|
The Beach House : a little local history Like
no other place on earth, the coastal area of Tora / Te Awaiti offers locals
and visitors alike a sense of place and perspective on the world that
settles the mind and rejuvenates the soul. The land
may share some similarities with areas in Scotland, Ireland or South America
but Maori and Pakeha have lived, loved and fought here for a very long
time and in doing so have created a unique history like no other place
in the world.
Over 1000 years ago, Kupe and his companion Ngake were not long past Tora on their coastal journey south when the great navigators acknowledging their gaze on a land of rivers and lakes gifted the name Wairarapa. Rangitane, Ngati Kahungunu and Ngati Ira, the mixed peoples of the east
coast from the Hawkes Bay to the South Wairarapa, are the people most
recently to have walked this land and called it home. And they did so
both from a need for sustenance of the belly and of the spirit.
Hiwikirikiri,
where you will find The Beach House (across the bay in the painting on
the left by William Mein Smith, 1849) has it’s own story. From the
original Te Awaiti station of the 1840’s, the Tora Estate subdivision
generated a number of ‘rehab farms’ made available to the returning
soldiers of the Second World War. Mike and Beryl Murphy took their chance
in the ‘Estate lottery’ and drew the un-named block “Sec
09” of 1600 acres, which they later came to call Hiwikirikiri or
: “the song of the sand hills”. Today
the area is rich with the history and spirit of those who have lived before
us. The garden stone rows (1140 AD); the ancient Karaka trees with their
engravings; the pits, terraces, and Pa. And from our European ancestors,
traces of the original East Coast Highway. Old wooden and iron buildings
from the pastoral era still being worked today, macrocapas, the reshaping
of the land by the axe, grazing animals and later the bulldozer. Today
the coast is alive and well. Sheep and cattle still graze the hills, along
with goats, deer and pigs. Fishermen still make their seasonal pilgrimage
to gather the crayfish and paua, and off-season, the groper, blue cod
and butterfish.
Today’s ‘Coasters’ still carry on that spirit of imagination, independence and tenacity.
Sometimes
with a little less seriousness. Home I Accommodation I Conference I History I Attractions I Enquiries +64
6 3078864
|
Europeans
too have long called this place home. Cook sailed this coast in 1770 endevoring
to confirm that the North Island of NZ was just that. Europeans arrived
on foot not very long after, travelling with their flocks of sheep around
the coast from Port Nicholson to establish the first pastoral runs in
the 'new country’. Up until the 1930’s wool and stock still
left the stations by sea rather than the road.
Some
fishermen have changed their habits a little bringing ‘the mountain
to Muhammad’ with the development of shoreline pools and onshore
storage tanks for the farming of cray and paua, as well as the luminous
paua pearl. The Internet too has offered others the opportunity to work
in one of the most magnificent places in the world.
