Green Walls of Otamarakau.

Curving inland from “The Mount,” the rail-line is laid through as sightly and fertile a countryside as can be seen anywhere in New Zealand. It is a land of many small farms and many families, this region centring on Te Puke town. Dairy farms and maize paddocks and orchards; comfortable looking homesteads, a friendly, hospitable looking country, Paengaroa, with its cows and its potatoes and maize; on to Pongakawa, with its slow-gliding river that was Hongi Hika's war canoe route to the Arawa country on his invasion a hundred odd years ago. Then the line, curving seaward again, passes near a wonderful monument to the military engineering genius and communal industry of the Maori, the great walled pa called Otamarakau.

If I were looking for a lovely site for a seaside home and had my pick of coastwise look-outs, I think I should choose this immemorial Maori fortress. A dark little river glides below and empties itself in the vast blue Bay, underneath a buttress-like salient, cliffy and tree-crowned, that must have been the citadel of the entrenched town. Huge earthworks, all grown with grass and fern and flax, enclose the site of the headquarters of the ancient Waitaha tribe. The outer ditch is wide and deep; the wall is twenty feet high in places. Within the works there is a broad level space of several acres, where the olden village stood. Nowadays the Maori owners grow their potatoes and maize and kumara and tobacco on this beautiful hilltop. There are large karaka trees, planted probably centuries ago, and underneath these broad-branched trees there are flat stones on which the Maori children of to-day, like generations of children before them, spread and opened the karaka drupes. That is Otamarakau to-day, a place saturated with tradition. The name is good; it signifies the place of youthful warriors; in pakeha colloquial phrase we might translate it freely as “Young Son-of-a-Gun.” And don't forget, in pronouncing it, to put the accent where it belongs, on the “ra.”