A Traditional Experience

Rotorua, home to the Te Arawa people offers the greatest number of Maori tourism experiences in one place. One of the most popular is a visit to the Mitai Maori Village, where you get an excellent introduction to Maori culture, traditions and protocols. It's an interactive experience that can include a cultural performance, a hangi (a traditional earth-cooked meal) and a terrific outing on Wai-o-Whiro Stream at night in the waka (war canoe) carved by the Mitai family. I made a fleeting visit during my recent visit to Rotorua and was very taken with the carvings (above) outside their main entrance. www.mitai.co.nz

Words for Birds

PiwakawakaKERERUtuiHUIAkakapopukekopitoitoikiwimanukorowhiowhioparerarakirakikoroheapiopioMOArupetarapungaTITIKOTARETOROAKOTUKUtui wekakakataiKEAKAKAtiekeHURUHURU

Casino Carvings

Whenever I go into Auckland's SKYCITY Casino to update Frommers NZ travel guide, I'm always slightly taken aback by the sight of this huge Maori carving - of which I know absolutely nothing about - standing in the middle of the entry atrium with clusters of advertising boards huddled around its base.

It's an unlikely and incongruous setting for a traditional Maori carving in one sense; but on the other hand, SKYCITY has one of the best New Zealand art collections in the country, featuring the works of both contemporary and traditional Maori and pakeha artists. In that sense it is perfectly placed and certainly it is admired by hundreds of people every day. www.skycity.co.nz

A Museum Visit

Auckland Museum has one of the best collections of Maori artefacts in the world - and this is one of them, the pataka (storehouse) Te Oha, which was sold to F.D.Fenton in 1885 by Te Mata Tahuri-o-Rangi. It was purchased by Auckland Museum in 1906. Pataka were generally used to store food, although they sometimes housed valuable weapons, cloaks and baskets. www.aucklandmuseum.com

Market Enterprise

Kete For Sale

Decorated with Paua Shells

Riccarton Rotary Market
Christchurch

September 2009 Ajr

Leaving Ruatoria

East Cape - May 2009
Farewell = Haere Ra

Gallery Graphics

I like the street presentation of Maioha, a contemporary Maori art gallery that I came upon by chance in Napier's Ahuriri area. It was closed when I visited unfortunately, so I couldn't get inside to enjoy a proper viewing of the interesting works on display. I particularly like the unconventional use of lime green in these traditional patterns.

Maori Place Names - 26

On the Way to Lake Kaniere

Hokitika, West Coast

South Island

Mussels and Memories

Kutai or Toretore = Mussel
One of the favourite traditional Maori foods.
I wrote about mussels and their traditional harvest at Tutehuarewa Marae at Koukourarata -Port Levy on Canterbury’s Banks Peninsular, about three years ago, for Ngai Tahu's TE KARAKA magazine. The marae, a cluster of buildings on a grassy slope, is perfectly placed overlooking a stony beach and a pretty jetty. Koukourarata is well known for producing some of the fattest, juiciest toretore around – mussels up to six inches long have been harvested from the bay over the years. Koukourarata was the largest Maori settlement in Canterbury in the mid-1800s with a population of around 400 people. Back then, Maori from Koukourarata bartered shark and other kai moana for eels caught by hapu from Waihora and Wairewa over the hills; and tons of dried fish were carried inland to trade.

Mussel patties courtesy ex-Executive chef of Blanket Bay, Jason Dell.
I recall Matapi Briggs, then 75, telling me how she remembered a Koukourarata childhood that revolved around the sea. “The sea was our life. It meant everything; it was where we played and where we found our food. We knew where all the best kaimoana was and we only had to walk along the beach to pick cockles, paua and mussels off the rocks. We never needed a boat.” She talked about the times they made fires on the beach, slipping fat mussels in their shells into the ashes and eating them there and then. One of their jobs as children was to gather mussels for family meals but they were taught from an early age only to ever take what they needed, unless the family were taking kaimoana as koha for another runanga. “Our mussels have always been sweeter and juicier. I think it’s because there are a lot of freshwater creeks running into the sea here,” she says. “It’s common for them to grow to four or five inches long.” In the old days - “when my parents were young” - mussels were preserved in seaweed by the tahu method. They’d split the seaweed, put the mussels in and fill the pouch with hot bird fat. They also did that with paua,” Matapi says.

Matapi’s younger sister, Tokerau Wereta-Osborn also has vivid memories of a happy Port Levy childhood. She was just 18 months old when she arrived in the bay and now, her great-grandchildren are the sixth generation of her family to enjoy everything the bay has to offer.
‘The bay has never changed in my opinion. It’s always been a wonderful place to live and the kaimoana has always been plentiful. We used to walk out to the island at low tide to collect mussels, paua, oysters, cockles and conga eel. Our favourite way of eating mussels was simple - they were just opened, scalded in their shells, drained and then eaten with a bit of vinegar and onion. Sometimes our mother would make patties, or she battered the mussels whole but I always preferred them plain with vinegar,” Tokerau says. “I always loved making a fire on the beach and cooking the mussels in the ashes, or on a piece of hot tin and eating them fresh. When we needed to store them we would make a circle of rocks just offshore and keep the live mussels there. It was like our fridge and it saved us going out hunting for them each time we wanted a meal.”

Traditional Designs - 9

T-Shirts

On Sale

Riccarton Rotary Market

Re-Visiting Papawai

When I was travelling through the North Island a few months back, I made a stop at Greytown to visit Ngati Kahungunu ki Wairarapa’s Papawai Marae. I hadn’t visited Papawai since my three sons were small boys (it’s the marae they are affiliated to) and I was keen to seen the changes brought about the major renovations of the late 1980s. It was a brilliant sunny morning in May, tuis were flitting in and out of the totara trees and all was quiet in the little row of houses across the road from the marae. I stood under the beautifully restored waharoa (gateway) and admired again, the totara whakairo (carved figures) that form the pallisade around the marae. Those figures by the way, both male and female, represent famous individuals and unusually, they face inwards to represent peace between Maori and Pakeha, rather than looking outwards to confront enemies in the traditional manner. (I’ll bring you some photos of those another time).

Ngati Kahungunu is the third largest tribal group in New Zealand and Ngati Kahungunu ki Wairarapa is one of their three main sub-groups, with others centred in Wairoa in Eastland and Heretaunga in Hawke’s Bay. Papawai was established in the 1850s when the government set aside land for Maori settlement near Greytown. The marae played an important role in Maori history when it became the focus of the Kotahitanga, or Maori Parliament movement in the late 19th century. Papawai hosted numerous iwi (meetings) to discuss, among other things, the protection of Maori land; and chief of the time, Tamahau Mahupuku, played a key role in hosting meetings to record the history, whakapapa (genealogy) and customs of his people. He died in 1904 – it was he, who planned the pallisading of the marae, which was created and put in place after his death.
The Hikurangi meeting house was also built in Tamahau’s time. It opened in 1888 and was followed by the construction of several other buildings. By the 1940s though, Papawai had fallen on leaner times. A number of buildings had been damaged by winds and earthquakes and many people had moved away from the settlement. It wasn’t until the 1960s that restoration work began on the rotting whakairo figures. The gateway has also been restored and today it forms a stately entrance to the marae complex.

A Contemporary Statement

Photo Courtesy Too Luscious

Manuka Honey Pekapeka

A Pendant

By Too Luscious, Rotorua

www.tooluscious.com

Casting Shadows

Auckland. April 2009 Ajr

I took this photograph in Auckland Museum as much for the tracery of shadows flickering across the wall as for the beautifully-detailed carving itself. This stunning pare (carved door lintel) has its origins in Ngati Paoa and Ngati Tamatera in the North Island’s Hauraki Plains area. According to the museum material, it was probably carved in the early part of the 19th century with stone tools. It stood at Patetonga Pa. www.aucklandmuseum.com

Another Kete Moment

One Small Kete

Hanging on a Wall

Northland

Words for Food

kai tuna KOURA PIPI paua paramuwhurutu remana paraoamitiaporokapetipihiketeparakiperehekihakaripatikihemokaihonititi

Maori Place Names - 25

Inland from Hokitika

West Coast, South Island

Market Wares

Old Postcards

Traditional Moko

@

Riccarton Rotary Market
September 2009. Ajr

Inanga Season

Whitebaiting on The Avon River, Christchurch 2008 Ajr

It’s whitebait season again. I was reminded of that twice last week – when I saw the ‘baiters’ working the Avon River and when I visited Riccarton Market and saw a stall selling whitebait fritters. Most New Zealanders are familiar with whitebait and have probably tasted them at some point in their life. What most people don’t know is that five separate galaxiid species make up the whitebait catch – inanga, banded kokopu, koaro, short-jaw kokopu and giant kokopu. Inanga (Galaxias maculates) is the most common in most river systems. All whitebait species spend part of their life cycle in fresh water and in the ocean and it is estimated that over 99.5 percent of the larvae die between hatching and returning from the sea as whitebait. Some of those inevitably end up in the whitebaiters’ nets and that’s just the way most whitebaiters like it.
At The Box, Waimate. Ajr
I’ve had some terrific encounters with whitebaiters in the name of journalism. Last year I did a story on the fishermen who trawl for whitebait within the residential stretches of the Avon River in Christchurch; I’ve watched the men at The Box, just off the coast near Waimate, fighting the treacherous seas to fill their buckets with their favourite delicacy; and I’ve interviewed the kaumatua of Arahura on the West Coast for one of Ngai Tahu’s Te Karaka magazine kai features. It was for the latter that I spoke with Te Maori Raukawa, who told me she was 83 the last time she went whitebaiting at the Arahura River mouth just north of Hokitika. We were all sitting down on the banks of the Arahura River, the sun on our backs, the skylarks singing, the sock nets in place in the river and chef, Jason Dell moving his spatula with a calming rhythm that lulled the hungry kaumatua into a state of mouth-watering anticipation.

Riccarton Rotary Market, Christchurch. Sept. 2009 Ajr
It was a happy scene that reminded Te Maori of the hundreds of times she and her late husband, Hector, had scooped at the river mouth for hours on end, going out on one tide and staying until the next. “It was hard work but it was lovely when everyone was fishing. They’d all set up in their own places and we were all related, so it was a very social time. But the bait are not as thick as they used to be,” she lamented at the time. I remember being amazed at the time when they told me stories of having so much whitebait in their nets – far too much for family needs - that they used it for garden manure. When sales for whitebait became a reality, the Arahura excess catch was sent to Christchurch on the 5pm goods train. It was put on the market at Ferron & Sons the next morning. Eli Weepu remembers the trains too.
“No one had fridges back in the thirties, so if we got too much whitebait it was always sent across to Christchurch,” he told me. He was just five when his father used to take him down to the river mouth on a horse and sleigh.
“Our dads used to teach us how to make the scoop nets from the straight branches of the lancewood. Long before that, back in the old days, they used to weave the nets out of flax fibre.
“And if the whitebait were running everyone would be down at the river in those days. But we never set nets. We usually only fished for enough for a feed and the best way to eat it was straight out of the river and cooked loose in a hot pan with a bit of butter and eaten with salt and bread.”

The Box, Waimate. Ajr
Back on the Avon in Christchurch Bill Espie is a regular whitebaiter. He’s one of dozens of urban whitebaiters who frequent the banks of the Avon and Heathcote Rivers during the annual whitebaiting season and when the tides are right he heads for his tried-and-true spot beside the Stanmore Road Bridge. He’s a regular there and locals often stop for a chat. That’s half the attraction Bill says. It’s a pleasant distraction in a long whitebaiting day that starts at 7.30am and ends around 6pm.
“I come here every day during the season. If it’s raining I can sit under the bridge but when the weather is good I can sit up here near the footpath and heaps of people stop and talk. It’s a nice relaxing way to spend a day and if I’m lucky I can get enough whitebait for a feed,” he says. Bill has been whitebaiting since he was seven – over fifty years – and although the catch varies he considers it a good day if he gets 1.5 kilograms of bait – and he does, often. “I got around 31 kilos for the whole season last year. I can’t afford to buy it at around $100 a kilo, so it’s great to be able to go home and make a fritter or two.”
Whitebait it seems – and the act of fishing for them – is addictive. They all say the same thing: it’s not just about getting a good feed, it’s as much about the act of fishing and the social encounters, the sharing and the inherent hunter-gatherer spirit that they all share.

Shopping for Piupiu

The piupiu is the traditional skirt worn by women for kapa haka.

When I visited Rotorua's Whakarewarewa Thermal Village some months back, I got some great shots of women making piupiu from harakeke (flax) and within the village itself, I stopped a while to watch people coming and going around this souvenir shop - you can see some piupiu hanging on the balcony. It's one of several shops that sells the wares of the Maori craftspeople living and working within the village, which is located in the middle of one of Rotorua's natural geothermal fields. The Ngati Wahiao people in fact, have lived in this village for over 300 years, utilising the natural steam for cooking, bathing and cleaning.

Most of us in New Zealand know the village as Whaka or Whakarewarewa but in fact its full name is Te Whakarewarewatangaoteopetauaawahiao. www.whakarewarewa.com

Made to Measure

Yesterday I wrote a little about the traditional Maori hangi - the method of cooking food underground using steam - and specifically about the hangi I attended recently at Tuahiwi. This one had been organised as the final kai feature for Te Karaka magazine. Over the last four and half years a small team of us from Ngai Tahu's editorial team have travelled to all eighteen of the Ngai Tahu runanga scattered around the South Island, writing cooking and photographing the traditional food speciality of the region.
To celebrate the end of the series, a large hangi was organised at Tuahiwi Marae just north of Christchurch and the marae team catered for around 80 people. You can see the work that went into that in previous posts I have made here (click on hangi or Tuahiwi in the label line below to see those). Part of the editorial process for every kai feature has been the styling and photographing of the dishes created by chef, Jason Dell. Every effort has been made to show off both his culinary skill and the featured traditional food.

At Tuahiwi the locals went to a particular effort, weaving baskets from fresh harakeke (flax) so we could show the hangi food off at its best. I was delighted to come upon this young girl weaving in one of the side rooms. She seemed to be about 12 or 13 but was already adept at weaving. A lovely touch and nice to know that the traditional skills are still being passed on to the younger generations. www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

H is for Hangi

If you’ve read anything at all about the Maori people of New Zealand, you’ve probably heard about a hangi – the traditional Maori of cooking underground via steam. The hangi is still a popular way of cooking and certainly, on a marae, it is really the only practical way of cooking for large numbers of people who gather for hui (meetings), tangi (funerals) and celebrations. Hangi is about celebration. You don’t have a hangi for no reason. It is a celebration of tikanga (custom) and whanaungatanga (kinship). “From a cultural point of view, ‘hangi is us’,” one kaumatua (elder) told me. “I don’t think we could come up with an improvement on the hangi – it encapsulates the whole concept of bringing our whanau together.”

I recently attended a big hangi at Tuahiwi Marae just north of Christchurch – it was to be the basis of the last kai (food) feature for Ngai Tahu’s TE KARAKA magazine. Buy the time I got there – early in the morning, well before the celebrations were due to begin, the men had already dug the hangi pit and the hole (around 2ft deep) had been fired up and river stones and bits of old railway iron were heating in the flames. Willow wood is a popular choice for the fire because it burns cleanly, leaving little ash and greywacke stones don’t crack in the intense heat. The team had gathered watercress from nearby streams and this was being kept wet in buckets prior to being thrown onto the heated rocks to create steam. It also lines the hangi baskets to act as a barrier between the food and the stones to prevent the food burning. In the absence of watercress, wet cabbage leaves are a common substitute.

The fire usually burns for about two hours. Then the big wood, the large rocks and the iron are taken out, and as many embers as possible are removed from the pit. Too much ash and embers in the bottom makes the food too smoky. Once the food has been loaded into wire baskets lined with watercress, the rocks and irons are put back into the pit and covered with watercress. Huge clouds of steam rise and the men work fast, stacking the wire baskets on top, draping them with wet cloths and sacks and then quickly burying the pit in dirt. That is then left for about four hours – by then everything should be cooked beautifully. On the day at Tuahiwi we had a tremendous feast. I’ve already posted some images from the kitchen preparations on the day. If you’d like to see those, just click on hangi or Tuahiwi in the label line below this post. www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz

The Beauties of Bone

Heru = Comb

Partnered with Tiki

In Bone

At Ake Aotearoa, Taihape

www.akeaotearoa.co.nz

A New Waharoa

Mou, Moko Mo Nga Iwi Katoa

For You, For Me, For All People

The New Waharoa (gateway)

at Waikawa Marae, Picton

More International Acclaim for Maori Artist

Rachael Rakena, 2009. Image Courtesy Bartley & Company Art, Wellington

Back in 2005 I went along to Christchurch’s SOFA Gallery to see “Taonga Whanau,” a stunning show by Maori artist, Rachael Rakena (Ngai Tahu, Ngapuhi), a collaboration with Otene and Hana Rakena. I still have clear memories of the darkened gallery, the flickering, tantalising video images, the beautiful pounamu taonga (treasures), swinging above reflective surfaces. So I was delighted to learn a couple of days ago that Rakena’s newest video work, He Waiata Whaiaipo, recently exhibited at Wellington’s Bartley & Company Art, is set for international exposure. Rachael is one of the 25 musicians, artists and scholars selected by Wellington composer, Associate Professor Jack Body, to travel to China to take part in an international symposium on New Zealand and Pacific music at the beginning of November. Rachael’s work has been selected to be part of a video installation that Professor Body is curating. The image above – One Man is an Island – is a still from Rachael’s video work – “a love song in moving image employing the act of eating as a metaphor to play out ideas about desire, pursuit and fulfilment. In addition to working as an artist, Rachael is a lecturer at Toioho ki Apiti, School of Maori Studies at Massey University. To describe and locate her art practice, she has coined the term Toi Rerehiko, which plays on rorohiko, the Maori word for computer. Toi Rerehiko is a digital media art form immersed in Maori tikanga (custom) and values. In addition to exhibiting widely throughout New Zealand, Rachael’s work has received much acclaim internationally, particularly her collaborations for Sydney Biennale (2006), Venice Biennale (2007) and Busan Biennale (2008). www.rachaelrakena.com www.bartleyandcompanyart.co.nz

Down by the Sea

Rimirimu or parengo is the Maori word for seaweed and karengo for the specific Porphyra species that was commonly eaten. Rimurapa is the word for the bull kelp, which Maori used for storage – the fleshy inflatable blades of bull kelp were used as bags for preserving food. These kelp bags, or poha, were made by splitting the blades open and inflating them. They were then hung to dry, then deflated and rolled up. Then, southern Rakiura Maori would take them to the Titi Islands around Stewart Island, where they would be used for the storage of muttonbirds. An average-sized poha could hold up to 50 birds and when the bag was full, hot fat was poured in to exclude air and seal the birds. Birds are said to have remained safely preserved for up to five or six years in this way.
Maori traditionally used a number of red and green seaweed species as food, which they pulled off rocks in winter and spring. After it had been dried, the seaweed was stored and used as a good source of protein during the leaner winter months. It should be noted that the photographs I have used here may not be any of the species traditionally used by Maori. I photographed these off the wharf on Stewart Island simply because of their spectacular patterns and shapes moving in the clear water. A number of seaweed species are still protected by customary fishing law for tribal use.

Maori Place Names - 24

Near Tuapeka River Mouth

South West of Dunedin, South Island

Back in the Hokianga

I was heading for the little village of Kohukohu to catch the ferry across to Rawene on the edge of the Hokianga Harbour in the Far North, when I saw the sign for Pikiparia Marae. I swung off the mangrove-bordered main road into Smith Deviation Road about a kilometre north of Kohukohu village. Pikiparia is home to the Te Ihutai, one of the Te Rarawa hapu; and the small cluster of marae buildings are tucked beneath low hills overlooking mangrove swamps. There was a small urupa (cemetery) on the hill above (to the left in the above photo). I didn’t linger because there was no one about for me to chat to and I had a ferry to catch to Rawene but I did regret that this was just another interesting marae that I had had to leave without discovering more about its interesting history.

It's All Too Luscious!

A Subtle Adornment

From the Creative Team

at

Too Luscious

Rotorua

www.tooluscious.com

A Place of Significance

Castle Hill. August 2009. Ajr

I drove up to Castle Hill, between Porter's and Arthur's Passes last week. My Australian visitor was keen to go rock climbing and this is one of the favoured spots in Canterbury for that. I love it for an entirely different reason. The landscapes up here are majestic and ever-changing - a photographer's paradise. Castle Hill, or Kura Tawhiti is also of special significance to Maori. I've written about it here before so I won't repeat all the information. If you click on Castle Hill in the label line below you'll be able to read the piece I did about early Maori using the area as a natural shelter. It's now a Conservation Area and there are early Maori rock drawings in the area - if you kno0w where to look. It was raining when we were up there last week and the gigantic limestone rocks took on a spooky, almost animate quality - so different to the summer photographs of my previous post.

From the Kete Files

A Northland Kete

Shell Attached

Hanging