Memories of Mauao - by Barbara Murray

Mauao, cloaked in greens, browns and blues, stands as a sentinel at the entrance to Tauranga Harbour.  All around our Bay of Plenty district people look for a view of ‘The Mount’. We watch for it as we round a particular corner on State Highway 2 north of Katikati – it is our first glimpse of home.  Similarly we scan the horizon eagerly, looking for the icon, when we travel from Rotorua or Whakatane, or journey over the Kaimai Range from the Waikato.

Yachts and other shipping making for harbour keep a lookout for Mauao.  It is a welcome sight.  For our local psyche it is as prominent as Diamond Head in Honolulu or Table Mountain in Cape Town.  I cannot imagine our landscape without that familiar shape or how bereft my soul would feel without its presence.

Mauao has seen its share of tragedy: fierce battles, fire, shipwreck, murder and mutilation. The peninsula has seen change, too.  Where there was once the occasional small home and store amongst the sand and scrub, the lupins and trees, there are now buildings – houses and schools, shops and high rise towers, a port development, industry.  The Sound Shell, where we went every New Year’s Day to watch the Miss Mount Maunganui contestants, has gone, so too has Hotel Oceanside, scene of many a family celebration.

When I was a child an outing to The Mount was top of a wish list: donkey rides, the swings, gathering shells, exploring the rock pools, braving the narrow path to the Blow Hole, jumping and shrieking with delight in the breakers, spitting out salt water; or diving through a green water wall to emerge triumphant on the other side: the thought of all these was part of the anticipation.

We took a bus downtown, boarding it outside Koops Cycles at the corner of Hospital Street, paid our money for the ferry trip at the ticket office on the wharf and, in my younger years, alighted at the Pilot Bay jetty.  The unsealed, shell-studded road leading to Adams Avenue wound through high stands of fennel and if it were a school outing, there would be frequent smashing of the seeds to release a foul smell.  Some were saved for the classroom where the girls obliged by gagging and giggling and the teacher walked up and down the rows of desks smacking a ruler on her hand, looking for a likely perpetrator.

I spent the Labour Weekend before sitting School Certificate, lying on my stomach in the Omanu dunes, cramming for general science and book-keeping exams, almost lulled to sleep by the sound of the surf and the rustling grasses.

A walk around the base of Mauao is a must for guests, whether from other parts of New Zealand or overseas.  We all stand wide-eyed at the spectacle of tumbled rocks, gnarled trees, the glint of sunlight on broken, swirling waters, and the views we see of Matakana Island and the Coromandel, the Tauranga city buildings, bridges and peninsulas, Kopukairoa, the Papamoa and Welcome Bay hills, the dip in the Kaimai skyline that is Thompson’s Track.

I like to imagine that Mauao was formed by a giant, beneficent Maori god who dug out a spadeful of soil and pebbles, and came striding over the countryside and its waterways carrying that spadeful, dropping it down at the very end of the slender arm of land.  The clod that spilled on the way became Mount Drury.  I can see him shaping the mound of Mauao with strong fingers, scattering seeds over it and pressing them in to grow.

The Maori legend is much more romantic and better told by someone from the local iwi.