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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 8 (November 1, 1938)

Home of the Maori

Home of the Maori.

The Waiohau River came swiftly out from the ranges through a basin of cultivated land, a vivid oasis in the fierce toss-up of crag and cliff and all-covering bush.

A Maori meeting-house and a few small whares and a pataka storehouse stood there, the Waiohau kainga. All this country, wild as it is, was a home and fighting ground of various clans of the Urewera people. Hereabouts was the olden fortified village called Tauheke. Descendants of the ancient clans, Ngati-Rakei, Ngati-Haka and Patu-heuheu live in the Waiohau district and such adjacent parts as are habitable.

The canoe-men of the olden tribes navigated the Rangitaiki; they made portages at the wildest parts, hauling their canoes around the banks above the worst of the rapids. It must have been a strenuous job at such places as this Okahu bluff, near the precipitous hill called Arorangi.

The modern highway makers had an even more difficult job, chopping and carving and smoothing this road of ours. The boiling-mad torrent below; the all-too-narrow wheelway; the cliffs impending over us, streaming with little waterfalls, every fern and shrub and bed of moss dripping.

More bluffs; then the ranges at last stepped back again. The valley opened out, and the Rangitaiki recovered from its display of temper and smoothed its face; and you would scarcely have known it for the same mad-drunk and disorderly river by the time we crossed it by the bridge at Te Teko and turned Rotorua-ward.

All that riverside journey—it was on a Sunday—we did not meet car, man, or dog. It was fortunate; the gorge road was narrowest just at the worst cliff corners, and was quite unprotected by parapet or fence.