument to the pioneer century in the ‘persons of two early settlers on "the rough places plain." A red granite obelisk in the Octagon commemorates those who died in the war-the Taranaki War of 1866-67. From the town I moved out a block or two into the suburbs, and found the local Domain. As I entered the gate a decrepit Maori in a football jersey came lurching out. "Gidday," he said. I gave it back to him, and he added: "Don’t look too good for the trots tomorrow, eh?" Clearly this particular de-

scendant of Hukanui Manaia had travelled a long way from his forbears. Y pocket guide told of a novel war -memorial, a ferro-concrete tower, "from ‘the top of which," the book promised, "can plainly be seen the watertower at Hawera." In search of this rewarding spectacle; I. clanked through the rusty turnstile on to the ground as many a stout Manaia fifteen would doubtless do in the season to come, and set about exploring the local twenty-. four acres. The memorial itoved difficult to find. The park gave place to a reserve where Nature was flourishing out of hand. A weedy brown stream floated amongst the overgrowth. The wind rocked in the

pinetops, shook every neglected shrub, fetched the breath, of the. Tasman to mingle with the fragrance of the pineneedles that lay deep underfoot. Almost by accident I came upon the tower, grey and penal-looking, in a wild little clearing that the townsfolk would seem to have forgotten. On this spot a garrison once mounted guard against attack by hostile Maoris, men three generations removed from the local football team. Protective earthworks still surround the place, and on either side stand the blockhouses of the original Manaia redoubt. The memorial itself is a concrete replica of the. wooden lookout tower of the ’eighties. For the rest, there is only the ebb of the wind, and a clearing as empty as hooligan laughter. Rustic seats have heen dismembered. and the pieces strewn about. An ancient field gun rests on its side in the long.grass. The gardens are desperate and unkept. As for the blockhouses, my guide-book says firmly, these have been put. in order by. a special grant from the government, Certainly they are well-enough preserved, One is used as-a toolshed, though some time seems to have passed since the things it contains came face to face with the gardens, Open blockhouse appears .to have been kept in the other; Jock Tulloch, of Hawera, was there in 1935, The west wall records the visit. of Margaret ‘Murphy during her Taranaki tour of 1946. And in 1943 Daphne Grey came all the way from Lepperton to make her mark four times, once on each wall. With penknife and pencil they have come, four "walls full of them, avid to set their names in the wood of the Maori War. I climbed the tower. I had not expected to see in Hawera’s water-tower, ten miles away, anything resembling the spires of Canterbury Cathedral, but when at length I reached the Manaia towertop there was nothing to see but the pines which have grown higher around it. The whole expanse of the Waimate Plains is excluded; and if a ghostly horde of Hauhaus came storming~ down from Te-Ngutu-o-te-Manu, Manaia redoubt would be all unawares. Y hotel was full of horsey péople who had ¢ome for the Hawera trots. After dinner that night they sat round a blazing fire in the Commercial Room and counted the odds of their art. Outside im the Octagon cold: gusts of wind came and rattled the windows, I left the company early and from the front doorway watched the moonlight driving across the empty pavements, glittering in the corrugations of the rotunda roof. Here and there lights were burning dimly im little box. churches, while the wind carried with it the sound of supplicant ‘choirs competing» one against the other. By moonlight ,the town had lost something of its desolation for an air of timelessness. The rows’ of shuttered shops wanted only the enlivening clatter of a coach and pair to fetch back ‘the past. As T went up to my room a -horsefaced woman emerged.from the bar, and with a shandy in one hand, waved me a gay goodnight with the other. "Off early, aren’t you, dear?" she said as she went back to worship in the Commercial Room. ~ I slept well in a bedréded with Sain ered paper peeling from the walls, and woke to broad sunlight. Manaia had (continued-on next page) e

(continued from previous page) taken on a new mood with a morning retrospective to high summer. We were leaving early, but I took time to. walk again in the grassy streets close to the town. There was a little more activity sevenish than there had been the day before. I was overtaken by a small ginger boy on a bike. He was throwing papers at Manaia’s fifteen state houses and whistling "The Old Piano-Roll Blues." Mr. Suter’s van rattled past full of milk churns. The driver (who knows, Mr. Suter himself perhaps), gave me a cheerful wave. It wasn’t far to the fields, open country nicely ruled by hedges of boxthorn. The road ran into the distance, falling gradual miles to the rich blye line of the sea. I turned back, and there, above it all, Egmont was asserting itself, crystalline in the sunlight. The man at the service station filled the tank. "A great day for the trots," he said. We agreed with him and drove out of town. If we were to believe the Post Office clock as we passed, the time was two minutes to eleven. |