Thinking of the mountain now, I remember best the redness of peeled tamarillos staining the dull grey newspaper they were murdered on. Their skins hung flail on the bench. Their black eyes rolled. I remember Nana’s ivory-handled knife, too. And the waiting jars. Her friend wanted to take me home and I said no.
I remember being small. And sitting on a chair in the kitchen. We had been to the cemetery. Nana held my hand and we walked through a gate in a hedge. It was important. Everything was green. Nana said her mother’s name was Olive. And her father’s name was Jim. She showed me their names on a stone.
I asked mum about the mountain later. I could see it from the cemetery. One side looked as though a monster had taken a bite out of it. A water tank sat on top. My mum called it McLaughlins Mountain. I thought it was a giant we had captured when people had fought the land. It was a warning to sky and sea about what men could do.
A Book and a battle
I grew up on the Great South Rd. It is in my putting together. In primary school, we walked along it in pairs to the swimming pools in Papatoetoe. My hand brushed up against the leaves hanging over the footpath. On wet days, I went to the school library and read The World Book Encyclopedia. It told me how rockets worked. And the Moon. It told me how Ramesses II turned the Battle of Kadesh in a chariot.
John Roi was my best friend then. Everything about him was different. He was brown. He had 11 brothers and sisters. His hair was short and spiky. People called him kina. Or worse. People made jokes about Māori then. They said “maoris” were late. They said, “Did you hear the one about the maori?” They said, “Three guys went into a bar, an Irishman, an Englishman and a maori …” His mum cuddled me into her whenever we met.
The bus into town passed along the Great South Rd. Past the Starlight Theatre, Foodtown, the man on the horse at Ōtāhuhu, Mt Wellington, Panmure, Greenlane and One Tree Hill. My dad took me off school once to watch Counties play the Lions in Pukekohe. Bruce Robertson was playing centre. We drove along the Great South Rd then, too, and turned off at Runciman. We passed an old church not far from the stadium.
My uncle lived in Cambridge. He was a farmer. Once a year, he would have a sale and Dad would take us in the Kingswood for the day. We would drive down the Great South Rd. Past Meremere. Past Rangiriri. Past Huntly. The Waikato River spun in circles all the way. When we got there, we would play with my cousins in the barn and eat pies without paying.
Later, we lived on Redoubt Rd and looked down over Rainbow’s End. I didn’t know what a redoubt was then but there was one in the backyard. My dad was angry he couldn’t build on it. He said it was just a ditch. And I said what my dad said. In time, I came to think the Great South Rd was my river. It took me to everywhere I knew. And to everyone I loved.
Cutting a cord
But that old giant at the end of Wiri Station Rd never seemed to leave me alone. One day, it made me ask a question. And that question led to another. Soon, there were so many questions I couldn’t keep up with them. I found out that Matukutūreia was the name of that mountain. It means “the bittern standing ready”. It once had a chief called Tamapahure. Another mountain stood beside it then. It rose to the east and was called Matukutūruru – the unguarded bittern. It had a chief called Tamapahore. One day, both chiefs were flying kites and Tamapahore’s flew the highest. So Tamapahure crossed his kite over the top of it and cut the cord. They named the area where this happened Te-manu-rewa-o-Tamapahore – the drifting kite of Tamapahore. Later, that got turned into Manurewa. In the way these things happen.
When I first learnt about those stories, I didn’t believe there could have been another whole mountain down the bottom of Wiri Station Rd, so I drove down there to see if I could find it. It was supposed to be on the corner of Roscommon Rd but all I found was a mountain-sized hole in the ground. I scooped up a handful of stones and took them home in a jar.
Digging deep
In 1863, Governor George Grey invaded Waikato. Duncan Cameron, his general, needed a road for an army to march on. So they began to dig up Matukutūruru and use all its small red stones to make the Great South Rd. The soldiers built a series of redoubts on hills overlooking it. One was called St John’s Redoubt. And the road that ran beside it ended up being called Redoubt Rd.
That old church I had passed with my dad on the way to Pukekohe Stadium had been shot up after Grey’s invasion. It still has the bullet holes in it. At Meremere, gunships sailed up the Waikato River and tried to surround the pā there. Rangiriri was one of the biggest battles of all. For two days, Māori held out against the British forces. And when it was done, the army swept through into the heart of Waikato. And all the time, General Cameron was building the Great South Rd out of Matukutūruru. And a slice of Matukutūreia. And marching his soldiers along it. And rolling his wagons full of supplies over everything that got in his way.
But there’s nothing about any of that stuff in The World Book Encyclopedia. Just stuff about Ramesses II and chariots and Kadesh. And how rockets work. And about science and engineering and maths.
Mountain missing
I walked along the Great South Rd again last year. It is part of the Te Araroa Trail now. East of the airport, the trail turns south and heads down Prices Rd. From there, you cross to the back of industrial South Auckland. Trampers often skip this bit. Some think it’s ugly. But walk over Puhinui Stream and on to Aerovista Place and you’ll see it, Matukutūreia, all alone – the bittern standing ready. The hole in the ground that was Matukutūruru is a little further along. The rest of it got eaten up building railway lines.
Southbound Te Araroa trampers also often miss out on Ōtuataua stonefields and Ihumātao pā, its Tino Rangatiratanga flags still flying, a few kilometres earlier. They skip the Great South Rd, too, on the way in to Drury. And a few kilometres later, they miss out on fording a muddy old farm river called the Mangatāwhiri, where King Tāwhiao drew a line in 1863 and Grey crossed it.
I thought about Matukutūreia and Matukutūruru walking through South Auckland. I thought about them when I walked through Meremere. And Mercer. And Rangiriri. I wondered what justice would look like to those old giants nowadays. And to their people. And to all the places they were used to invade. I wondered what I would say to John Roi as well. And to all those people cracking all those jokes. How should I look at the Great South Rd now? Could I still love it? Was it still my river?
I told my daughter about the mountains when she was old enough. She has Tainui whakapapa, after all. I wanted her to know. I drove her to the redoubt. I showed her the jar of stones. I took her to the cemetery. The mountains seemed to trouble me more than they troubled her. I wondered why that was. And I wondered why I hadn’t read about any of this all those years ago in The World Book Encyclopedia.
Mind you, if you do look in The World Book Encyclopedia it says that the formula for the volume of a cone equals ⅓ pi x the radius of the base of the cone squared, multiplied by its height. So according to that, and assuming that Matukutūruru had a diameter at its base of approximately 200m and a height of 50m, then that would mean it had a volume of 523,598 cubic metres.
If a simple everyday stone about 1cm x 1cm x 1cm has a volume of 0.000001 cu m, and if the hole in the ground where Matukutūruru stood was of a similar size to the mountain itself, then it would take 1,046,666,000,000 stones to rebuild it. If everyone in New Zealand brought the volume of their chest in stones every year to Matukutūruru and piled them on top of each other then it would be rebuilt in 35 years. The World Book Encyclopedia can be really useful at times like this.
Come to think of it, if everyone threw a set of The World Book Encyclopedia into the hole each year that would get the job done quicker, too. By the time my daughter is my age, she could drive to the bottom of Wiri Station Rd and see those maunga and know their stories.
I like to think that every time someone reads this story, too, a sentence might rise up and snap loose suddenly – like Tamapahore’s kite that day the cord was cut. Some might soar like bitterns along the length of the Great South Rd then. People would get out of their cars to look, buses would stop, flowers and birds and congregations of ghosts would turn their faces to the sky. And maybe even kids running their hands through the leaves of overhanging trees.
Perhaps my grandparents’ parents, and my grandparents, and even my dad, might sit up, one by one, and shade their eyes. In time, the road itself would quiver and leap as though it had been woken by some long-forgotten memory and everyone who felt that shiver run through it might put their hand to its surface and feel its love and rage. Those mountains would hover above us then, kept afloat by their not forgetting, and ours, until all those stones we brought rose up to meet them. One day, people might even look at their own backyards and wonder how they got there. I reckon there’d be some justice in that. Seeing what’s there and what’s not at the same time is half the battle. That’s all I have to say. Who knows how these things end up anyway.
Glenn Colquhoun is a poet and a GP in Horowhenua.
