Matata Maori claims ancestors were angry

Keith Fergusson among the remains of his home ruined by the Matata floods. Picture / Alan Gibson

Pam and Bill Whalley arrived back at their coastal Matata home optimistically carrying two cat cages borrowed from a vet.

The couple clambered across huge boulders, uprooted trees and through stinking mud to get there.

Their half acre section was Pam's pride and joy. People used to compliment her on her beautiful garden; she thinks she had 1000 plants in it.

They are gone now, swept away or buried by the water and debris which tore into the quiet Bay of Plenty settlement on Wednesday. Pam draws a diagram in the mud to try to show how the section looked before but it is impossible to imagine.

Someone else's garden shed is there now; their own is in a lagoon several hundred metres away.

Bill starts calling out for the cats, Ollie and Catherine. The couple are looking after Ollie for their granddaughter but Catherine is his cat, and if the garden was Pam's pride and joy, the 16-year-old moggy is his.

"Come on, little girl," he calls out.

He has shed tears over the thought she may be gone too. The couple know they were lucky - their house is still standing - and he feels embarrassed to cry for a cat when others have lost homes and possessions.

But he loves that cat: "It's like a little kid going," he says.

Inside the house, a chicken casserole sits untouched on the bench. Bill had been cooking it for dinner when the water came.

He finds Ollie tucked up on one of the upstairs beds, but there's no sign of Catherine.

As the couple go on to the deck, the stink of mud wafts up. In front of them is a bus on an area which used to be a grassy reserve. The bus is buried almost to its roof in mud.

Light relief comes when a Tower Insurance man turns up unexpectedly, barefoot.

"You're like that guy on the fishing boat in that ad," says Bill, roaring with laughter.

"Do you want a cup of tea? Wewould if we could put the bloody power on."

Some homes in Matata are still without power and the water is off.

A man with a digger arrives. He was going to cut a path through the boulders, but says they are are too big to move. Some weigh three tonnes.

The insurance man says he has assessed homes after four floods, but has never seen anything as bad as Matata. The damage here will cost tens of millions of dollars.

The Whalleys' neighbour, Keith Fergusson, whose basement was blanketed in mud, said: "We have had better days.

"It's not the sort of thing you want to come back. You just switch off, you can't panic about it, there is no point."

Mr Fergusson said there had been rumours that looters had taken advantage of the situation and he was keeping an eye out for them.

Many residents returned home yesterday, but only for the day. Most wore gumboots and were splashed with mud from head to toe as they sweated with spades, clearing basements, lounges and bedrooms.

Chainsaws buzzed through logs, and diggers worked to forge new paths to people's homes.

But some have not returned home. Up the road from the Whalleys, on Clem Elliot Drive, the damage is even more extensive.

It is hairy getting to some of these homes. One of the houses was washed 700m from its original site. The mud is deep here, and h ing at gumboots and refusing to let go.

The water was waist-deep on the night of the flood. Escaping through it in the mud, the dark and the rain, was terrifying.

In Pakeha Rd, nearer the hills, damage is appalling too. A house from one side of the road has ended up, in pieces, in Don and Janet McMillan's front yard.

It has smashed Mr McMillan's garden of broad beans and cabbages and flattened his fruit trees. His family came yesterday to help clear up. Nearly everything is ruined and they have heaped mud-spattered furniture into piles. Thick mud covers the new carpets.

"Want to buy a cheap house?" he says.

Prime Minister Helen Clark choppered into Matata to see the damage. A small gathering welcomed her and she walked up Clem Elliot Drive, giving one woman a hug.

"It's an absolutely horrific site," she said. "It's the sort of thing we saw in the tsunami - houses gone, complete devastation. It must have been terrifying to have been here."

The Cabinet would meet to discuss proposals about the recovery and what would be done to help.

"Up country there's quite a lot of farmland under water, there are clearly infrastructure issues with roads,"the Prime Minister said.

"There may well be a need for rates relief schemes so we're going to have to go back and purpose-design the package for this - as we have with other disasters."

Some Maori say the ancestors are angry. Much of the damage is in areas where ancestors killed in the wars of the 1860s are buried.

"I'm a believer in this, whole-heartedly," said Tuwharetoa Kaumatua Matiaha Ota. "This is the area where they wanted to build houses and to us it's a wahi tapu."

Earlier in the day 68-year-old May Clarke, known as "Auntie" and who has lived in Matata for 45 years, said: "They [the ancestors] are angry.

"The bones have been disturbed.

"I never knew that they would do it in full blast for the whole community but they used their force which no-one can take from them."

Mayors launch relief initiative

The New Zealand Herald has thrown its support behind a joint Mayoral Relief Fund set up for victims of the floods in the Whakatane, Tauranga and Western Bay of Plenty Districts. Anyone wishing to make a donation may do so at any branch of the Bank of New Zealand or National Bank.