In motels you have paperbacks by Catherine Cookson. In hotels you have ham steaks with pineapple on the restaurant menu, and a $45 buffet complete with pavlova, ye olde shrimp cocktails, and Māori cultural performances – the small stage, the acoustic guitar, the painted faces under a spotlight. In broad daylight, the window frames of the motels and hotels were chipped and flaked, because nothing stands in the way of Rotorua sulphur, chewing its way out of the earth and invading every surface. There was talk of having to change bath and sink taps four times a year. Sulphur had a particular appetite for electrical appliances. It even corrupted the alphabet: the sign for the Regal Geyserland had been reduced to REGAL CEV ERLAND. Imogen, a guest, posted a bad review with a happy ending: ‘The furniture is shabby and tatty, the mattresses saggy and ancient. The blankets are just rough cuts of material … appliances don’t work … the shower is disgusting …The staff are friendly and helpful.’
I thought of another sour-faced visitor to Rotorua, the writer and harridan Lynn Barber, who visited in 2002 and commented: ‘The town centre consists entirely of burger bars, massage parlours, tourist tat shops and Māori nightclubs offering evenings of haka and hāngī (war dances and barbecues) to be avoided at all costs.’
War dances and barbecues! Still, she got the ‘avoid at all costs’ right. But there was so much to see and do. There were the spa baths and mud baths, a fast jet-boat ride and a slow gondola. Haka World taught the haka, but not correct use of apostrophes (‘Learn the word’s and actions!’). And visitors could immerse themselves in an authentic pre-European experience at Mitai Māori Village, or Tamaki Māori Village, where guests were invited to ‘browse through the marketplace to view designer clothing and much more’.
Mitai and Tamaki weren’t living villages. No one lived there. The population at Ōhinemutu was about 300. I asked Polly Morgan, 71, of Whakarewarewa, how many people lived in her village. She started counting the people in families: ‘One, two, three, four … five, six, seven … eight, nine, ten, eleven…’ She got to 53 and then said, ‘No more than a hundred.’ We sat next to each other on a bench outside the meeting house. Tourists walked by. Polly smoked a cigarette and wore a soft tracksuit. ‘We never used to lock our doors,’ she said. ‘We’d play and then go to the auntie’s for bread and jam. It’s a business now. Tourists all the time. It doesn’t bother me.’ Asked what she thought the difference was between Ōhinemutu and Whakarewarewa, she came up with an incredible answer. ‘My own opinion is that they’re more commercialised than we are.’
However, it cost nothing to visit Ōhinemutu. Visitors arriving at Whakarewarewa entered a ticket office and were greeted with $29 general admission, $31 general admission plus cob of corn cooked in steam, $59 general admission plus hāngī lunch, and so on. Punters then set foot on the bridge over Puarenga Stream and were immediately asked to pay another tariff by ‘penny divers’, young boys and girls who swam in the river and called out to passers-by to throw them coins. ‘Please, sir! Give us some money! Lady!’ etc.
It was easy to submit to the hand-wringing liberal within and ask yourself what kind of message it was sending that Māori children were encouraged to beg. It hardly seemed plausible that this nineteenth-century custom was still in existence. It made New Zealand look distinctly Third World, but the divers could earn about 30 dollars a day in the high season. Liberal anxiety is no match for that much hard cash.
Whakarewarewa had souvenir shops, and Neds Café specialising in hāngī meals. It was dusty and tiny and lovely. Hot mineral water melted the Earth’s crust, colouring it yellow and orange and bone-white. Houses were obscured behind clouds of delicious steam. A man leaned out the window of his car and asked Polly, ‘Any mail, Auntie?’ None of the houses had letterboxes; all mail was sent to post boxes and picked up from there.
Another man dipped a plastic bucket into a hot pool and walked back to his home. ‘Water to wash the dishes in,’ he said. That morning Polly had put a pot of chicken soup in her steam box in the ground. She was about to have her ‘nanny nap’ and would eat the soup at about seven-thirty.
Chicken soup and village life, lovely, peaceful, quiet. ‘Any mail, Auntie?’ Tour guides telling attentive Germans about the apparently smooth impact of the first Christian missionaries on Māori: ‘What was written in the scriptures coincided with our beliefs.’ The sun was gentle and a tūī sang in a gum tree. But the ground was sinking, caving in, eroded by geothermal acidic fluids.
And it seemed no one knew where they stood in other ways – Whakarewarewa was in the midst of an ongoing land dispute among Ngāti Wāhiao, Ngāti Whakaue and Tūhourangi. Part of the dispute was based on the widely held view that Tūhourangi were squatters. They had only come down in the last shower: they arrived after Mount Tarawera erupted in 1886 and were ‘gifted’ their land. The message was: Gift it back. What was a mere 120 years of settlement? They were even later on the scene than Pākehā.
Polly’s iwi was Tūhourangi. She said, ‘People have called me – what was it? – an overstayer. No, not overstayer. Something else.’ I said, ‘Squatter?’ She said, ‘That’s it! “You fellas are just squatters.” That’s what some people say.’
She laughed. ‘The honest truth is that some of us here couldn’t care less about who owns what. As long as I’ve got food in the cupboard and I have my smokes…’ She threw away her cigarette butt. It landed in the brown grass. She stood up; it was time for her nanny nap.
Nanny naps and village life; the tour guide saying to the attentive Germans ‘Repeat after me, “haka”,’ and the
