Bruce Bisset: End this war of words over name

The real joker is that while everyone including Mayor Bill Dalton and MP Stuart Nash repeatedly claim "Napier used to be known as Ahuriri", that's a myth deriving from government land-buyer Donald McLean, writes Bruce Bisset. Photo / Duncan Brown

Clearly the roses don't smell as sweet for Napier when it comes to adding Ahuriri to Hawke's Bay airport's name, while "giving" the Crown-owned half of it to local iwi adds injury to insult - or so the racist revisionists would have it.

The white supremacists who dub this "creeping Maorification" seek to negate centuries of Maori occupation, even dragging up the "Moriori were here first anyway" argument - as if Maori mattered not a whit, and history leapt straight from the moa-hunters to modern European civilisation.

Makes you wonder whether the slaves were ever truly freed, or if the blood shed fighting fascism ever really knew its enemy, or what century we might be lost in to continue to so vilify our neighbours solely because of their skin-tone.

Name-calling, indeed.

The airport is built on what was originally the primary source of kai moana for the region - the mostly freshwater lagoon of Te Whanganui-a-Orotu, that disappeared with the 1931 earthquake.

Wrongly classified as a saltwater estuary, as seabed it "automatically" became Crown property; then was taken by the Harbour Board, then by the city council when it became dry land.

But, as the Waitangi Tribunal agrees, Orotu's lagoon was never intended to have been included in any "sale" - so it's entirely fitting if a part that turns a profit, providing some small recompense, now transfers back to Maori ownership.

As for the name, let's get real: in practice, everyone will call it Napier or Hawke's Bay airport, regardless of what the company or the terminal is officially called. Any distress around that is a borderline-racist beat-up.

The real joker is that while everyone including Mayor Bill Dalton and MP Stuart Nash repeatedly claim "Napier used to be known as Ahuriri", that's a myth deriving from government land-buyer Donald McLean, simply through his naming of the purchase of that area as the "Ahuriri Block".

The Ahuriri Block was bounded on the southern side by the Tutaekuri River and so - though it also (over iwi objections) included the Napier hills - excluded much of what was then swamp and is now part of today's city.

But Ahuriri itself was a very specific locale: the place where chief Te Ahuriri had his men dig a channel to allow the waters of Orotu lagoon to flush to sea, because the usual intermittent mouth at Te Taha (Westshore) was blocked.

That channel became a convenient egress point and parking place for waka and, later, trading ships' lighters. It naturally became the place where Europeans started to build a town and port, and the obvious place for McLean to meet local chiefs to discuss the purchase, hence coining of the name Ahuriri Block.

At that time Napier was an island, little more than two hills with sandspits either side. The hills were known as Mataruahou, and were renowned for having healing powers - the reason iwi eventually agreed to include their sale was to get a hospital built there.

Ahuriri, on the spit flats and in Onepoto Gully, was quite distinct from Napier, which was laid out in 1855 as a settler's town by one Alfred Domett and named after Sir Charles Napier, recent victor at the Battle of Meannee, in Sindh in what is now Pakistan. Domett misnamed the hills Scinde Island, after the province, and the Raj-sourced names (Clive, Hastings, etc) soon ran through the district.

So even to claim, as we're now led to believe by encyclopedias and commentaries, that Napier was once known as Ahuriri is not even a truth in pakeha history, let alone from a Maori perspective.

That's the right of it.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.