Te Aute Crossroad S2 : E7

Whakapapa

The Tukituki river and the Ruahines.

Whakapapa, explains Anne Salmond¹, is not a biological tracing, but includes all forms of life. The universe, land, gods, men and all living creatures are kinfolk, bound in a tangle of shared ancestry.

As you’ve been reading, we brought our own backstory to The Brow. But that building, that land, has its own whakapapa, of which we were to become part. And the more I learn of its story, the more extraordinary I discover it to be. It’s truly a Forrest Gump tangle: whatever was going on in the universe, The Brow seemed to be part of²…

For example, around forty million years ago, the part of the planet that was infant Aotearoa (having birthed from Gondwana), sank—almost entirely—below the sea. And stayed that way for around fifteen million years. Many, many generations of marine organisms lived and died, and their shells and skeletons sank and littered the sea floor, creating deep layers of what would become limestone.

And then, (around twenty-five million years ago), movement of the tectonic plates incrementally lifted the land back from the sea; the mountains were formed, snow fell, glaciers crept and scraped, rocks eroded, volcanoes vomited.

And, as the land rose and the ash fell, rivers and streams carved it into hills and valleys. Plants began to grow. The forests spread, birds and insects multiplied.

Not yet christened, of course, The Brow was there. For all of it.

It was formed from that layer of limestone—embedded with shells and fossils that you can see today wherever the topsoil has eroded; topsoil that has ash from the Taupo eruption mixed through. Earthquakes lifted the land, creating a ‘brow’ to look down from, across the plains that were once a lake. The stream that marks the bottom boundary—the Mangaonuku—begins as a spring in the foothills of the Ruahines, before spilling into the Waipawa and then the Tukituki rivers. The mountains themselves were elevated to their throne by the relentless pressure of the tectonic plates, their snowmelt rushing seasonally down those rivers, across the plain, refilling the aquifer.

Long before anyone gave it names, the land was covered in forest. Now long, long gone of course, and yet still present at The Brow—tangled into the ancestry—in the timbers of the house and the (totara) posts and battens of the well-worn fences.

The people who settled New Zealand came to a dramatic and unquiet land, with rugged mountains, active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes. It is a country with a complex geological history³.

At The Brow, as everywhere, the universe, land, gods, men and all living creatures are kinfolk, bound in a tangle of shared ancestry. We shall continue to unpack that whakapapa in subsequent episodes.

1. In her book Knowledge is A Blessing on Your Mind p143

2. In the 1994 Tom Hanks movie, Forrest Gump, ‘a gentle soul born in a small Alabama town, happens into one memorable experience after another through a panorama of American history’.

3. Te Ara, The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. New Zealand- a geological jigsaw puzzle.