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

The Old Beach Fort

The Old Beach Fort

All sorts of vague legands have grown up around the ruined stone fort on Paremata beach, at the entrance to Porirua Harbour; you can see it from the railway as you approach the Paremata bridge, sixteen miles out of Wellington City. Here are some facts about “Paremata Fortress,” as it was rather grandiloquently styled in despatches eighty-odd years ago. It was major's command in 1846–47, including the posts of Jackson's Ferry and the lately captured pa at Paua-taha-nui. The British officer-in-charge had about 300 men under him. The stone redoubt was finished in 1847, and although greatly damaged by the earthquake of 1848, remained garrisoned until the early ‘Fifties. Not far away from the post “Barney” Rhodes, the trader, had a store where the soldier, the whaler, the settler and the Maori could obtain anything in reason, from “B.P. Rum” and “Best Case Gin” to shawls, calico, pilot coats, tobacco and shoes.

The ruins consist of a considerable portion of the lower walls of the fort, which was a solidly built structure of large stones, with an admixture of red bricks, firmly cemented with a mortar of sand and seashells. The walls still standing are two feet in thickness, about eight to ten feet in height. The building measures about 60 feet by 40 feet, and a stout wall divides it into two sections, which in turn were sub-divided into a number of rooms. Formerly this stone redoubt was surrounded by a stockade, which enclosed also a guard-room, a small hospital for troops, and whares which were occupied by some of the detachments. All traces of this stockade, however, have vanished. The site of this olden scene of military life is now part of a farm, and the ruined walls are a shelter for shivering sheep on the days when the blustering westerlies blow in across the sandshoals at Porirua's entrance. In the days of its youth there were some lively scenes on the Paua-taha-nui inlet, when Lieut. McKillop's gunboat (oars), gave fight to Rangihaeata's war canoes.

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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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