Otaki Town and its Maori Church.

Most of the tall timber has long been destroyed in these parts near the rail and road, but many patches of the smaller native trees have been left, and landowners along the line take a pride in preserving these pretty groves of karaka and ngaio and other trees and shrubs which adorn the levels between mountain range and seaside. There is food for our native birds in such clumps of flowering or berry-bearing trees.

An old Maori of Waikanae said that in his young days the now-vanished huia was frequently seen about the place where the Waikanae railway station and township now stand. In winter time the beautiful birds used to come down from the bush of the mountains in search of food in the more varied and fruitful woods on the flat.

Otaki town is the most historically interesting place on the route. It has always been an important centre of Maori life. The railway station is a mile or so from the heart of old Otaki, the Mission Church, called “Rangiatea,” after a famous sacred place of the Maori ancestors in the Eastern Pacific, the traditional home-island now called Rai'atea. This church, the largest and oldest existing place of worship built and used by a Maori community, dates back to 1849–1850. It was built by the Ngati-Raukawa and Ngati-Toa tribes, in the time of the Rev. Octavius Hadfield, the local missionary of the English Church, afterwards Bishop of Wellington. The great Rauparaha, lately released from captivity in a British warship, influenced his people to join in the construction page 28 of “Rangiatea,” in token of their conversion to Christianity—though he himself remained a sturdy old pagan. It is a blend of pakeha and Maori architecture; the plan is English, but the interior construction, though plain, is massively Maori. Native meeting houses have often been of greater length, but the height of the steep-pitched roof exceeds that of any Maori building. Three round pillars, or poutoko, each forty feet high, support the great painted ridgepole: this huge roof-tree is eighty feet in length. The mast-like poutoko are 3ft. to 3ft. 6in. in diameter at the foot; the circumference is more than a man can span. They are sunk fifteen feet in the ground, beneath the church floor. These roof-pillars are whole totara trees, adzed smooth by the Ngati-Raukawa bushmen of eighty years ago. The trees were felled in the forest at Ohau, north of Otaki, and were floated down the Ohau River and towed by canoes to Otaki beach, thence hauled inland to “Rangiatea.”

The broad under-surface of the ridgepole and the rafters are painted in bright and graceful native designs—the scroll patterns that the Maori took from his observation of natural objects, such as the drooping flower of the kowhai tree and the curling new fronds of fern trees.

The altar rail is supported by many pillars, each carved in a different pattern, each by a separate sub-tribe. Not a pit-saw was used on these Maori posts, pillars and planks, everything was done with axe and adze. There are planks squared out of the solid nearly 2ft. wide, 1 1/2in. thick, and 30ft. to 40ft. long.

On the opposite side of the road to the Maori Church is a memorial to Te Rauparaha, a figure procured by the Ngati-Toa at a cost of several hundreds of pounds. The tribe wanted the monument erected in the Church grounds, but the Ngati-Raukawa strongly objected. “No,” they said, “he was a man of blood; we see blood on that figure.” And so old Rauparaha had to stand outside the holy ground, and there his memorial is to-day, separated from the churchyard by the width of the motor road.

Inland to the east from Otaki is the road up the Otaki River to the Forks; from there a favourite sub-alpine trail leads across the Tararua Ranges to the Wairarapa side.

Continuing northward to the town of Levin, we pass Ohau, where a road goes in to the west, seaward, to that very pretty little lake Papaitonga (“Beauty of the South”) with its historic islands.

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