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Waikato River Journey Continued


From Karapiro into the Waikato region proper, the river's journey is gentle.
 
For the remainder of its course it has expanded in time of flood to form lakes and swamps.
Little forest now darkens hills above. The countryside is pastoral with cows grazing to the water's edge.
 
The river passes the pleasant town of Cambridge, pushes through the heart of Hamilton and joins the Waipa at Ngaruawahia.
Here the Waikato is again distinctly Maori. It glides past the complex of carved buildings that constitutes the headquarters of forty thousand Maoris of the Waikato, and official residence of their monarchs.
 
On festive occasions, and especially during the Ngaruawahia Regatta in March, the river once again swarms with colourful Maori canoes.
 
From here, the Waikato has only nine kilometres to travel and forty metres to fall. north of Ngaruawahia, two hundred and eighty seven metre Taupiri Mountain (sacred to tribesmen of the Waikato rises starkly at waterside.
 
Once a strongly fortified pa, it is where the mighty chief Te Putu (ancestor of the present Maori queen) ruled and was slain.
 
For the past one hundred and thirty years, Maori monarchs have been interred on its steep slopes, along with many of their Waikato subjects.
 

The Waikato Emerges to the Sea


Broader now, the river rolls across the rich coalfields of Huntly and past the tall chimney ­stacks of the coal-fired Huntly power station. Dykes have been constructed here to narrow the path of the river.

Until the nineteen-fifties the area between Huntly and Mercer was often badly flooded - sometimes becoming one large lake. Near Rangiriri and Meremere the waters pass battle sites of the eighteen-sixties. At Meremere, Waikato warriors checked the British advance on their lands for three months.

At Rangiriri they demonstrated their capacity to die for those lands - and to leave an imposing list of British dead. At Mercer, where road and then railway once dropped travellers for the upriver journey, the ever-swelling river swings through swamp and wetland towards the Tasman.
 

The Great Journey


Between 1840 and the early eighteen-sixties, in the golden age of the newly Christian Waikato, produce from the fertile Maori hinterlands was ferried this far downriver. It was then portaged across to the Manukau Harbour and on to Onehunga for sale in Auckland's markets.

At Tuakau the Waikato washes under its last bridge and begins to taste of the Tasman's tides as it eddies past marshy islands greened with willows. The great journey - from 'the very core of the land' in Hochstetter's words - is all but done. Finally it forms a delta a kilometre wide, fluttering with duck, shag, pied stilt, heron, mallard, pukeko and swan. Flounder, mullet and (in spring) whitebait flourish, as do fishermen.

The mountain and desert that gave birth to the river are half the land behind. The great hydro­electric dams are lost. As it finds its way between black dunes of ironsand and into the sea, the Waikato is again much as it was when the first humans adventuring here found a mighty river worthy of their wonder.

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