Napier to Taihape
Winter Issue: June 2008
The central North Island is divorced from the east coast by a wall of mountains so impermeable that it divided the two for centuries. Today the wall still stands, with a single serpentine road that threads its way through the valleys and headwalls of the mighty Ruahine Range.
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The route was first tracked by Maori in the early 15th century, then by teams of horses packing wool from the interior to the port of Napier in the 18th. Even today, 46km of the winding road is unsealed. The route itself seems so inextricably linked to the history of the North Island, to the characters and economies of the region, that simply passing through it gives one an insight into the lives and legacy of those early pioneers.
So I set off from the Art Deco flamboyance of Napier, bound for the Heartland, to learn more about a forgotten corner of the country and, in my own way, to retrace the steps of the first New Zealanders. I've chosen the modern equivalent of a draught horse, a muscular Holden Rodeo ute.
A series of ranges looms large on the horizon, with no evidence of a route through. Local lore explains that it was a Maori hunter called Patea, who reluctantly wore a reputation as both a bad shot and a hen-pecked husband, who first crossed this range. He endured the frequent verbal abuse of his wife for his poor hunting efforts, and perhaps because of this relentless barrage, his forays into the hills grew more protracted. On one occasion he returned from a lengthy expedition with little to show for it, and his wife - who had single-handedly filled the storehouse - gave him a severe ear-bashing. Out of remorse, or criminal design, he invited her on his next hunting expedition into the mountains. Somehow, Patea's wife 'fell' over a cliff, never to be seen again.
A truck winds through the ranges
Rather than face her relatives he continued on, through the dark ranges that had been his solace, over the Gentle Annie and beyond, into the interior that has been known as Inland Patea ever since.
My wife is sitting in the passenger seat as I enthusiastically recount this crime of passion, and shows some reservations about my exact motivations for retracing the route of Patea's homocide. She eyes me suspiciously when we stop to 'take a photo'.
Centuries after Patea's infamous shove, the interior developed rapidly, becoming a centre of merino wool production, with some of the biggest stations in the country. By the 1870s, a single station could cover 50,000 hectares and shear up to 80,000 sheep. The only way to market was back over Patea's route to the port of Napier.
The turbo whistles as we climb from the river to Gentle Annie's giddy saddle, the bonnet scoop flared like the nostrils of a panting horse.
Actually, Annie is anything but 'gentle'. Over the course of history, hundreds have lost their lives on this route. It was not uncommon for packhorses, laden with wool, to lose their footing on the rocky trail and plunge hundreds of metres to the gorge below.
We lurch onto asphalt and follow the endless white stitching on the centre line leading to Taihape. The small town was once a capital of the rural world, a much-anticipated destination on the Main Trunk Line and a jumping-off point to find gold, farm the land or do in a nagging spouse.
But since the rundown of the railway service in the 1970s, Taihape has been searching for a new claim to fame. It famously reinvented itself as the Gumboot Capital of the World - a bold declaration, but amply reinforced every year in the form of the Taihape Gumboot Festival, where all comers would take turns to lob a Skellerup Size 8 gummy down a purpose-built slinging alley on a siding of the Main Trunk Line. The single event on the town calendar became an auspicious occasion not to be missed and, for one day a year, travellers stopped at Taihape.