James Cowan

“ It is not well to camp there even now, should you have Maori blood in your veins. The flax-clumps and the tauhinu bushes still murmur the name of Ngati-Mamoe, and though pakeha sheep have long grazed over the site of Tauhinu-korokio and pakeha voices make lively the mountain side, the soil holds the mysterious spell of the tapu. Maoris who have camped on the side of the track which goes over the hills there have spent a night of inexplicable discomfort, inexplicable, that is, but for the presence of the tapu and the unseen spirits of Maoridom. ”

“ Here and there a Maori tree, like our ribbonwood yonder, and a tattered clump of light bush in the gullies or on a rocky cliff-top, to remind us of the different setting when Rapaki was tumultuous with wild Maori life; when tattooed Ngai-Tahu were in fighting flower, and when dense and beautiful forest covered the feet and shoulders of all those dark volcanic crags and tors lifting above us [41] there like so many ruined castles battered by the artillery fire of the gods. A remnant, a morehu , now are tribe and forest; alike they have dwindled to a shadow ”

“ It is the Port Hills’ nomenclature, perhaps, that carries the most poetic suggestions of any of the Canterbury place-names, and here, perhaps, the dwellers on the heights in the days to come when all these Plain-ward-looking slopes are dotted with pretty homes, will seek inspiration in such legendry and history of the soil as we of the present generation have preserved. There are names of dignity and beauty clustered about those old lava-built crags and ruined towers and tors past which the Summit Road goes a thousand feet above the city. ”

“ Now we turn and, passing a rugged cornice in the lava wall, descend into the gully to examine for ourselves the tree-covering of old Kahukura’s shoulders. There is a thick growth of flax on the little terraces and steep slopes above the bush, and in one place we force our way through a regular jungle of it, growing so thickly as almost to encourage the idea that a flax-mill would find profitable business here. Some of the tall korari stalks are well in flower and bees are busy; on others the long dark-sheathed buds are just unfolding. ”

“ Really to appreciate the special and peculiar beauty of the hills, with their nippled peaks and crags and their age-weathered cliffs, one must travel along the Lyttelton-Governor’s Bay road rather than view the range from the Plains, where the smoothed and settled ridges, like a series of long whalebacks, give little hint of the sudden rocky wildness of the precipitous dip to the harbour slopes. ”

“ In his younger days, when he lived at Tikao Bay, on the shores of Akaroa harbour, he frequently observed for himself the peculiar fitness of the Hilltop name. Often at sunset a cloud-cap would rest lightly on the dark skull of the fairy crag, and to this cloud the declining sun would impart a bright red glow, the kura of the Maori. This was a sign to the weather-wise that a nor’-wester was blowing on the Canterbury Plains—a tohu , or token, that was seldom astray. “U” means to rest, as a canoe upon the beach. This surely is a name that the pakeha should imprint upon his Peninsula maps. ”

“ As we travel northward along the Summit Track from the Poho-o-Tamatea, observing from this commanding height—a thousand feet above little Rapaki village, lying in its grassy nest below—how that great spearhead of rock has in reality an almost level top, we come to a remarkable broken wall of grey lava moss-crusted and shrub-tufted, protruding from the grassy flanks of the craggy knoll called Witch Hill. It is in fact a huge dyke of once-molten lava, cutting wall-like through the old lava flows and trending southward across the shoulder of its parent hill. ”

“ Sometimes on dark nights the Maori villagers would see the light of torches moving about in bays across Lyttelton Harbour, then the Bay of Raupo, where they knew there was no settlement of their tribe, and they would say to each other, “See! The Maeroero are out, spearing patiki.” The Maeroero were the wild men of the woods, fierce hairy giants who sometimes captured Maori women and carried them off to be their wives in the bush of the Port Hills. ”

“ That old ribbonwood tree that quite overshadows the little Rapaki church holds memories of the vanished forests that once clothed all these Port Hills and of the “flitting generations of mankind” it has so long outlived. It is a dignified survivor of the woodlands of the Rapaki-a-Te Rangi-whakaputa. Once upon a time the indigenous timbers thickly covered all these now-grassy slopes slanting quickly from the rhyolite hilltop crags to the quiet waters of the Whaka-Raupo. ”

“ Sometimes, when the mists came down and the fog enveloped the hills, on still, calm days our old men and women would say the fairies were out, the sun-shunning Patu-paiarehe , and it were well not to venture up the range. On brooding quiet days our people could hear the thin voices of the little folk—they were small, fair people, as all the elders said—crying out to each other and singing fairy songs and playing little songs on their wooden or bone flutes, their koauau and putorino . ”

“ Our Christchurch artists need not go further away than the inner dip of the range, the battered rim of the ancient fire cauldron, for impressions of bold rock faces straightly grand and honeycombed with curious caves, and witchy-looking weathered old trees; pictures that approach grandeur when the storm clouds swirl about the tussock-topped tors of Kahukura, the Rainbow God, giving the dark cores of the olden volcanoes an added height and mystery, or when they drift softly and mistily from the deep gullies between the ridges like steam masses from some hidden geyser. ”

“ The fragments of the native bush which survive in the valleys will be of surpassing botanical interest in another generation or two, but the vegetation of the hills inevitably will suffer many changes, and an exotic growth will for the most part replace the ancient trees. With all the alterations which man’s hand may make in the reserves and along the public tracks, however, the monumental rock-beauty will remain the great and peculiar feature of the hills, their most wonderful and unalterable glory. ”

“ Lower down, however, the way is clear of this bush plague, and we find ourselves under a shady roof of thick foliage, woven of the cool green leaves of the broadleaf, a small puka , the mahoe and kowhai and other minor trees of the Maori bush with much of the kotukutuku , the native fuchsia, now come into flower, with its masses of slender pendulous blossom giving promise of abundant konini berries for the birds. (Like several other New Zealand trees the fruit of the kotukutuku is given a different name from the plant itself.) ”

“ And so, by way of the long Maori story, the one solitary example of volcano-legendry the writer has heard from the South Island, we come to the Rapaki peak’s guardian name, Te Poho-o-Tamatea. The explorer bestowed his name upon the height, tapa-ing it after himself and his sacred breast, much as a present-day traveller justly might claim the right to map-name some peak after himself. Tamatea’s travels led him far after he turned his back on the Port Hills. ”

“ The sun is over the range, and Tamatea’s gloomy peak is outlined in sharp symmetry against the burning west. In the deep gullies between the spear-head and the ridge of the Sacred Fire the smoky-blue mists are already forming, and wreathing and creeping around the tangled shrubberies of bush that have escaped the general massacre. The harbour lies a sheet of scarcely moving tender turquoise, just a shade lighter than the face of the famous Tikitapu, inaccurately called the Blue Lake by the pakeha ”

“ The little bush on either hand here runs almost to the ridge top, and we come suddenly out of the koromiko thicket on to the great cave-worn ramparts and have a clear track to the Summit Road again. The picture from the breezy ridge is worth the warm scramble up through the matted bit of woodland. The long smooth rolls of hills go down to the Plains on the one hand; on the other the harbour and beyond the cloud-belted heights of the Peninsula. ”

“ The march downhill of this curious upstanding dyke of lava, grey against the more sombre tints of the range, may be traced in the masses of lava boulders through which the Rapaki water-course has cut its way in its lustier days. And if you turn your face southward and look far across the upper part of the harbour, near the western slopes of Mount Herbert, you will plainly see what seems a continuation of the remarkable wall of lava which welled ages ago white-hot from the cauldrons of Ruaimoko. ”

“ When Waitai and his companions emerged from the bush and topped the lofty round of the range, he halted, and bade them look out over the wide, silent country. He pointed to the reedy lagoons and streams that silvered the flax and tussock desert, where Christchurch City and its suburbs now spread out leisurely and shade off into the rural lands, and said: “Yonder the waters are thick with eels and lampreys, and their margins with ducks and other birds; in the plains beyond there are wekas for the catching.” ”

“ There is hardly a more interesting specimen of vulcanism in New Zealand, for example, than the strange wall of grey-white lava rock which Europeans call the Giant’s Causeway and the Maoris “The Fire of Tamatea,” which protrudes from the hilltop just above Rapaki, and which may be seen again on the far side of the harbour, a volcanic dyke that the ancient people—with surely some perception of geological truth—connected in their legends with the internal fires of the North Island. ”

“ The Maori name is a combination of the names of two Native shrubs which were very plentiful on that portion of the hills in former times and specimens of which may still be seen there. Tauhinu is a heath-like plant found all over New Zealand; it is the Pomaderis phylicaefolia of the botanists. It grows two or three feet high, or sometimes higher, and it is so plentiful and so prone to spread that it has been placed on the Agricultural Department’s index expurgatorious as a noxious weed, in spite of all the sweet heathery perfume of its blossoms which the bees love. ”

“ The sun goes, and the delicacy, the tenderness of colour, the fading of landscape details into a haze like the camp-fire smokes of the legendary Patu-paiarehe , weave a veil of faery over the valley and the darkening sea. ”

“ The graceful lacebark or ribbonwood, too, is here in plenty; there are some beautiful specimens on these hills and slopes, and finest of all perhaps is the grand old houi that overshades the little Maori Church at Rapaki. Aka vines interlace the close-growing trees and here and there present tangling obstacles to a passage along the gully sides. The place lacks the softness of moss and fern underfoot to which we are accustomed in the real bush ”

“ Totara of some size, we observe, once grew here; there is the tall, smooth barrel of a tree now dead. In the next main gully to the northward, the Taungahara bush, on the Native reserve, there is at least one fine totara , and some big fellows were cut down there not so very long ago by the Rapaki people for fencing posts.
As we make upwards, with care evading the diabolical ongaonga that haunts the bush outskirts, we strike a steep face, with here and there a dripping of water glistening on the moss-crusted rock and on the little flax and koromiko plants that root themselves in tiny crevices. ”

“ To the matter-of-fact pakeha and the modernised Maori there is a very simple explanation of these fairy tales. The Patu-paiarehe and the Maero were simply [70] the remnants of aboriginal tribes, such as the Ngati-Mamoe or the Waitaha or their predecessors, driven away into the heart of the mountains and the forests, where they lived a wild, secluded life, existing on the foods of the wilderness. The old English and Scottish belief in fairy people arose in much the same [71] way, the very word “pixy” comes from the name of the Picts, who were driven into the hills and caves. ”

“ The most perfect local example of an ancient crater perhaps is one that does not seem to have attracted much attention from scientific writers and lecturers, and this may be mentioned as a type of the remarkable places which build up the romantic ruggedness and savageness of our harbour-palisading hills. It is to be studied especially well from the Lyttelton-Governor’s Bay road. ”

“ The Kaumatua spoke of the hilltop homes of the Patu-paiarehe , the fairies, whose craggy castles [62] defended by the thick dark woods and the fogs and mists, ringed all this harbour round and made the high places of the Peninsula an uncanny land, given up to all manner of enchantments. Not that he reposed implicit faith in the fairy stories himself, he told them as he had heard them from his elders in the days of long ago. “We are half pakeha ourselves now, we Ngai-Tahu,” he said, “and our young people deride these notions about the Patu-paiarehe . ”

“ With a number of companions and food bearers the barefooted explorer trudged across country, through the unpeopled tussock prairies of Otago and the plains now known
[56] as Canterbury, fording or swimming the rivers or crossing them on rude rafts (mokihi ) made of bundles of flax-stalks or of dried raupo , until he reached the hills that wall in Lyttelton Harbour. He travelled along the range-top, as was the way of the Maori explorer, until he neared the dip in the sharp ridge at the back of Rapaki, over which the Maoris and the pioneer white men made a track. ”

“ Like the other hapus of the Ngai-Tahu tribe, the Ngati-Irakehu and their kin are now half-pakeha in blood; they have intermarried with their European neighbours, and their little township, with its sixty odd souls, is scarcely to be taken at first sight for a Maori settlement. The communal house, of characteristic Native build, with its carved frontal barge-boards and its gargoyle-like tekoteko perched above the entrance, familiar to travellers in the Native districts of the North, is wanting here ”