The soft and plaintive flute song of the fair-skinned folk who lived on these misty mountains seems to have appealed to the Native heart, for it is described as sweeter by far than the whakatangitangi , the “making sound upon sound,” of the ordinary Maori flute-players. Distance, aided by imagination, no doubt lent it additional enchantment. And the Patu-paiarehe men appear often to have made themselves agreeable to the wahine Maori, for stories are told of women being taken as wives by the fairy chiefs, and of girls from the Maori villages wandering away into the woods to meet their fairy lovers. The offspring of such unions were always known by their extremely fair skins, unnaturally pale, and their light flaxen hair; they were korako or albinos.
And there was another people of the wilds. Sometimes on dark nights the Maori villagers would see the light of torches moving about in bays across Lyttelton Harbour, then the Bay of Raupo, where they knew there was no settlement of their tribe, and they would say to each other, “See! The Maeroero are out, spearing patiki.” The Maeroero were the wild men of the woods, fierce hairy giants who sometimes captured Maori women and carried them off to be their wives in the bush of the Port Hills. The Maeroero are described as having very long and sharp finger-nails, so long that they were great claws, and it was with these long talons that they speared the flatfish and caught the birds in the forests.
The Summit Road pathway, through the Devil’s Staircase, or The Remarkable Dykes (on the way to Kaituna)
To the matter-of-fact pakeha and the modernised Maori there is a very simple explanation of these fairy tales. The Patu-paiarehe and the Maero were simply the remnants of aboriginal tribes, such as the Ngati-Mamoe or the Waitaha or their predecessors, driven away into the heart of the mountains and the forests, where they lived a wild, secluded life, existing on the foods of the wilderness. The old English and Scottish belief in fairy people arose in much the same way, the very word “pixy” comes from the name of the Picts, who were driven into the hills and caves. Nevertheless, for those who like to preserve their Peter Pan fancies and illusions this theory may cheerfully be disregarded, and we may still, on days of mist and cloudy calm, imagine the little tribes of the rocks flitting out from their caves and hollow trees and raising as of old their thin voices in their waiatas and piping their fairy sweet koauau music on the level hilltop of Otehore or the dark rock of Tamatea’s Breast.
MOUNT PLEASANT AND ITS “TAPU.”
Now the Old Man’s memories take him back seawards across the Port Hills to the familiar knolls of Tauhinu-Korokio. This is the Native name of Mount Pleasant, the great grassy upswell of land lifting sixteen hundred feet above sea-level and looking down serenely on the vast curving sand-line of Pegasus Bay. The Maori name is a combination of the names of two Native shrubs which were very plentiful on that portion of the hills in former times and specimens of which may still be seen there. Tauhinu is a heath-like plant found all over New Zealand; it is the Pomaderis phylicaefolia of the botanists. It grows two or three feet high, or sometimes higher, and it is so plentiful and so prone to spread that it has been placed on the Agricultural Department’s index expurgatorious as a noxious weed, in spite of all the sweet heathery perfume of its blossoms which the bees love. The korokio is a small bushy black-branched growth which the tauhinu , as the Maoris say, often embraces and smothers, as the rata eventually smothers the tree which it clasps. Tauhinu-korokio was an ancient pa of Ngati-Mamoe which stood on the site of Major Hornbrook’s old homestead and the present house of
Hinekura.
J. Cowan, photo