The names that line the coast north of Ōtepoti guide those who care and are nourished in return, Khyla Russell tells Luke Chapman and Tom McKinlay.
Tokotoru kā wāhi e au
Engari, ka puta ki waho kei Ōtākou,
Ko Pakihau te mauka
Ko Ōtākou te whenua me te moana.
Engari ka moe tētahi atu ko Teoti Taiaroa atu ki Maaki Parata nō konei, nō Karitāne.
Nā reira, ko Hikaroroa te mauka
Waikouaiti te awa
Ko te ākau nui o Karitāne te tai
Tae noa ki mua te moenga o taku taua ki taku pōua
Koina rāua. Ko tētahi atu; nō Moeraki, ko Tini Burns i moe a ia ki a H.K. Taiaroa.
A whale’s eye view of Khyla Russell’s pepeha would see it sweep north from Ōtākou along the coastline, narrating land and sea and the places they meet.
There are the mauka, the mountains - from Pakihau on Muaūpoko, Otago Peninsula, to Hikaroroa, the mauka tipuna that watches over Puketeraki.
Waikouaiti, the river, flows from the distant hills to meet the ākau nui o Karitāne, the long coastline centred on the seaside village.
The last of the ancestors she names is H.K. Taiaroa, the Kāi Tahu rakitira who is the focus of an exhibition at Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Russell notes that he was originally named Huriwhenua - a name that commemorated a peace accord with Te Āti Awa. But later took the name of the governor George Grey - using the northern dialect transliteration of Hori. If he’d opted for the southern equivalent it would have been Teoti, a Scots-leaning translation of Georgie. Names are important, they tell stories.
She herself has lived along a good part of it at one time or another, from growing up at Ōtākou, to periods at Koputai Port Chalmers, Ōkāhau Warrington and Karitāne, where she’s sitting on this occasion.
And foremost among its qualities, in Russell’s telling, is the richness of its kaimoana, its seafood. Which is where another name comes in, another name that sits here on the land as a tohu, a sign.
‘‘The full name for the area, if you’re looking from Pūrākaunui to Warrington, or Ōkāhau, and you can see the Kilmog, or Kirimoko, the whole of that area, that whole hill, before they put roads through it and did things, was called O Tamatea,’’ she says.
‘‘That’s the best view of him. You imagine if it was still in the native flora, and you were sitting out, I don’t know, on the shipping lane out here.’’
This is the story passed down in her family, learned at her father’s side, their truth, as are the practices that accompany them.
The Tamatea in the name is the kaihautu Tamatea Pōkai-whenua, the captain of the waka Takitimu, one of the great sailing waka of the migration.
‘‘O Tamatea ... the way we learned about it, was that he was there keeping an eye on all of those things. That if you look at all of those bays, from here to there, and over in Pūrākaunui and the harbour, that’s where the kaimoana is. And it’s delicious.
‘‘You’ve got every single kind you could want from pāua, cockle, you know, tuaki, pipi, bubu, the whole nine yards, plus those flat ones, plus those up this river, by the other side, so that’s flounder, crayfish, and those sorts of things.’’
So good is the kaimoana, it was once swapped for pounamu.
‘‘The fact that you would trek from here to the West Coast to exchange fish and some of the kaimoana that you could dehydrate, and then rehydrate, and they loved it, and come back with chunks of the green stuff. It all fits nicely on the waka, if you think of it like that.
‘‘I mean, who knew that you could exchange fish for pounamu? We did. But if I went in now to a lovely pounamu shop and said ‘here’s a blue cod, I’d like that’ they would ring the police, wouldn’t they.’’
This sure and certain knowledge has been central to Russell’s lifeway always, having grown up in a large fishing family based at the kaik, Ōkākou.
After World War 2, Rāniera Ellison set up Ōtākou Fisheries to provide work for those living at the kaik, to keep them there, as well as the men returning from the war. Time was tough, resources stretched. Kāi Tahu had never been given the tenths they were promised.
Russell’s father was an Ōtākou Fisheries fisher too - a fisher on work days and at other times as well.
She makes a fishy, swimming motion with her hand on the table in front of her. It’s what her father would do, all he had to do. It meant a floundering expedition was on, that night.
‘‘And so as soon as Dad did that, we would go straight to bed and sleep for three hours, so we could get up and go and do that. And all of those things, I think, were influenced by Tamatea, O Tamatea,’’ she says.
Another of her father’s ways of teaching all this, she says, was, on a school holiday, to kick the end of the bed and say ‘‘get up and have a wash’’.
‘‘OK, get up and have a wash. So, we were going fishing. It wasn’t a fishing day but we were going. Or we were going to trek over to Pipi.
‘‘Or we were going to borrow someone’s boat - I presume with their permission but I don’t absolutely know that ... ’’
And off they’d go, to all the best food gathering places watched over by Tamatea, when the tide and the moon were just right, to get so many of one thing and however many of another for their old people.
‘‘You count the kaumatua that could no longer get it,’’ she says, demonstrating on her own fingers.
‘‘And there were seven, then there were six and there were five. But there were more people coming to being kaumatua age who probably didn’t live as well as they should and so we would spend hours and days doing that.’’
The work continued into adulthood, she says. She was 40 and still not actually getting anything for herself, because there were taua and pōua who needed it more.
It speaks to a hierarchy of sorts, a hierarchy of need written in the tikanga, the way of doing things right. And Russell has another hierarchy to sit alongside it.
A hierarchy of delicious.
‘‘For me it was Warrington, or Ōkāhau, had the very best tuatua that ever lived,’’ she riffs on the name, pronouncing it Ōkāihau, to get the flavour of the food into it. It becomes a place where the elements, in this case the wind, the hau, have conspired, under Tamatea’s watchful gaze, to produce something particularly special.
‘‘I’m not going to tell you where, but they were down that end of the beach,’’ she teases. It’s a long beach.
She also rates its pipi.
‘‘And if you went round the corner and into the inlet, I could either swim over to Waitati and get ...,’’ she ends that thought there, and starts another. It could be the same thought. ‘‘They’ve got quite nice bubus.’’
The bubu, or pūpū, a cat’s eye, is as good as the pāua if you can get a decent-sized one, she reckons. The tasty bit’s just in a different place.
‘‘The cockles, the nicest cockles in the whole world come from the kaik. They don’t come from anywhere else.’’
This then is the sort of mātauraka you grow up with, with your dad, transmitted in the doing.
She thinks its lessons must also have been a part of the annual Ōtākou Fisheries picnics, which were hosted variously along the coast. She doesn’t remember it as an explicit feature of the day, not like the individual tubs of ice cream with their own small spoons, but it must have been there woven through the conversation.
‘‘We assume so, because when we got to that age, we were doing just that.
‘‘It’s that kind of ordinary, everyday knowledge that is of huge significance.’’
It hardly needs saying then, that Russell believes it’s vital for these names to remain on the land for those who use them to sustain themselves, to live full and healthy lives.
It’s good for others to know them too, have some knowledge, so they understand that when Māori do things, ‘‘ā-Māori, mā Māori’’, in the Māori way, for Māori, it’s because that’s what they need to do.
‘‘The names are helpful, but they’re only helpful if you are interested in what their kaitiaki role was, or what it was that they held for us, if we should choose to go look for it.’’
By way of further elucidation, Russell makes a comparison to other naming conventions. Take ‘‘Nelson’’, she says. It has been liberally attached to maps to remember the admiral’s deeds and adventures. But other than than, what does it tell you?
‘‘What did he eat?’’ she asks.
There are other names in
O Tamatea that tell further stories of people and land and food and sea. Mihiwaka, the mauka that stands above Orokonui Ecosanctuary is one.
‘‘You’ve got Mihiwaka up the top, where you can call out to, or greet, or say, ‘Here the bastards are. Let’s run and hide’,’’ she explains.
Mihi means to greet, and waka - that’s the dot in the distance getting larger on its way up or down the coast that could be a friend or not.
If it turns out they are a friend, then it’s ‘‘let’s see what we’ve got, that we don’t have to show them where we go to collect it, to give them the best we’ve got’’.
‘‘That’s what we were told as kids. Tamatea’s watching, he’s watching in the right way. He’s also watching when you sneak around, you know, there were times when we absolutely loathed him, but that kind of thing.’’
There’s been a recent addition to the names that adorn O Tamatea, newly coined for the burial place of a paikea, a humpback that died near Waitētē (Waitati). The new name is Mutuwhenua. Mutu means to end.
And even here there is a connection with kai.
Russell helped to process the body and came across a piece of the paikea that looked interesting, from a gastronomic perspective.
‘‘Anyway, there was a bit of black skin there, and I thought, that looks like it could be like a pāua.’’
It could have been from the lip, or maybe not. But she turned it over and had a gnaw, and another.
‘‘And it tasted superb. And I thought, the poor sods, you know, who were whalers, had to do days and days of work, but the ultimate reward would be tasting that. God, it was lovely.’’
There’s another name on the land then, for those who need to know, to stand against forgetting - forgetting who was there, what was there, what it was useful for.
‘‘Because we don’t say we’re from there, we’re saying we’re of it,’’ Russell says.
‘‘There’s a difference between from and of, isn’t there? It’s not much, it’s got a couple of the same letters in it, but they are so far apart in terms of understanding.’’
• Toitū te Whenua is produced by Allied Productions.
