Showing posts with label Geology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Geology. Show all posts

Friday, 2 August 2024

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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Friday, 19 January 2024

A Brief Three-Part History of Karewa Island

Part 1 - Early Human Visitors and its Inhabitants 

Karewa Island
Whites Aviation, Karewa Island, February 1954, with Mount Maunganui and the Tauranga Harbour entrance in the background
Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref. WA-35082-F

Karewa Island is located some 4 miles or 6.5 km north-east of the Tauranga harbour entrance. When viewed from the higher parts of Tauranga township, it appears as a solitary, conical rock, jutting abruptly from the waters of the Bay of the Plenty. When viewed during a north-easterly blow from atop Mt Maunganui, the island seems to be on the move. It appears as an orca or great white shark swimming on the surface and steadily battling its way out to sea. The island’s foreshore environment comprises bedrock slopes, rocky reefs, and rock pools with several small, sandy beaches. Parts of the island are forested in taupata, a resilient, low growing shrub or small tree bearing very shiny dark green leaves. Widely used as a hedge plant for seaside gardens, taupata forms the low, dense forests that we often see on coastal islands and along the exposed coasts of the North Island and upper South Island.1

 

For Maori, Karewa island was a traditional harvest site for titi (mutton birds) and kai moana (sea food), with paua, crayfish and kina (sea urchins) abundant on almost all the rocky reefs. The island remains a very popular dive site and is well known among locals, for the variety of fish caught in the surrounding waters.2  Karewa is a home to kekeno or fur seals, but is best known for its high densities of tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus). These ancient reptiles are dependent on the continued productivity of the surrounding marine environment, especially the well-being of the mutton birds or sooty shearwaters which coexist with them and share their burrows.3

When Captain Cook sailed the Endeavour between Mount Maunganui and Mayor Island on 3rd November 1769, he did not name Karewa, describing it instead as ‘a small high island’.4 The late 19th century ethnologist Elsdon Best wrote that Karewa was the named by the first Polynesian deep-sea navigators who arrived in the Bay of Plenty on the Takitimu waka around 12th century A.D. He states that they named Karewa after the star, upon which they relied, to make their voyage to New Zealand.5 Gilbert Mair, the colonial soldier and New Zealand Cross winner who, from the 1860s, lived out his life in the Bay of Plenty, said however that the first arrivals on the Te Arawa waka named the island Karewa because: ‘In fine weather, owing to mirage, it appears to be like Mahomet's coffin, floating in the air, the silver streak of sea showing plainly underneath; hence the name Ka-rewa, to float’.6 

Gilbert Mair later sailed tuatara collectors from Taurangato to Karewa Island on board his 35-foot whaleboat
Gilbert Mair in military uniform, glass copy negative of half-tone print, unidentified photographer
Alexander Turnbull Collection, Ref. 1/1-017971-G

Mair added, that to his annoyance, the Maori name Karewa and other Tauranga place names were too often mispronounced by Pakeha. 

Some friends in Tauranga, where I am now resident, pronounce the simplest Maori names quite incorrectly… Here are a few illustrations of this ear-annoying mispronunciation:
Katikati is popularly Katty-kat.

Maungatapu is mutilated into Manggertap.
Waimapu is called Waimap.
Paapaa moa becomes Papper-moa.
And Karewa is Karewha.7

Sir Maui Pomare recorded that traditional uhi Mataora or the face carving chisels used by tohunga ta moko (tattooing experts) were often made from the wing-bone of the albatross, adding that: ‘The Bay of Plenty tribes made expeditions to Karewa Island, which was a breeding place for the albatross and many other sea-birds.8 Among the other sea-birds nesting on Karewa were gannets, whose feathers were highly prized by the rangatira class as adornments for their hair. One of the myths recorded from Rotorua’s Te Arawa people concerning Hatupatu, describes the appearance of this famous ancestral hero figure, when he stood to address and inspire his warriors before battle.

He had been sitting down, and as he gracefully arose, it was beautiful to see his plumes and ornaments of feathers fluttering in the breeze; the long hair of the young man was tied up in four knots, or clubs, in each of which was stuck a bunch of feathers; you would have thought he had just come from the gannet island of Karewa where birds' feathers abound.9

Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus)
Bernard Sladden. Close-up view of a tuatara on a branch. Date: Within Sladden's adult life (1900-1961) Tauranga City Libraries. Pae Koroki Ref. Photo bs-205

Karewa Island is often mentioned in the journals of Tauranga’s pre-Treaty missionaries. After arriving in the Bay of Islands in 1834, the missionary printer William Wade went on to the Bay of Plenty to help establish the new mission station at on Tauranga’s Te Papa Peninsula. When intertribal warfare broke out in the district in 1836, he was evacuated back to Paihia. After a dispute with the Anglican Church Missionary Society over his employment, in April 1840, Wade left Tauranga to serve as a baptist minister in Tasmania. One of his journal entries read:

In every part of New Zealand that I have visited lizards are numerous. There are several varieties of small green lizard; and, by native account, many of the insular rocks abound with guanas. 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.10 

A portrait of Taurikura, the mythical ancestress of Karewa Island’s tuatara can be seen today in the poupou (carved wall pillars) of  the meeting house Tamateapokaiwhenua in Tauranga’s Judea
Photographer unknown, Tamateapokaiwhenua Wharenui, 1962. Tauranga City Libraries, Pae Koroki Ref. Photo 16-139

In Maori mythology, Whiro, the god inhabiting the underworld was a personified form of evil, misfortune, darkness and death. The first tuatara to resemble Whiro on Karewa was, according to Ngati Ranginui legend, their female ancestress Taurikura. A spoilt young woman of noble birth, she one day refused to fetch water for her thirsty koro [grandfather], With great difficulty, the old man who was disabled, descended a steep track to the river, before returning with a gourd of water which Tauri-kura demanded.  The old man became angry and told her that she was selfish and a disappointment.

Embarrassed and ashamed of her behaviour, Taurikura left the village with a kit of charms and went down to the river. There she turned herself into a ngarara or reptile and swam down the Waikaraeo Estuary and out to Karewa where she became the ancestor of the tuatara that live on the island today. Taurikura is remembered at Judea today, where her carved portrait can be seen on the poupou (carved wall pillars) in the meeting house Tamateapokaiwhenua.11

During the 1830s, the island became a regular provisioning port of call for the Bay of Islands’ missionaries during voyages on their small sailing vessels to and from Tauranga, Maketu, Whakatane and Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty. In February 1832, the Rev. Henry Williams and his Maori crew, sailed the mission schooner Karere (Messenger) to Maketu in the hope of making peace between warring tribes. After camping overnight at Mercury Bay on the 26th he recorded:

 

Fine morning. I intended to move at break of day, but the boys were apprehensive of a Southerly wind; delayed till 9 o'clock when we pulled out in quest of a wind. A breeze sprung up at East, which shifted in the course of the day to North. Passed on at an agreeable rate to Karewa. Mr. Chapman out of sight. The boys landed and caught a number of young birds and found some potatoes, which afforded them a good supper. Entered Tauranga by 9 o'clock, landed under the Great Hill, "Maunga nui." Kindled fires and cooked our supper which we all stood much in need of having taken nothing. Rolled ourselves up in blankets, and laid down on the ground…Our distance run today about 40 miles.12

A stylised painting of Henry William’s Karere (Messenger) accompanying a Ngapuhi predatory expedition to Tauranga in 1832, in the hope of negotiating peace.
Joseph Josenhans, “War Canoes’ in Illustrations of Missionary Scenes, An Offering to Youth, Mainz, Joseph Scholz, 1855. XII

Departing Maketu on the Karere with a full complement of Maori passengers six weeks later, Williams again described landing on Karewa, and an additional Maori reason for fearing the tuatara:

Tuesday, 26. A quiet night. At daylight calm but cloudy, afraid to move out. No stir amongst the natives, all quiet. At 5 p.m. light airs from the N. E.; left the harbour on our way home, in all seventeen including Hamu our old lady who accompanied us from the BOI, besides a dog and two kittens, our boat was very full. We pulled to Karewa, a small island 8 miles from Tauranga. Some of the boys landed here to look for birds and potatoes. Upon the island are Ruatara, a species of the lizard about a foot in length, which are regarded by the natives as Atua. Strict orders given [by Hamu or an accompanying rangatira] not to disturb them in their holes lest we should be upset. About 8 o'clock a light air from Southd; got underweigh and stood on our course.13

Dr Ernest Dieffenbach
Dieffenbach, Ernest, Travels in New Zealand, Vol. II, John Murray, London, 1843: Frontispiece
Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref. A-259-010

Karewa’s tuatara drew several famous men of science to Tauranga during the 1840s and 50s. The touring German naturalist and geologist Dr. Ernest Dieffenbach visited Tauranga’s Te Papa mission station for several days during June 1841. Wishing to obtain a tuatara specimen, he attempted to visit Karewa as a passenger on one of the mission station’s whaleboats, but was forced back to port by bad weather. He was not however, entirely disappointed in his quest:

I had been apprized of the existence of a large lizard, which the natives called Tuatera, or Narara, with a general name, and of which they were much afraid. But although looking for it at the places where it was said to be found, and offering great rewards for a specimen, it was only a few days before my departure from New Zealand that I obtained one, which had been caught at a small rocky islet called Karewa, which is about two miles from the coast, in the Bay of Plenty, and which had been given by the Rev. W. Stack, in Tauranga, to Dr. Johnson, the colonial surgeon.

 

From all that I could gather about this Tuatera, it appears that it was formerly common in the islands; lived in holes, often in sandhills near the sea-shore; and the natives killed it for food. Owing to this latter cause, and no doubt also to the introduction of pigs, it is now very scarce; and many even of the older residents of the islands have never seen it. The specimen from which the description is taken I had alive, and kept for some time in captivity: it was extremely sluggish, and could be handled without any attempt at resistance or biting.14   

HMS Pandora
Thomas Hornbrook, HMS Pandora (1833), Wikipedia

During his survey of Tauranga Harbour in November 1852, Captain Byron Drury of HMS Pandora described Karewa as: ‘a rugged island about half a mile in circumference) 6 miles N. E. by N. of Monganui, is two miles off this sandy beach, having a channel on either side, of 12 to 15 fathoms’.15 According to Lieutenant Theodore Jones of the Pandora who toured the Tauranga district with some of the ship’s officers:

          During our absence Capt. Drury accompanied by the doctor [surgeon John Joliffe, R.N.], had visited the little Island of Karewa, about three miles from the entrance of the harbour, where they succeeded in capturing some very large lizards, the longest measuring 20 inches. It had been supposed that this was the only Island on which they were to be found, having been quite exterminated on the mainland. On a subsequent visit to Mongonui one had just been found in that neighbourhood, and I believe on Moto horo [Moutohora-Whale Island], they have also been seen. They have a rather repulsive appearance – of a darkish brown colour with serrated back – and of them either living or dead the Natives have a most lively horror.16

Not all Maori appear to have held the tuatara ‘in great abhorrence’. On Motiti Island where they were once common, Gilbert Mair saw one that Maori had kept safely from predators in an old kumara pit ‘for over three generations’. 17  

Endnotes

1 Karewa Island – Dive Zone Tauranga, https://www.divezonetauranga.co.nz › karewa-island

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

3 https://www.divezonetauranga.co.nz › karewa-island

4  Reed, A.H. and A.W; (eds.), Captain Cook in New Zealand: Extracts From the Journals of Captain James Cook, A.H. and A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1969: 55.

5 Elsdon Best, The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori, Genuine and Empirical, W.A.G. Skinner, Government Printer, Wellington, 1922: 40.

6 Mair, Gilbert, Reminiscences and Maori Stories, Brett Publishers, Auckland 1923: 52-53. 1923:

7 Ibid.

 

8 Pomare, Maui, Legends of the Maori, Vol. II, James Cowan (ed.), Southern Reprints, Papakura, 1987: 315

 

9 Grey, Sir George, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race, H. Brett, Auckland, 1885: 122.

10 Wade, William, A Journey in the Northern Island of New Zealand, George Rolwegan, Hobart, 1842: 178.

11 Bay of Plenty Times, 23 December, 1948: 4. Rotorua Daily Post, 22 June, 2013: 7. Taurikura – Te Rununga O Ngati Ranginu, http://www.ranginui.co.nz › taurikura

12 Williams, Henry, The Early Journal of Henry Williams, L.M. Rogers (ed.), Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1961: 286-287.

13 Ibid: 301.

 

14 Dieffenbach, Ernest, Travels in New Zealand, Vol. 1, John Murray, London, 1843: 206.

 

15 Byron Drury, Sailing Directions… For the Northern Part of the Colony of New Zealand, Williamson and Wilson, 1854: 28.

 

16 Jones, T. M; ‘HMS Pandora in the Bay of Plenty, 1852’, Extracts from the Journal of Lieutenant T.M. Jones, RN, Part II: 72, in Historical Review: Journal of the Whakatane and District Historical Society Inc. Vol. XVIII, No.2: 72.

 

17 Waipa Post, 1 March 1923: 3.



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