Friday 14 January 2022

Te Puna's Lost Watercourse

It’s a large historical claim to make, that something has been quite lost.  And for various reasons, the stream so-described in the title – the Hakao – has never been entirely abandoned by human memory.  Perhaps the better term might be, “ignored” – except that the very-much-altered Hakao has become, of late, a focus of intense interest for two quite different aspects of modern development in Te Puna: the imminent construction of the Takitimu Northern Link road and, across the fan where it used to meet the estuary at the mouth of the Wairoa River, the creation of a zone of land designated in 2005 to be used for industrial purposes.  The image that follows stops short of the inland route of the TNL but shows very clearly the expansive wetland that Theophilus Heal first surveyed in 1867[1].


Well before 2005, the valley of the Hakao had been seriously modified.  The writer remembers the long straight drain running down the centre of flat water meadows from the middle of last century.  The Environment Court’s 2005 decision puts these drainage works at “unspecified dates after the 1940’s”[2] 


Nevertheless, it is possible to surmise that, even in the nineteenth century, the wide expanse of bottom land was easily-cleared, attractive farmland, not far away from the Wairoa Mill, and different in nature from the irregularly rolling neighbouring country, regularly divided by other narrow but consistently running streams draining from the Rangituanehu/Minden Ridge.  Wheat grows well in damp soil.  As does grass, once waning soil fertility drops the grain yield to an uneconomic level.  Another early map[3] is endorsed in copperplate handwriting to show land holdings, from the Hakao mouth to where SH2 crosses it today, in the names of “Thos. Craig, Waihi Hohi, C Potier’s Children and James C Doull”.

These landholdings made up the bulk of J A M Davidson’s property, Rangikura Farm.  The Cyclopaedia of New Zealand[4] is hazy about the date of acquisition, possibly in deference to the sensibilities of John’s Maori wife, Adelaide.  But it tells us that this energetic settler, soon to be County Chairman and the first Chairman of the Tauranga Harbour Board, was born in Jamaica and was using his farm for “fattening store sheep and cattle for the Waihi market”. 

Why Waihi, one wonders?  To me, the answer lies, as it so often does in settler society, in the infrastructure.  No sooner had the twenty-five-year-old Davidson arrived in Te Puna than he was made chairman of the Te Puna Roads Board and no doubt found it easier to contemplate herding his stock overland to a market within reach of the Thames goldfields than negotiating the Wairoa river and the muddy wetland tracks around the Kopererua valley to a much smaller market in Tauranga.

Davidson was well-acquainted with mud.  The entrance to Rangikura was, it appears, adjacent to the point where the Hakao intersected with the main road, termed in the Bay of Plenty Times, “Te Hakau”.  Technically, there was a bridge[5].  Actually, the County Chairman, writing in his capacity as a private citizen, described the area as a “lake.”


The dry bone of SH2 now lies over the well-culverted and contained Hakao watercourse at the very same spot.


But a 180-degree turn offers a very small taste of what the upstream Hakao might have been like – the stream along which, in living memory[6], Maori wāhine from nearby kāinga did their washing and, no doubt, fossicked for koura and freshwater mussels.

“The extensive low lying wetland that extends from the mouth of the Wairoa River, past Pukewhanake to the foot of Rangituanehu, is generally known as Te Hakao.  The name Te Hakao was probably attributed to the whole area from the name for a tributary of a river near its mouth.  Whilst parts of this landscape are tapu, in certain places food and eel fishery which was [sic] in use until at least the 1960’s.  It is not fished these days but is still considered important as a nursery.[7]”

Given the ravages that time has wrought on the lower, highly important reaches of the Hakao, it is mildly comforting to read the 2017 account from the New Zealand Transport Agency indicating their opinion that the “potential hydraulic impacts” of the Hakao Stream bridge structure that will carry the traffic hurtling along the Takitimu Northern Link to Tauranga “will be no more than minor[8]”.

Wetlands hold a very mixed place in history.  There is a peculiar irony in the fact that it was pressure from the Port of Tauranga, the eventual descendant of the body first chaired by J A M Davidson, that pushed the District Council into the hard-fought, and still controversial, decision to zone the lower Hakao as suitable for industrial use.  And the big rigs that serve the port with its containers and logs will in due course go over the upper Hakao using a bridge and not a culvert.  Only if some simultaneous catastrophe takes out the two main roads will they make their tenuous way, adjacent to the railway line, past Te Tawa and Pukewhanake.  But of course those carrying stuff destined, not for the port, but for other Environment Court-sanctioned purposes will have to go that way.  And the status of the lower Hakao, seeping still underneath an industrial “park”, seems to justify the word, “lost”.

 
References

[1] I have written about this map before [THS blog, October 2019].

[2]  Thomson v Western Bay of Plenty District Council [2005] NZEnvC 41 3 February 2005 http://www.nzlii.org/cgi-bin/sinodisp/nz/cases/NZEnvC/2005/41.html

[3] SD9760 of 1867

[6] Conversation between the author and Gordon Burr, whose parents farmed along the upper reaches of the Hakao.

[7] Wairoa River Strategy October 2013, p.26. https://www.tauranga.govt.nz/Portals/0/data/council/strategies/files/wairoa_river_valley_strategy.pdf

An excellent topographical map of the area, including the present course of the Hakao, is at p. 4

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