Maori Folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand

With the opening of tracks along the bold range of heights between the Canterbury Plains and Lyttelton Harbour, and the acquisition of new reserves for the public, mainly through the efforts of one tireless worker, Mr. H. G. Ell, Christchurch residents are perhaps coming to a more lively sense of the value of the Port Hills as a place of genuine recreation. The Summit Road has made city people free of the grandest hilltop pleasure place that any New Zealand city possesses within easy distance of its streets, and the worth of this mountain track, so easily accessible and commanding so noble a look-out over sea and plains and Alps, will increase in proportion to the growth of the Christchurch population. The fragments of the native bush which survive in the valleys will be of surpassing botanical interest in another generation or two, but the vegetation of the hills inevitably will suffer many changes, and an exotic growth will for the most part replace the ancient trees. With all the alterations which man’s hand may make in the reserves and along the public tracks, however, the monumental rock-beauty will remain the great and peculiar feature of the hills, their most wonderful and unalterable glory. The Port Range and the Banks Peninsula system of mountains are indeed the most remarkable heights in the whole of the South Island, not excepting the snowy Alps; there is nothing like them outside the northern volcanic regions, and in some aspects they carry a greater scientific and scenic value than even the crater-cones around the city of Auckland. What the Canterbury coast would have been like but for the vast volcanic convulsions which formed these ranges and huge craters is not difficult to imagine. It would have been a uniform billiard-table on an enormous scale, very gently sloping to the sea, with scarcely a break but for the snow rivers and with never a usable natural harbour. Volcanic energy gave us Lyttelton and Akaroa harbours, and shaped for us also the ever-marvellous hills that are at once a grateful relief to the eye from the eternal evenness of the plains and a healthful place of pleasure for our city dwellers.

The passage of untold ages has so little altered these fire-made ranges that build a picture-like ring about Lyttelton Harbour that their origin and history are plainly revealed to the climber and the Summit Road stroller; the story of the rocks can scarcely be mistaken. Geologists from the days of von Haast have written much of the Lyttelton and Akaroa volcanic systems, and in truth it is an ever-new and ever-fascinating subject. There is hardly a more interesting specimen of vulcanism in New Zealand, for example, than the strange wall of grey-white lava rock which Europeans call the Giant’s Causeway and the Maoris “The Fire of Tamatea,” which protrudes from the hilltop just above Rapaki, and which may be seen again on the far side of the harbour, a volcanic dyke that the ancient people—with surely some perception of geological truth—connected in their legends with the internal fires of the North Island. Along the craggy hill faces again, and particularly well in such places as Redcliffs and the Sumner end of the range, it is easy to read the history of the rocks in the alternate strata of solid volcanic rock and the soft rubble that seems almost to glow again with the olden fires. The most wonderful example of this stratified formation is the face of the south head of Akaroa Harbour; but it is possible to study similar pages in the volcanic chapter of Canterbury’s history without going many yards from the Summit Road anywhere from the sea to the hills above the harbour head.