David Topi Werahiko Borell – a tribute

On Saturday 9 May, fifty years and one day after his death, representatives of Tauranga Historical were invited to gather with members of the Borell whānau  to commemorate their koro and our rangatira’s contributions to his community.

Paparoa marae, 9 May 2026  (Image: Beth Bowden)

Family man, famed sportsman and scholar, Mr David Borell of Te Puna was a member of the Tauranga Historical Society in various roles in the 1960’s.  He was on the Executive Committee for a long time, starting in 1963 and serving as Vice President for 1965 (the job was taken over by T. R. Te Kani in1966).  But his activities extended far beyond those administrative functions, and well into the century’s – and his – 70s.

Te Puna Rugby Team, 1920.  Davy Borell is third from left in the middle row. (Image: Te Ao Marama, 08-073)

Davy, as he was usually known, famously turned down the chance to play for the All Blacks because his wife was due to have a baby.  The confidence that underlay such a decision may have come from his earlier experience as a scholarship boy:  he had won his secondary education at a big-city school, Sacred Heart College in Glen Innes, Auckland, where he learned Latin, history and geography.  He spoke te reo all his life and moved effortlessly between te ao Māori and te ao pākehā.  In his retirement, he put these talents at the service of the Tauranga Historical Society.

In the Society’s September 1964 Journal (Number 21) [1] he published a long-form article titled “Historic Te Puna”.  Being the scholar he was, it took two full pages of background description of waka voyages, social context, and whakapapa before he actually got on to Te Puna;  and in the midst of this introduction is a small personal gem:  his father saw the famous, now lost, family portrait sent by Queen Victoria in return for a gift of a sack of wheat flour milled at Rangiawahia.  Davy mentions:

My father actually saw this portrait of the Royal Family, which he said measured about three feet by about four feet.  In 1932 communication was made to the then Governor through the authorities, for a possible replacement of that portrait or something similar, but of course the request proved negative.  It was I who wrote out the request and covered almost two foolscap sheets of writing paper.

Davy then goes on to describe, in order, the pā of Te Puna – Oikimoke, Epeha, Hamaruru, Raropua, Oturu, the strange and beautiful story of Hawaiki, the island pa of Tukoro, Hūharua on today’s Plummers Point, and the inland pa of Hopuni, Tawhitinui, Pukewhanake, Paerangi.

We must note here, given the current exhibition of toki at the Western Bay Museum:

The pā at Hakarua [Hūharua]… was a repository of scores of stone axe-heads.  Miss Violet Plummer, while I was there building at her home, showed me two boxes of these stone axe-heads.  Some of them were well polished, others were of a rougher nature, and the best ones she told me were sent away to the Auckland museum, a box full of them… a taiaha was found in swampy ground lower down… Who knows, there may be a lot of other old artifacts within or immediately outside that pā.

 Davy wrote beautifully, and was a great storyteller.  He could evoke character and personality, drama, emotion, and humour.  He describes the workings of the mill on the Wairoa River, and how his father Werahiko and Hone Bidois built St Joseph’s church.  He himself learned his carpenter’s trade from Werahiko.  As late as 1967 he was still using these skills for the benefit of the Society, making “a large cabinet” for the Society archives, “placed temporarily in the Sladden Library room adjoining the City Council Library.”  A suggestion that the cabinet was included in the Museum collection (Journal Number 42, April 1971) remains unconfirmed.

He was just as much at home of the water of Tauranga Moana as the mainland, and organised two trips, both involving launch travel, to entertain and inform Society members.  Under his guidance, in 1965 they enjoyed boating out to Ōmokoroa and thence (by bus) to Whakamārama; and, in 1966, took another trip out to Motuhoa Island, which started with a pōwhiri:

After these formalities were over, the tractors with their passengers and others who preferred to walk moved off towards the western end of the Island to the home of Mr. and Mrs. C. G. Borell.  It was a lengthy trudge, for those on foot, but it helped to build up a thirst and an appetite…Mr Peter Bidois, who is a highly respected elder of the Pirirakau tribe, extended a worm welcome to the visitors in traditional Māori style.  He likened their coming to the arrival of the early Māori fleet of canoes, with the winds, from the four corners of the earth, making the same waves that had carried both the visitors and the Māori people on their journeys.

Luncheon was then set on tables on the lawn…

By far the best story of island life, however, appeared in the April 1967 Journal (Number 30). It is an account of horse racing on Matakana Island, meetings which took place on New Year’s Day of 1919, 1920 and 1921: [2]

A Committee of management was elected, Mr. Aramoana Amohau being chairman and Mr. Turoia Kuka, secretary.  The first programme  was made known by way of notebook and verbal contacts.  The news spread like wildfire, and nominations were soon received for the various races.  … one such race horse, named Oaklands, a fine upstanding brown gelding, by appearance, and that alone; anyone would have deemed defeat in a race impossible; but alas, it was not to be.  Some of the Island half-racehorses which ran against Oaklands beat him to a frazzle. 

For the descriptions of the “Island half-racehorses”, and their names, and those of their owners, and the weight of their jockeys, and the adjudication of the races themselves, and the hilarious double-booking of the Tauranga Municipal Band that eventually triggered official intervention, you really do have to read the full article.  When Davy died eight years later, the Journal editor reprinted it, along with his obituary (Number 57, September 1976).

At the end of his very first article for the Journal, Davy expressed the fear that

As we are being borne aloft on the wings of progress and speeding on into the vortex of a faster world, the very things we loved and cherished are being swept away…

Screenshot of a Matakana Island beach race in 2012.  (Image: Stan Walker, J M Media)

At the commemoration we all agreed that he would be pleased to know that horses still occasionally race at Matakana Island. [3]  

 [1] All sources for the Journal references in this essay are available on Pae Koroki.  For the Collection Summary page, go to https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/23915

 [2] For a vigorous overview on horse racing activities in Tauranga, see Leabourn, B. From the Government Paddock to Group 1 Glory, especially Chapter 3.  https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/50640

 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXgUvLgNpps&t=24s , JM Media

 

TT in Te Puna, 1961

 

Motorcycle road race, 24 January 1961, group on truck

Image: Te Ao Marama Photo gca-523

On Te Puna’s busy roads of today, it is hard to believe that for a Saturday afternoon in January 1961, two of its most important thoroughfares were closed.  And not for the first time – the Tauranga Motorcycle Club had been able to do this since 1955, just before my family arrived in Te Puna.  The family in the photo above is still to be identified, but the image shows the cheerful interest that was taken in these races, described in combative terms: “thrilling duel”, “battle”, “challenger”, “desperate effort”.  Road races, on real roads, were the stuff of drama.

By 1961, Te Puna Road had been tar sealed but was significantly narrower than it is today.  Its long, flattish stretch from the main highway provided starting and finishing straights for a series of motorcycle races, “conducted under ideal conditions [and] watched by a good crowd”. [1]

You can find the starting line today.  It was at the entryway to number 78, Te Puna Road.

"Competitors in the 500 c.c. race at the Tauranga Motorcycle Club's Road race meeting at Te Puna at the weekend being briefed while lined up on the grid awaiting the start.  The winner, F. Cardon (Auckland) is nearest camera, No. 5."

Image: Te Ao Marama Photo gca540

This was probably not the only start-point, however.  The NZ Lightweight TT race ran over 20 miles, which by my calculation of the route used meant a half-lap had to be accommodated somewhere.  The TT (standing for “Tourist Trophy”, a term of art in the motorcycling world) probably began at the corner of Borell and Snodgrass Roads, where there still is a short straight to roar off on, then down over the railway bridge and uphill for a mild left turn into Armstrong Road before its chicanes taxed the riders’ skills.  After that, they went for five further laps before the finish line outside number 78 on Te Puna Road.

All the other roads, in 1961, were surfaced with metal from the Te Puna Quarry.  Pink/grey rhyolite, ready to crumble and turn to dust, but in “ideal conditions” skiddy, slidy fun stuff to zoom along on - as long as you were ahead of the pack.  But not even then. In 1961, the leading contender in the 350 cc race, F. Cardon, had to retire when “a stone dropped down the venturi mouth of his carburettor.”

The longer, 32-mile races, took seven circuits for the 350 cc and 500 cc racing bikes.  In 1961, the winner of the 350 cc class, J. Farnsworth, set “a new lap record of 3.29s” over the 3.7 mile circuit.  Less than a mile a minute on average: given the twists and turns of the route, this must have meant some crazy speeds on the straights.

It also meant a thrilling afternoon for the “good crowd”.  Haybales lined the corner of Borell Road, just after the other, Te Puna Road, railway bridge; at George and Bubbles Waterman’s chook farm on Snodgrass Road; and at Armstrong Road, where Alistair Clark’s house still stands.  This was a counter-clockwise circuit, with left-hand turns all the way.

F. Cardon, winner of the 500 cc race at Te Puna in 1961, negotiates the transition from loose metal back to tar seal at the corner of Armstrong and Te Puna Roads

Image: Te Ao Marama, Photo gca541

Spectators lined the route, and I imagine (I was always at the start/finish line) that another landmark Te Puna property, Rex Williams’ farm, famous for Rex’s collection of machinery and variously-powered engines, provided a vantage point for knowledgeable enthusiasts, later to be known as petrol-heads.

Motorcycle road racing seems not to have lasted in Tauranga much beyond 1961.  Images in the Photo News, which came to Tauranga in 1962, show cross-country races on the Papamoa Hills and the startup of Bay Park.  Its editor would surely have included a road-race story if one had happened.  These days, the Tauranga Motorcycle Club does its racing off-road, at the TECT Park.  A very different landscape to the placid pastorale of 1950’s Te Puna, which tolerated – on the evidence, actively enjoyed – having its peace and rights of way destroyed for a summer afternoon’s excitement.

"THRILLING DUEL. F Cardon (No. 5) and J Farnsworth (No. 27) battle for the lead in the 350 c.c. racing class at the Tauranga motorcycle club's road race meeting at Te Puna on Saturday.  Farnsworth won the race, Cardon retiring after a stone lodged in his carburettor venturi."

Image: Te Ao Marama, Photo gca524

Notes

[1] Bay of Plenty Times, Monday January 23 1961, p. 3.  All quotes used are taken from this article and accompanying photograph captions.

The Otūmoetai Beachfront Pathway- Three Later Walkers

 The Otūmoetai harbourside path with Te Puna’s Oikimoke Point in the distance

The Otūmoetai beachfront pathway was traversed for centuries by resident Māori iwi as well as iwi from outside the region with peaceful or warlike intentions. During the 1800s, a succession of European missionaries, traders, sailors, scientists and colonial officials also walked the pathway, after first crossing the Wairoa River from the Te Puna Peninsula to the west or the Waikareao Estuary from the Te Papa Peninsula to the east.

Reverend John Wilson

Rev. John Wilson, 1836

After ten years’ service in the Royal Navy, John Alexander Wilson was employed by the Anglican Church Missionary Society as a catechist. He was posted to their missions in New Zealand, arriving at the Bay of Islands with his wife and children in 1833.

By 1835 mission stations had been established beyond the Bay of Islands including Mangapouri (Hamlin and Stack), Matamata (Alfred Brown), Rotorua (Thomas Chapman) and at Te Papa, Tauranga, by John Wilson. However, as the intertribal fighting in the Tauranga region escalated, Wilson and the missionaries Alfred Brown and James Stack at Te Papa sent their families aboard the missionary brig Columbine for safety on 31^st March 1836. They remained at the Bay of Islands and did not return to Tauranga until the following year.[1]

In 1836, Wilson and the Rev. Thomas Chapman set out from the Bay of Islands in the hope of ending the intertribal war in the Bay of Plenty. The missionaries first visited the Ngati Haua iwi at Matamata, before crossing the Kaimai Range to meet with Tauranga iwi who were jointly planning an attack on the Te Arawa people at Maketu and Rotorua. Alone at Te Papa during July 1836, Wilson describes crossing the Waikareao Estuary by boat, before undertaking the (one hour) beachfront walk to and from Otūmoetai Pa.

9th. --Mr. Chapman left to-day for Rotorua. I walked some distance with him. On my return had a visit from one of the head chiefs of Tauranga, old Taharangi. He was very pleasant but sorry to see me left alone and grieved that everyone had left the station. Flooring my back room--found it hard work planing boards and getting them to fit, I being a very unskilful carpenter.

Sunday, 10th. --A few people came to morning service at the settlement [the Te Papa Mission Station]. Spoke from Matt xiii. 13 to 16. Felt deeply the fulfilment of the prophecy here quoted by our Lord as applicable to the present state of the Māori people. They appear alike uninfluenced by the love or the terror of God.

“At Otumoetai only sixty natives were present at service. Walked solitarily homewards, if a desolate house can be called home. And as I sauntered along the shore [the Otūmoetai harbour front walkway], the loneliness of the mission station, surrounded on two sides by water, without a habitation near, or native, save one [Taharangi, the elderly rangatira who protected the mission station], open and exposed to the enemy, gave rise to sad forebodings. But soon the thought flashed into my mind that it was for the Lord, and my gloom was gone.”[2]

Intertribal warfare in fact escalated during the remainder of 1836. Following the storming of Maketu and Te Tumu Pa and the slaughter of their inhabitants, and the plundering of the Rotorua mission station, Wilson and Chapman temporarily abandoned the region and retraced their steps over the Kaimai range.

Rev. Richard Taylor, 1839

Rev. Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor (1805–1873) was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1829. He was later appointed a missionary with the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and settled at the Bay of Islands in 1839. He took part in Treaty discussions at Waitangi in February 1840 and in later years he evangelised at Whanganui and Taupo with considerable success.^[3]

In 1839, Taylor had only been in New Zealand for a few days before he set out from the Bay of Islands with missionary William Williams on the cutter Aquila for the East Coast. They called at Tauranga during the voyage where they met the missionaries Alfred Brown, his wife Charlotte and John Morgan. Like the Rev William Colenso, Taylor was a keen student of natural history and the life and customs of Māori. He also kept a diary in which he detailed all that he saw and experienced. [4]

Monday 25 March – “I walked with Mr Morgan to the pa at Otutumoiti [Otūmoetai] which is a very populous one and much like the other distant about 3 miles [Maungatapu?]. I called upon a Mr Bidewell residing there [John Carne Bidwill, botanist and explorer]. He is supposed to be sent to spy the land by the New Zealand Association. He is a very gentlemanly and well-informed person. He returned with us to dinner and then accompanied us to see the mount [either Mount Drury or Maunganui]”. [5]

Taylor, Williams and their Māori crew remained for a week at the Te Papa Mission Station awaiting favourable winds, before they and the Aquila exited the harbour entrance to continue the voyage to the East Coast.

Joseph Cochrane, 1855

Joseph Cochrane

Like the traders James Farrow and John Lees Faulkner, the former Londonderry auctioneer Joseph Cochrane also located his store near the busy Otūmoetai pathway and foreshore. On passing Joseph Cochrane’s new store, from 1855, people travelling the beachfront would stop to converse with the trader - described by his peers as ‘a cheerful, intelligent kind and generous hearted man’. The store was a large building from which Cochrane supplied other traders along the Bay of Plenty coast. Located by his patron and protector Hori Ngatai on land, between the Faulkner's land at Okorore and Otūmoetai Pa, Cochrane regularly forded the Waikareao Estuary to stay and converse with his good friends Rev Karl Volkner and his wife Emma at the Te Papa Mission Station.⁶

On one occasion when Archdeacon Brown was away from the Te Papa Mission Station, Cochrane crossed the Waikareao Estuary and saw Rev Volkner and his Māori schoolboys engaged in clearing a patch of scrub near the cemetery. Wishing to assist, Cochrane set fire to the heaps of cut scrub, but when the wind suddenly changed and the fire threatened to spread, someone, hoping to preserve the wooden grave markers, pulled them up and threw them into the estuary. As the estuary entrance was rendered tapu by this act, Māori fisherman and traders were unable to enter or exit in their waka and sailing boats. To redress this offence and transgression of tikanga (customary law), a Māori taua muru (ritual plundering party), approached the mission station, but withdrew when Rev Volkner, a former Prussian Army soldier, confronted them with his rifle. [7]

Another Māori muru party later crossed the Waikareao Estuary to Cochrane’s premises seeking redress, but as he had considerable mana, being Hori Ngatai’s Pakeha, Cochrane’s store was not plundered. Nevertheless, utu (redress) was still required as without satisfaction the affected Māori traders and fishermen would be rendered huka kore or people of no consequence. To the satisfaction of the offended parties, utu was achieved when Cochrane’s wheat theshing machine was ritually struck and damaged with a tomahawk, an act considered tika - a perfectly correct response to the considerable inconvenience he had caused them. [8]

[Editorial note: Readers may be interested in part one of this article, The Otūmoetai Beachfront Pathway – Four Early Walkers, published here on Sunday 23 March 2025.]

References

[1] McClymont, W.G; The Exploration of New Zealand, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1940: 33.

[2]  Wilson, J.A; Mission Life and Work in New Zealand, 1833 to 1885, Star Office, Auckland, 1889: 41-42.

[3] Taylor, Richard – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography – Te Ara, https://teara.govt.nz › biographies › taylor-richard

[4] Taylor, Richard, unpublished journal, cited in Matheson, A. H; ‘Early Tauranga visitors’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society (Inc.), No. 51, August 1974: 21

[5]  Ibid, 26.

[6] Bay of Plenty Times, 23 October 1875: 2. Fletcher, Kathleen, Early Flax Traders Around Tauranga’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society, No. 59, September 1976: 26.

[7] Bay of Plenty Times, 16 September 1884: 2. Matheson, A. H. ‘Otumoetai Pa and the Early Days in Tauranga’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society (Inc.), August - September 1975, No. 54: 17-18.

[8] Ibid.

Images

Photographer, Sgroey,‘Otumoetai Beach’, 9 April 2022,https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ot%C5%ABmoetai_Beach.jpg

Wilson, John Alexander, Missionary Life and Work in New Zealand, 1833-1862, C. J. Wilson (ed.), Star Office, Auckland, 1899, title page.

Reverend Richard Taylor. Bates, Arthur Palmer, 1926-2002: Photographs of Reverend Richard Taylor and associations. Ref: 1/2-C-14302-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22607779

Hopkins, Wanda, ‘One of the Right Sort’ Kae Lewis (ed.), The New Zealand Goldrush Journal, Vol. 4, 2020. Kae Lewis, https://www.kaelewis.com › cochrane › hopkins

Photo News Views Te Puna, 1963-1967

“BACK COVER. A quiet corner of Te Puna River.  Just around the point to the left of the picture, the estuary opens out to form a popular anchorage for small boats.”

IImage:  Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries, Logan Publishing, Tauranga and Bay of Plenty Photo News Collection Magazine Number 63

For the purposes of this exercise, it turned out to be fortunate that Te Puna is bounded by two rivers.  Seeking to promote the Western Bay of Plenty Community Archives [1], I asked for access to its collection of the Tauranga/Bay of Plenty Photo News, with the thought that browsing through its early issues would be a certain way to discover many images, long left hidden, of life in the 1960’s in the rohe west of the Wairoa bridge.  After all, I reasoned, the magazine’s editor, Tony Ahern, lived in Bethlehem – he was bound to find, and frequently, matters of interest in the next-door neighbourhood, and worthy of a picture or two?

 Tony Ahern 

Image: Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries, Logan Publishing, Tauranga and Bay of Plenty Photo News Collection Magazine Number 61

Not so.  Tony’s was a big beat to cover, extending out beyond the growing town (which became a city in a ceremony recorded in the Photo News of 25 May 1963, Issue 12)  to Opotiki in the east and, occasionally, Katikati and the lower Kaimai to the west and south.  He didn’t look past the riverside very often.  Over the first four years’ worth of issues held in the archive, I found that someone using the search term, <Wairoa> would be much more richly rewarded than if they sought for hits on <Te Puna>.

Tony himself wrote, in the 27 April 1963 issue of Photo News:

“Rivers nearly always make attractive pictures and this scene, where the Wairoa crosses the Waihi highway [i.e., upstream of the road bridge], has frequently been painted by local artists.”

Browsing through the physical copies, as opposed to searching on-line using a specific search term, rewards the researcher with a sense of proportion as well as humility (if that researcher is biassed, as I am).  This is a historiographical exercise – where was the gaze of Tony’s photo-journalism directed?  What served the popular imagination in ensuring the undoubted success and wide appreciation of the Photo News, franchised as it was throughout the North Island? [2]  What – my crucial inquiry – were the things that got Te Puna a feature image or two as the magazine found its way into the households of the Bay of Plenty?

As well as rivers: two things, it turns out.  Cute kids and mushrooms.

Tauranga Photo News #31, 12 December 1964, “Te Puna Convent Day”, p. 49

Image: Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries, Logan Publishing, Tauranga and Bay of Plenty Photo News Collection Magazine Number 31

I encourage readers to explore the online image, digitised on Pae Koroki [3]  - the captions, especially for the driftwood sculpture displayed by Selwyn Bidois, are well worth reading.

Over the first 62 issues of Photo News, this was one of only two features concerning non-riverine Te Puna, as well as one incidental (and interesting) image of a painting, not of river scenery but of workers in the Te Puna Mill, by a local Tauranga artist, Pauline Peacock-Mills. What has happened to this evocative picture? 

 Franklin's Mill, circa 1963, by Pauline Peacock-Mills
Image: Beth Bowden

Photo News spared little to no space to industry in Te Puna, framing it very much as a pastoral enclave with few indications of the corporate, monocultural land uses that were to become such a feature of the area (after the magazine’s demise, it must be said).  One example of innovative and high-tech factory farming, then as now much appreciated by locals, was the Olivers’ mushroom production unit originally sited on Clarke Road [4].

 Oliver family's mushroom farm, Te Puna 1967.  Bay of Plenty Photo News, June 24 1967.  
Image: Beth Bowden

We do know what happened to the Oliver’s mushroom farm.  It moved [5].  For while the geography of Te Puna remains bounded by its two rivers, and its economy is founded on its famously versatile soils, the skills and techniques of land and farm management Tony Ahern recorded in his scant coverage of Te Puna either died in place – as with the mill – or found other ways and means of showing themselves.  The area pictured below, now designated – and used - as an industrial zone in the WBoPDC’s District Plan, no longer merits Tony’s caption of September 1963 [6]  But so things go.

"Down to the Sea.  Wide and free, the beautiful Wairoa River flows beside Te Puna station road through quiet countryside of great charm."  Tauranga Photo News, Issue 16, 14 September 1963 

Image: Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries, Logan Publishing, Tauranga and Bay of Plenty Photo News Collection Magazine Number 16

[1] See its online collections at https://westernbay.recollect.co.nz/

[2] For a step-by-step account of how the Photo News for each particular region was produced, see Bay of Plenty Photo News No. 61, 24 June 1967, “Focus on Photo News”, pp 71-77 Bay of Plenty Photo News No. 61 | Pae Korokī

[3] https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/101357#idx380992

[4] Bay of Plenty Photo News No. 61 | Pae Korokī

[5] https://www.maramasmushrooms.nz/pages/about-us

[6] https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/101372     

Author: Beth Bowden

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.

Archaeology in a Small Locality

 

Like love in a cold climate, there may be more of it around than you might think. My initial search of the Heritage New Zealand database admitted some vagaries - it counted all references to the Katikati-Te Puna Purchase and included some reports concerning the Te Puna Mission Station in Northland. My own count of the ‘matches’ it presented found 31 reports of archaeological investigations in the rohe between the (southern) Wairoa River, along the Minden ridge and down to the Te Puna stream. All but one of them, (Motuhoa Island, 1983) were dated after the turn of this century.

Harper’s Farm, Munro Road East, Te Puna

Even before it became fashionable – or necessary – to establish evidence of prior settlement, I have long known we had archaeological sites at our front door. As a child I thought that two hillocks on two neighbouring properties on Munro Road were “made” – their shapes were too regular, their tops too flat, to be entirely natural. Celtic myths of the faery hunt in hollow hills, mixed with tales of waka being hauled into caves[1], fed my fantasies. I had to wait some decades to have the facts, revealed – as is often the case – by plans to subdivide and develop house plots on what had been open paddocks (and, within living memory, the site of a 1940’s cowshed).

Harper’s Farm map (Real Estate advert)

The realtor’s 2016 advertisement disclosed this hill to be a kainga site. It shows as the slightly irregular pink-shaded circle on the right-hand side of the following image. (The other pink areas were described as middens and possible storage pits.) In a map[2] surveyed after the Te Puna Quarry Reserve was gazetted in 1911, the same area is labelled, tantalisingly, as a “Village Res.”, indicating at least some memory of previous settlement. I suppose (I am not an archaeologist) that this flat-topped knob would be called a ‘platform’. Around 2020 a modern house was built at the bottom of the slope, its back garden shaving off a small flank of hillside. The rest of the hill has yet to attract the attentions of anyone with a trowel, brush and measuring stick, so material evidence of pre-European habitation remains in the ground. But the patterns of landform and geography – an undefended, nevertheless dominating, site adjacent to a watercourse and hillside forest – make it easy to imagine a way of life from 500 years ago.

This is but one example of the outburst of energies and archaeological attention stimulated by the growth of horticultural and “lifestyle block” development all over the western Bay of Plenty[3]. Even more locally, the creation of the “Minden Lifestyle Zone”[4] had the effect of intensifying modern settlement across an area that was, as the result of efforts by the Historic Places Trust and, in particular, post-grad students from the Anthropology Departments of Auckland and Otago Universities, much better understood as a landscape richly endowed with evidence of past existence. 

When Mary O’Keeffe published her thesis in 1991, she could refer to the (then) Tauranga County as “archaeologically unknown”, until it became the subject of “recent field work [that] has shown there to be a very large number and a wide variety of sites…”[5]. Her work was founded on an appreciation of the qualities that have continued to recommend themselves to subsequent populations: the benign environment and congenial climate of the countryside between the coast and the Kaimai range. Less appreciated, perhaps, is her other salient observation that “many features present do not show on the surface.[6]”

Maybe it is a feature of settler society to be unappreciative of anything much below the surface.  Writing in 2002[7], Garry Law reported to the Department of Conservation (in respect of a much larger area, DoC’s Bay of Plenty Conservancy)  that although Māori archaeological sites were better known and recorded (albeit in somewhat erratic fashion) than “historical” – that is, post-European – archaeology: “the forestry, mining and transport history readily seen on the ground”. To this we could add farming infrastructure. The aforementioned cowshed’s materials were all (except for the concrete milking floor) repurposed. Its floor survived until new foundations were laid for another 21^st-century house.

Even a cursory analysis of the Heritage New Zealand database shows that, in the tiny area of Te Puna, there are two main drivers for archaeology:  roading and housing. The advent of the Takitimu Northern Link has generated a significant number of reports across a broad swathe of landforms, from the Wairoa River floodplain to the rolling uplands of the Minden Ridge. Because of its scale – at the time of writing it is the largest archaeological site in New Zealand – it has revealed patterns of settlement and itinerant activities (including the unfortunate effects of careless development) from the present day backwards to about 1350. Already it is altering Te Puna’s history, as it (we trust) stands the test of time and becomes, itself, “historical”.

As to housing: many of the addresses in the database search results were familiar. Building consents, even on ostensibly bare land in Te Puna, now very frequently require an archaeological report. So I got in touch with Murray Lloyd, who has lived all his life at 350 Wairoa Road[8]. In fact, the fourth generation of Lloyds now live there too. Murray’s family, starting from his grandfather, have been on the property since 1909. “Getting the report done was really pretty special,” Murray told me. “We always knew it had been lived on before, being right on the river – the main ‘road’, so to say – and my dad had a good relationship with Ngati Pango, especially the Apaapa whānau…  we thought it was important to know where it would be ok to put our houses. It was a bit of inconvenience, but it wasn’t a surprise, what we found out.”

Basalt adze found on Lloyd’s Farm, Wairoa Road
Image courtesy of Matthew Campbell, CFG Heritage Ltd

No-one should be surprised by the discussion in this essay.  Our locality has been lived in, worked over, and modified for centuries[9].  The powerfully haunting outline of the Papamoa pa system on our eastern horizon is a constant reminder.  My friend Kiritoha Tangitu said once:  “Whenever I look at them, I think: the work!  The work!”

So I approach with humility and admiration the whenua kua ngaro at the corner of my road.  It too took labour to create.  I also hope the whānau whose home it once was had times of peace and plenty before they had to abandon this small toehold at the foot of Rangituanehu.  I’m glad they left its shape behind them.

References

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[1] Park, Ruth, The Hole in the Hill, first published 1 January 1961

[2] Survey plan  SO13702, South Auckland survey district

[3] https://heritage.nzdl.org/greenstone3/library/sites/hnz/collect/pdf-reports/index/assoc/OKeeffe9.dir/OKeeffe9.pdf

[4] https://www.westernbay.govt.nz/repository/libraries/id:25p4fe6mo17q9stw0v5w/hierarchy/property-rates-building/district-plan/plan-review-2009/minden-structure-plan/documents/PR%202.pdf

[5] O’Keefe (1991) p. 4.  Later, however, she states Tauranga County to be one of the most intensively investigated regions in New Zealand… some 4723 recorded sites within County boundaries.”

[6] O’Keefe (1991) p. 20

[7] https://heritage.nzdl.org/greenstone3/library/sites/hnz/collect/pdf-reports/index/assoc/Law1.dir/Law1.pdf

[8] https://heritage.nzdl.org/greenstone3/library/sites/hnz/collect/pdf-reports/index/assoc/Campbell/50.dir/Campbell50.pdf

[9] https://heritage.nzdl.org/greenstone3/library/sites/hnz/collect/pdf-reports/index/assoc/Piriraka/u1.dir/Pirirakau1.pdf