Stories of the Rangitikei

Written account by Anonymous

One family use to commercially fish eels from the streams, I’m not sure if they do it now, but they were when they first purchased the farm. The same family would also erect signs alongside the river, I can’t remember exactly what the signs said, but it was something like, no jet boating in this area and no kayaking through this area. He used to put them up because he would take paying customers down there to fish.   

While growing up, our whānau spent a lot of their time down the river fishing and swimming. We mainly fished for eels, which were always clean and huge. We would often catch trout but preferred the eels.

I’ve spent most of my life out at Mokai. We were told there was a Māori settlement on the land next to the Rangitikei awa. There was battlements in the side of the bank. They used the bark from the totara tree to make water holders, there is a māori name for these I’m not sure what they’re called, but they were to carry water – those totara trees are still there. There was access to the river via a steep bank, the track was there before I was born.  

We found areas near our old house that looked like an old garden. Dad ploughed the flats in a paddock not far from our house, he discovered evidence of old cooking fires and smalls bits of obsidian and old trade acts. Richard Steedman was contacted about this. There was a freshwater source not far from the house and he said they would have used this stream to collect water for their garden. 

Richard said there was a lookout on one of the hills that could see both directions of the river, which he assumes would have been a good place to settle as the group would have seen other tribes coming up or down the river.  

There were many tracks found on the farm, that may have been used as access to the Hawkes Bay area through the valley.  

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