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