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Taupiri maunga, resting site of the Māori monarchs.
Taupiri maunga, resting site of the Māori monarchs.

SocietySeptember 5, 2024

The shade in the shadow of Taupiri maunga

Taupiri maunga, resting site of the Māori monarchs.
Taupiri maunga, resting site of the Māori monarchs.

Taupiri maunga has served as a sacred burial site for hundreds of years, and will be the final resting place of Kīngi Tuheitia. Lyric Waiwiri-Smith looks at the history of the maunga on the day of the kīngi’s burial.

One of Taupiri maunga’s nearest neighbours is a motorway service centre dominated by McDonald’s and Taco Bell. It’s a place for commuters to stop during their travels to cool down with ice creams from the gas station in the summer, or a quick feed in the middle of a long trip. Many passing through probably won’t think much about the mountain looming in the background of the Waikato Expressway, but the service centre that bears its name  provides respite all the same. In the shadow of Taupiri maunga, shades of healing can be found everywhere.

Taupiri, a rural settlement of 640 inhabitants just off the expressway, sees little traffic in the town centre, even by foot, on the average day, with its palmful of cafes and a Candyland factory-turned-pet-store. Today, the area will see its largest gathering in years when Kīngi Tuheitia is laid to rest on the mountain alongside the Māori monarchs who came before him.

The maunga holds major cultural significance for Waikato Tainui, including this reporter, and serves as a gravesite, or urupā, for many within the iwi. My hapū belongs to a separate marae with its own urupā, meaning a burial at Taupiri won’t be on the cards for me just because I belong to this iwi, but Taupiri is still our tupuna maunga. The maunga is an ancestor, an extension of our own existence forged by the bones of our tupuna buried there. Most mountains across Aotearoa are linked to iwi and hapū, which is why some have fought to have these landmarks returned to mana whenua, or to have their maunga’s personhood legally recognised.

On any other week, Taupiri maunga is as quiet as the residential street that acts as its entryway, where chickens peck and goats graze on overgrown grass. The beginning of the Taupiri urupā sits on flat land in front of the maunga, stretching up a few sides of the mountain. It has been regarded as a sacred site by Waikato Tainui since the murder of Ngāti Mahuta chief Te Putu in 1798, outside the pā he built on the maunga for his iwi.

Taupiri maunga serves as a sacred burial site for Waikato Tainui.

Every Māori monarch since the first, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, has been buried at Taupiri maunga. Kīngi Tuheitia will be buried in an unmarked grave at the maunga’s summit, which has been a tradition of the Kīngitanga since the second Māori monarch, Kīngi Tāwhiao. He believed gravestones not to be necessary, as everyone should be equal in death. The exact site of the royal graves are known only by select members of Waikato Tainui and neighbouring iwi, and kept secret to the public. Though monarchs across the globe have grave sites open to the public – such as Queen Elizabeth II’s grave in St George’s Chapel, or Norway’s Royal Mausoleum – Taupiri maunga is not a sightseeing destination, but a sacred place.

The maunga has seen something of a facelift over the past week, with a 50-strong team assigned to landscaping tasks – widening existing footsteps, creating new footpaths, and a general clean-up of the grounds aided by the Department of Conservation – to ensure Taupiri is fit for a kīngi’s burial. A group regularly maintains the maunga, but for an occasion like this, extra hands from the youngsters from the local rugby league clubs are needed.

Huntly born-and-bred Luky, of Taniwharau Rugby League Club, was one of the younger guns who took on the task of preparing Taupiri maunga for the kīngi. Taupiri holds personal significance for Luky – his grandparents and great-grandparents are resting there, so taking time to care for the urupā comes not only as an honour to the kīngi, but to his whānau. “A lot of my whānau is up there, so usually when there’s a tangihanga around here, everyone knows that’s where the laying place is going to be,” Luky says. “It does hold huge importance for us … tikanga and ritual is a huge thing around here.”

Luky lent a hand in cleaning up Taupiri, where his tupuna are also buried.

The unique thing about Taupiri, he says, is the colour-splashed urupā that stretches partially up the maunga, where benches wait for tired legs. “By the time you get up there, you need a little break from huffing and puffing. A lot of whānau have benches made up for our older ones, and the way they do up Taupiri is awesome,” Luky says. “The people who keep it clean, the amount of mahi they do, it’s a lot of maintaining and hard work to keep the place the way it is, and they do it out of love for their family and the Kīngitanga. If you go up there, it’s the most hard-headed, down-to-Earth people. They don’t like being praised.”

Luky isn’t overstating – the Taupiri urupā is a splash of colour on the side of the mighty green, with dozens of wind spinners, plastic flowers and items of affection dotted around the grounds. Some tombstones are personalised, either with photos or branding, such as Ford or Louis Vuitton. One grave, where a father and son are buried together, has a “works end” road sign scribbled with goodbyes. On the grave of another father rests a mug that must have been his favourite: “Dad You Rock”. Some buried here died in their old age, while one was as young as a day old.

Before he arrives at Taupiri, Kīngi Tuheitia’s body will be transported down the Waikato awa, which shares a stretch of its bank with Tūrangawaewae marae. A fleet of four waka will travel alongside a flower-covered barge carrying the kīngi’s body downriver to Taupiri. Just as the maunga serves as an ancestor, so does the river.

Women weave branches together for decoration.

On Wednesday, final touches were being made to Tuheitia’s float and its surroundings: flower pots were lined up alongside the barge and branches woven together to create greenery for the bridgeway, while the waka fleet attracted admirers along the bank. From today until eternity, Kīngi Tuheitia will rest alongside his mother Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, and the Māori monarchs of times past. In life, the kīngi was a truck driver turned reluctant leader, who in his last year on Earth drew an estimated 10,000 people, cross-iwi and cross-country, to Tūrangawaewae marae to hold the government to account on Māori issues. In death, he joins his people and ancestors as an equal.

‘Become a member to help us deliver news and features that matter most to Aotearoa.’
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
— Politics reporter
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Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund
Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund

SocietySeptember 4, 2024

How two pōhutukawa ended up on Alcatraz

Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund
Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund

A recent visit to San Francisco brought an unexpected discovery for Stewart Sowman-Lund. He goes in search of answers.

Walk around the coast of San Francisco and you could forgive yourself for thinking you were in Wellington during summer. Narrow, winding roads, a constant view of the sea, a chilly breeze – and streets lined with flowering pōhutukawa.

Perhaps I was alone in that I’d never contemplated New Zealand has to share the pōhutukawa, our unofficial Christmas tree, with anywhere else. But a recent trip to the US city quickly taught me otherwise. It was on a day trip to Alcatraz Island where I made my first discovery. Turning a corner on a winding seaside path in front of the deserted prison that once held some of America’s most notorious inmates, I passed under the boughs of two fully grown pōhutukawa. They were perched on the edge of a cliff face with sweeping views across the city and the fog-covered Golden Gate Bridge. How, and more importantly, when had these trees made it all the way to an island in the middle of the ocean 10,000 kilometres away from Aotearoa?

Alcatraz Island shrouded by cloud (Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Shelagh Fritz, from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, told me the pair of pōhutukawa on Alcatraz are close to 100 years old. They are believed to have been planted in the mid to late 1930s, she explained, which would mean they arrived on the island just as notorious gangster Al Capone – or Scarface – was being locked behind bars there. The trees were planted by Freddie Reichel, the first secretary to Alcatraz’s warden and someone who took an interest in developing the prison’s gardens. “Reichel consulted horticulturists of the time for recommendations on what to plant that would survive the tough seaside conditions, and these trees were recommended to him,” Fritz said. 

As this blog post explains, the gardens of Alcatraz had been tended to by military inmates dating back to the 1860s. But by the 1930s, when the famously escape-proof prison was housing gangsters, it was the maximum-security prisoners involved in keeping the gardens thriving. Though it’s impossible to know for sure, and it’s quite a strange image to evoke, that could mean that the likes of Capone and Machine Gun Kelly (not the musician) helped to nurture the trees that are still standing nine decades later. While we can’t be certain who planted them, this report from the Washington Post confirms that the pōhutukawa were “prisoner-planted” trees. That means they survived the decades after the prison closed, when the island was abandoned, and before it was taken over by the National Park Service in the early 2000s. 

The two pōhutukawa on Alcatraz could feasibly be the oldest in San Francisco, but they are far from the only flourishing Metrosideros excelsa in California. A planting spree in the 1980s means there are well over 4,000 of the trees dotted around coastal parts of the city. On Reddit, someone even asked last year about two “anemic looking” pōhutukawa “hanging out in the middle of the road near Hermosa Beach” in Los Angeles. But, as the New York Times reported over a decade ago, they’re a lot less popular in the United States than they are here – the article describes the trees as a “cursed relic” from a decade that had a lot of “ill-fated ideas”. That’s because the pōhutukawa’s ability to withstand rapidly changing weather conditions is in part thanks their thick roots which have led to warped sidewalks and damaged underground sewers. One San Francisco woman, who had a pōhutukawa planted outside her house in 1984, found that by 2010 it had caused the footpath to buckle and because of a local law, the council had tried to make her cover the bill.

This article from 2011 provides advice to locals on how to prune “New Zealand Christmas trees” in order to stop the roots from growing even more. Needless to say, pōhutukawa are no longer being planted in San Francisco, though you’ll still spot dozens of them decorating front lawns and street corners (you can be penalised close to $2,000 if you try to remove one without permission). There are even other varieties of the tree there, including one with a yellow flower that started as a mutation in Hawke’s Bay and was brought to California in the 1960s.

Thankfully, the two pōhutukawa growing on Alcatraz don’t seem likely to upset anyone. “They are thriving and are a perfect fit for life on the island,” said Fritz. A small part of New Zealand on display in the most unexpected of locations.

‘Become a member to help us deliver news and features that matter most to Aotearoa.’
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
— Politics reporter
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