Lost in the Waikato: Two Quick Notes for Searchers

Scott Hamilton

1. Lost on an Expressway

Most New Zealanders live in big cities. Their experience of the rest of the country is mediated by roads. The old road from Auckland to and through the Waikato offered a narrative that introduced many Pakeha to history and to another culture. The new Waikato Expressway buries that story.

For Māori over centuries and for early Pākehā settlers, the Waikato River was the only viable road through the region. Highway One and a railway gradually displaced steamers and schooners, but they largely remained loyal to the route of the river, skirting hills and mountains. 

I remember my parents driving us south beside the river, past rusty barges and the turret of a warship at Mercer. The road bent around Taupiri, the green pyramid of the Tainui peoples. My father had little interest in or knowledge of Te Ao Māori. But the terraced graves that rose through the mist on Taupiri demanded some sort of comment. 'That hill's where all the Māori kings and queens were buried' he said. His gesture was as vague was his words.

But that single sentence of my father was a sort of keyhole, offering a view of a room, a large and dim room I hadn't known existed. Māori kings and queens? Didn't kings and queens come from Europe? And didn't we already have a queen, an English queen? How could two monarchs exist in one country?

My father offered no further explanations, but the mystery was compounded by the exquisite carved house we passed a few minutes later in Ngāruawāhia, and the sign that identified it as a royal residence. We were passing through the capital of a country that been captured but not erased. This small, rundown town had somehow seen great events. 

The road to the Waikato was designed, like all major roads, to tell a story. When we were researching our book Ghost South Road Paul Janman and found documents prepared by the colonial government in Auckland in the early 1860s, documents that jumped bizarrely between Roman Britain and Aotearoa. The Romans had taught the ancient Britains civilisation by building roads through their forests and fens. Now the British, who had created an empire to rival Rome from their capital of Londonium, would teach Māori by building a great new road.

Queen Victoria's name harked back to Boudica, leader of indigenous resistance to Nero's legions, yet her agents in the potholed colonial outpost of Auckland saw themselves as Romans. There was a sadomasochism  inherent in Britain's imperial enterprise. Britons would conquer nations in the same way the Romans had conquered them. Just as boys at public schools required hazing and beatings by prefects and teachers before they were ready to join the ruling class, so nations had to suffer if they wanted one day to be 'civilised'. 

The desire for punishment and suffering was as much a part of the Great South Road as mileposts and gravel and tarmacadam. The road forced travellers to reenact the invasion of the Waikato, by running right through Rangiriri pā, where the bloodiest battle of the war had been fought. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell asked us to imagine the future as a boot tramping endlessly on a human head. The planners of the Great South Road wanted wheels and feet to trample endlessly on the heads of the warriors killed and buried at Rangiriri. 

There is much to praise about the Waikato Expressway project. The urupa and pa at Rangiriri were recovered  and protected. Archaeologists working closely with local iwi also made sure the bulldozers and graders and diggers avoided other wahi tapu. Lizards and birds were moved out of danger into relict forests and swamps. Signboards and exquisite artworks have gone up along the route. 

But how much of a signboard explaining the battle of Rangiriri or the kingdom of Tawhiao can the occupants of a vehicle travelling at a hundred kilometres an hour read? The expressway turns away from the river and Taupiri and Ngāruawāhia. It wants the mercilessly straight path of a missile. Hills—small, archaeologically undistinguished hills, deemed unworthy of preservation—were blown apart with gelignite to clear its route. As we drove through them I thought I could taste the greywacke and clay, smell the gorse that burned only a few springs ago. I imagined the earth returning, and our vehicle being entombed, like a longboat in an East Anglia barrow, a curiosity for future archaeologists. But I was being romantic. The expressway ran on, away from history.

2. Lost in a Small Town

We seem to have left Aotearoa by car. This morning I walked the several kilometres from our motel to the centre of Cambridge without seeing a single piece of native vegetation. The Waikato War was waged by many species, and here the invaders seem to have triumphed. 

The troops that entered the Waikato in July 1863 marched from Queen's Redoubt in Pōkeno, but Auckland's Domain was where the Acclimatisation Society garrisoned species like trout, duck, oak, and willows in ponds and nurseries. Soldier-settlers unleashed them all in the second half of the 1860s. Swamps were drained, kahikatea forests razed, and creeks straightened into drains. Omphalic sites like Kirikiriroa's sacred maunga were planted with redoubts, churches, and later police stations, so that their mana could serve a new master. The war was also fought with toponyms: names from the imperial homeland like Cambridge replaced mysterious indigenous words.

A recent op ed in Mahurangi Matters called for my hometown of Warkworth/Puhinui to think of itself as the 'Cambridge of the north'. The author was a businessman, who had enjoyed a visit to the Waikato. He thought Cambridge not only beautiful but prosperous. It is true that both Warkworth and Cambridge are often given adjectives like 'leafy' and picturesque'. But where Warkworth has numerous reserves of native bush and a sky full of native birds Cambridge is relentlessly alien. Where we have pūriri and totara Cambridge has oak and conifers. Instead of our tūī and kererū I see pheasants and starlings here. 

I'm reminded of Hanmer Springs, where there was also a campaign to eradicate indigenous plant life and replace it with exotic species. There the motivation was not conquest but tourism. Locals wanted their town to resemble a spa or ski resort in the Rockies. Jared Davidson's book Blood and Dirt shows how prisoners were put to work planting tens of thousands of firs and pines. 

But botanical invasions are always challenged. In the 1980s a group of Māori patients at Queen Mary's hospital in Hanmer rebelled against their surroundings. They successfully demanded that the hospital plant native trees and build a marae. When Paul Janman and I were researching Ghost South Road we talked with Wiremu Puke, who had for decades been trying to reverse the botanical conquest of his rohe. Puke had planted tens of thousands of native trees along the river he called 'the Māori Nile'. Brett Graham's sculpture 'Te Rongopai' is a different sort of tree. Graham has given Cambridge an iron descendant of the wooden niu poles that members of the Pai Mārire faith raised. Men and women would trance dance around the poles, as they gathered strength to fight Pākehā militia and the British army.

As I walked through the strange countryside here I was engaged in an imaginary conversation with J Wiremu Kane. A couple of months ago I published a dialogue with Kane about Tolkien and Hobbiton at Reef Shark. He had accused me of dogmatism and a lack of curiosity.

I'd long seen the Tolkienisation of Aotearoa as a sort of neo-colonialism. I'd written about the way that the Kīngitanga village of Peria, which embodied some of the utopian qualities of the Shire, lay under long grass close to Hobbiton. It was destroyed by invading British Orcs. But Kane argued that I hadn't looked at how people saw and felt about Hobbiton. He defended Tolkien as an environmentalist and someone curious about other cultures, and he identified subversive subtexts about sexuality and gender in The Lord of the Rings.

And what if visitors to Hobbiton were finding their own agrarian symbol of opposition to the technological dystopias of the twenty-first century? 

Kane's argument reminded me of how much my English father-in-law and some other migrant from Britain enjoy visiting Cambridge. What are they finding here? 

Alan grew up in poverty on a housing estate in the Midlands, then rebelled against his working class socialist father by going to university and becoming an anthroposophist and folk musician (he'd later abandon the anthroposophy, but not the music). He brought his family to Aotearoa after reading John Wyndham's The Chrysalids. Like so many books, before and since, that novel presented these islands as a sanctuary in a dangerous world. My father-in-law has never had any sympathy for Britain's class system, royal family, or empire. And yet he feels an intense nostalgia for its countryside.

I've never been able to persuade Alan to enjoy what Colin McCahon called the 'wild side' of Aotearoa. He prefers the tidy farmland of the Waikato to the bush and scrub and hills of the King Country, and the well-mannered shorelines of the Hauraki Gulf to roaring west coast beaches like Piha or Muriwai. Perhaps he comes to places like Cambridge to replenish himself. Here he can reenter the English landscapes of his youth, remembering the weekend hikes when he escaped his dirty old town for the green and pleasant countryside beyond it. 'Is there anything wrong with that?' I imagined Kane asking. 

I was reminded of the pilgrimages that some Tongans make to the island of 'Eua. With its cooler weather, sparse population, ferns, and highland, 'Eua is known by some Tongans as the 'little New Zealand'. Tongan couples who have returned home after living for many years in Aotearoa sometimes escape flat, crowded Tongatapu for 'Eua. It is way of revisiting the landscape they long for without leaving Tonga.

In 2005 I made an extended PhD research trip to Britain, staying in London, Cambridge, and Hull. The dirty air and water and the overpopulation made me feel claustrophobic and weary. Then I visited Wales. Climbing into the forested Welsh hills in a rental car, my girlfriend and I turned on the radio and heard a DJ introducing Crowded House's 'Weather with You'—in Welsh. I felt suddenly unburdened. I felt somehow that I was at home, in this natural landscape with its resilient indigenous culture. i felt like I might have been driving through the Hokianga, and listening to Radio Waatea. 

Who am I, then, to begrudge my father-in-law the same feeling? We all need places that replenish us. But sometimes the same place can replenish one person and drain another.

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