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Pioneering Reminiscences of Old Wairoa

At The Pa

At The Pa.

Without going to the trouble of inflicting on readers a list of the pas of old Wairoa, it may be sufficient to state that in earlier days there were ten or twelve pas within a stone's throw of Wairoa town site, containing several thousands of fighting men and, of course, a large number of wives and children, and not a few slaves. Nearly all the pas were on the hillsides until the Pakehas brought the deadly guns, and then the hill-forts were abandoned, and the Maoris built their homes on the flats. The result was the breeding of tuberculosis, and as the Pakehas also brought in rum and some unnameabie diseases the page 191foundations were laid for an almost wholesale decimation of the Maori race. Among the pas of renown may be mentioned Titirangi, where the Maoris first experienced the deadly guns of the white man. Kaiuku, and its heroic defenders, who sooner than bow the neck to the raiders, lived on clay (hence Kaiuku) till the seige was raised. Rangihoua and Whare-okoro at the Heads, Te Huki and Hiruharema at Mohaka, Whenuariri's great pa on the hill opposite Grey Street, and hundreds of others, most of them perched on the hill-tops. Coming back to later days we have Te Uhi pa, the only one surviving, and rapidly becoming modernized, the past only being surrendered with a wrench. Yet the hockey stick and the tennis racquet are fast replacing the patu and the mere, the maipi, the Maori spear and the Pakeha gun as a means of asserting superiority. There is an old Latin saying which, rendered into the vernacular, runs thus: "Times change and we change with them." So it has been with the old pa on the east bank of the Awatere. It had two names, one was Kurupakiaka, given because someone in the wild and woolly days was killed there on the root of a tree. The other name was Te Uhi-O-Karoro. One of the ancestors of the dwellers in the pa was named Karoro, and the name then signified that the locality was covered by the mana, the shadow or the influence of Karoro. In the troublous days of the 'sixties, and the early 'seventies, the old pa was strongly stockaded, estimated to hold nearly 1,000 men, and the palisading was "adorned" with many grotesque figures, some of page 192them even indecent enough to shock George Bernard Shaw, or the sculptor of the statue of Eros in London. It was, for a considerable time, a thorn in the flesh of the military authorities and a menace to the handful of Europeans on the south side of the river, and they were only held in check by the mana of Ihaka Whaanga and Kopu, both of whom were loyalists to the backbone. Professedly loyal, the people of the pa harboured the emissaries of Te Ua Haumene, the Taranaki fanatic, and his band of discontents, and hundreds from there slipped away to join Te Kooti when he escaped from the Chatham Islands. Since peace was made between the Europeans and the Maoris, Te Uhi pa has not been wanting in loyalty to the Crown, and now the inhabitants are joining in the national sports of the Pakehas and hold their own with them, even in tennis.

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