Mt Wellington - Maungarei

Maungarei - Mt Wellington
by Celia Walker

Maungarei - Mt Wellington is Auckland’s highest volcano, and the views from the perimeter of the impressive crater give a whole new perspective on this unsung part of the city.

Various drawn-out acts of wilful damage have whittled away at both the geological structure and Maori heritage features (a century of quarrying being the worst of this). However, enough remains of this distinctive cone to make it a significant landmark and physical reminder of sacred cultural memory.

Carved pou from Ngati Paoa, Ngai Tai Ki Tamaki and Ngati Te Ata watch over the maunga from the walkway strung above the old quarry, bringing to life the ‘watchful mountain’ meaning behind the name Maungarei. Centuries of shifting allegiances have generated other naming stories – another has that Maungarei was named after Reipae, a Tainui ancestress who travelled to Northland in the form of a bird. A distinctively European perspective, from Reverend Butler in 1820, is the first written account of this place:

The prospect from the summit is grand and nobly pleasing. I observed twenty villages in the valley below, and, with a single glance,
beheld the largest portion of cultivated land I had ever met with in one place in New Zealand.
The prospect now is somewhat less grand, though if you squint and ignore the clutter of buildings, roads and the train station in the immediate surroundings, the views to Rangitoto, or Panmure Basin and the Tamaki Estuary in the other direction can still be pretty pleasing. A rose-tinted view of things could even see fifty years of dispersal of the scoria by the Mt Wellington Roads Board as a connecting feature with the surrounding landscape. Only the tiniest hint remains of the cultivated fields and settlements: fragments of lava field gardens lie below the road (now closed to traffic) and a stonefield remnant remains to the west. This cut-off snippet sits at the end of a nondescript residential cul-de-sac, and takes a bit of finding (the map in Bruce Hayward’s excellent field guide, Volcanoes of Auckland proving to be much more useful than Google).

Salvage archaeology was undertaken before some of the destructive projects of the digger-happy 1960s and 1970s such the reservoir and the now-closed summit road. The hints and findings from these excavations, along with the visible remnants of Maori settlement, all support the oral traditions of a heavily defended pa. While its present grass-covered slopes don’t quite have the park ambience of the more heavily visited maunga, it shouldn’t be forgotten, it is an easy trip on the train and the walk is infinitely nicer now that the road is closed to traffic..

Image Credits: Celia Walker