Perhaps it’s not fair to Māori history to write the title I gave this post. We visited Mangere Mountain, a successful Māori town of 3500 people for centuries. The mountain is a volcanic cone. It was a fertile and defensible place to farm, and the people could live on terraces along the site.
Along the mountain were are still large depressions marking very large food storage pits, as many as eighty-seven of them. When food was stored below ground, the temperature might only vary by a couple of degrees. Farming was communal, and prestige was gained through success at providing food for the whole community.
In the mid-1700s, this community was abruptly raided and completely killed by another Māori iwi (tribe). In a part of the story that I don’t understand, the victors did not move on to the mountain– they just left that land empty. Agriculture continued in the rich land below the mountain nearer to the harbor. Today, we saw the modern housing development below, on land that had a been a source of Māori wealth until the late 1800s.
Everywhere you see houses and trees on what was once Māori farmland.
Many acres of land were confiscated by the New Zealand government in the decades after the Treaty of Waitangi. Some of the iwis have never recovered from the loss. There is no part of the history that makes the government seem sympathetic. European settlers were arriving, and the government decided they needed land. The Māori were successful, and so they were displaced. It’s tragic, and was a repeat of similar actions over and over again in colonies around the world.
When we were welcomed to the site, the director spoke to us in Māori to welcome us and also to give a formal beginning to our time together. We had a similar conclusion at the end, and some of the words he translated were that we should not let the upsetting parts of what we learned stay with us too heavily. It was an overly kind wish to bestow on us visitors, I think.
We drove to an interesting beach with petrified wood that looks like basalt rock:
We had lunch in Devon, a small and quaint town which is home to the NZ navy (which owns all of seven ships!)
We had the afternoon to wander in Auckland on our own. Mark and I decided to go up the Skytower. I wanted to see Auckland as an isthmus– a narrow point of land between two oceans– and needed the height. The views were amazing.
The marina where our yacht experience of the previous day started.
Auckland is really large and spread out. I would think that it would be really easy to stay in a corner of the city and feel like other areas of the city were unknown. That 1/3 of the country lives here is very impressive.
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Māngere mountain was to be our first stop after we all met at the airport but because it was raining we decided to head south to the Hamilton Gardens and sunshine. Great kōrero on Manga mountain.