🧚 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.1 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.2 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.3 _Tauhinu_ is a heath-like plant found all over New Zealand; it is the Pomaderis phylicaefolia of the botanists.4 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.5 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.6 Tauhinu-korokio was an ancient _pa_ of Ngati-Mamoe which stood on the site of Major Hornbrook’s old homestead and the present house of7

_J. Cowan, photo_]8

stay for visitors, just below a remnant of the ancient bush on the northern and sunny slope of the green mountain.9 There was a good spring of water close by, and this important fact no doubt determined the situation of the Ngati-Mamoe hillmen’s village.10 In Ngai-Tahu times, after Te Rangi-Whakaputa had conquered this _pa_ in the course of his subjugation of the Whaka-Raupo aborigines, the vicinity was found by the Ngai-Tahu to be a very suitable spot for such vegetable foods as the _korau_ and the _pora_, or _pohata_, now extinct; the roots, which were sweet, were dried in the sun and stored in _ruas_, or underground pits and earthed-in storehouses, as potatoes and _kumara_ are now.11 _Kumara_ and _taro_, the tropic foods of the north, did not flourish in the hill country of the south, though they did well enough, with care, on favoured parts of the Canterbury Plains and the Coast.12

There is in Maori belief an exceedingly _tapu_ spot on Tauhinu-korokio, close to where the old Ngati-Mamoe _pa_ stood.13 It was probably either a _tuahu_ or a burying-place; the _tuahu_ was the spot where the tribal gods, or, rather, their symbols in wood and stone, were kept, and where the wise men, the _tohungas_, resorted for incantation and occult ceremonies and the black art of the _makutu_, by which enemies might be slain though they were at a great distance, by thought transmission and the malignant projection of the will.14 It is not well to camp there even now, should you have Maori blood in your veins.15 The flax-clumps and the _tauhinu_ bushes still murmur the name of Ngati-Mamoe, and though _pakeha_ sheep have long grazed over the site of Tauhinu-korokio and _pakeha_ voices make lively the mountain side, the soil holds the mysterious spell of the _tapu_.16 Maoris who have camped on the side of the track which goes over the hills there have spent a night of inexplicable discomfort, inexplicable, that is, but for the presence of the _tapu_ and the unseen spirits of Maoridom.17 Taare Tikao himself says that many years ago, when he was shearing at Major Hornbrook’s, he was taken suddenly and mysteriously ill, and that the illness was probably the effect of the local _tapu_.18 However, these fancies need not trouble the _pakeha_, whose constitution is not affected by even the most virulent of Maori bedevilments.19

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