In the first instalment of a new video series on Māori place names, Toitū te whenua, we visit Pūrākaunui, where mana whenua have reawakened the history that lies on the land.
Ko Mihiwaka, ko Māpounui
ka mauka,
Ko Āraiteuru te tai,
Ko Kāi Tahu, ko Kāti Māmoe,
ko Waitaha kā iwi,
Ko Kāti Huirapa,
ko Kāi Te Ruahikihiki kā hapū,
Ko Puketeraki te marae,
Ko Māpoutahi te pā,
Ko Pūrākaunui te kāika.
Dr Lily Fraser recites her pepeha surrounded by the whenua of which she speaks.
The mauka tīpuna, the ancestral mountains, Mihiwaka and Māpounui, stand sentinel above her, as they have done always during the long centuries of occupation by her iwi Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe and Kāi Tahu.
Below Māpounui, Pūrākaunui estuary is at low tide, revealing the rich muddy flats that would have first attracted Fraser’s tīpuna to this kāika, this home. It’s a mahika kai of renown still — tuaki, kūtai, pāua and the rest — a prized food basket on Te Tai o Āraiteuru, the coastline named for the voyaging waka Āraiteuru. There was then pātiki, flounder, too, and rich birdlife in the forest that flowed down to the coast.
Here we are at about the midpoint between the pā at Huriawa and Pukekura, homes to the hapū Kāti Huirapa and Kāi Te Ruahikihiki.
Partially obscured by a stand of pine, just over Lily’s left shoulder, the site of the old pā tūwatawata, the fortified pā Māpoutahi, juts out from the white sand beach, recommending itself as a good spot to watch the coast’s comings and goings.
All of it on this occasion is bathed in late winter sunshine, shadows as long as the whakapapa in Lily’s pepeha.
Lily moved back to the area just a couple of years ago, from the big smoke of Tāmaki Makaurau, to help out with hapū responsibilities.
And is loving being back.
‘‘You know, I drive up to mahi every day, and I drive past Mihiwaka and Māpounui, and, yeah, it makes me feel like I’m in a place where my tīpuna have always been. I’m excited that my daughter gets to grow up under her mauka, and gets to have that as her normal daily life,’’ she says.
Among the reasons these names and this mātauranga, this knowledge, remains available to her daughter is here too — Aunty Niccy. In fact, we’re on her deck.
This is Niccy Taylor’s home, overlooking the Pūrākaunui estuary. And that spelling, complete with all of its vowels and the two macrons are something for which she had to battle. It was a battle fought because different spellings on the one signpost made no sense, but also because spelt correctly Pūrākaunui tells a story, captures big important history that happened here.
The work inevitably raised the question of the correct name for the area.
At the time, the most common misspelling was Purakanui — generally pronounced with a Pākehā twang.
‘‘It was his initiative to ask for the ‘u’ to be put back into Pūrākaunui, which had slipped away,’’ Niccy recalls.
Then, in 1989, prompted by the nation’s sesquicentennial celebrations for Te Tiriti o Waitangi, McLachlan approached the New Zealand Geographic Board to have the spelling ‘‘Purakaunui’’ formalised — returning the ‘‘u’’. There were one or two other names in the area on his list for correction, including Whareakeake, the bay that had become known as Murdering Beach, southeast of Pūrākaunui.
It wasn’t a straightforward process — the Purakaunui spelling meeting opposition from some quarters, which meant the change wasn’t approved in time for the 150th celebrations of Te Tiriti.
Undaunted and determined to put things right, McLachlan raised the matter with another kaihautū of the Ngāi Tahu waka, Tā Tipene O’Regan, who suggested rolling the matter into the Ngāi Tahu ancillary claims before the Waitangi Tribunal.
In the end, both processes met with success. The geographic board finally ‘‘assigned’’ the name Purakaunui to the land in question in 1992, and the tribunal’s deed of settlement on the various issues related to Pūrākaunui spelled the name correctly throughout, with both the ‘‘u’’ and the macrons.
It was, though, far from the end of the process.
‘‘I came here to live in the year 2007 and I discovered a right pickle, because some places had adopted the u, others hadn’t,’’ Niccy says. ‘‘There are some wonderful photos of the two different spellings of the name on one post.’’
It was just messy, so Niccy, whose lifelong connection to the place stretched back to childhood holidays with her grandmother, took it upon herself to complete McLachlan’s work — an effort that encountered some of the same resistance he had experienced. To say the least. Change is seldom easy.
But when opportunities to effect change arose, she acted.
In 2007, the New Zealand Geographic Board Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa had updated its spelling of ‘‘Purakaunui’’ to the correct orthography, ‘‘Pūrākaunui’’, including macrons, to cover the locality, creek, bay and inlet.
Then, in 2011, the Dunedin City Council adopted a policy on road names, opening the door to a discussion about Pūrākaunui Rd — at that time spelt with the familiarly incorrect ‘‘Purakanui’’.
Niccy doesn’t name the cause of some of the opposition she met, but she has a story.
After the DCC had adopted its new naming policy, she followed up about a sign on State Highway 88, which, just outside Port Chalmers, indicated a turn-off to ‘‘Purakanui’’. The sign was the work of the NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi rather than the DCC, but the principle was the same.
‘‘I rang the man, I found his name and phoned him up. He goes, ‘oh, too expensive to fix it. Can’t do it’.
‘‘I go, ‘if that was a European name and you had the spelling wrong, you would find the money to fix it’. So we ended our conversation. About 10 minutes later he rang me back and said, ‘OK, we’ll do it’.’’
Then there was the school and the amenity society, which were both missing a u. It was a lot of work.
But Taylor was sure of her ground. Purakanui made no sense. Literally. No sense.
In this context, the ‘‘pū’’ at the start of the word means a pile, the next section, ‘‘rākau’’, means a stick, and ‘‘nui’’ is big. A big pile of sticks.
‘‘So if you drop the ‘u’ off, you have a different word, so the meaning changed,’’ she says.
Beyond that, there’s the significant history that the name captures, a story as old as time but not lost to it.
Settlement at Pūrākaunui and the neighbouring bays stretches back at least as far as the 15th century, perhaps 100 years earlier than that, but its name is a record of the upheavals this coast saw during the 18th century. The Kāti Māmoe and Waitaha peoples of the South had been joined by Kāi Tahu, some of whom were migrating to escape conflict further north.
Lily takes up the story.
As a child, she says, she wasn’t aware of the specific history behind the name Pūrākaunui, but she knew a pūrākau was a story. ‘‘So when you think about a pūrākau, I just thought it was some big story — which in effect it is,’’ she says.
It wasn’t until, as an adult, while doing some translation work with Aoraki Matatū, a group of fluent Kāi Tahu reo speakers, that she came across the place-name’s true meaning.
At the time of the events the place-name remembers, around the middle of the 18th century, Māpoutahi pā had been occupied by the rakatira Te Pakihaukea — an ally of Te Wera, who had previously been based just up the coast at Huriawa.
The peninsula had then borne his name, Te Pā o Te Wera. There, Te Wera had endured a long siege by another local rakatira, Taoka — after Te Wera had one of Taoka’s sons killed. And now Taoka had his eye on Māpoutahi.
There are various tellings, Fraser explains. In some Te Wera was at Māpoutahi at the time, in others he was not.
But battle ensued and it did not go well for the residents of the pā.
It might have been that they were surprised — a possible reason for which is related by Ōtākou kaumata George Ellison in Atholl Anderson’s book The Welcome of Strangers.
Taoka’s tauā, his warriors, attacked and the pā fell.
‘‘After the battle, so many had died that they were stacked up. It was also probably snowing at that time and they were stacked up in piles. And the next morning, the snow had settled on them, so it looked like stacks of wood.
‘‘And I was quite horrified, actually, when I heard that kōrero,’’ Lily says.
‘‘Because, I guess, having grown up in Auckland, I hadn’t chanced across that kōrero anywhere else.’’
It was internecine strife, she explains. The rakatira involved were mostly brothers or cousins — Te Wera and Taoka, and another chief, Moki II, who was based at Pukekura.
‘‘They were asserting their mana along this coastline. Kāti Māmoe were here and this was the time of the migration of Kāi Tahu down from Taumutu — from around the Canterbury area.’’
In a documentary made in 2010 about Pūrākaunui, John McLachlan describes the environment as one in which there were a number of younger chiefs between Timaru and Ōtākou. The clear implication is that a few more older, wiser heads might have led to some different outcomes.
However, he also recounts some more recent history, providing a modern counterbalance to the bay’s tragedy.
He tells the story of an uncle who fought in World War 1 and returned traumatised and ill with the Spanish flu. The uncle spent time during his recovery fishing in the currents below Māpoutahi and ascribes his survival to the beauty of the surrounds, the fresh air and the warmth of those days.
‘‘For our families it has been a place of peace and renewal,’’ McLachlan says.
‘‘I can actually see Māpoutahi out one window and I can see Whareakeake out the other,’’ she says.
‘‘That’s been the big thing for me to come home ... to be around those stories and hear them from a wide range of people. Because, as we know with history, there are many perspectives on what happened, and when you have disconnection of oral transmission of history, which has happened in our whānau — the suppression of your Māori identity over two or three generations — means that you don’t get those stories passed down through your own whānau. And therefore I rely on the kōrero of other people.’’
Because she was brought up with te reo Māori and is a fluent speaker now, Lily has also been able to go back to early te reo Māori manuscripts to do her own translation.
Those too are inevitably just the perspective of the writer, as is all history, but Lily is grateful to her tīpuna who were quick to pick up the pen and record those stories, not just of places and events but of flora and fauna and mahika kai practices.
There is more to uncover and maybe some mātauranga waiting to be revealed about that recurring word māpou, a part of both the pā and the mountain.
The māpou is a small tree, growing to about 7m.
Maybe there was a single māpou standing on Māpoutahi, Lily suggests. And perhaps one large māpou or many of them on Māpounui.
‘‘Maybe we will get an understanding of what the significance of the māpou tree is to this rohe. Unfortunately, I haven’t come across that yet.’’
Regardless, Lily is happy with the direction of travel, the restoration of the place-names, the renewed emphasis on the correct spelling, the efforts being made to pronounce the names correctly.
‘‘The macrons — particularly the Māori linguist in me just thinks that’s awesome because the place of a macron can really change the meaning of a word. Being guided in the correct pronunciation of words is really important. I think macrons ... they’re the final icing on the cake for me.’’
The signs are propitious.
‘‘I’m a kura kaupapa kid, my daughter’s a kura kaupapa kid, and the dream for me is that every generation is better and is going to that next level in terms of cultural revitalisation and strength, and I feel like that’s happening. So, I feel really happy and I feel hopeful for the future of te reo Māori,’’ she says.
Niccy confirms the same positive trajectory.
There’s an astonishing work of art in her house, by her mother, a representation of the tapairu, the princess Motoitoi — and her many descendants.
It was her mother’s way of keeping the story alive during more challenging times.
Today, Niccy sees the life her own granddaughter, the next generation of Motoitoi’s mokopuna, is living and the opportunities she is afforded to embrace who she is at school.
‘‘It’s just fabulous to see the change and the natural, easy way they’re encouraged,’’ she says. ‘‘They’re taught to respect who they are and understand it and find out about it.’’
She too lives in the seaside village and travels back and forth to town past those signs at the top of the hill, for Pūrākaunui and Pūrākaunui Rd.
All the letters, both the macrons, all the history.
• Toitū te whenua is produced by Luke Chapman and Tom McKinlay
