Last month I wrote about the discovery in
my neighbourhood of extensive food storage
pits of late 18th century origin that had once belonged to the large pā, or
fortified village, above the shore of Ōtūmoetai peninsula in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. The find was an exciting one since there are relatively few material traces of Māori life before
European settlement. The dimensions of the storage pits suggested that at least two thousand
people were living in and around Ōtūmoetai Pā at the time of James Cook’s first expedition to New
Zealand in 1769. In this month’s post, I would like to write a little more about
this particular local pā, which was home to the Ngai Tamarawaho hapū
(clan) of the Ngāi Te Rangi tribe.
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| An impression of the pā at Ōtūmoetai in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. Philip Perry. |
Ōtūmoetai Pā covered an area of about four acres, centred on an escarpment that looked over Tauranga Harbour and out towards the South Pacific Ocean. The pā was a
complex construction encompassing outer barriers of ditches, banks, palisaded ramparts and fighting stages on multiple
terraces. These earthworks were arranged around
inner fenced compounds where kin-groups lived in groups of timber-framed dwellings
with reed walls and thatched roofs. The naturalist Joseph Banks, who had been on board Cook’s first expedition to New Zealand, described Māori dwellings (whare) as ‘mean and low', but conceded that 'they most perfectly resist all inclemencies of the weather.’ The interior of the whare (house) was spare. A fire burned in the centre of the single room upon the floor and the entrance served for a chimney. Tools and weaponry were stored in the house and high-born families kept intricately carved boxes containing feathers and other valuable items for personal adornment, but there was no furniture except for a square of boards joined together for a bed, with a mattress made of a thick layer of grass and dried ferns. Latrines and rubbish heaps for food scraps and waste served each cluster of houses. A typical pā of this time can be seen in the lithograph made by artist John Webber, who accompanied Captain Cook on his third Pacific expedition.
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| John Webber. The inside of a hippah in New Zealand, 1784. The lithograph shows a pā (or ‘hippah’) with houses constructed of reeds in the Marlborough Sounds. |
The dwellings are similar in a sketch of a pā in Wellington made some sixty years later by Captain William Mein Smith, a surveyor-general engaged by the New Zealand Company in 1839, and in photographs taken by Herbert Deveril later in the 19th century.
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| Captain W. Mein Smith. Pipitea marae, Wellington, c.1840. |
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| Herbert Deveril. Te Rangi Tahau on the porch of his whare, c.1875. |
The site of Ōtūmoetai Pā was, and is still, an advantageous
one. A tidal estuary, the waters of the large bay, and the ocean beyond provided an abundance of food. Women gathered shellfish
and men went out fishing with bone hooks and flax nets weighted with stone
sinkers. These accomplished
offshore sailors paddled their
canoes to outer islands to collect obsidian and immature petrels (muttonbirds) for food, and red ochre for body
painting. Mauao, the volcano at the harbour’s entrance, was a useful place marker. A favoured hapuku (groper) fishing spot could
be found by lining up Mauao’s western slope with a tall tītoki tree that grew
at the rear of the pā. This venerable tree, still extant, is now more than three hundred years old.
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Joseph Jenner Merrett. A Meeting of Visitors, c.1843. View of a pōwhiri (welcome)
between two Māori groups outside Ōtūmoetai Pā with the outline of
Mauao (Mt Maunganui) in the background. Tauranga Libraries. |
To the west of the pā, rainforested hills provided berries and bird
life, and timber, and eeling places in the rivers that flowed into the sea. In a
pattern that continued well into the twentieth century, Tauranga Māori made use
of these rich resources by migrating between inland areas and the coast to
gather food and tend crops. Excess was preserved – fish were wrapped in fern
leaf, shellfish threaded on blades of rushes, birds stored in fat in gourds –
and kept in raised storehouses together with large calabashes of water.
Flax and kūmara (sweet potato)
were the principal crops and they were treated with reverence. Each flax plant was
regarded as a family, the central shoot being the child and the leaves
surrounding it the parents. In order to maintain the plant’s vitality, only the
outermost leaves – the grandparents – were harvested. Women softened the blades of flax by beating them with stone pounders. They wove
the flax into hoop nets and cordage, plaited it into mats and baskets and
worked it into a silky fibre for clothing, which was similar in weight and
drape to sweat-shirt
fabric.
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| Gottfried Lindauer. Women Weaving Flax Baskets, 1903. Auckland Art Gallery. |
Māori wore a diversity of garments – cloaks, aprons
or kilts or a ‘girdle of many platted strings made of leaves’, and various closely
woven mats worn next to the skin. Both men and women bored holes in their ears,
which were kept extended by plugs of feathers, bones or wood. Sometimes women
wore bracelets or anklets made of shells or small bones, while the men hung
greenstone tiki around their necks or the tooth of a shark or a whale. Women sometimes
wore their hair short, cut with sharpened shells, or tied it behind the head,
or wore it at shoulder length. On occasion, women cropped their hair as a
mourning gesture.
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A woman photographed by the Foy Brothers, late 19th century,
with cropped hair decorated with huia feathers.
British Museum. |
Sydney Parkinson, the botanical artist on
the Endeavour in 1769, recorded that
men on the east coast of the North Island '... had their hair most curiously
brought up to their crowns, rolled round, and knotted.' Parkinson’s portrait of a chief shows an example of the style. Long hair was oiled and bound it
in various ways with flax and adorned with combs, carved from wood or whale,
bird and human bone, and feathers.
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Sydney Parkinson. Portrait of a New Zeland Man, from a sketch made in 1769.
Many men and some women wore facial moko (tattooes) to varying degrees. |
Kūmara tubers were planted in spring with
some ceremony in scattered communal gardens. Everybody worked in the
gardens, including rangatira (chiefs) – but they were exempt from carrying the
small gravel, obtained from the bottom of streams, which was brought in baskets
during the winter by women to prepare the planting ground.
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Kūmara tubers. Before the planting began, prayers were offered to Rongomātāne,
the god of kūmara, and other cultivated plants, to secure goodwill with regard
to the harvest. |
The tubers
were planted in mounds in soil that has been amended with wood ash and were
considered tapu until they were ready for harvest. Low fences served as breaks
against the prevailing westerly wind at Ōtūmoetai, which can be gusty in early summer
with a tendency to dry out the soil.
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Te Parapara Māori Garden, Hamilton Gardens. Photograph by Michal Klajban.
A storehouse overlooking a mounded kūmara garden. Māori used a cord
to plant the rows of kūmara in a straight line. The seed tuber was set
with its sprouting end towards the warmth of the north.
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The mauri (life force) of the kūmara, and hence the fertility of the crop,
were protected by carved, wooden atua kiato (god sticks)
fixed around the perimeter of the gardens. |
After harvesting in autumn, the kūmara was steamed
and dried before being stacked on the sand-strewn floors of underground pits
over winter. The pits at Ōtūmoetai
had the capacity to hold up to a tonne of tubers.
Once the
kūmara had been harvested and placed in storage, the people could lead a more
itinerant lifestyle, trading, or gathering other foodstuffs needed for winter. They might wander the beach or the banks of
streams looking for good water-smoothed cobbles that
could be used to crush the red
ochre brought back from Motiti Island, or for heating the earth ovens in which
food was cooked. Joseph Banks described the ovens as
‘holes in the ground filled with provision and hot stones and covered over with
leaves and earth’. Small fish and birds were generally roasted over an open
fire on a skewer. Kūmara, taro, large fish and dogs were cooked in the ovens.
Cook and Banks marvelled at the vitality of the Māori they encountered. That is hardly surprising given a diet that was simple and
moderate, plenty of fresh air and exercise, and an absence of sugar and
alcohol. They tended to be taller and more robust than Europeans, Banks noted.
He was particularly struck by the number of healthy old people in the
population. Some even appeared to be in their eighties, ‘and of these, few or
none were decrepid, indeed the greater seemd in vivacity and chearfullness to
equal the young, indeed to be inferior to them in nothing but the want of equal
strength and agility.’ Aged men and women in Māori communities were held in esteem for their experience and wisdom.
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William Hodges. Sketch of a Māori woman carrying a child, 1773.
Children were treated with indulgence, Joseph Banks observed.
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For forty or fifty
years after the first contact with Europeans, Māori at Ōtūmoetai continued to
flourish. The lack of accessible timber at Tauranga – the result of previous land clearance by
Māori for pā and for crop cultivation – meant that the area held little
interest for early Europeans looking for opportunities to exploit New Zealand's hardwood forests – and
shore whaling efforts and sealing were centred elsewhere in the country. The
large Māori population at the Bay of Plenty eventually attracted missionaries
and traders, but this occurred later than in some other coastal areas of New
Zealand. Flax was a resource where the Bay of Plenty had an advantage, and this
eventually featured in later Māori and European industry.
Ōtūmoetai Pā had the
distinction of never being conquered by enemies, but the eventual military
defeat of Tauranga Māori in the New Zealand Wars of the mid-19th century led to the confiscation of their land by the Crown. The people at Ōtūmoetai were forced to leave their ancestral home and the land was allocated to soldier
settlers.
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Tori Tupaea, the last great Ngaio Te Rangi chief of Ōtūmoetai Pā.
Image Mike Dottridge. |
