Surfing, Sacred Lands, and a Call to Restore
Sitting in my home – nearly hidden in kānuka (white tea-tree) forest – above the stretch of sand and sea that is my tūrangawaewae (place to stand), Te Puia Pā (an ancient fortified village) is shrouded in mist. My mind takes me on a journey.
It’s sixty years ago and I’m fifteen, I have driven in my dad’s little van with a group of surf mates
fresh from the national surf champs at Fitzroy, New Plymouth. We got to Whangamatā and then
travelled north, still on the search. Hot Water Beach was solid, two metres, offshore and of course – empty. Wayne Parkes, Peter Way and ‘Taff’ Kennings paddled out to what we now call indicators.
Kit Davidson and I tried to go out by the hot pools and got slammed. No leg ropes or wetsuits in those days but we were buzzing. “There’s no one else here!” For me the biggest buzz was seeing a sign in the sandy lupin paddocks saying, ‘Sections for sale – five hundred pounds’.
My parents travelled down a couple of weeks later and bought one. I was stoked! A place at a surf beach … and so began a youthful era of camping, girlfriends, surfing and weekends spent building our beach house.
I quickly became entranced with the mysterious feeling of Hot Water Beach and especially Te Puia Pa. Now people call it mauri or wairua (spirit), unknown terms to me at the time. I remember this one time a group of us decided to camp on the Pā for a night with the naive enthusiasm of young men. One of the group was my best friend Graeme, he knew his whakapapa … he didn’t think camping there was a good idea. We started scaring each other with ghost stories as Graeme became quieter and quieter … then he shared his ancestry with us.
He was a direct descendant of Hongi Hika, the very fierce Ngā Puhi chief who had stormed Te Puia Pā around 1817-1818. His stories in the light of our smoky fire made the hairs on my neck stand up. He spoke of Hongi’s blind wife Turikātuku who often travelled with him, and how she would predict who would die or survive the coming battle by casting rune-like stones and bones on the ground. At this point, despite being university-educated Takapuna white boys, we were definitely feeling the wairua. The stories were brought to an abrupt end as a ruru (morepork) suddenly joined us and sat unblinking just a few feet away. We were out of there, scrambling, scratched and grazed, through the bush and back to our main tent on my parents’ section.
From this point on I treated Hot Water Beach with new respect and care. Years later, with a
farming career, four children and extensive landscaping experience under my belt, I embarked on a bucket list project to restore the ngahere (forest) and dunes around Te Puia which have been degraded by farming, forestry, sand removal and coastal erosion. The thirty odd years of removing stock, fencing and planting is another story … to be continued.
Words by Howard Saunders
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