At long last, an information panel with the names of those buried there has been placed in the kiosk at the historic Maori cemetery.
The urupa on the Maori-owned Maranuku reserve is still open for burials. It is looked after by Kaka Point resident Tam Scott, the caretaker or kaitiaki, whose family and ancestors’ bones lie beneath the grassy hillocks. Most of the graves are unmarked, a matter that he would very much like resolved through further anthropological study of the site.
But in the meantime, he was pleased that people could at least read about the 35-plus people buried there, some of direct descendants of New Zealand’s first people, and the Catlins’ first agriculturalists.
‘‘It’s something I wanted to do before I’m buried under that rata tree,’’ he said, indicating a sunny spot he had chosen for his final resting place, not far from his grandmother’s grave.
‘‘I got told by someone who knows about these things that I’d get to 77. That’s not a bad age. I’ll be doing all right I reckon.’’
It was particularly poignant that a few weeks after this interview, grave goods from his grandmother Stella Rakiraki’s headstone, lovingly arranged by Mr Scott, were stolen.
‘‘If you put things on a grave, you just don’t go and take them. They were there one day and gone the next.’’
Catching up with him again after the list of names had been put up, he had got over the anger but not the disappointment of losing the stones and bone carvings that had meant something to her and to him.
While Mr Scott (73) did not grow up at Kaka Point but in nearby Dunedin, he holidayed there as a child, with his grandmother.
He spent many years working in Australia in the building trade, then in Blenheim as vineyard worker. A family reunion, organised by the Rakiraki Tautuku Whanau Trust, brought him home in 2005.
It was a homecoming in every sense of the word.
Mr Scott is a direct descendant of Haimona Rakiraki (1800-1895), a Waitaha chief who settled in the Clutha district in the 1830s, and came from the Wanaka-Hawea area.
There is record of his baptism at nearby Karoro Creek on January 12, 1844 or 1845, and his marriage on December 19, 1846 to Pi (Wiki) Wairaki. Wiki was the first adult burial at the urupa, in 1871. Haimona was also buried there, but no-one is completely sure of the exact spot.
‘‘These were the people that helped the first Europeans ashore when they came here.’’
In fact, they were the first farmers.
History tells us that before Europeans arrived, Maori people had a staple diet of seafood and birds for protein, and aruhe (fern root) and cultivated imported crops, carried across the Pacific by their ancestors; they included kumara, taro, hue (bottle gourd) and yam. Learning to grow them in a cool climate gave them gardening skills that enabled them to move rapidly from subsistence gardening to commercial agriculture.
When James Cook arrived in New Zealand in 1769, he brought cabbage, turnips and potatoes.
Maori traditionally used ko and timo (digging and grubbing tools) to prepare ground for planting crops. Many stone tools of this type have been found in and around the urupa.
The Rakirakis grew vegetables, and soon they were trading potatoes, along with eels and ducks, with the Europeans at nearby Inch Clutha.
Mr Scott’s grandmother Stella (Maori name Tira) was the daughter of Haimona and Wiki’s third son, Puao. His mother was Mary (Girlie) Rakiraki and his father, John Wakefield Scott.
In a charming letter in Mr Scott’s collection to someone called Dot on March 6, 1901, 16-year-old Stella remarked on the death of Queen Victoria (January 22, 1901):
Isn’t it sad about the queen? Poor old lady. She has gone to stand before a far mightier throne than the one she occupied down here.
She also offered to send Dot, who possibly lived in Dunedin, a rata tree.
However, she declined, saying that it would ‘‘scarcely survive the trip up to town from Port Molyneux’’.
Most travel was done by river or sea.
Stella died in a rest-home in Dunedin in 1962 and was buried in Andersons Bay, but Mr Scott brought her bones home and she was reinterred in Kaka Point Urupa, in 2009.
A tribute to her by Doug Adair of Kaka Point, which was read at the service, very much summed up the state of the urupa when Mr Scott took it over, in 2006.
Astride this jutting spur, below the site of the decades-old native school lies what once was a neglected urupa cemetery.
The ‘‘jutting spur’’ of consecrated ground is Maka Tu Point.
‘‘It was covered in blackberry. Someone had to do something about it,’’ Mr Scott said.
That someone became him. He works voluntarily for the urupa trust.
Places like it were becoming a rarity because they are privately run and funded.
Another project dear to his heart is honouring the school by the sea, the Reomoana School (1877-1928) with a permanent interpretive panel, which is being worked on at the moment. The school site overlooks the urupa, near an historic macrocarpa tree with the girth the width of the garden shed opposite.
Again, the family connection is strong. Believing that learning English would be an advantage to Maori in an increasingly European-dominated world, Haimona applied to the Government for a grant to start a school. The Rakiraki family gave the site to Native Affairs to build the first school (1877-1880), which was attended by both Maori and European children.
When the roll increased, a bigger school house was built near the old one (1902-28).
It closed because of a dwindling roll, and the land was given back to the Rakiraki family, in 1930.
They had previously given land for a new school, a few kilometres away at Port Molyneux, where the old pilot station used to be. The new school consolidated the Reomoana and Nuggets schools. It was built in 1933 and stayed open until 1999, when it was merged with the Catlins Area School at Owaka.
Stella went to the Reomoana and her family lived in the old school house until the 1960s.
In Mr Adair’s poem, he describes the ‘‘ghostly thudding of adzes’’, the sound of the Maori axes that could no longer be heard.
The site has a further claim to fame, and that is because of the Waitaha chief that Maka Tu Point is named after.
Maka got caught in a fight with the invading Katimamoe tribe in about 1680. Subsequently, he was captured, cooked and eaten. Some say the site is by the school, others closer to the entrance on the main road.
‘‘This is a special place. In the summer all the flowers start to bloom. Its really good up here. I can stay up here til late.’’
- By Mary-Jo Tohill
