Taonui was a high chief of Ngati-Maniapoto and took a leading part in Kingite politics.
Formidable on the youthful eye in those lively years of the Seventies loomed the Blockhouse. This was the picturesque little garrison-house which crowned the Karaponia hill at Orakau, as if guarding our homestead that stood a few hundred yards away among its groves. It was very close to the spot where the British headquarters camp had been pitched in 1864 at the attack on Orakau Pa. The Blockhouse was a type of the border outposts built on many parts of the frontier, as far away as the Hawke’s Bay-Taupo Road, in the Hauhau wars. The building was of two storeys, and its curious tall shape and its lonely stand on the hill-crest commanding a look-out over the wild Maori country southward made it the most prominent object in the landscape. On the ground floor the building, constructed mostly of kahikatea, was about 16 feet by 20 feet, with a height of 9 feet. The upper storey overlapped the lower one by about 3 feet all round, and was 12 feet high. The walls were lined, and the space between the outer wall and the lining was filled with sand to make the place bullet-proof. The palisade which surrounded the Blockhouse was 10 or 12 feet high; there was a space of 6 feet or 7 feet between it and the building. In the walls of the top storey there were loop-holes all round, breast high, three at the ends and about six at the sides; and there was also provision for firing through the projecting part of the floor. There were no rifle-slits in the lower storey, but the palisading was loopholed; these firing-apertures were about 5 feet apart and breast high. The loopholes were 6 inches high and 2 inches wide, just large enough to put a rifle barrel through. In the front the palisading was double, with a curtain of timber covering the entrance. The front fence was nearly all tall manuka stakes, but the main palisading consisted of posts 10 or 12 inches in thickness; manuka timber was used to fill the interstices. On the edge of the gully at the rear of the Blockhouse the bank was scarped perpendicularly about 7 feet as an additional protection. To heighten the warlike face which this little fort presented to the world, above the narrow gateway there was [[90]]set a wooden effigy of a sentry. The figure had been carved by some Maori artist; it represented a soldier, with wooden rifle and fixed bayonet, in the correct attitude of “port arms.” It gave a kind of artistic finish to the “pa o te hoia,” as the Maoris called the Blockhouse, and it loomed very grim and soldier-like in the eyes of us small youngsters from the Orakau farm. A tall flagstaff stood in front, and there were a potato patch and a garden plot, with all the old-fashioned flowers—sweet william, verbena, sunflower, Indian-shot, pansies, and their like. The married men of the Armed Constabulary lived outside the Blockhouse, in raupo whares, and very cleverly the pakeha learned to thatch his house. I remember the home of an Irish sergeant who lived near the Blockhouse, beside the main road; it was a snug, thatched dwelling, very neat and pretty; there was a potato patch, and there was a sweet little flower garden, and honeysuckle twined about the whare and hung over the door.
The Blockhouse stood no sieges; its loop-holes never flashed the fire of Enfield or Snider on a yelling horde of Hauhaus. But it is certain that the existence of this chain of posts along the frontier, with the vigilant patrol of the settlers’ cavalry corps, prevented the hostiles from raiding across the border and descending on the out-settlements.
There were many scares, and more than once the wives and children on the scattered farmsteads were taken in to the redoubts and blockhouses for the night, while the men of the farms, with carbine and revolver, watched their homesteads and rode patrol along the tracks leading to the Maori country and the fords of the Puniu.
They are all gone now, those romance-teeming old blockhouses of our pioneer days. Like many other deserted posts, the Orakau building stood there on the sentry hill-top for many a year, rocking in the gales now that the protecting palisade had gone, until a Crown Lands Commissioner with no interest in historic matters sold it as mere old timber. Few people in those years possessed sufficient prescience and sentiment to help preserve for the new generation of colonists those relics of the adventurous days.
Of the redoubts, less easily demolished, a few crumbling earthworks remain here and there. One, I am glad to say, that is very well preserved is the Armed Constabulary redoubt at Alexandra—[[91]]now Pirongia—garrisoned up to 1883. The village English Church stands in the centre of the work to-day. I give a sketch-plan of this last surviving example of the old frontier forts.
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Pirongia Redoubt.