Her proper name is Hinemihi te Ao Tawhito ‒ “Hinemihi of the old world”.
Hinemihi is unique. She is the only Māori meeting house in Britain, one of four meeting houses outside New Zealand, and if the carvings of Hinemihi could only speak, they’d tell a hell of a story. A story of profound creative talent, Victorian tourism, prosperity, natural disaster, survival, poverty, loss, acquisition, abandonment, memory, cultural paradox – and hope.
Late 19th-century Britain ruled not only the waves but much of the terrestrial world. “The sun will never set on the British Empire” is a saying that expressed Victorian England’s overweening confidence and its place in the international order – ascendant, at the top. Its territories were flung across the globe and in the farthest flung, Aotearoa New Zealand, was the “eighth wonder of the world” – the dazzling Pink and White Terraces on the shores of Lake Tarawera.
They evoked rhapsodies from punters, and none more so than a JA Froude in a piece published in the New Zealand Railways Magazine in December 1931. His Māori guide took him to the pink after seeing the white terraces.
He wrote, “The youth led us up the shining stairs. The crystals were even more beautiful than those we had seen, falling like clusters of rosy icicles or hanging in festoons like creepers trailing from a rail. At the foot of each cascade the water lay on pools of ultramarine; their exquisite colour was due in part, I suppose, to the light of the sky refracted upward from the bottom. The temperature was 94 or 95 degrees [fahrenheit]. The water was deep enough to swim comfortably, though not over our heads.
“We lay on our backs and floated for 10 minutes in exquisite enjoyment, and the alkali, or the flint, or the perfect purity of the element, seemed to saturate our systems. I, for one, when I was dressed again, could have fancied myself back in the old days, when I did not know I had a body and could run up hill as lightly as down.”
And of the crater pool at the top of the pink terrace: “The hue of the water was something I had never seen and shall never see again this side of eternity. Not the violet, not the harebell, nearest in its tint to heaven of all nature’s flowers, not turquoise, not sapphire, not the unfathomable ether itself could convey to one who had not looked on it [the]sense of the supernatural loveliness.”
To go to see them, a vision of naturally created confectionary in the hot lakes district, was not for the faint-hearted. But faint-heartedness was not the spirit that made Britain great. Travellers would take several months to sail to New Zealand, catch a steamer from Auckland to Tauranga, take the bridle track to Ohinemutu on Lake Rotorua, travel by coach to Te Wairoa, then canoe across Lake Tarawera, and then go up the Kaiwaka Channel, finally crossing the hill to Lake Rotomahana and the terraces.
There, they would take in as many sights as possible, lunch on potatoes and kōura (crayfish) cooked in a boiling hot spring, cross over to the pink and white terraces where they would “take the waters”, and return. Boasting rights were surely a factor when recounting this hard-won experience. Among the many visitors, the most eminent include Sir George Grey in 1849, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh in 1869, and novelist Anthony Trollope in 1874.
At te wairoa
Hinemihi was originally built in 1880 at Te Wairoa, the village near Lake Tarawera, by carver Tene Waitere for Tūhourangi chief Āporo Wharekāniwha, whose tribe were and still are renowned as premier carvers. The whare was named after a notable female ancestor who lived in the hot lakes district before European contact and was famous in legend for keeping the company of a giant lizard. The whare was planned as a meeting place for Ngāti Hinemihi, a hapū of Te Arawa, and was also used to entertain visiting Victorian tourists with cultural performances.
Waitere was a revered, prolific, and innovative kaiwhakairo. His mother was a slave taken in the musket wars by Ngāpuhi. He was originally a staunch Ringatū, enforcing the strict tapu of Ngāti Tarawhai carving practice until giving up tapu to help play midwife at the birth of his moko – the celebrated Guide Rangi. As a crucial figure in Rotorua’s whakairo tradition, and friend of Sir Āpirana Ngata, Waitere’s work was prized by European collectors. His departure from traditional design included fashioning bedposts, golf clubs, and 3D shapes and landscaped perspectives. He was the ideal person to create a unique structure.
And Hinemihi was unique from the start: the female name, the mixed use. At the behest of Chief Āporo, another singular feature was, instead of pāua shell, the use of gold sovereigns in the eye sockets of the large male figure at the base of the centre pole and silver coins on the outside carvings. It was a gesture that served to illustrate the prosperity of his people because of this tourist Mecca and, in a flourish worthy of Ian Fleming, Hinemihi became known as “the house with golden eyes”.
Not everyone was happy with the departure from convention. There were grumblings from some of the old people about the straying from ancestral values and commercialisation of their village. One tohunga, Tūhoto Ariki, foresaw dire consequences. On May 31, 1886, the waters of Lake Tarawera rose, weirdly and unexpectedly. The famous guide, Sophia Hinerangi, was leading a boat full of tourists to the terraces and noticed a small, one-man waka near the lakeside. The waka changed into a larger vessel paddled by five men, with heads that looked like that of a dog. Then it changed again, into a large war canoe, with 13 men paddling.
The hue of the water was something I had never seen and shall never see again this side of eternity.
It would be easy to dismiss such an account as fanciful or arising out of any number of physical or psychological causes. What is eerie is the account of a tourist on the vessel, a Mrs R Sise of Dunedin, who wrote a letter to her son that night describing what she’d seen: “After sailing for some time, we saw in the distance a large boat, looking glorious in the mist and the sunlight. It was full of Māoris [sic], some standing up, and it was near enough for me to see the sun glittering on the paddles. The boat was hailed but returned no answer.” Other eyewitnesses saw two rows of Māori on board the waka, with one row paddling and the other standing. The standing had their heads bowed and wore splendid cloaks. On their heads were the feathers of the huia and kōtuku – the white heron – emblems of death. Mrs Sise also said that their guide, Sophia, murmured; “I don’t think I shall see the terraces again.”
Eleven days later, all hell broke loose. On June 10, 1886, Mt Tarawera erupted, spewing boiling mud, red hot boulders and vast clouds of black ash from west of Wahanga dome, five kilometres to the north, down to Lake Rotomahana, and burying Te Wairoa. Volcanic debris landed as far afield as Auckland and Christchurch. The pink and white terraces simply disappeared. A crater over 100m deep was all that could be seen of their former site.
Hinemihi was one of the few buildings that survived the eruption, in which 153 people were killed. She saved the people who sheltered in her, including Tene Waitere and his wife, Guide Sophia and 50 others. Her people then, and now, consider her a living being with each carving representing a part of her body. Her head (tekoteko and koruru) sits on top of the house, her arms (maihi) embrace the veranda and heart (pou tokomanawa) is shown by the central supporting column inside the house. Her people survived a hellish catastrophe because of her embrace but she suffered a pile-up of volcanic matter against her outside walls and roof.
Sold for £50
Along with the disappearance of the pink and white terraces went the prosperity of Ngāti Hinemihi. The roaring tourist trade was stopped in its tracks. The whare became derelict and the departing governor of New Zealand, William Hillier, fourth Earl of Onslow, bought it in 1892 for £50. He then had it dismantled and shipped to the Onslow family seat, Clandon Park, in Surrey. There were 23 carvings sent to Clandon, 21 can be identified today.
Lord Onslow was the enlightened 19th-century aristocrat straight from Central Casting. Educated, he had a healthy dose of Victorian confidence, curiosity and ambition. In his almost three years in New Zealand, he learnt te reo and, to the delight of locals, had a second son when in office – Victor Alexander Herbert Huia Onslow, always known as Huia. Queen Victoria agreed to be his godmother and, at 10 months old, he was accorded the honour of being made an honorary chief of Ngāti Huia, a hapū of Ngāti Raukawa. The prestige of the name and the chieftainship illustrated the importance of the huia bird to Māori, the feathers of which could only be worn by those of the highest rank.
Lord Onslow’s “Māori room” in the majestic Palladian Clandon Park House, displayed his extensive collection of Māori and colonial memorabilia, but the largest object in his collection, Hinemihi, was rebuilt as a boathouse on the edge of the lake in grounds laid out by Lancelot “Capability” Brown. And there she stayed – for a while.
Hinemihi as garden shed
Māori never forgot her. Those attending Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897 visited Hinemihi and did the same in 1902 during the coronation of King Edward VII. During World War 1, Māori soldiers convalescing in an army hospital set up in the grounds suggested they dismantle the whare and re-erect her away from the lake. This they did, relocating her to where she is today, near Clandon’s house. There, Hinemihi was used as a garden shed, a home for a pet goat and a playhouse by the children of subsequent generations of the Hillier family. Such uses, time and weather took their toll.
The current eighth earl, Rupert Charles William Bullard Onslow, inherited his father Michael’s passion for history and culture but not his eccentricities. Michael was, to some, a caricature earl.
He once confessed to a desire to “thrash most of my children most of the time”. He bought from Lord McAlpine a Roman artefact – a stone testicle – which he placed under his wife’s pillow. He also chased a runaway bullock down the A3 on horseback and described himself as “a hereditary peer who sees the illogicality of having any power over his fellow citizens just because his forbear got tight with the Prince Regent”.
Son Rupert has fond memories of Hinemihi from his childhood: “It was the most brilliant, wonderful, mystical place to play as a child. I didn’t want to look at endless portraits of my crusty relatives as a child, I wanted to escape to the sandpit in Hinemihi.”
Open to the public
In 1956, Clandon Park House and gardens and Hinemihi were gifted to the National Trust. Rupert moved into a private house on the estate in 1960 and Clandon Park became open to the public. Hinemihi, as ever, drew people in. The London Māori community, Ngāti Rānana and Te Kōhanga Reo o Rānana, started holding an annual hāngī at Hinemihi on a Sunday in June. Before the hāngī, Hinemihi’s community had a maintenance day to clean and care for her. More than 200 people would gather and the day became an expo for creative practitioners from Aotearoa. The wider New Zealand community also found her a meeting point.
During the 2012 Olympics, Kiwi athletes attended a ceremony at Hinemihi. So, once again, she became seen. And what people saw, along with her charm and beauty, were the indignities of age after decades of structural deterioration caused by the cold, the damp, rot and wood-eating pests.
The thin straw roof was replaced with a thick covering of Norfolk reeds, giving her an ‘Olde English’ feature.
In the years following the donation to the National Trust, along with the community efforts, there were professional interventions to stop the decay. Some of these meet with faint praise by conservationists today, such as the refurbishment in 1979 by JW Draper & Sons of Titchfield, Hampshire, specialists in historic wooden buildings. The National Trust consulted an array of experts, and the ensuing restoration included a new front wall, door and window as well as the pou tāhū (interior carved roof support) being returned to its correct position and all the carvings being cleaned and repainted.
So far, so helpful – to a point. Eric Draper of Draper & Sons recounted that the only guideline the National Trust gave him was a photo of Hinemihi at Te Wairoa a few days after the eruption. Her roof was cloaked in several tons of volcanic debris, which he mistook for traditional English thatch. So, he replaced the thin straw thatch roof with a thick covering of Norfolk reeds, giving her an “Olde English” feature.
In 1992, Hinemihi had been standing in the grounds of Clandon Park for a century. John Marsh, of Ngāti Hinemihi and then director of the New Zealand Māori Arts and Crafts Institute, visited. He returned home and consulted with his iwi about the missing carvings of their ancestral meeting house. These carvings had been photographed by Victorian photographer Alfred Burton when he visited Te Wairoa in 1881.
The Onslow family isn’t the only intergenerational thread in Hinemihi’s journey. Robert Rika (fourth-generation grandson of original carver Tene Waitere) and Colin Tihi (third-generation grandson of Āporo Wharekāniwha, Tūhourangi chief), were recent graduates of the four-year carving apprenticeship at the institute.
Informed by Burton’s photographs, they spent approximately 1000 hours creating new carvings, unpaid and in their spare time. The handing over of the carvings to the National Trust at a dawn ceremony in June 1995 generated a lot of publicity.
Restoration plans
Jim Schuster is the great-great-grandson of Waitere. He, too, is a carver and has worked for Heritage New Zealand as a Māori heritage adviser. He is part of a large whānau, many of whom feel strongly about Hinemihi. Through his expertise, Schuster is the go-to person for those interested in her. He and his wife, Cathy, did restoration work on Hinemihi in 2006 and, until December 2023, Jim was president of Te Maru o Hinemihi, a London-based organisation set up to have Hinemihi restored. But progress was slow.
Yet, he says, “Without her, my family would not be here. She saved them. My heart weeps, she is so alone. She looks mokemoke [lonely] up there just under a big oak tree. But when crowds visit, she smiles once more.”
He has worked, patiently, for decades, to see the right thing done for her.
In 2015, all hell broke loose – again. On April 29, a catastrophic fire broke out at Clandon Park. It raged through the house, damaging everything except one room. Clandon Park curator Sophie Chessum: “My memories of that night are of contrasting noise; not just of fire, breaking glass and falling debris, but the din of engines, hoses, generators, voices and, inevitably, mobile phones … it was a grim experience for so many of us to stand by and watch the destruction of a place that was once a home, an architectural masterpiece, a museum full of remarkable artefacts.”
One artefact remained unharmed. Located at a safe distance from the house, Hinemihi stood, once again the ultimate survivor.
TE HOKINGA: THE RETURN HOME
The National Trust, like many such organisations, struggles to maintain its portfolio of properties, many of which are as majestic as Clandon Park House. Some years after the fire, it announced it was unable to afford the restoration. Instead, it would make it a “safe ruin” that visitors could tour. But what of Hinemihi?
National Trust properties and their contents contain the plunder and acquisition from that empire on which the sun has pretty much finally set. Many of them were built on the profits of slavery and it has, in recent years, had to acknowledge this unsavoury aspect of British history and try to create a new way forward for itself in which this context is explained and understood. It has been a fraught and contentious process and will continue to be so for many years to come.
The exchange will represent a new way forward regarding Britain’s fraught colonial legacy.
Hinemihi is an awkward visitor in today’s Britain. Legitimately bought and privately owned originally, then inherited by donation, she hasn’t the moral baggage of much of the trust’s estate, but now lives alongside a ruin.
Yet, recent developments have started another chapter for Hinemihi. Throughout the century since her arrival in Britain, there have been calls for her return to home.
In November 2019, the National Trust announced an agreement in principle with Heritage New Zealand for the original historic carvings to be returned. In exchange, a new meeting house will be built at Clandon with carvings from expert Māori, including descendants of Tene Waitere, “allowing the important cultural connection between New Zealand and the UK to continue”.
“We approached this decision with great care and have thoroughly researched the international significance of Hinemihi,” says John Orna-Ornstein, director of culture and engagement of the National Trust. “We have consulted the Māori community and others here in the UK and in New Zealand. Hinemihi is unique and we recognise the deep spiritual relationship between our Māori partners and the historic carvings of their honoured ancestor.”
All her carvings have been removed from the body of the house, cleaned and stored for safe keeping. The exchange project is estimated to take five to six years, so the return home will be 2029 at the earliest, just shy of a century and a half of expatriation.
The exchange will represent a new way forward regarding Britain’s fraught colonial legacy and the acquisition of significant artefacts from her former empire.
It hasn’t yet been decided where Hinemihi will go on her return.
If Hinemihi could talk, she might well say “Kia whakatomuri te haere whakamua”: “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past.”
Nicola Saker (Te Atiawa), Visiting Scholar Stout Research Centre for NZ Studies, Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka
