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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 12 (April 1, 1930)

Ngaere, Old and New

Ngaere, Old and New.

Just about where Eltham town now stands, on the Taranaki Railway line, was a one-time famous Maori retreat and food-foraging place, the Ngaere swamp. Old Maori hands have told me about the glorious times they had there in the days when all this part of the country was an untrimmed, unfenced, undrained wilderness. It was a vast marsh with lagoons and slow-running water-courses and an island-like peninsula running into it. Once, when the Hauhaus were on the run before Colonel Whitmore's troops, the pursuers crossed the quaking bog by means of fascines made by saplings tied with supplejack; and now and again some of these old-time fascines are unearthed by dairy-farmers and drain-diggers, who wonder how the deuce they got there. It was a great place for wild duck and other water-fowl and for eels, that Ngaere swamp, and the Ngati-Ruanui tribesfolk camped there for weeks every year, catching and smoke-drying huge quantities of page 42 eels and snaring ducks and that now almost extinct beautiful bird, the kotuku, or white heron; it was capital eating, says Hone. The tawhara fruit, too, which grows in the great bunches of astelia in the tree-forks, was especially plentiful, and the summer time hunt for it was a great picnic. Sometimes a forager would get lost in that maze of swamps and belts of bush, and to guide these hunters back to the island camp a pu-tatara, a kind of wooden bugle, would be sounded as evening came on, to guide the rovers home.

Nowadays the face of the country is completely transformed. The ancient swamps are the richest of dairying land; Queen Cow reigns where once millions of eels crawled in the bogs; the barnyard fowl is the wild duck's successor.

The Ever Fascinating “Iron Horse.” (Photo, W. W. Stewart.) A scene on the Auckland station, New Zealand, before the departure of a special picnic train.

The Ever Fascinating “Iron Horse.”
(Photo, W. W. Stewart.)
A scene on the Auckland station, New Zealand, before the departure of a special picnic train.

It is a phase of nation-making and wealth-making that many other parts of New Zealand can show too, as instance the Hauraki Plains and the great Rangitikei levels.

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