Feature
The flight of Te Kooti
by Sid Marsh
Retracing the final dramatic episode of the New Zealand Wars through the mysterious Urewera wilderness.
We are crashing about in the katote ferns somewhere inside the eastern boundary of 300,000ha of contiguous Urewera forest. In front, a coil of supplejack catches on Andy Blick’s pack, and as my mate trudges forward it stretches full length before suddenly springing backwards to whip me sharply in the face. I take the hit with a grunt, wiping the sting and drips away, and press on.
We then break out onto a flat covered by pole forest. It is immediately obvious we have arrived onsite. Roger Dahm, another expedition member, has already peeled off out-of-sight. Andy shoots away to the right, leaving me standing next to the husk of a fallen rimu giant, and this is where I drop my pack and Winchester carbine.
A kakariki chatters in the treetops of the 130-year-old regrowth. The waterway we have been following loops around this island of scrub, which is surrounded by old-growth tawa and rimu forest. I want to look over the flat ground on the opposite side of the rimu, so clamber over. The fluted trunk is sprouting tufts of grass and although still covered in bark, the sapwood underneath is mush.
I don’t think any more about it as our three-person team sets out to confirm that this is indeed Te Kooti’s Waipaoa Headquarters, where the famous 1871 gun-battle with the Arawa Flying Column (AFC) occurred. Although scant, the evidence is there: the half-loop in the adjacent Waipaoa River; scattered whare slabs of heart totara; one ancient stake with a tomahawk-worked end; three probable whare sites – now mere rectangular depressions in the ground; the tawa-covered sentry knoll where sentry Patara Te Whata was shot dead; that vertical bank on the opposite side that took the bullet meant for Te Kooti, but killed Paora Te Wakahoehoe in the process; the moat-like banks of a dry creek that feed into a side stream with a small waterfall.
This splattering waterfall draws the three of us to the pool at its foot. The location was so accurately described by one of the attackers – Gilbert Mair – that we can easily visualise the Ringatu captive Mere Maihi kneading her kete of pikopiko there in the pool, watched by Mair on the opposite bank.
I take four photographs and later many more of the other points of interest before we have lunch. Then we shoulder our packs and set off back to our fly-camp downstream. A few hours on, it suddenly hits home – the fallen rimu that I had hopped over was probably the very tree that Ringatu fighter Wi Heretaunga was diving over when shot in the knee by Mair during the attack. (The aftermath saw the wounded Heretaunga subjected to a bush court-martial, then executed that night.) It is the only fallen podocarp on the hectare-sized area and its heartwood alone would be durable enough to retain its form after lying for over a century in the open.
Long before our Waipaoa expedition, I studied the episode in a number of old history books and was fully conversant with all aspects of it, as I was with the 26-month Urewera Campaign, the last of the New Zealand Wars. I had also pored over the period photos with a magnifying glass, and read screeds of unpublished firsthand accounts – including dispatches and diary entries – filed away in some of New Zealand’s premier archival institutions.
The trail through this forest of published and archival paperwork has led me and my friends onward into the actual theatre of war itself, the primary forests of Te Urewera. Over the course of many privately financed expeditions, we have explored, discovered and compared past with present. By walking the original Maori war trails, we have found a wilderness of waterways, mountains, centuries-old trees, rare forest birds, ancient Tuhoe pa and also the long-hidden battlesites of the protagonists.
The 1870-72 Urewera expeditions were driven by a vengeful Colonial Government (also known as the Kawanatanga), desperate to track down and destroy Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and his Ringatu guerrilla force then regrouping within the boundaries of the Tuhoe tribe’s forested rohe. To this end, the politicians backed a new counter-insurgency operation designed to be relatively simple and cost-effective: the expensive Armed Constabulary (AC) field force was redeployed piecemeal to occupy a line of posts and stations from Poverty Bay and Hawke’s Bay to Lake Taupo and across to the Bay of Plenty.
Mounted orderlies and coastal vessels, bolstered by the newly erected electric telegraph lines, addressed the problems of unreliable supply trains and delayed/disrupted lines of communication. At the same time, the bounty on Te Kooti’s head was upped considerably to £5000 sterling. With such a financial inducement it was left to the main Kawanatanga fighting tribes or Native Contingents (NC) – Te Arawa, Ngati Porou, Ngati Kahungunu and lower Whanganui – to launch their own independent expeditions to make this campaign of forest and fern a short one.
In early March 1870, a Ngati Porou contingent kicked off the Urewera Campaign. Major Ropata Wahawaha NZC led his 370 warriors from the East Coast and entered Te Urewera from that side of the island, while a Whanganui force, comprising 250 men under Major Kepa Te Rangihiwinui NZC, moved inland from Opotiki. Tuhoe villages were stormed and plundered in the search for Te Kooti, setting the scene for the next two years.
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