Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 2 (June 1, 1931)

On Mokoia Island

On Mokoia Island.

A few days spent in exploring the historic places and the slopes and hilltops of Mokoia Island was a perfect finish to a Lakeland cruise on which not a lakeside village was left unvisited. That leisurely voyage was rich in memories of beauty; it produced, too, sundry notebooks filled with Maori legendary and poetic data, gathered from the last of the old tattooed warriors and sages of the lakes.

page 30

But weeks instead of days could be spent on Mokoia, or rather could in the days of the past, for the old well-schooled people who were such mines of folk-lore and song have gone and the young generation will not live on the ancient isle of ghosts, remote from the cinema and the jazz hall. Thirty to forty years ago many families lived on that wonderfully productive Paepaerau Flat, on the northeast side of the island. What a garden of food it was! And it could be a garden of food again, for the volcanic soil is amazingly rich, and frosts and blights never afflict Mokoia.