No sign of `Rawhiti' pub

Peter Gaston
The tiny settlement of Te Pohue, about 40km north of Napier, is suffering an identity crisis.
It's all because their local watering hole, the Te Pohue Hotel, with its links back to the stage coach days, was recently being advertised for sale as being in a place called Rawhiti.
And the identity crisis has not been helped by fact that the Lowe Corporation rescue helicopter reported that it attended an accident on the Old Coach Road, Rawhiti.
The land agent handling the hotel sale said she got the name "Rawhiti" from the Hastings District Council's rates notice. However, the legal description for the hotel both in the council's rating information database and its valuation service providers data base was "Lot 1 DP 10479 X111 Maungaharuru" and made no reference whatsoever to "Rawhiti".
Don McLean, a former Napier traffic officer who has lived in the area for more than 15 years was upset to suddenly find area referred to as Rawhiti.
He knew of a Rawhiti Street in Wainuiomata and according to Wise's New Zealand Guide there was a "Rawhiti" hundreds of kilometres away in the Bay of Islands on a peninsula which ended at Cape Brett.
However, the Reed Dictionary of New Zealand Placenames says Rawhiti, meaning sunrise ( ra: sun; whiti: east) was in Northland, 16km from Russell.
It also said there were other places of the same name in Wellington and Hawke's Bay, but did not say where these places were.
Mr McLean said Te Pohue residents were annoyed that the name of their community was being changed without consultation.
"We are all finding this a bit confusing. We know we live in Te Pohue but others are trying to tell us we now reside in Rawhiti," he said.
John Wills, who has farmed in the area for 50 years, said he had never heard of the district being referred to as "Rawhiti", though there was a property, farmed by Paul and Penny Carney, in Glengarry Road, called "Rawhiti".
According to Mr Wills and The Cyclopedia of New Zealand, Te Pohue was originally called "Pohui", and was named after the flower of the indigenous pohui vine, a relative of the convolvulus family of plants.
The current hotel was built after the 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake. The original hotel at Te Pohue was built by Joseph King. The one destroyed by the quake was across the road from the present site.