Living on the Land - Mokomoko Marama on the Minden Dome

Matua sub-series stratigraphy, Te Mete Road, south side SH2

The vigorous geology of our country makes its presence felt in all sorts of places, especially in the well-populated western Bay of Plenty.  Present and increasing settlement pressures are frequently the reason for analysis and archaeology that reveals the pre-history of the landscape surrounding us [1]. 

Recent excavation for the Takitimu North Link (TNL) highway in Te Puna, at Te Mete Road, has revealed the alluvial soils of the Matua subgroup (and some recently-piled topsoil to the right).  The stratigraphy showing up most clearly in this image, above the bright green strip of grass, and below the newly-built fence, evokes the handsome markings of the copper skink, Oligosoma aeneum. 

Copper skinks (Auckland) [2] Photo by Nick Harker

Skink and gecko populations were spread all over New Zealand Aotearoa when humans arrived, and skinks had been here for about 20 million years [3] (geckos have a different and more complex story).  The lizards of this whenua are deeply endemic - each has its own family - but within each their species proliferate in tiny ways.   Not only does this keep herpetologists happily contending [4]; it also means their small populations are highly vulnerable [5]. But also adaptable, it seems. It is possible that skinks were in place here before the Matua subgroup soils were laid down in the early to Mid-Pleistocene. [6]^[7]

Their vulnerability in the Anthropocene explains why care was taken, on the TNL site, to capture and re-release these elusive creatures.  Some went to Mauao [8]. Others, with less publicity, were taken to the Te Puna Quarry Park. And now, even if (like most of us) you never catch a glimpse of a live one, a new sculpture by Mike McCarty, made from leftover steel from the TNL project and named “Marama [9]”, confirms the Quarry Park as an enduring place for mokomoko.

Mokomoko, Te Puna Quarry Park

It was not always so. Were County Engineer Captain A.C. Turner, or his overseer for the Te Puna Riding, George Davoren, asked, in 1911 or so, to consider the effects of quarrying operations on the wild creatures that lived within the rectangle on the northern face of the Minden rhyolite dome gazetted for the purpose, I imagine their faces would have gone blank. This is an a-historical statement. I have no evidence for it whatsoever.

And I may be wrong. Evidence shows that attitudes to the natural environment was a focus of lively and pertinent discussion in Tauranga’s settler society. Only two months before the temporary Quarry reserve had been gazetted [10] on 6 October 1910, a Mr W.R. Turner, (no relation, as far as I can tell, to the Captain) ventured to read a paper on “The Natural History of the Bay of Plenty” to members of the Tauranga Literary and Debating Society assembled at the Good Templars’ Hall on Wednesday 27 July [11]. Mr Turner was a newcomer to Tauranga, recently settled in in a gracious house built to his own design in Selwyn Street [12].

“Turner” is too usual a name for simple internet searches to deliver reliable information as to personality, but we can work out that W.R. Turner was well-off, confident, vigorous, and had a lively mind. He not only built three houses for himself in Tauranga; he was apparently the architect of its first Baptist church [13]. He bought a farm on the Kaimai Road [14], joined the Chamber of Commerce, and was hon. secretary of the Tree Planting and Beautifying Society [15] in which capacity he led the charge for plantings on the Monmouth Redoubt “of a protective and ornamental character”.  In the small society of Tauranga [16] , he was ready to express his opinions and he did. The Literary and Debating Society, initiated as a “Mutual Improvement Society” seems to have been his idea [17].

Crusher bin and bird sculpture, Te Puna Quarry Park

His paper on the natural history of his newly-adopted landscape is a fascinating example of the state of general knowledge and thought at the turn of the twentieth century. After Darwin, but before plate tectonics, this member of the Baptist church thought the science was in on matters geological: “It had been pretty conclusively proved that New Zealand was no child in the arms of nature … we were not living upon a thin crust of the earth’s surface.” He grasped the scale of time involved and the “tremendous power of seismic, glacial, climatic and tidal forces in altering the physical features of the land.” He was matter-of-fact about fossils and the spread of species “by means of ice and drifting wood from one land to another”. (Read Gibbs on Gondwana to find out what particularly intrepid island-hoppers New Zealand skinks seem to have been. [18]) 

“The lecturer thought,” reports the Bay of Plenty Times, “that with regard to the appearance of flora and fauna upon new countries the founder of the scheme of life had never ceased to create, and that under certain conditions the earth produces species which are changed by environment in varieties.”

Turner was pretty good on the matter of the Matua sub-group soils as well  A “great formation of igneous matter consisted of lava, thrachyte [sic] and tuffs [sic], which had been cooled beneath the ocean… we were now living under the line of that formation… the destruction of this system found a great bay extending from the Mount towards the ranges; that after the denudation [sic, he possibly meant inundation] of the material there was an upheaval of land from the bed of the ocean, and that during a long period of volcanic rest a surface was formed, partly through sedimentary formations, and partly through the dust storms of the desert land. Evidence of this surface can now be seen in any of our cuttings and cliffs, which show an excellent soil full of organic matter which once produced a luxuriant vegetation.”

Cog wheel on rhyolite boulder, entrance, Te Puna Quarry Park

That luxuriant vegetation was well gone by the time Europeans arrived in the Bay.  There was no timber nearer than the current bush lines along the Kaimai and inland hills [19]. Even today the unbenched parts of the Te Puna Quarry reserve lack aged forest giants. Slash-and-burn cultivation had rendered the lowlands as, in the words of one surveyor, “very poor and broken fern country” [20]. Appreciative though I am of W.R.’s efforts, I doubt that the County Engineer, desperate as he was for a supply of roading stone, gave much thought to the wildlife that made a living there.

Machinery among rhyolite boulders, Te Puna Quarry Park

The Quarry Park is full of reminders of its industrial past. Their decayed mechanics among the rhyolite offer a nostalgic and softened gaze on what was once a brutally desolate, dangerous and noisy place.  Put sentiment aside. We need to be reminded where these relics come from and why they were used. (Point of fact: there never was a waterwheel in the industrial Quarry. That feature is a later, post-2000, addition.)

The scholarly field of environmental history has much to teach us. If nothing else, it prompts us to realise that memory shapes attitudes, and that ecologies, especially in complex geologies, are local.  The two Turner’s attitudes to their immediate landscapes looked forward as well as back. Today, it is clear we do the same.  We routinely “price in” the impact of industrial development on the places we once knew. Invariably the price is paid in small, local ways. To take just one example: by the copper skink. A previously abundant, now ‘at risk – declining’ [21] inhabitant of the surviving bush areas of the Western Bay. 

Note to the reader:  This essay does not deal with the second half of W.R. Turner’s lecture, a brave traverse of the anthropology of the day. I recommend reading it in the original.

All photographs except that of the copper skinks are by the author.

References

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[1] https://www.heritage.org.nz/archaeology/archaeology-digital-library

[2] Photo: Nick Harker, https://www.reptiles.org.nz/herpetofauna/native/oligosoma-aeneum

[3] Gibbs, G., Ghosts of Gondwana, fully revised edition, Potton and Burton, 2016

[4] Published species were noted as numbering 72 in Gibbs, 2016 and 110 in NZ Geographic, 2020

[5] Hansford, Dave, New Zealand Geographic, “Lizards anonymous”, March/April 2020, pp. 90-105

[6] https://www.tauranga.govt.nz/Portals/0/data/living/natural_hazards/files/maungatapu-landslide-advice.pdf , p.5.  But see also:

[7] https://www.boprc.govt.nz/media/306845/geology-of-the-tauranga-area-report-web.pdf , p.36

[8] Bay of Plenty Times, “Native lizards on Takitimu North Link roading project rehomed on the Mount”, August 12 2022 https://www.nzherald.co.nz/bay-of-plenty-times/news/native-lizards-on-takitimu-north-link-roading-project-rehomed-on-the-mount/OHFTHLMZDSFM3YQ5XEIP7K6OVY/

[9] Name bestowed by the pupils of Te Puna School, 4 July 2024

[10] https://library.victoria.ac.nz/databases/nzgazettearchive/pubs/gazettes/1911/1911%20ISSUE%20001.pdf

[11] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19100729.2.23

[12] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19100221.2.7

[13] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19110913.2.13

[14] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19100420.2.5

[15] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19100713.2.9.1

[16] My estimate: about 1,000 people in 1910.  See E. Stokes, Changing patterns of settlement in Tauranga County: a study in historical geography, https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/57096

[17] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19100504.2.4

[18] Gibbs, op.cit, p. 273

[19] Conversation with John Coster, date unknown.  See too E. Stokes, op cit, who recounts that timber for the military settlement had to come to Tauranga by boat from the Coromandel.

[20] Cadastral map 1370, Tauranga Survey District

[21] https://www.reptiles.org.nz/herpetofauna/native/oligosoma-aeneum

History of Karewa Island - Part 2

The Tuatara Collectors
(contd from Part 1)

Karewa Island is a pest free wildlife sanctuary, administered by the Department of Conservation. Inhabited by fur seals, tītī (mutton birds) and other seafaring birds. It is also the home of tuatara (Hatteria punctata).  For Tauranga’s iwi, the island was an important, traditional harvesting place for tītī, paua and koura (crayfish). Karewa’s tuatara were, and remain, creatures of great cultural significance for Tauranga Māori. Viewed variously as mythological ancestors and kaitiaki or guardians of knowledge, misfortune, calamities and death might also be attributed to tuatara, which during the 1800s, often horrified the Māori who saw them.¹

Departing Tauranga for the Bay of Islands on the little schooner Glatton in March 1838, the missionary William Wade said of tuatara:

The island Karewa, off Tauranga, is said to swarm with them. Although perfectly harmless, the lizard is held in great abhorrence by the New Zealanders, who say it is the form or resemblance of Wiro, the evil Spirit.²

Karewa, as seen by voyagers approaching the Island and Tauranga from the north-east

Karewa’s tuatara were frequently collected by visiting overseas scientists as specimens for study, and for exhibition in public and private museums, and zoos. As noted in Part One, German naturalist Ernest Dieffenbach failed to personally obtain a tuatara from the island due to bad weather in June 1841. He eventually acquired a specimen in Auckland, originally obtained from Karewa by Rev James Stack who was based at the Te Papa mission station.³ Dieffenbach later gifted the ‘Tuatera’ to the British Museum, though whether alive or dead is not clear.

Twenty tuatara were taken to Europe by the German geologist Julius Von Haast, who, along with fellow geologist Ferdinand Von Hochstetter, visited Tauranga in May 1859. All are believed to have been taken from Karewa Island, and all survived the homeward voyage. Six were presented to the King of Belgium and fourteen placed in the Berlin and Vienna Zoological Gardens.⁴

Ferdinand Von Hochstetter

In 1873, Tauranga resident and colonial soldier Gilbert Mair sent two tuatara from Karewa to the British Museum, though sending them by post was not without its risks.⁵ In 1868, Major St John of the 1^st Waikato Regiment reported from a sunny hillside overlooking Tauranga harbour.

Lying lazily on the clover covered ground, and well shaded by a big "rimu," we had a perfect panorama before us. Tauranga harbour and the coast line, northward and southward for many miles could be all taken in at almost one glance; and out at sea rose several islands: the Great Barrier, a mountainous mass; Motiti, or Flat Island; and, nearest of all, Karewa, a rocky islet abounding in obsidian, and the home of a peculiar lizard, something like a small iguana. They are not handsome beasts these lizards, but they are pretty tenacious of life. One was sent a long distance by post, and arrived safe at his journey's end; another, I was assured, had eaten nothing for three weeks, and I was invited to go and look at it; in this case however, the fast had proved too protracted, and, when the box was opened, the brute was as dead as Julius Caesar.⁶

Major John Henry Herbert St John of the 1st Waikato Regiment

Andreas Reischek, an Austrian taxidermist, naturalist, ornithologist and collector, undertook extensive collecting expeditions throughout New Zealand. He was also notorious for robbing Māori graves and the treasures of their occupants during his expeditions. Living in New Zealand from 1877 to 1889, the specimens of fauna and flora that he collected for New Zealand and overseas museums and private collections included tuatara, on which he reported:

On all the larger islands they live principally on insectivorous foods, such as beetles, grubs, wetas, grasshoppers, flies, etc., which I found on dissecting. I think where such food — which they prefer even in confinement — is plentiful, they will not prey on birds.

But on my visit to Karewa Island, at the beginning of 1885, I saw many young birds with their heads off, and I followed one of these lizards with a bird of considerable size in its mouth, which tried to escape in a burrow, but got stuck at the entrance. They catch the bird by its head, and then chew until it is devoured. My opinion is that, as this island is small, and these lizards so numerous, this is the reason they prey upon birds.

On December 10, the boatman informed me that we should have to leave these islands, as bad weather was expected. I left unwillingly, for time had been all too short.⁷

Andreas Reischek

Māori were not alone in finding tuatara strange and sinister creatures. In May 1876, the Evening Post recorded considerable public interest in thirteen recently acquired living tuatara at Wellington’s Colonial Museum:

Some were almost two feet in length, described as ‘having an exceedingly sinister aspect, strongly resembling crocodiles with spiky backs and extensive smiles. However, they are quite harmless and very gentle, the thirteen living peacefully together; quite a happy family amongst their artificial rockwork, grazing pastorally on the worms, with which they are liberally supplied.’ People were startled by their sudden movement after seeing them completely motionless.⁸

While safe from the introduced pigs and ships’ rats that killed off their mainland relatives, Karewa’s tuatara were regularly captured by well-meaning locals and amateur naturalists.

Two specimens taken from the Island were donated to the Auckland Institute by H. T. Clarke, almost certainly Henry Tacey Clarke (1825-1902), the son of missionary George Clarke. Henry ‘served in the military, spoke fluent Maori, was a registered interpreter, a Native Land Court Judge, and Commissioner of Tauranga’.⁹ The anonymous writer, who contributed an article titled ‘A North Island Trip’ in the Cromwell Argus in 1880, mentioned that in 1873 he had visited Karewa Island, ‘home of the giant lizard,’ to obtain specimens.¹⁰

Tuatara were also taken from Karewa by some of Tauranga’s early European settlers, who kept them as novel garden pets and conversation pieces - sometime held  in place with a light chain around their necks.¹¹ As late as 1908, the New Zealand Herald reported how a Mr G. Norris, who had kept ‘a large collection of these strange pets’ at Tauranga had moved to Dunedin taking some of his tuatara with him.  Mr Norris ‘stated that he had kept tuataras ever since he could remember and had so many in his possession at one time, that he was in a position to speak with some authority about their habits’.¹²

Sketched by J. Ernest Tinne, an English tourist at an unidentified location in 1873, these tuatara have been chained in place in a garden

In January 1914, the Herald reported on another ‘gentleman at Tauranga [who] has had a number of tuatara in his garden for many years, brought from Karewa’.¹³ An Auckland naturalist once took 12 tuatara from Karewa Island, for study and as pets for his Ponsonby garden. They caused a short lived, local sensation one morning in March 1887, when they were seen and reported by a panic-stricken milkman who mistook them for snakes.¹⁴

 

In 1895, tuatara were protected by law, one of New Zealand’s first native species to be so safeguarded, but they were still poached and continue to be poached for private collections.¹⁵ Today, Karewa’s predator free 3.5 hectares are administered by the Department of Conservation (DOC) in close co-operation with Tauranga tangata whenua, who own the island. In recognition of its important cultural values and status as a pest free wildlife sanctuary, landing on the island is prohibited without a DOC permit. Additionally, access is by boat and visitors must be accompanied by DOC staff after going through biosecurity checks.¹⁶

A Karewa Island tuatara from Andreas Reischeck’s book Yesterdays in Maoriland

References

 

¹ Thomson, Arthur, The Story of New Zealand, Vol 1, John Murray, London, 1859: 29. Best Elsdon, Maori Religion and Mythology, Part 1, Wellington, Government Printer, 1982: 460.

² Wade, William, Journey in the North Island of New Zealand, George Rolwegan, Hobart, 1842: 178.

³ Von Hochstetter, Ferdinand, New Zealand: Its Physical Geography, Geology and Natural History, J.G. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1867: 442.

⁴ Bay of Plenty Times, 4 May 1936: 2.

⁵ Tinne, J; The Wonderland of the Antipodes, Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, London, 1873: 84.

⁶ St John, J.H.H. Pakeha Rambles in Maori Lands, Robert Burrett, Wellington, 1873: 123.

⁷ Andreas Reischek, Yesterdays In Maoriland: New Zealand in the Eighties, Wilson and Horton, Auckland, 1930: 100.

⁸ Evening Post, 12 May 1876: 2.

⁹ Edwards, Vivien, A Dinosaur From Karewa, Friday, 18 October 2021, Tauranga Historical Society

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Tinne, 1873: 84.

¹² New Zealand Herald, 11 November 1908: 5.

¹³ Ibid: 31 January 1914: 1.

¹⁴ Auckland Star, 1 March 1887: 3.

^{15 Tuatara: New Zealand reptiles DOC. https://www.doc.govt.nz › nature › reptiles-and-frogs}

¹⁶  Site 68. Karewa Island Risk Ranking, https ://www.boprc.govt.nz › media › karewa

Images

Sladden Bernard, 1879-1961, Karewa Island, Ms 33/5/84, photographic collection, Pae Koroki, Tauranga City Libraries.

Photographer unknown, Ferdinand von Hochstetter, circa. 1865, Website Naturhistorisches, Museum, Wien, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_von_Hochstetter

Photographer unknown. Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Herbert St John. Ref: 1/2-028459-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Photographer unknown, Andreas Reischeck, 1902, Wikipedia, http://wikipedia.org/wiji/andreasreischek

Tinne, J; The Wonderland of the Antipodes, Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, London, 1873: 84.

Reischek, Andreas, Yesterdays In Maoriland: New Zealand in the Eighties, Wilson and Horton, Auckland, 1930: 100.