Today the sand-hills are being covered with marram grass and pine forest. Te Taou and the Sandhills by Colleen M. Sheffield For the last million years restless Tai Tama Tane, the Tasman Sea of the Pakeha, has been casting up sand on a thirty-mile beach just north of Auckland. In the beginning the tiny grains collected and grew into a long narrow bar separating the ocean from what was to become the harbour of Kaipara. The years went by and this sand began to grow upwards upon itself until it formed a range of hills, a continuation of the higher Waitakere ranges, running parallel to the coastline. More sand emerged from the sea to form a beach, and then an ever-widening stretch at the western base of these hills. A chain of fresh-water lakes appeared between the hills and plains of sand and as the centuries rolled on, the whole of this land became clothed with forest. Kauri, karaka, puriri, rewarewa and lesser trees grew to maturity, the rakau katoa to cover the naked skin of Papa. And no man saw them. A hurricane came with lightning, and the forest was burned and laid low. The ocean cared not and continued to throw up sand from its depths. When the west wind blew, the sand went flying away inland once more, covering the dead trees and making new hummocks and hollows. In some places where hills were low and the wind keen, the sand evaded the lakes set out like sentry posts to guard the remnants of the forest, and crossed the long dividing barrier to smother the fertile land beyond. This was the land that the people of Te Taou gained by conquest early in the eighteenth century. They saw where the children of Tane had been smitten by Tawhirimatea, and saw Tangaroa, ceaselessly throwing up sand for Hauauru, the west wind, to spread across the land. As they considered these things, this hapu of Ngatiwhatua saw a parallel between the story of the sandhills and their own history. First there had been the time of their beginning in Aotearoa. This was around 1300 A.D., when some people of the Mahuhu canoe had landed on the low sandbank at the entrance of the Kaipara harbour. Then a great storm and the sea had come destroying their homes at Taporapora and casting the people about like trees in a gale so that they were scattered and forced to find new homes. Most of them went north; from there, together with some of the people of Mahuhu canoe who had always lived around Doubtless Bay, Ngatiwhatua began to drift south again, over-running the human obstacles in their path. When Ngatiwhatua had migrated as far as Poutu on Kaipara North Head, they were con-

fronted, if they wished to continue south, with the task of defeating the men of Waiohua, Ngaririki and Kawerau. As the lakes and hills of their ancestral home had long defied the onslaught of the sand dunes, so the people of these tribes resisted the invasion of the lower Kaipara. It took Ngatiwhatua all the years between 1680–1730 to gain this territory. During this time there were many skirmishes on sand and beach as first one side and then the other won a victory. The great Ngatiwhatua chief Haumoewharangi, who led the earliest war parties, was killed there, and so was the giant warrior Kawharu of Kawhia, whose aid had been sought by Ngatiwhatua. Special machines are used for planting marram grass. Leather jackets and goggles protect the men against the sand. Ngatiwhatua attach most importance to the battle of Otakinini, a pa on the west side of the mouth of the Kaipara river, as marking the final conquest of lower Kaipara; but to the hapu of Te Taou, the important battle is the one fought at Waionui lagoon. Kaipara South Head, within sight of the sandhills that had already cost them dearly. This took place at the end of the sixteenth century. The warriors of Haumoewharangi, the Uri o Hau, in making one of their attacks on the Ngaririki, had killed Nganaia, a man of note among the defending tribe. In return for this, Ngaririki killed the chifetainess Tou Tara of the Uri o Hau. This ancestress of the Reweti people died through a spear (tao) wound in the breast (u) and so the hapi of Ngatiwhatua to which she belonged took the name of Te Taou.