We have very little exact knowledge of the early occupation of the Port Molyneux district.

We have good reason to believe that the Rapuwai and certainly the Waitaha people lived in large numbers around the Kaitangata Lakes and at the mouth of the Matau.

We know that a village called Murikauhaka was in existence for some time prior to the whaling days. But before that villages called Matai–pipi and Otapatu were in existence near the mouth of the river. On the sea sandspit and in all the bays from Port Molyneux to the Nuggets there is evidence of very old occupation. This old occupation was also all down the coast to Pounawea and the mouth of the Tahakopa, this last being a very old moa hunter site, as the researches by Dr. H. D. Skinner, L. Lockerbie and D. Teviotdale disclose.

But these belong to a shadowy past, and the village that Morrell saw was the home of Tuhawaiki's people. This village was right opposite the long tongue of sandhills known as the Sandspit. Where the old pilot station stood, and where the present school stands, and back over those easy slopes which lie to the morning sun, the village was scattered. The burial ground was in the sandhills at the mouth of the river, and the present road goes over part of it. The canoes were tied up in a backwater between the present school and Mr. Wright's house.

The question naturally arises:: If this was the site of the old village, why did not Tuhawaiki insist on it being put in as a reserve when the block was sold to the pakeha in 1844?

The answer is that between Morrell's visit and the sale in 1844 epidemics of measles and influenza almost wiped out the Maori population of the village.

When a Maori was near death, he was removed from the permanent dwelling house to a temporary shelter. After death this shelter was abandoned. The removal of the dying person from the permanent house avoided it becoming tapu.

Many people died in the measles epidemics that swept Murikauhaka, and all the houses would become tapu. So they would be burnt, the dead being cremated in them. Those who survived would shift to new ground. And that ground was obviously near Karoro Creek.

The reserve that Clarke was asked to put into the map was the new clean ground.

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