Once the most secluded spot in the North Island, Taumarunui has developed in thirty years into a large and busy town. When this century opened it did not exist, except as a Maori settlement, important only because it was at the head of canoe navigation of the Wanganui River. Construction of the Main Trunk Railway brought it into being as a town, and promoted the settlement of the originally wild country of which it is now the prosperous business centre.

“The Place of Abundant Shade” is a translation of the name Taumarunui, which accurately describes that sheltered valley as it was before the coming of the pakeha settler swept most of the tall dense forest from the encircling hills. Local Maori tradition ascribes the origin of the name to a certain incident, the erection of a screen or shade to shelter a dying chief, but the interpretation may reasonably be given a wider topographical significance. The level land on which the modern town is built, at the meeting of the waters that form the great navigable channel of the Wanganui, is a place of comfortable sheltered aspect, well guarded by its pumice-coated ranges from the cold and blustering winds.

The heart of the island, too, is a description which the building of the North Island Main Trunk Railway and the transformation of the well-hidden native village into a bustling provincial town have not deprived of its fitness. It was the loneliest imaginable Maori home when first I saw it; it seemed, and was, very far remote from the great world of noise and money-making and many inventions. It was three days' ride from the nearest white township on the north; it was quite inaccessible from the west; it was a long rough journey from the east, and it was a canoe voyage of a week or more from Wanganui on the South. All the rivers were unbridged; the only roads were horse tracks or bush foot trails. Now, though the scene has been trimmed and softened, the geographical truth remains. Taumarunui, as a rail station, is nearly midway between Auckland and Wellington; it marks practically the centre of the Island for train transport. It is the centre from which several routes diverge for industrial, commercial and pleasuring purposes.

Here, travellers bound down the Wanganui River leave the trains to embark on the most beautiful and novel of inland voyages, the power launch and steamboat cruise of more than a hundred miles. From here the timber milling country, the greatest tract of forest land still available for the saw in the Island, can be explored by several routes, and there is the stepping-off place for the Tongariro National Park, up yonder on the Waimarino plateau.

So Taumarunui may correctly claim for itself, if it likes, the title of hub of the Island. No one will dispute its right.