Accessing the Otūmoetai Beachfront Path, The Wairoa River’s Outer Ford - Some Early Māori and Pākehā Crossers

The Wairoa River entrance at low water showing Kaiarero (Tilby) Point on the north-west corner of Fergusson Park

Living in early Tauranga, a place of many peninsulas, rivers, estuaries and fords, often meant getting your feet wet and muddy depending on where you crossed - and now and again in the case of a misstep when travelling on foot or horseback, a complete soaking or drowning. Before the 1870s, overland travellers from the north wishing to access the Otūmoetai Peninsula and beachfront path to Otūmoetai Pā and Te Papa mission stationwere confronted with a final watery challenge - a crossing of the Wairoa River, which contributes about 50% of the total freshwater inflow to Tauranga Harbour.

On 3 July 1838, travelling English botanist John Carne Bidwill and his party of Māori porters crossed the Kaimai range to the Te Puna peninsula, from where he was carried at low tide ‘half a mile’ over the Wairoa Rivers dangerous outer crossing ‘on the shoulders of one of the natives’. to the Otūmoetai beachfront path.¹ The outer crossing from Te Puna’s Oikimoke Point, which followed a narrow zig-zag causeway with quicksands on either side, had a sinister history, with fatalities among both Māori and Pākehā who mistimed the crossing or strayed from the path.

In March 1832, the chief Titore Tākiri’s predatory Ngāpuhi amphibious expedition from the Bay of Islands entered Tauranga Harbour. Initially camping on Rangiwaea Island, the invaders crossed to the Te Puna side of the Wairoa River. When a daring group of Ngāpuhi musketeers attempted the outer crossing at low water, they became caught fast in quick sands off what is now Tilby Point, on the north-west corner of the Matua foreshore (Fergusson Park). All attempts by their comrades to extricate them failed and they remained trapped with their heads barely above the tides. When the sufferers called out for sustenance during the stillness of the nights, the Otūmoetai defenders from the pa, called to them contemptuously Kaiarero! (Eat your tongues!), by which name the point is known to Ngāi Te Rangi to this day.²

Wairoa Swamp

This watercolour was painted by an unknown soldier. He was present at the siege of Maketū, the battles of Pukehinahina (Gate Pā) and Te Ranga in in 1864, and the subsequent occupation of the Tauranga District. Titled ‘Wiroa Swamp’, the sketch shows the old Matua-Otūmoetai Swamp, which was later drained to become today’s Fergusson Park. Kaiarero (Tilby) Point is in the foreground with Te Puna across the Wairoa River entrance at high water. From Kaiarero Point, north bound travellers left the Otūmoetai beachfront path and depending on the tide, walked, rode or were ferried by canoe directly across to Te Puna’s Oikimoke Point.                                  

Miss Eliza Jones, 1858

Eliza Stack née Jones in later years

In June 1858 the Anglican missionary John Kinder accompanied Miss Eliza Jones, a well travelled,  adventurous young woman, from Auckland to Tauranga in the schooner Hope. Having lost her Welsh parents at an early age, Jones who had been born and raised in Edinburgh, came out to New Zealand with her brother Humphrey, an officer in the Britsh Army in 1857. After enduring an appalling ten-day, rough weather voyage in a dirty, cramped cabin, half suffocated, amidst dogs, poultry, potatoes and three additional fellow passengers, Jones resolved never to repeat the experience and later returned to Auckland on horseback.

Arriving at Tauranga on 9 July 1858, Jones lived at the Te Papa Mission Station with the Volkner family and later with the Chapmans at the Maketū station. Her enjoyable and memorable sojourn which included picnics, local explorations, and a visit to the Rotorua themal district soon came to an end. On 25 October, she departed overland to Auckland by way of the Kaimai Ranges’ Wairere Track accompanied by Rev Karl Volkner. The Maori travellers and porters accompanying the party travelled on foot while Volkner rode a horse and Miss Jones rode Archdeacon Brown’s pony Robin Hood, sitting side saddle, with a starched bonnet and thick veil to ward off the ‘venomous bites’ of mosquitoes.³ She recorded:

It was sad parting from my dear friends at Te Papa, who had been so kind to me, and to whom I was indebted for one of the most notable experiences of my life. The whole party together with the [Maori] school children, came to the beach to see me off [from where they crossed the Waikareao Estuary by boat]. The horses were already waiting for us on the Otumoetai side, and a few minutes after saying good-bye I was mounted on Robinhood and cantering along the beach with Mr Volkner, to catch up our Maoris who had gone on with the baggage and provisions. We found them waiting for us at Te Puna, a broad estuary which could only be crossed at low water, and under the guidance of some-one who knew the fords.

As soon as the tide permitted, we commenced what proved to be a most disagreeable undertaking. We had to traverse a wide extent of sand and mud flats, crossed by many water channels, varying from two to four feet in depth. The sides were steep, and getting in and out was very unpleasant. The shortness of my pony's legs caused him to drop into the water with such a sudden jerk every time that he nearly pitched me over his head, and I was very thankful when the last channel was crossed and we got back to dry land. The danger when crossing this estuary is being caught by the tide. The channels are only fordable at dead low tide, and as it takes some time to get over them all, it proved nervous work till it was done.⁴

Near the end of her return journey to Auckland in October-November 1858, 29-year-old Miss Jones stayed at the Kohanga mission station on the Lower Waikato River. There she met for the first time James Stack, a young missionary who was then assisting the missionary-linguist Dr Robert Maunsell. On the 28 January 1881, Eliza Rachel Jane Jones and James West Stack were married by Bishop Selwyn at Auckland; they had seven children.

Eliza Stack and her party were fortunate to have crossed the Wairoa safely. The river’s outer crossing continued to take the lives of the tardy, the reckless and the unlucky into the 1870s. Under the heading A Horseman Lost, the New Zealand Herald reported on 14 August 1871:

A man named E. G. Hall, attached as foreman to the party engaged in the erection of the telegraph to Katikati, was on Tuesday reported to the police by Mr. Floyd, as missing. He had started to cross the Wairoa at the ford on horseback. The horse was caught on the Te Puna side of the river with saddle and bridle on, but the rider has not since been seen. He was believed to be drowned while crossing that very dangerous ford. Mr. Hall was seen riding east Mr. McSweeny’s place beyond Otumoetai, going towards the Wairoa, between one and two o'clock in the afternoon, with a heavy bag over his shoulders and long boots on ... [A] native coming down from Te Puna to the Wairoa river to fish for eels, met and caught the horse just as he came out of the wnter on the Te Puna side, with a saddle and bridle on, but no rider, so it must have been almost immediately after the catastrophe.

Only those who have crossed this ford can properly describe its dangerous character. The ford is at the mouth of the river, which there is very wide; and the track - if it may be so called - is on a narrow strip of solid sand, on each side of which are numerous quicksands. The water, at the lowest tide, is over the saddle flaps, and the route for more than half-a-mile goes in a zig-zag direction, only known to those who have to cross frequently, and very unsafe for an unpractised traveller. It is said that a Maori and his horse once disappeared altogether in one of the quicksands. The search party returned again on the evening of the 6th instant, without having found the remains Mr Hall. It is said that he was the bearer of a considerable sum of money, wherewith to pay the men employed at the telegraph camp.⁵

Wairoa Village

Painted by the same unknown soldier, the original handwriting on the front reads ‘Wiroa vilace.’ Looking across the Wairoa River from the Matua side to Te Puna, the watercolour shows the Wairoa River at high water with Wairoa Pā and kainga in the background. In the foreground is a waka tētē (utility canoe) for ferrying travellers across to Te Puna.

Travellers crossing to Te Puna from the Otūmoetai Peninsula were able to avoid the treacherous outer crossing by bypassing Kaiarero Point. Wading over Wairoa Bay (today’s Matua Saltmarsh Reserve) which could be safely crossed at half tide, they made their way to Bethlehem, where, depending on the state of the tide, they waded or were canoed across the Wairoa at its safer upper ford - crossed in later times by three successive bridges.⁶

In 1874, with travel across the Wairoa River increasing, the government built a one-way bridge of kauri timber. It replaced the ferry service operated by Te Puna’s Ngāti Kahu who were transporting travellers across in waka and row boats. The wooden structure was replaced in 1913 by a single laned concrete bridge. The two-laned State Highway 2 bridge that motorists use today was opened in February 1968.⁷

References

¹  Bidwill, John, Rambles in New Zealand, W. S. Orr and Co. London, 1841: Capper Reprint 1974: 79-81.

² Rorke, Jinty, Fergusson Park and the Tilby Point Farm: The Maori History, Tauranga City Council, 1997: 1.

³ Matheson, A.H; The Wairere Track: Ancient Highway of the Maori and Missionary, The Elms Trust, Tauranga, 1975: 56-58.

⁴ Stack, J.W; Early Maoriland Adventures of J.W. Stack, A.H. Reed (ed.), A.H. and A.W Reed, Dunedin, 1935: 48.

⁵ New Zealand Herald, 14 August 1871: 2.

⁶ Von Hochstetter, Ferdinand, New Zealand: Its Physical Geography, Geology and Natural History, J. G. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1867: 445.

⁷ Neal, Justine, ‘The Wairoa River Bridge’, Tauranga Historical Society, 3 September 2021. https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-wairoa-river-bridge.html

Images

Photographer, White’s Aviation, ‘Aerial view of Matua Peninsula, Otūmoetai, with Mauao and Mount Maunganui in the background’. Photo 00-Whites Aviation 52741 (473i), 17 March 1960.  Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo 00-434.

Artist unknown, ‘Wairoa Swamp’, Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries. Art 21-042.

Photographer unknown: ‘Portrait of Mrs James West Stack’. Williams, Nigel (Canon), 1901-1980: Photographs of Maori chiefs and others. Ref: PA2-2782. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Artist unknown, ‘Wairoa Pa’, Te Ao Mārama, Tauranga City Libraries. Art 21-043.

The Otūmoetai Beachfront Pathway - Four Early Walkers

A map of the Otūmoetai Peninsula by the late Tauranga historian Alistair Matheson

Otūmoetai Peninsula’s beachfront path has been a major thoroughfare for Māori visitors and residents for centuries.  Walkers traversed a level and pleasant path of approximately two miles – often through groves of ngaio trees - from the Wairoa River entrance to the Waikareao Estuary entrance, just as they do today. Tauranga is a region of peninsulas and estuaries and accessing the peninsula path was not always an easy task.

Before the 1860s and the Tauranga War (1864) and Bush War (1867), Māori and Pākehā overlanders walking south through Waihi and Katikati or over the Kaimai Ranges from the Waikato would, from the Te Puna Peninsula, walk or canoe across the Wairoa River to access the walkway. Travellers trekking northwards from locations like Lake Taupō and the East Coast/Western Bay of Plenty, would first visit the Te Papa mission station before crossing the Waikareao Estuary to access the path.

Travellers in both directions often overnighted at Otūmoetai Pā, the district's Māori and Pākehā-Māori commercial hub. Also known as ‘The Capital of Tauranga’ before the 1860s, the pā was located approximately half-way along the path from the long abandoned Matuaiwi Pā. Early Pākehā travellers who trod the beachfront path included Rev. Henry Williams (1828-1832), Bishop Pompallier (1840 and 1841), Treaty of Waitangi official Thomas Bunbury (1840) and Captain Byron Drury of HMS Pandora, who surveyed the harbour in November 1852. The recollections of four additional walkers are described below.

John Carne Bidwill, Botanist,  1838.

On 3 July 1838, travelling English botanist John Carne Bidwell and his party of Māori porters crossed the Kaimai range to the Te Puna peninsula, from where he was carried at low tide ‘half a mile’ over the Wairoa Rivers dangerous outer crossing ‘on the shoulders of one of the natives’. During his walk to Otūmoetai Pā, he said:  ‘a mob of slaves and boys began to twitch my clothes and gun as I passed along, and make all kinds of impertinent remarks; however, I walked on as fast as I could... and after about a mile got rid of all but the most determined of my persecutors’.¹

From Otūmoetai Pā, Bidwill observed a visiting taua (Maori war party) ‘perfectly friendly with the Tawranga tribe’, leave the fortress for the Waikareao crossing at first light ‘as did they not leave at the time of low water, they would have about a dozen miles further to march’. He also noted that when any allied war parties traversed the Otūmoetai walkway, Tauranga’s resident traders, including those along the path like James Farrow and later, John Lees Faulkner, ‘took all possible precautions to prevent robbery, even to the locking of their stockades, and securing in them such bulky articles as canoes and boats, which would otherwise have been very probably taken away or destroyed’.² Unfortunately, no images of John Carne Bidwill have survived.

Lady Mary Ann Martin, 1846

Lady Mary Ann Martin, c1860s

Another early beachfront traveller was the intrepid semi-invalid, Lady Mary Ann Martin, author of Our Māoris (1884), a New Zealand best seller in its day. During October 1846, she accompanied her husband William - New Zealand’s first Chief Justice, on a journey from Auckland to Rotorua via Tauranga. During their crossing of the Kaimai Range by way of the Wairere Track, Mary Ann  Martin was carried by Māori bearers while lying on a stretcher. She recorded that after, finding herself in a vertical position on several occasions during the ascent, with sheer drops below, she instructed her bearers to tie her to the stretcher:

By one p.m. we had passed through the forest, and came out on a wide plain, from which we saw the sea and coast, stretching far away, and a mountain at the entrance of the harbour standing out against the blue sky; but our fatigues were not over: we knocked about till dark in a whale-boat on a rough sea, and when we landed the first sight that greeted us was a raging fire in the pah [Otūmoetai]. My bearers put me down on the beach, and rushed off to help extinguish the flames.

A kind Maori woman, whose English husband was away, received us into her house, and gave us bread and coffee, and when, after stumbling along [the walkway] in the dark to the crossing-place and shouting across [the Waikareao Estuary to the Te Papa Mission Station] in vain for a boat, we returned to her, she brought out a pile of new blankets and made a bed for us on the floor. About midnight, however, our host, Archdeacon Brown, arrived, and soon after we reached his comfortable Mission-house. After ten nights in the bush, an English bedroom seemed a great luxury.

I stayed for three weeks at Tauranga, while my husband went on to the hot springs. The house was all of native workmanship; the outer walls were of raupo, and the inner walls and ceilings reeded after the best Maori pattern. The windows of the bedroom were overhung with roses^.3

The house where Lady Martin and her husband found temporary refuge, was that of the trader and shipwright John Lees Faulkner - the ‘kind Maori woman’ being his wife Ruawahine. Their house, store and shipyard were located on her land at Okorore, a one acre property located about a half mile east of Otūmoetai Pā on what is today’s Beach Road. The Martins and their Maori porters were returned to the Te Puna Peninsula on Rev Alfred Brown’s whaleboat, from where they retraced their route to Auckland. The Faulkner house has been relocated at Tauranga’s Historic Village).⁴

An Anonymous Walker, 1859

Appearing in the newspaper New Zealander in April 1859 - one month before Ferdinand Von Hochstetter and Ernest Dieffenbach’s scientific expedition visited Tauranga – the following article was written by an unidentified overland traveller.

Leaving the Mission Station and proceeding westward for Otumoiti village, you have to be ferried over the other boat channel [the Waikareao Estuary], and, in making for the village, cross a sandy plain on which is a large, but for the present deserted, native settlement. At Otumoiti there is a considerable settlement, and the Roman Catholic Church, of native structure, is elaborately decorated in the most artistic native manner.

On the beach are the house and stores of Mr. Faulkner, who has resided here for many years, and from whom and Mrs. Faulkner the travellers receive'd a hearty welcome. A short distance further on is the store of Mr. Farrow, and on the opposite side of the harbour is the residence of Captain Sellers (of the cutter “Comet,") who trades along the East Coast. No other Europeans, that we are aware, are regular residents at Tauranga at present; but it is to be hoped that their numbers will soon have an increase, and that they will have the " White Swan" steaming into this noble harbour, and affording them the means of speedy communication with Auckland.⁵

Ferdinand Von Hochstetter, 1859

Ferdinand Von Hochstetter

A noted geologist and writer, Von Hochstetter was appointed to the Austrian round the world scientific expedition in 1857. Arriving at Auckland on the frigate Novara  in December 1858, he, the naturalist Ernest Dieffenbach (who had previously visited Tauranga in 1841), and his scientific party visited many central North Island locations including Taupō and Rotorua. Returning overland to Auckland via Maketu and Tauranga, Von Hochstetter and his companions were welcomed at the Te Papa Mission Station by the Rev Karl Volkner and his wife Emma. Departing after a two day stay he recorded on 12 May 1859:

Kind Mrs. Voelkner had baked some fresh bread and prepared an excellent roast-pork for our benefit on the road; and thus most liberally provided with food, we again parted from a Mission house, the kind and hospitable inhabitants of which I shall never forget. We crossed the Waikareao Creek in a boat, and thence passed over a sandy plain through a deserted Pah in a north-westerly direction along the shores of the harbour, which presents the character of a shallow estuary with, many inlets and studded with numerous islands, separated from the sea only by a row of sandhills, and extends, at an average breadth of two to three miles, in a N.W. direction, as far as the Katikati river, a distance of 15 miles.

After a short hour's walk we reached the Otumoetai Pah (others spell it Otumoiti), one of the principal settlements on Tauranga Harbour, at the same time the seat of a Roman Catholic mission. The church of the place is of a very neat construction; there are also some Europeans settled here. On the beach lay a number of beautiful war-canoes; and next to them a schooner, belonging to the Maoris, which they had bought for £500, leaving it afterwards to rot and decay.

From Otumoetai we came over excellent, fertile alluvial plains to the Wairoa Bay. The Bay is very shallow, and the sandy rather than muddy ground so firm, that, although the tide had already half set in, we could without danger wade through to Peterehema (Bethlehem)... How very different everything here will look in after-years, when a European City shall rise on the Tauranga Harbour, and the beautiful country round about be dotted with flourishing farms.⁶

References

¹ Bidwill, John, Rambles in New Zealand, W.S. Orr and Co. London, 1841: Capper Reprint 1974:  79-81.

² Ibid.

³Martin, Mary Ann, Our Maoris, E. and J. B. Young, London, 1884: 98-99.

⁴ Matheson, A. H; ‘Otumoetai Pa and the Early Days in Tauranga’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society (Inc.), August - September 1975, No. 54: 14.

⁵ New Zealander, 2 April 1859: 3.

⁶ Von Hochstetter, Ferdinand, New Zealand: Its Physical Geography, Geology and Natural History, J.G. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1867: 445-446.

Images

Matheson, Alistair, ‘Otumoetai Pa and the Early traders in Tauranga, Part II’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society (Inc.), August-September 1975, No.54. OT (2) 3.

Bartlett & Co. (Auckland): Lady Mary Ann Martin (1817-1884) PA2-0195. National Library, Wellington New Zealand

Dauthage, Adolf, 1825-1883. Dauthage, Adolf, 1825-1883 :Ferdinand R. Hochstetter 1859, aged 28.. Haast, Julius von: In memoriam. Ferdinand R. Hochstetter. Dunedin, J. McKay, 1884. Ref: PUBL-0135-front. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23162756

Enemy at the Gates 1820, 1828

The Intertribal Musket War’s Impact on Tauranga

A Ngāpuhi musket haka or haka peruperu

During the 1820s and 1830s, the Matua-Otūmoetai foreshore boomed and echoed ominously to the roar of haka, as besieging enemy tribesmen from several iwi leapt and stamped in frustrated fury below Otūmoetai, a previously unconquerable pā tūwatawata (palisaded fortress). During the summer months of 1820, the foreshore became the scene of one of the most famous peace-making incidents of the intertribal Musket Wars.

In that year, Tauranga was invaded by a Ngāpuhi musket taua of 600-700 warriors aboard 50 waka taua.¹ The expedition was initiated by the rangatira Te Morenga, who was seeking further utu for the killing, cooking and devouring of his niece Tawaputa at Tauranga in 1806. Deploying his contingent of shock troops ahead of his force (35 toa armed with the only flintlock muskets in their possession), Te Morenga oversaw the destruction by gunfire of the Ngāi Te Rangi defenders of [Mount] Maunganui Pā, who twice charged their ranks with traditional short and long weapons of stone, bone and wood. ‘For three days the grisly aftermath of the battle [fought at Waikorire-Pilot Bay] continued as the bodies of those slain were committed to the hāngī and eaten’.²

Te Morenga and his triumphant taua next turned their attention to Otūmoetai Pā. Initially bypassing the fortress, the Ngāpuhi fleet encamped on Matakana Island for several days, before sweeping en masse one morning into the Matua inlet near the Wairoa River outlet. The toa disembarked and camped on the long-abandoned pā site of Matuaiwi, a knoll overhanging the Wairoa River, about a mile and a half from the great Otūmoetai pā. Like successive enemy taua before them, they too attempted to storm Ngāi Te Rangi’s central fortress without success.³

Te Morenga’s moko Mataora (face tattoo).
Eight years after the kidnapping of his niece and sister by convict pirates in 1806, Te Morenga sketched this image of his own moko Mataora for John Nicholas, who was friend and assistant to the leading missionary Samuel Marsden

Te Waru, Ngāi Te Rangi’s paramount chief, set out alone one day to reconnoitre the Ngāpuhi camp. Advancing carefully through the ngaio trees along the foreshore, he saw Te Morenga, who was resting in the shade, also alone and unguarded. Springing upon the Ngāpuhi, Te Waru disarmed him, bound his hands and drove his prisoner into Otūmoetai Pā. There he untied Te Morenga, restored his weapons and instructed him to treat him in the same manner. When Te Morenga drove the disarmed and bound Te Waru into the Matuaiwi encampment, he, with some difficulty, persuaded his warriors not to kill his prisoner. Invited to make peace with Ngāpuhi, an extended kōrero ensued during which Te Waru accepted the offer. Soon after, Te Morenga and Ngāpuhi fleet departed for the Bay of Islands. The peace was to last until 1831, when the tohunga Te Haramiti’s Ngāti Kuri and Ngāpuhi predatory raiders were defeated by Ngāi Te Rangi and allied iwi on Motiti Island.⁴

In 1828, Otamataha Pā on the Te Papa Peninsula was stormed in a night attack by a Ngāti Maru musket taua under the rangatira Te Rohu, during which most of the Ngāti Tapu inhabitants were slaughtered. Te Rohu’s waka fleet then crossed to the Otūmoetai foreshore and pā, where they met with counterfire from the now musket armed defenders. The besiegers withdrew when one of Te Rohu’s wives persuaded him that the utu he had attained from Ngāi Te Rangi during the storming of Otamataha Pā was sufficient.⁵

A pōwhiri or welcoming ceremony on the harbourside bench beyond the palisades of Otūmoetai Pā. The palisades proved impervious to musket and cannon fire when Tītore Tākiri of Ngāpuhi launched an amphibious artillery campaign against the Tauranga people in 1832

On 17 July 1842, Ensign Abel Best visited Otūmoetai Pa at a time when it was still subject to attacks by Te Arawa contingents from Rotorua. Impressed by its defences, he recorded:

Part of the Pa is on the sea beach and part on the top of a cliff or steep bank 40 feet high. By its position naturally strong it is rendered more secure by a strong palisade and on the land side & flanks it is further protected by a deep and wide Ditch having a Stockade on its exterior side. Moreover, the level of the exterior plain is somewhat lower than that of the Pa. Were it well defended its intricacy alone would render it formidable but at present there are not men in it to defend one fifth of its great extent. Nowhere have I seen so great a number of fine Canoes the care with which they preserve their fishing nets was also worthy of remark every net being placed on a little elevated platform and then securely thatched over.⁶

During the Musket Wars, the Ngāi Te Rangi hapu occupying the Otūmoetai Pā site were able to defend their fortress and drive off besieging Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Maru and Te Arawa  taua. The wars set in motion more than 40 heke or tribal migrations, but Ngāi Te Rangi were never driven from their lands. Otūmoetai Pā’s steep escarpments, defensive ditches and palisades were unassailable, the defenders too well led, provisioned and resolute.

Endnotes

¹ Crosby, Ron, The Musket Wars: A History of Inter-Iwi Conflict, Reed, Auckland, 1999: 71-72.

² Ibid: 72

³ Gifford, W.H. and H, Bradley Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga, Capper Press Christchurch, 1976: 18.

⁴ Ibid: 18-19.

⁵ Wilson, J.A. The Story of Te Waharoa, Whitcombe and Tombs, Wellington, 1907: 17.

⁶ Best Able, The Journal of Ensign Best, 1837-1843, Nancy M. Taylor (ed.), R.E. Owen, Wellington, 1966: 371-372.

Illustrations

Artist unknown, ‘New Zealand war-dance’, in Grant, James, British Battles on Land and Sea, Vol. III, Casell, Petter and Gilpin, London, Paris and New York, 1880: 259.

Te Morenga, self portrait in Nicholas, John, Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand, Performed in the Years 1814 and 1815, James Black, London, 1817: 216. Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. A-080-061

Joseph Merrett, A meeting of visitors Mounganui. Tauraga in the distance. [1843?], E-216-f-119, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

Orchards at Otumoetai

Otumoetai Peninsula, c. early 1950s
Oblique aerial view by Whites Aviation, Negative No. 35118

When I was first given this lovely image it took me quite some time to get my bearings but finally I recognised the large bushy area which includes four large Norfolk pines as the garden of "Maungawhare”, a colonial gothic home of generous proportions built about 80 years earlier. In the early 1970s I was privileged to have a pony and his paddock was on part of their land on the Vale Street West/Maungawhare Place precinct and the “pound” for large animals was right next to my rented grazing. I can see Maungawhare Place coming from the left of the image about one third from the lower margin of the photograph and where it disappears behind the tall trees that was my area of special equine interest.

The Kaimai Ranges are in the backdrop and Matakana and neighbouring Rangiwaea Island to the right. The two “peninsulas” on the left are actually Motuhoa Island with Omokoroa Point behind.

Bring your eyes down to the Matua Peninsula where it is possible to pick out the paddocks of the Tilby Farm which surround the large coastal group of pines and the small point to the right, the homestead can be seen with a large dark tree to either side. This is now the site of Matua Primary School.

Bisecting the large salt marsh and wetland is the gentle curve of the railway, built by 1928, but as yet Ngatai Rd which runs parallel has not been formed. The higher ground by a hedge and newly formed road is now Otumoetai Intermediate School, and behind the large eucalypts would later become Carlton Street and Emily Place.

As you can see clearly, the block of land between Otumoetai and Grange Roads was well established in fruit trees, probably representing all types of common citrus. This view is interesting as it truly illustrates what a horticultural area Otumoetai was (citrus fruit), prior to being cut up gradually for residential lots.

I was curious as to the date this may have been flown so looked the the Tauranga City Council's Mapi site for older aerials. In the 1943 view there are less houses along the curve of Grange Road in the foreground, but in 1959 there are many more built than in the White’s image. Therefore I have concluded it may have been in the early to mid-1950s.