From issue: February 2001

Manukau Secures its Birthplace

by Christopher Paxton

Hundreds of years of gardening, farming and cultural history are now protected in the Otuataua Stonefields Historic Reserve.

For most of last century, Mangere's Otuataua stonefields were unknown to most New Zealanders. For many years, local Maori lobbied for the preservation of a landscape which told the story of up to 1,000 years of Maori and Pakeha gardening, farming and cultural history. This month the dream of those who wanted the stonefields preserved will be fulfilled. The stonefields, purchased by the Manukau City Council in 1999, with assistance from the Auckland Regional Council, the Department of Conservation and the Lottery Grants Board, will be opened as a reserve.

The Otuataua Stonefields Reserve preserves features of landscapes that were once common across the Tamaki Isthmus but are now rare. The area is one of the few places close to Auckland where extensive remains of Maori and European occupation of the land can be seen side by side. The area is also one of great geological and botanical interest. Photo: Manukau City Council

Together, these public bodies have conserved one of the most important remnants of the Tamaki Isthmus's formerly extensive stonefields. Of the 8,000 hectares of stonefields which once existed, 7,800 have been destroyed by 150 years of urban development. The eighty-nine-hectare Otuataua site represents close to half of what little is left of the stonefields. The stonefields were areas of Maori agricultural settlement, built around Tamaki's numerous volcanic cones. Most of the stonefields became deserted, overgrown wildernesses during the tribal wars of the early nineteenth century. They were largely forgotten until the recent recognition of the importance of what little remained.

Archaeologist Dr Rod Clough says that the Otuataua stonefields are of particular importance because they include a pa site on the Otuataua cone, and because descendants of the stonefields' original Maori residents still live at the adjacent Makaurau Marae, while descendants of early Pakeha settlers remain on neighbouring farms. When Rod Clough examined the stonefields' gardens, he found stone formations up to 1,000 years old. The formations include dry stone walls, terraces, boundary markers, low-walled enclosures and pits.

Dr Clough also found garden plots for growing kumara, yams, hue (bottle gourd) and taro. Some plots had rock mounds constructed in them to absorb warmth from sunshine which stimulated the growth of hue vines which scrambled over them, and of other crops planted around the mounds. This practice of building mounds of stones added one month to the growing season, extending it from spring to mid-autumn. In the living areas, Rod Clough discovered the foundations of temporary huts (wharau) and of larger houses and cooking shelters. Paths and shell middens were also in evidence.

For most of Otuataua's history, the villagers followed a seasonal cycle beginning in winter, when fields were prepared. Crops were planted in spring, grown during summer, and harvested in autumn. During the nineteenth century, the Wai o Hua people cultivated the Otuataua stonefields. When the first Pakeha arrived on the Tamaki Isthmus, Wai o Hua traded Otuataua-grown wheat and oats at Auckland and Onehunga.

Pakeha settled in and around the Otuataua stonefields from the 1840s. Archaeologists think that missionaries from the nearby lhumatao Mission Station, established in 1847, encouraged the creation of small, walled enclosures (one still has fruit trees) in the stonefields. More Pakeha settlers came to Otuataua after the Land Wars of the 1860s. Families like the Elletts and Rennies established dairy farms, and their descendants farmed in the stonefields into the 1990s.

More recent stonefields structures date from the times that dairy farms predominated in the area. Substantial dry stone walls define paddocks and property boundaries. Concrete water tanks and troughs are evidence of dairy farming. Some dairy cattle are likely to remain on parts of the stonefields under a grazing management plan for the new reserve.

When the stonefields were purchased in January 1999 with the assistance of the Department of Conservation, the then Minister of Conservation, Nick Smith, said, "On this one small piece of land it is possible to trace the history of human settlement in Auckland over the whole millennium from the earliest Maori agricultural settlement, to the arrival of Europeans with their pastoral farming." He continued "Manukau has secured its birthplace." And so it has.

Christopher Paxton is a freelance writer who lives in Papatoetoe.