Paratutae - Whatipu

Paratutae - Whatipu
By James Littlewood

The drive itself is adventurous, by Auckland standards. Start out for Titirangi, the western village on the maunga of the same name. It’s good for coffee, alcohol and snacks, and you’ll enjoy the pleasantly sub-alpine feeling of the place: Auckland’s highest suburb, after all.

I love the bend in the road before descending to Huia, the view is expansive and the skyline dramatic. Cross the wee bridge past Huia, hang a left and check out Karamatura, worth a visit for the beautiful walks and the tiny, fascinating Huia Museum, most of which deals with the Orpheus wreck.

You have to ford a stream at Little Huia, and if you’re lucky, you get to feel quaintly smug about the yuppies in the Beemer in front of you, who chicken out. It’s only a couple of inches deep and even my electric shopping trolly takes it with ease. Maybe it’s tougher in winter.

Carry on up the windy gravel Whatipu Road and over Mt Donald MacLean (and if you know an older Maori name for that maunga, please let us know). If you’ve a spare half hour, take the spur to the summit: it’s a grand view, although access was recently prohibited by the rahui established by Te Kawerau a Maki to mitigate kauri dieback, so please observe the signage.

Down the hill, and you’re there. Whatipu. A vast place of mountains, dunes, surf, rips, rocks, swamps and caves. It’s history is also vast. The very name of the place dates back to pre-human times, and comes from the taniwha Whatipu, who travelled there from Tuhua (Mayor Island in the Bay of Plenty) before settling upon this dramatic promontory on the Manukau north head.

The home of Whatipu - the taniwha - was Paratutae, a tiny but vertiginously cliff-rimmed island at the south end of the beach, marking the north head of the Manukau. This place became the meeting place for Whatipu and other taniwha, and the bay immediately north of Paratutae acquired the name Waitipua: a meeting place of the spiritual guardians.

Aeons later, the master mariner Kupe mai tawhiti made an appearance. Some legend holds that Kupe deserted his brother on the east coast before sailing north around Reinga and on to the west coast. Kupe left his mark on the area, quite literally, by striking Paratutae with his paddle, before incanting his karakia to enrage the sea from a jagged rock rising out of the surf near the shore. With the sea whipped up to a tumultuous rage, his pursuers were forced to abandon the chase. This is one explanation for why the sea is generally more turbulent on the west coast, than the east.

Henceforth, the rock was known as Te Toku Tapu a Kupe, the sacred rock of Kupe. Pakeha called it the Ninepin. The gouges Kupe made in Paratutae can still be seen today on the northern side of the island.

The karakia must have worked, because nowhere is the sea angrier than right here. The mouth of the Manukau is narrow, and the Manukau itself is huge: hundreds of square miles. Untold water flows through the heads twice a day in ripping tides surging over a large sand bar, treacherously submerged just below the surface, a mile or so out offshore and directly in front of the harbour mouth. Even on calm days, we can see the surf breaking dramatically out at sea.

Later again, in the 14th century, the waka Tainui arrived. The waka’s spiritual leader - Rakataura, also known as Hape - travelled extensively around the North Island, including Whatipu. Some of the Tainui crew settled there, joining with others already living there, and adopting the tribal name Ngaoho. A long and complex period of conflict followed, with the tribal group Te Kawerau a Maki prevailing across much of the isthmus, and who today are recognised as mana whenua in west Auckland.

Elsewhere in NZ Places, I’ve covered the story of the Orpheus, whose wreck in 1863 testifies to the tumultuous approaches to the Manukau harbour. The Orpheus was en route to support Governor Grey and his militia in their war and theft of Maori land. And so the signal mast on Paratutae - guiding ships safely over the bar - presented itself to Waikato Maori as a legitimate target. A few months after the Orpheus sank, a raiding party of Waikato Kingites scaled Paratutae and destroyed the signal mast. It’s been speculated by the historian Scott Hamilton that this might have been the northernmost event in the Waikato land wars.

One of the most obvious influences of colonisation on Whatipu, and the Waitakere Ranges, was the deforestation caused by kauri logging. Kauri were felled in their thousands, and for many years were transported from as far north as Piha by a system of makeshift tram lines, running the full 6 km of Whatipu beach, all the way to Paratutae.

Here we can still see the remains of the tram lines, leading to the remains of the most improbable of wharves. Having sailed for weeks on end, even from as close as Sydney, no sooner did the kauri ships reach the Manukau than they would make an immediate left turn, and enter a watery space not much bigger than a large rock pool. How tempting it must have been to sail the few more miles to Onehunga, each headland providing more shelter from the following westerly than the one before.

No luck. This is no harbour. This is the home of taniwha, and it feels like it. Tucked into the faint lee of a navigational menace, perched on the edge of an ocean-facing harbour near a ship-destroying bar, it’s the last place on Earth a tired crew would seek shelter.

Here was a rugged and hastily constructed wharf: two piles emerged from the tide - they’re still there - and a few planks was all there was to keep the ships from being dashed on the rocks. The bollards are there too: long rusted and melded to the rocks so tightly it’s hard to believe they’re not made of the same stuff.

It’s easy to be critical of the people who stripped the great forest of its majestic canopy, and the vast ecosystem that thrived within it. And there’s no doubt that what they did was inexcusably bad (although it might not have seemed so to them, at the time). But when you stand on those rocks and consider the risks they took, it’s mind boggling. Felling the forest giants was dangerous, often fatal. Transporting the logs via streams, dams and tramlines: likewise. Simply mooring the ships involved dancing with death: fancy crossing oceans just to be tossed out on a sandbar within sight of land.

And all of this colossal history took place over just a few hundred square metres. We haven’t even got to the caves yet.

Image Credits: James Littlewood and Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections