by Bruce Ansley
Julius von Haast, explorer and geologist, claimed to have been the first European over the Pass, although a prospector named Charles Cameron reckoned he was the true pioneer. Cameron was vindicated a few years later when his powder flask was discovered on Mount Cameron directly to the west of the Pass. Both would have been following the Maori route, for there simply was no other way. Road-makers of every era follow the same paths, the easiest.
That track evolved into a packhorse route and remained the main route through these mountains until 1929, when hundreds of men displaced by the Great Depression were put to work pushing a road north from Hawea. Work stopped at the Gates of Haast when World War II broke out, and did not start again until 1956. The road eventually opened in 1965. Thirty years later it was even sealed.
For all that, the Pass remains dark and dangerous and peopled by spectres. Ghosts haunt the place: the unsolved murder of Jennifer Mary Beard, the terrible deaths of two Canadians swept off the road into the roaring Haast River. The world’s best roading technology can scarcely restrain the tremendous forces trying to hurl great slabs of rock into this void.
Tioripatea was a suitably awful route for a taua intent upon killing. Even now its dank atmosphere smells of death. The road nestles beside the river, in some places all but in it. The mountainsides close in, dripping. Is it better to go over the Pass in the daylight when you can see it, or in the dark, when you cannot? That’s a moot point, but Te Puoho’s party didn’t have the choice. They sneaked past the cliffs, where waterfalls spout from sheer walls and every rock wants to become a rolling stone, then over the Pass, probably cold and wet, certainly hungry.
An old bridle path cut in the late nineteenth century, once part of the drovers’ route, runs off from the Pass towards the lakes. A swing bridge takes it over the Fish River; it rejoins the road at Davis Flat below. It follows the old Maori track used by Te Puoho, and later by Cameron and Haast too. It’s strange, walking through a silent forest whose trees once stood by as the taua padded past. Boughs drip above me. That tree there must have been just a sapling, that big one already half a century old. The mossy ground is silent and soft. The raiding party must have loved that path. They knew they were past the worst, the country gentler to the east.
They descended onto the flats of the Makarora Valley and headed down the Makarora River on its southern side. They were in very different country now. Probably the sun was shining, the dark green bush giving way to golden tussock. The wind blowing whitecaps across Lake Wanaka. Mountain peaks topped with winter snow rising above the clouds, but they were on the good side of them now. Across a low saddle to Lake Hawea. The rockscape of Central Otago spread before them, a strange place then, invested with taniwha, fiends and demons. Now it is haunted more by real-estate agents and speculators, just as carnivorous.
Maori lived there for part of the year, usually over summer, just as people do now. They built several settlements around the two lakes, including one on the peninsula jutting into the water beside Wanaka town. They ate eels, duck, fern root, weka, and they went after local pounamu, greenstone.
Te Puoho’s raiders fell upon these peaceful people, first striking a tiny settlement at Makarora near the present-day pub. Nine people were said to live there, including two infant girls. The hungry taua killed and ate the two children.
Te Puoho had to keep going lest word of the raid get out and alert locals. He captured a young man called Pukuharuru from the next tiny settlement, at the saddle between the two lakes where the road now crosses. Te Puoho sent him ahead, with two of his warriors, to capture his father Te Raki. But Pukuharuru managed to escape and alert Te Raki, who wasted no time finding and dispatching the two guards.
Te Puoho realised the game was up. Unless he cleaned up the locals he was going to face a well-organised Ngai Tahu taua with something other than forgiveness on their minds. They would be in good shape, and his own warriors were not. They’d marched through hell and high water and besides, they were still hungry. Even now, he reasoned, accurately, Te Raki, his family and others from nearby settlements would be racing down the Clutha Valley to present-day Tarras then up the Lindis, intent on raising the alarm.
The Maori summer trail followed the present road, past what is now the ruin of the old Lindis Hotel, around the enormous bluff to the Lindis Pass, over to the Waitaki Valley then down to the coast and southwards. It is still lonely country whose mysterious golden folds are portrayed in a thousand watercolours, and it’s easy to imagine here the Ngai Tahu fleeing noiselessly, hiding their tracks as they ran from Te Puoho.
The Ngati Tama chief had to move quickly southwards if he was to win this race. He took the five inhabitants of the Wanaka settlement prisoner, bringing the total to twelve, and forced them to guide him south over another Maori trail. He chose to head up the Cardrona Valley.
It is an easy journey at first, the route leading up a wide scrubby valley, but it soon turns severe, as is the way with mountain passes. Today it is the Crown Range Road, carrying traffic between Wanaka and Queenstown. You’ll have noticed a pattern here. All the way from Golden Bay this man has followed routes which became the absolute innards of scenic New Zealand. Two centuries later he might have been employed by the Tourist and Publicity Department.
Now here he is climbing the Crown Range. Did a man bent on warrior-upon-warrior action stop to admire the view, among the finest by any world standard, the golden brown spread below him and the sharp white peaks? Or did he simply say, as many a snowbound motorist has, ‘Let’s get off this bloody mountain and back to the warm’? No snow poles to guide him. He is thought to have ducked over a saddle and into another valley and descended by way of the Roaring Meg, beside the Gibbston Valley.
He and his band have walked two thirds of the length of the South Island through and over what was then, and still is, New Zealand’s most difficult territory. A tramper going away for a week is advised to take some sixty items of gear as well as food. Te Puoho had none of them: no boots or gaiters, no waterproof clothing, no polar fleece nor polypropylene, no sleeping bag or GPS, not even scroggin.
But I’m carrying some of that gear, as I stand on the Crown Range road with a small party of trampers working out which way he would have gone. He was aiming for the Roaring Meg on the other side, and he wanted the simplest, most direct route. Which, I think, as I stand looking at the Pisa Range, is also the easiest.
Behind me is the warmth and comfort of the Cardrona Hotel. Smoke is rising from a few cottage chimneys. It is late in the season but a little further down people are coming off the Cardrona skifield with the well-padded look of skiers after a good day. Cows stare in the manner of animals for which humans usually mean some sort of unpleasantness, but otherwise it is a contented scene.
We aim for a low-ish saddle. We walk up a long, quite gentle valley, idyllic in the spring sun. The spaniard springs golden from the ground: an orange, spiky plant, it is capable of spearing through anything save a suit of armour, although the armour theory is still untested. The long thorns of grey matagouri warn us away: matagouri can live for much more than a century. Did Te Puoho give these same plants a wide berth too? Almost certainly this is the route he would have used. Early stockmen used Maori trails and this was once a stock route too.
We reach the top of the range easily enough. The track descends into the rocky canyons of Central Otago, the hills dotted with rock spikes, like the armour of dinosaurs, weathered by eons. I wonder what Te Puoho would have made of this landscape with its pillars and fortresses and gargoyles. If he’d been an imaginative man he might have thought it premonitory. It is a lonely place, but a lovely one, a long, spectacular but quite easy descent down the valley of the Roaring Meg.
Which stops us completely, almost exactly halfway along the track. In the spring thaw the stream is just too high and fast to cross. It is living up to its name.
I stand beside the ruin of an old hut, the rubble of a fireplace with a broken iron dixie and an iron stove and a sheet o
f corrugated iron half-buried, all jammed between two precipices alongside a tributary stream. People were hardy then; me less so. Nothing for it but to turn back, plod up and over the Pisa Range again. I cannot imagine Te Puoho giving up so easily, but on the other hand I’ve already lived much longer than he did. I catch a sneaky grin from his ghost.
Instead, I drive over the Crown Range and through the Kawarau Gorge to the Roaring Meg and climb the track from the opposite direction. It is a straightforward tramp of a few hours to the point where we stalled then back again, but satisfying.
Not long after Te Puoho passed through, a goldminers’ hotel, the Kirtleburn, stood beside the Kawarau River at the foot of this track. It burned down in 1880, leaving its owner with a bag of flour, a case of spirits and little more. Some of its patrons might have used Te Puoho’s route across the river, if they’d drunk enough at the bar.
He crossed the river by way of a natural rock arch, known to Maori as Whatatorere and to Pakeha as the rock bridge, or Chalmer’s Leap. It cannot have been a popular way of crossing the river, for one of the stories about the Roaring Meg is that it was named after a woman carried through the torrent by diggers.
The Kawarau is a wild river. The rock arch was the only easy crossing and it had been used by Maori for centuries. Goldminers used it too, leaping over a gap in its middle. It is said that this amazing geological construction was blown up by gold prospectors, but remnants remain and intrepid souls still use the crossing.
Te Puoho probably climbed the spur of Mount Difficulty opposite the rock bridge, and descended to the Nevis River valley. The Nevis has cut its groove between the Hector Mountains on one side and the Garvie Mountains on the other. What little traffic there is through the valley passes through Bannockburn, once a gold-rush town and still booming, for wine is now bringing in more money than gold ever did.
One thing has hardly changed since Te Puoho put his cold feet upon the ground, and that is the nature of the valley. A good winter here can still throw up three weeks of twenty-degree frosts.
A Maori track is said to have run between Bannockburn and Garston, a little settlement in the Mataura River valley below Lake Wakatipu. Moa hunters left traces of a summer hunting camp with ovens. Maori used it as a path between Southland and Central Otago, and told early European settlers of the route.
It was a hard road then, and it still is. It is not much used and anyway is closed from mid-June until the end of September. Even at the outset signs announce, rather unnecessarily, that the grade is steep for the next nine kilometres, and that Mount Cook is 198 kilometres to the north. You can see it peeking over the far ranges.
The route runs over Duffers Saddle, at 1300 metres among the highest public roads in the land. It is probably the loneliest too. From there it drops into the wilderness of the Nevis Valley.
But Te Puoho is believed to have taken the shorter route from the Roaring Meg. The two meet at the Nevis Crossing at what seems to be the bridge to nowhere.
The entire Nevis Valley has always been a crossing. The gold miners came and went, leaving few traces: the remains of a gold dredge on Schoolhouse Flat, an old stone village on the Lower Nevis where a few people still live, lots and lots of clay and rock jumble from their endeavours. Farmers have endured, as they always do. All they ask of passers-by is that they close the bloody gates, for there are lots of those. It’s anybody’s guess who they’d prefer crossing their land, a band of warriors hell-bent on violence or day-trippers leaving their gates open, but I think the tourists would lose by a neck.
Modern traffic still has to ford, officially, twenty-seven rivers. Te Puoho and his band must have been even wetter and colder than usual. The first goldfields warden here described his territory, accurately, as a ‘cold, sequestered and ice-bound region’. The taua had another problem: food was so scarce it was all but non-existent, and they were starving.
One account says they were so weak that when they sat down to rest they had trouble getting up again. One older man wandered off and died. His skeleton was found years later by a shepherd, his taiaha beside him.
At the southern end of the valley lies the Nokomai River, whose own valley would have carried the raiders down to the Mataura and into Southland over the broad green valleys to the Waimea Plains where fat cows now amble. No ambling for Te Puoto though: his was a race, for he would have been certain that the Ngai Tahu fleeing from Lake Hawea, over the Lindis and down the Waitaki would waste no time warning people of his advance and summoning Bloody Jack from his lair.
In his book Te Puoho’s Last Raid, Atholl Anderson describes how Te Puoho spotted the smoke of an eeling party beside the Mataura, between the present-day Wendon and Otama. They captured the party and fell upon their eels with equal zeal.
Then they passed by what is now Gore, then Mataura, and came to Tuturau. The kainga sat on a low hill, a few huts, a few old people looking after the place until eeling parties returned. The raiders simply took it over and moved in. Te Puoho was confident that no one yet knew the raiders had reached the far south.
But word had reached Tuhawaiki, who was visiting the whaling station at Bluff at the time. He immediately thought that Te Rauparaha must again be at his gate. That mistake was fatal for Te Puoho. Tuhawaiki was not going to trifle with such a warrior. He rushed back to Ruapuke and marshalled his forces.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century it’s the scale of this confrontation which startles. Te Puoho’s force seems tiny for such an ambitious raid. But the mighty Tuhawaiki may have had even fewer men willing and able to fight: Anderson estimates sixty poorly armed warriors, perhaps fewer.
Still, a fleet of waka and a whaleboat set forth from Ruapuke. They landed on the mainland, marched north and surrounded Tuturau. At dawn, two armed men climbed on the roof of a hut. Te Puoho woke, shouting a warning. One of the attackers fired his musket, hitting the northern chief in the arm. The other fired too. Te Puoho fell back, dead.
Te Puoho’s head was cut off and stuck on a pole. Few survived the subsequent massacre. They were enslaved and later killed. And that was that. The huge adventure was over, with a whimper.
In a way, Te Puoho’s brother-in-law Ngawhakawa drew the shortest straw. He managed to escape then retraced the raiders’ steps, up through Central Otago, over the Alps, up the coast, all the way back to Golden Bay, where he delivered the news. A retaliatory attack on the southerners petered out. By any standards the raid was a complete failure.
Henry Samuel Chapman, Supreme Court judge, newspaper owner and editor and historian, later met the man said to have fired the fatal shot that Killed Te Puoho, Topi-Patuki. Topi is still a revered name among southern Maori. Judge Chapman wrote the event’s epitaph: ‘Thus ended in disaster this ill-advised expedition, which must have caused a great deal of suffering, hardship, and starvation to its members for no result whatever. [But it] really was a very wonderful undertaking considering the terrible country the taua had to pass through, and has not been equalled by any other in Maori history.’
Yes, what an epic! Some of that wild journey can still only be done on foot, the Kahurangi coast, sections of the West Coast below, parts of the Central Otago trek. Roads follow some of it, and in places like the Haast Pass it is easy to imagine a force of desperate men scrambling over rocks and through the forest; cars or not, time there has stood still.
One hundred and one years after the event, in December 1937, Southlanders raised a memorial to the raid. They named the place the Maori Centenary Reserve. They built an obelisk on a hill where the tiny Tuturau settlement once stood, and beside it a thatched wharenui, or meeting house. Built of wooden slabs and roofed with tussock, it soon decayed and collapsed.
The memorial declared: ‘The last fight between North and South island Maoris, in which the Southerners were victorious, took place in this locality in December 1836.’ One-nil. Go the south! Some of the descendants of Topi, the man who shot Te Puoho, were at the unveiling. The unfortunate chief might have been gratifi
ed by the crowd. About 3000 people turned up, far more than ever attended his raid.
One last thing: Te Puoho’s only monument here by the Mataura River does not so much as mention his name.
4
Pointing down
Puysegur Point lies at the most south-westerly point of New Zealand. You can get there by sea, or by a hard tramp along the bottom coast. Either way, you have to be keen. It is a wild place, the edge of the void. The mountains running all the way down the South Island’s spine stop the wild westerly winds crossing the Tasman and bat them downwards. They collect here and spit through Foveaux Strait.
The average winds here are gale force. They are more than a gale for a third of the year, hurricanes for at least two weeks. The West Coast is the wettest area in New Zealand and, politely put, Puysegur Point is at its end.
Who would want to go there? Well, hardly anyone, although I’ve been at the Point quite often. Not once was it easy. The first time, I arrived in what I thought was a roaring gale but greater experience taught me was just a breeze by Puysegur standards.
I was the accidental partner in a fishing boat, the Nina. Accidental because I was a reporter on the Otago Daily Times and my immediate boss was a man called Ian. He had been a commercial fisherman and was now settling for a shore life after a serious injury. He noticed me reading a boating magazine and our shared interest drew us together.
We were working the night shift then, both a little bored, and one night he came up with a proposition, which essentially came to this: why didn’t we build a boat and go cray-fishing? We could make money and have fun. Was I interested?
Yes, I was. I was unattached and looking for adventure.
We borrowed the money for the boat. It was the first time I’d been inside a bank manager’s office and I sat in mute horror as Ian listed his assets. Mine took less time. Essentially, I owned an old car.
No matter. The bank manager smiled upon us and lent us the money, to me a fortune, enough to buy a house and another car. Oh yes, those were the days.
