The Petroglyphs
of Tongaporutu
A Spiritual Pilgrimage
PHILLIP WILSON
My daughter Julie in Sydney wrote that she'd been talking to an old family friend, Hira. She was a Taiparua great niece of Tawhiao the second Maori king, son of Te Whero Whero the Waikato chief who raided into Taranaki and later became Potatau I. Julie asked me about the rock carvings in a sea cave near where she was born and lived as a baby.
I got up from my writing table and rang A. 'I want to go down to Tongaporutu,' I said. 'My daughter's told me about that old shelter site: if only we could find it. It's near the Sisters: but the cave mouth's half covered at high tide.' 'Why?' he asked. 'That part of your life's finished for good.' 'It's in my blood. It's part of my New Zealand heritage'. I said. 'Great ancestors, culture heroes and heroines. You could photograph them. That cave contains petroglyphs better than anything in Arnhem Land'.
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| The Sisters, North Taranaki coast |
The raw vitality of the countryside and its people excited me as we headed south from Hamilton. When we passed the monument to Rewi Maniapoto at the old entrance to the King Country I was overcome by an echo of the powerful emotions of twenty years ago when I made this same journey, on to Te Kuiti and away west down the romantic Awakino Gorge. I was out of work then and penurious, a wild Waikato boy with a Taranaki wife. I'd just been granted the New Zealand Scholarship in Letters, then worth 500, not enough to live on: but my wife landed a job as assistant at the Ahititi School.
About two o'clock I saw again the home where we lived in those years. It was unchanged, one of a row of fishing cottages on the estuary bank. It was overshadowed by Puketapu, a tribal fort in ancient times, its sunlit fighting terraces now grazing ground for sheep. All around me the old pa sites and burial grounds, the strange rock formations, convoluted bush-covered hilltops and fissured river-mouth caves, aroused the same erotic feelings that had stirred me then.
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Mouth of the Tongaporutu River |
A. and I walked out to the river mouth, under the karaka trees. The sea wind made me feel more sharply alive. I was in love again with this seminal landscape so important in my work. The tide was out, so we scrambled around the foot of the cliff. We waded through the last swirling eddy where the river eats into the sandstone bluff. Then we were out on the ironsand beach. We walked among shells and seawrack to the old tribal lookout fort that commands the windswept entrance, its top covered with manuka, toitoi, broadleaf and taupata. From the tidal cave beneath it, shaped like an open-ended funnel, A. photographed the three Sisters out in the breakers. They stood up like phalluses from the waves.
We followed the line of them to the coastal cliffs. There, 'just around the corner', exactly as described, was the triangular opening of the cave, more like a fissure in an ancient Egyptian pyramid than a site of Maori rock art. We peered up and around and there they were, totems or ritual religious carvings, ancestral beings or records of secular events from the time when Te Whero Whero raided down the Mokau River and massacred the coastal peoples.
While A. set up his camera tripod, I bent my head back to study them. What did they mean? Feet, feet, and more feet! What fetishism were they symbols of? These Freudian shapes, dream images, though part washed away by western storms, fascinated me. They were amazingly clear-feet with three toes, with four toes, with five toes, with six toes. Among them were other shapes, curious stick figures with phalluses carved, shapes like birds, human mouths, like wood carvings with oval Asian eyes - designs of a kind found at other cave sites in both North and South Islands where there are no feet.
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A. began taking photographs. I copied the designs into my notebook. No one was sure if the artists who made these engravings in the soft stone were intending to depict feet with toes cut off in battle, or had some ritual purpose beyond our present understanding. I counted them. There were thirteen feet with three toes, twenty-six with four toes, as many again with five toes, and seven with six toes. Their sizes varied from four to twelve inches long and three to five inches wide. (Similar depictions of six toed feet have recently been discovered in very ancient carvings in Australia.)
Some of the feet had stab marks in them. Others had all their toes scored out by deep gashes. Dark and mysterious as voodoo they seemed to me related to tribal wars, maybe the symbolic killing of Waikato warriors of Te Whero Whero who'd tramped down here and attacked the people of Tautara, whose descendants my wife and children are.
When the photographs were finished we walked back among the tidal driftwood and shells of the beach. There I found a delicate seahorse skeleton. I remembered that the male seahorse bears its young. With a deep emotion I recalled when my daughter Julie was born, I used to feed her as a baby. I'd jump up from my writing table at her first waking cry to look after her while my wife was away at the school. Was that why I loved her so much? Cries of seabirds brought back family memories. I felt like Autolycus in drag.
Cold, misty sea rain moved in. We sheltered in estuary caves. Salt water gurgled around us. Rain water dripped from the cave ceilings. Flax bushes grew around their mouths. Deep fissures and cracks in the cliff were moist with fern fronds. Wind-rounded knobs of sandstone stuck out. There was a Dionysian quality about this landscape and its ancient Maori relics.
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Photographs by Arne Loot |
We walked to the house of Mr and Mrs H. who once owned the store here. They told us to visit the Tainui Anchor Stone up the coast. We raced back in A.'s car. We found it just at sunset, a Maori burial ground on a cliff top. The anchor stone was embedded in concrete because it had been stolen and only recently returned. Out to sea the sun was setting. It shone directly from the horizon through the iconic stone, a primitive, voluptuous shape that could have been inspiration for a Molly McAlister sculpture. Around it the ancient anchor rope had been twisted. Genitals had been chiselled with primitive, rough-cut marks. Beside it in a pool lay the branches of a sacred shrub, its leaves yellowed now, placed there in an act of worship by descendants of famous ancestors. I too bowed my head in thanks to the great life force that drove all our lives in these rugged islands.