Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Tarawera erupting in 1886

125 years ago, on 10 June 1886, Mt Tarawera erupted without warning. Craters vented fountains of glowing scoria, and a 17-kilometre rift spewed steam, ash and mud over the surrounding area. Nearby settlements were destroyed or buried by hot mud, and about 120 people perished.

A major tourist attraction, the Pink and White Terraces, was one of the casualties of the eruption. The area around the terraces had become a deep crater, which filled with water within a few months to form the modern Lake Rotomahana.

There has long been speculation about whether any part of the terraces survived, but it had been impossible to check deep in the lake. Early this year a joint US–New Zealand team explored the bed of Lake Rotomahana using a small, unmanned submarine. In February they announced that they had found part of the Pink Terraces, but it was then believed that the White Terraces had been destroyed.

However, on the 125th anniversary of the Tarawera eruption, GNS scientist Cornel de Ronde was delighted to announce that detailed analysis of the underwater sonar records had detected hard, crescent-shaped structures on the lake bed at the site of the White Terraces at a depth of about 60 metres. Unfortunately there are no underwater photographs, but there is little doubt that this discovery will lead to renewed exploration of the floor of Lake Rotomahana.

You can see an illustrated account of the investigations on Julian’s Blog, and on YouTube you can watch an excellent video clip: White Terraces rediscovered.

The discovery has special significance for the Tūhourangi people, a sub-tribe of Te Arawa) whose ancestors used to guide visitors around the Pink and White Terraces. Many members of the tribe were killed during the Tarawera eruption, and those who survived settled at Whakarewarewa. The devastated land was later taken over by the Crown, and is now the subject of a claim before the Waitangi Tribunal.

NIWA – the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research – has just released the monthly climate summary for May 2011. Climate data indicates that the average monthly temperature was 12.9°C, which is 2.2°C higher than the 1971–2000 May average temperature and the highest since reliable records were first compiled in 1909. A difference of 2.2°C is a lot.

May was also wet in some places and dry in others. Nelson and the north-west South Island experienced 2.5–3.5 times the normal rainfall and many parts of the North Island received far more rain they ordinarily would. By contrast, southern Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa, Banks Peninsula and Fiordland received less rain than usual.

The warmth and wet were caused by predominating north-westerly winds. Auckland’s deadly tornado at the start of the month occurred when this warm air came up against colder air during a storm.

Kōwhai blossoms are meant to herald the beginning of spring

Prior to NIWA releasing this information about May temperatures I observed some unexpected changes in my garden. Firstly, I noticed my young kōwhai tree had sprouted its first ever flower pods. This was probably in late April or early May, and it’s now flowering. Then, last weekend I discovered some daffodil bulbs had sent up shoots and that my beautifully scented daphne had started to flower.

This was all very nice, but rather surprising and a little strange. I associate all these changes with spring, not the end of autumn – perhaps winter at the earliest for daphne. I’ve since learned that kōwhai flowering is staggered between July and November so the trees do not compete for birds, which is very ingenious. But May is not July, and I’m sure my bulbs would not ordinarily have poked their shoots up this early.

I think awareness of climate change made me think about these changes in more detail, notwithstanding the fact that it’s not possible to say there’s a connection between climate change and May’s record average temperature. They felt odd – my feeling was ‘but it’s too early for you all to appear!’

When I heard May was so warm these changes started to make sense. The average temperature at Wellington Airport for May was 14.2°C, 2°C higher than normal and the highest since records were first taken there in 1962. In Kelburn, a suburb near the CBD, the average temperature was 13.7°C–2.2°C higher than normal and the highest since records began in 1928.

Has this unseasonably warm month tricked my plants into flowering early and will the colder winter months fell my blooms untimely? Have you noticed any environmental changes or phenomena which you can now relate to this warmth? This could even extend to people – I saw some wearing t-shirts and shorts in  Wellington recently. It wasn’t that warm!

The Waiwhetū has seen better days

Waiwhetū has been in the news recently, with the controversy over whether the waka Te Raukura should have a home in the new whare waka on Wellington’s waterfront or at the Te Āti Awa marae in Waiwhetū, in the Hutt Valley. Waiwhetū is a river and was the name of an historic settlement at some distance from the present marae. On a recent weekend I walked the length of the Waiwhetū, from near its source in the hills above Naenae, to where it joins the Hutt River close to the latter’s estuary. This journey along the Waiwhetū from north to south was geographical, but it was also a journey through different settings, times and histories.

The hills where the Waiwhetū rises are home to the rather confusingly named Taitā cemetery – it is reached through Naenae. But the cemetery’s name is reminder of the fact that when it was established in the early 1890s Taitā was a farming district more extensive than the present-day suburb.

The Waiwhetū then takes a course through Naenae itself, a suburb that was an experiment in social engineering through state (public) housing, which was laid out in the 1940s and 1950s. The name of Naenae’s shopping centre, Hillary Court, honours the country’s hero of the time, Edmund Hillary, who reached the summit of Mt Everest in May 1953, along with Nepali climbing partner Sherpa Tensing Norgay.

There’s not quite the same spark in Hillary Court today, yet something of the vision that made Naenae survives. The Olympic swimming pool, opened in the 1950s, and Wellington’s first of such dimensions, remains a draw card. And Naenae’s ideals also express themselves in new ways. With depictions of a variety of ethnic groups, large colourful murals are a reminder of how much the ethnic composition of Naenae and its neighbours has changed in the last half century – Sherpa Tensing would not be as out of place in Naenae in 2011 as he would have been in 1953.

Multicultural mural at Hillary Court

From Hillary Court it is only a short walk to Riverside Drive which – as its name suggests – follows the Waiwhetū, and does so for most of the rest of its distance. In this stretch the river has a tranquil, almost rustic, air and ducks settle in happily under pūriri trees overhanging the bank.

By this point we have reached the suburb of Waiwhetū itself, at the heart of which is the impressive Waiwhetū marae. Its meeting house dates from 1960 and is a confirmation of the tribe’s history of settlement in the Hutt Valley. Nearby Te Whiti Park, named for the great Taranaki pacifist leader, is a reminder of links with that part of the country, from which Te Āti Awa hapū migrated in the 1820s and 1830s. A new cultural centre, opened in 2005, has striking architecture, carvings and motifs.

For Māori in years gone the Waiwhetū was a fruitful source of food – both eels and other fish in it, and the plants that thrived along its banks. That’s not so today. The river has to cope with run-off of many kinds, much harmful, and the problems intensify as it enters an industrial area, as signs soberly indicate. Some of the factory names are very familiar: Griffins has long had a big plant not far from the river, whilst a Masterpet plant nearby caters not to man but to man’s best friends. On the opposite bank lies the Hutt Park raceway.

Ōwhiti cemetery

We approach journey’s end, in more ways than one. Near where the Waiwhetū joins the Hutt – and across the busy main road to Eastbourne – is Ōwhiti cemetery. It is on the site of the historical Waiwhetū pā, but rather unhappily penned in today between river and fuel storage tanks. It is a mundane end to the river too, but with a certain fitness that a water course that starts with a cemetery also ends with one, yet traverses in between such a variety of past and present lives and livelihoods.

Old Blue, from whom all other black robins are descended

Ornithologist Don Merton died on Sunday 10 April 2011, some 27 years after the black robin dubbed ‘Old Blue‘. Don pioneered conservation techniques of intensively managing the last remaining individuals of a species to recover the population and also of transferring species from one island to another, where habitats were more favourable and predators absent.

In the 1960s active management of predators and manipulating breeding at an individual level was not the done thing. Managing threatened species was pretty much a case of preserving habitat and then leaving them alone. An experience on Big South Cape Island in 1964 changed that. Rats got onto the island and Don and his colleagues transferred the only known South Island saddlebacks and the tiny Stead’s bush wren to nearby rat-free islands. The Stewart Island snipe and the greater short-tailed bat were not transferred and they soon became extinct. While the wren was transferred, it did not breed on its new home and it too ceased to exist.

Don later recalled: ‘The tragedy of Big South Cape was a timely and valuable lesson for us. It convinced even the most sceptical that predators could induce ecological collapse and extinctions. But it also has a massive, enduring impact because it shaped the way we developed policies about conservation and put them into practice.’

His most startling achievement occurred in 1976, when the remaining seven black robins on Little Māngere Island, one of the Chatham Islands, were transferred to nearby Māngere Island, which had better forest. As a young boy Don had successfully placed goldfinch chicks in his grandmother’s canary’s nest, which the bird then raised as her own. Using this age-old cuckoo’s trick as a cue, he gave the eggs of the last surviving female, named old Old Blue, to tomtits, which they successfully incubated. Old Blue would then lay another clutch. Slowly the population grew and so the species was saved – from just five individuals and one breeding pair. When Old Blue died at age 13 her passing was announced in Parliament. All of the 250 or so surviving black robins are descended from her and her breeding partner Old Yellow.

Few people could lay claim to saving a species, yet Don, as well as having a major hand in saving multiple bird species, also developed approaches that could be adapted for other threatened species. The Department of Conservation’s current recovery plans for threatened species build upon the work of Don and other conservationists of the late 1970s. The continued existence of the kākāpō and black robin are his most visible legacy, yet the hands-on approaches he and his colleagues developed, and that many others have since built upon, continue to offer hope for retaining biodiversity both in New Zealand and overseas.

In conservation circles Don Merton was not only world famous in New Zealand, he was world famous worldwide. And rightly so.

The Waiatoto River in its breath-taking surroundings

‘The Waiatoto – it’s inland from Jackson Bay – some nice views of Aspiring apparently,’ my paddling friend Nick said as we left Wānaka. Anyone familiar with Jackson Bay at the bottom of South Westland knows it’s a remote place, so I figured the Waiatoto would be isolated, even for a bunch of white-water kayakers. This would be the perfect way to top-off two great weeks spent on some of the lower South Island’s wild rivers.

As we drove over Haast Pass in heavy rain, other local rivers looked full and enticing. Nerves caught me in the throat as I peered out the car window at the water pounding over the Gates of Haast. The next morning we crammed dry clothes, food, sleeping bags and tarps into dry bags and 12 of us set off from Haast beach to meet helicopter pilot James Scott. With no road access anywhere near the river, James would chopper us with our kayaks to Bonar Flats where we would start our two-day journey down the Waiatoto to where the river meets the sea south-west of Haast.

The Waiatoto drains the Volta glacier system on the western side of Mt Aspiring. Several smaller rivers flow into it, fed by glaciers. The river travels north along a valley flanked to the west by the Haast Range before turning north-west to reach the Tasman Sea. Much of the river’s length is within the bounds of the staggeringly beautiful Mt Aspiring National Park.

White water on the Waiatoto

Soon after getting on the river, we paddled down some tricky boulder sections, many of the rocks submerged by a high flow from the recent rainfall. Stretches of flat paddling between white-water allowed us to ogle the scenery: waterfalls spilling over schist rock formations, moss-covered valleys, beech forest and groves of tree-ferns. On our first day a kea flew over the river, swooping low, screeching and laughing at us as we paddled on. We set-up our tarp bivvies on a grassy spot on the first night and fell asleep – covered in insect repellent to ward-off the notorious West Coast sandflies – to the sound of the river flowing past.

John Breen, in his book River of Blood, has introduced readers to some of the stories of the Waiatoto, a place he calls New Zealand’s version of the Wild West. A few families of West Coasters tried to live in the river valley, hacking out livelihoods despite the isolation. The fierce battles before Europeans arrived gave the river its Māori name, Waiototo, which means ‘Blood River’. Explorer Charlie Douglas travelled the length of the river in 1891, adding to the folklore, and William O’Leary, otherwise known as Arawata Bill, spent time on the Waiatoto as a ferryman.

After an adrenalin-filled day of white-water rapids and a dinner of dehydrated spag bol, I sat on the river’s banks in the evening light. The ghosts of the warriors, the pounamu-gatherers, the hunters, the explorers and the drovers who had lived up this river seemed close to the surface. I felt lucky to be here.