Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Kupe's passage is marked around NZ: he left his sails (Nga Ra o Kupe) near Cape Pal-
liser as triangular landforms; he named the two islands in Wellington Harbour Matiu and
Makoro after his daughters; his blood stains the red rocks of Wellington's south coast.
The Maori colonisation of Aotearoa began from an original homeland known to Maori
as Hawaiki. Skilled navigators and sailors travelled across the Pacific, using many navig-
ational tools - currents, winds, stars, birds and wave patterns - to guide their large,
double-hulled ocean-going craft to a new land. The first of many was the great navigator
Kupe, who arrived, the story goes, chasing an octopus named Muturangi. But the distinc-
tion of giving NZ its well-known Maori name - Aotearoa - goes to his wife, Kurama-
rotini, who cried out, '
He ao, he ao tea, he ao tea roa!
' (A cloud, a white cloud, a long
white cloud!).
Kupe and his crew journeyed around the land, and many places around Cook Strait
(between the North and South Islands) and the Hokianga in Northland still bear the
names that they gave them and the marks of his passage. Kupe returned to Hawaiki, leav-
ing from (and naming) Northland's Hokianga. He gave other seafarers valuable naviga-
tional information. And then the great
waka
(ocean-going craft) began to arrive.
The
waka
that the first setters arrived on, and their landing places, are immortalised in
tribal histories. Well-known
waka
include
Takitimu, Kurahaupo, Te Arawa, Mataatua,
Tainui, Aotea
and
Tokomaru
. There are many others. Maori trace their genealogies back
to those who arrived on the
waka
(and further back as well).
HOW THE WORLD BEGAN
In the Maori story of creation, first there was the void, then the night, then Rangi-
nui (sky father) and Papa-tu-a-nuku (earth mother) came into being, embracing
with their children nurtured between them. But nurturing became something else.
Their children were stifled in the darkness of their embrace. Unable to stretch out
to their full dimensions and struggling to see clearly in the darkness, their children
tried to separate them. Tawhiri-matea, the god of winds, raged against them; Tu-
mata-uenga, the god of war, assaulted them. Each god child in turn tried to separ-
ate them, but still Rangi and Papa pressed against each other. And then Tane-
mahuta, god of the great forests and of humanity, placed his feet against his father
and his back against his mother and slowly, inexorably, began to move them apart.
Then came the world of light, of demigods and humanity.
In this world of light Maui, the demigod ancestor, was cast out to sea at birth and
was found floating in his mother's topknot. He was a shape-shifter, becoming a pi-
