Takahanga Carvings

One of my favourite contemporary carvings

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Takahanga Marae, Kaikoura

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

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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