The PUHOI today seems a friendly
river. To watch the tide flowing slowly into it is to understand the Maori meaning of the
name..... slow water.
At the top of the tide it looks like
a baby "Waikato River" (NZ) but at low water is reduced to a thin trickle
between mud flats and mangrove swamps.
Hills once heavily bushed to the
water's edge are now cleared, grassed and deeply ridged by the racks of sheep and cattle,
and fat dairy cows now graze on the river bank. Dotted across the steep hills are
scattered patches of bush and stands of imported trees and they can all tell a tale of
tree conscious people who spared what they could and, when they couldn't spare replanted
them.
A love of trees is natural in a
people whose forefathers lived by the trees and the advice of the old ones was "spare
the bush to attract the rain". That attitude, however, was for the future.
When the new settlers came out of
the whares in the wintry dawn to take their first daylight look at their new home, the
trees were the enemy, firmly in possession of the land that was to be theirs. Apart from
the clearing of the river bank on which they stood, every where else was forest.
There were more tears and
lamentations. One present-day resident says of her grandmother. "If she could have
walked the sea, she would have walked back home".
But they could not walk the sea or
the forest. They had o funds to cut their losses and go in search of a better prospect.
They had few possessions, few tools, no firearms, no knowledge of any language but their
own. To settle in this frightening place seemed impossible but, where there is no
alternative, even the seemingly impossible must be attempted. It was fortunate that they
could not realise that the prospect was even worse than it looked. It was not until the
bush was cleared that it was seen that there was not a level acre of ground in the whole
block. With no possible escape route open to them, the settlers had to make up their minds
and try to move forward. More Nikau (NZ palm) whares were erected in the clearing on the
site now occupied by the Church and the Public Hall and the forty-acre grants were
allocated "to the satisfaction of all concerned".
Whether the allocation was made by
choice, ballot or by government decision seems to be in doubt. And why a settler who
received his grant in the deepest part of the bush should be as fully satisfied as the one
who received his on the bank of the river that was their life-line is hard to understand.
A party surveying the area in 1862
in search of a suitable site for another settlement inspected the PUHOI block and decided
that it was quite unworkable. The description left by one of the surveyors of the bush at
the time helps to bring home the immensity of the task the Bohemians had before them.
"The more the timber trees,
the more the undergrowth. The timber trees run up to a height of 40 to 80 feet almost
with no branches. They do not spread to much of a head but keep their branches close and
compact together.
The whole space is filled with the
tree ferns 6 to 20 feet high, nikau palms about the same size and an immense variety of
trees and shrubs. The whole of this is again festooned and intertwined with creepers of
all sizes which grow horizontally across the other shrubs lashing the whole together into
an impervious thicket.
If, in addition to this, you imagine
the whole forest strewn with innumerable trees which have fallen from the effect of
many winter storms, you will begin to have some idea of the difficulty".
Hard necessity helped the Bohemian
settlers to find out that it was just about impossible to live off the bush. The nikau
palm which provided them with shelter also provided them with their staple food. It ought,
in fact, to be the emblem of PUHOI. The central part of the palm was found to be like
cabbage when cooked and, when very young, like the heart of lettuce.
Punga fern (another NZ native) was
also eatable and so were numerous berries such as taraire, which looked like prunes but
tasted like turpentine. There were fish in the river, birds in the trees and wild pig in
the bush, but at the beginning these were not easily available as the settlement hod no
firearms, no shoot and no fishing tackle.
However the river teamed with eels
and crabs which were easier to catch and wild bees provided a supply of honey. There were
many fresh water springs in the bush when they could be located and when the land was
cultivated it was found that bidibid made a type of tea and burnt corn something
resembling coffee.
These formed the bulk of the diet
for the settler's for their first year. Auckland was a hard day's walk away and they had
very little money to spend on groceries.
It is unlikely that any of the
organised immigrant groups coming to New Zealand had such a struggle for survival.
To ask the older residents of the
present-day PUHOI how they achieved it is to be given, over and over again the same two
reasons..... "They had the Faith and they helped one another".
"They had the Faith"......
it is offered as the simple explanation for everything... the reason why there was no
possibility of despair; the way in which suffering and even death were only part of the
pattern, the darkness which combined with the light to make the whole of man's full life.
"They helped one
another"..... it was of course a part of their Faith. They were brothers in the sight
of God and one man's suffering was another man's pain. Community effort was the only way
to move forward. The BOHEMIAN settlement had to stand or fall as a unit.
If the stronger and more efficient
had forged ahead for themselves at that point and secured their own position first, the
weaker would not have survived.
Instead, joint endeavour made tracks
through the bush from one holding to another, built a whare of nikau on each and
established the families on their own hame on their own land. It might have been easier to
stay in a heartbroken group on the river bank, but hunger is the hardest task master.
To live at all it was necessary to
work and the PUHOI settlers dispersed to their individual holdings and worked as they had
never worked before.
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