Stuart Lilburn, at Ore Ore. Photo / Laurel Stowell
About 15km south of Raetihi is and area known as Ore Ore and Stuart Lilburn has spent his entire 80 years there.
Laurel Stowell travelled the Parapara to speak with him.
Stuart Lilburn has been told he should write a book about his Ore Ore area on the Parapara highway and the two murders that happened on the site of his current house in 1913.
Lilburn is 80 and has lived at Ore Ore, about 15km from Raetihi on the Parapara stretch of SH4, all his life.
He's not far from the big slip that closed the road for about three months last year.
He's one of the farmers whose land was resumed by the Atihau Whanganui Incorporation, and he's philosophical about it.
"You knew it was going to happen one day. It was no different than if you owned the land and they were farming it. I would want to take it back too."
He also bought 34ha just down the road in 1982. It had a small brick house near the Mangawhero River. When he extended the house he found the remains of a fireplace from an earlier dwelling.
He and his wife Nonie Elizabeth (Beth) had bad luck after moving there - financial, and then their daughter, living in a nearby house on their land, lost her youngest child when the house burned down.
Fire caught because continually heated bricks had charred timber to ignition point. The mother managed to rescue her two oldest children, but when she went back for the baby a door had slammed and she couldn't get inside.
Some attributed the Lilburn bad luck to the two 1913 murders that happened at their house site. They decided to have the place blessed by Anglican Minita A Iwi Tom Hawira. It was a moving ceremony, Beth Lilburn remembers, with women wailing and Hawira feeling a presence at the spot where the murders happened.
One of the dead, Hiriti Paneta Maehe, is said to buried in an unmarked grave in the Ruke urupā nearby.
The Lilburns and Maehe's great granddaughter Bev Muraahi have a written record of "The Ore Ore Tragedy" from a July 4 1913, Wanganui Chronicle, and they have the handwritten notes from a Coroner's inquest held on June 30, two days after the murders.
The papers record that there was a house on the site of the Lilburn's present home. It may have looked like the Wilkies' first homestead, a tōtara slab whare still standing at Ore Ore.
A man known as Rangi Puta, his wife Peeti Te Tua and her sister Raukura Te Tua lived in the house. They were farming the land and clearing the bush.
Peeti Te Tua's niece Hiriti Maehe had been living with a Pākehā man called Joe Graham in Raetihi, but they had quarrelled. Both left the area, and on her return on June 25 Maehe went to stay with her Te Tua aunts.
When she heard that Graham had also returned to the area she was worried enough about her safety to alert Raetihi police.
He went to her aunts' house twice, and asked for the return of things he had bought her. He was told to leave and he left, saying Maehe had better watch out for him.
He returned secretly on June 28, with a .33 calibre rifle, and went into the house where Maehe was. In a small front bedroom he shot his former partner in the head.
At about 2.30pm Raukura Te Tua heard her groans and called Peeti Te Tua, who grabbed a crosscut saw, forced open the door and went in. She found Graham lying over Maehe's body and struck at him several times with the saw.
He was badly wounded. Raukura Te Tua ran out of the house and gave the alarm, others came and they shut the door of the room where Graham was bleeding profusely. They called the police.
Police and a doctor arrived just after 5pm, but Graham was unconscious and survived only 10 minutes. Peeti Te Tua freely admitted that she had hit him with the saw, which was found nearby.
The jury at the inquest was of the opinion that Graham was "suffering from a mental derangement" at the time he murdered Maehe. It found Te Tua's act was committed in self-defence, and "perfectly justifiable in the circumstances".
The house where the murders happened was deemed tapu, and burned. As a child Stuart Lilburn used to cross the area to get to a swimming hole. The remains of an orchard were the only sign that people had once lived there.
There's a small sequel to this sorry tale. Bev Muraahi, the great granddaughter of the murdered woman, has been researching her family history.
One day one of her neighbours came to see her, saying she had had a visitor the previous night - a female visitor who was not a living person.
The visitor had a message for Muraahi - it wanted her to know that Hiriti Maehe was pregnant when she was murdered. It wanted Muraahi to go to the urupā and say a prayer, to release the baby.
"I decided I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn't," Muraahi said.
She got a lift to Raetihi and Ore Ore, picked a big bunch of roses and took them to the urupā.
"I had a prayer, left the roses and came home," she said.
These days the Lilburns' enlarged brick house has a great big Ore Ore sign next to its driveway. Stuart Lilburn likes the area and is still happy to be there. His family has had better luck since the house was blessed.
Ore Ore is barely a place on a map now, but it was once a planned township for the labourers working on big hill country farms. It had 17 surveyed town sections of two to 40ha, enough for a family to keep a horse for transport, a cow for milk and "a mutton or two".
When Stuart Lilburn was growing up the land was still littered with stumps, from the felled forest. He started at Ore Ore School in 1944. It had its own fenced 2ha section, to pasture the horses children rode to get there.
From 1907 to 1919 Ore Ore had a post office and telephone exchange, kept by a resident. Young Stuart went to birthday parties at a neighbour's whare with a dirt floor.
"More or less the school went along, as a community," he said.
In the 1940s to 1950s there was a Public Works Department camp at Ore Ore, with quarters for single men, cottages for married men, a cookhouse and a laundry. The men were put to work on the highway, with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows.
When the camp was disbanded most of its buildings were pulled down. In 1958 Lilburn's mother cut the ribbon to celebrate the highway being fully sealed.
The word "ore" means to move or shake in te reo Māori, Lilburn says. The area is famous for its instability. He tells stories of many slips and slides. One changed the course of the Ararawa Stream. Another took out the Sommerville house on Ohotu Rd, and narrowly missed the school.
In the early 1960s a big slip took out a section of SH4 on the Raetihi side of the slip that shifted 500m of highway down the slope in October last year. Lilburn may yet lose some of his land to a re-aligned SH4.
