SHA62 BEARS THE legacy of Māori occupation and use, says archaeologist Dave Veart, a member of the Auckland Council’s Heritage Advisory Panel. Development on the Wallace block risks destroying it.

An avuncular man who immediately brings to mind a favourite primary-school teacher, Veart first visited Ihumātao in the early 1980s. At the time, he was assessing the archaeological significance of the volcanic stonefields for the Department of Conservation. His team recommended the purchase and protection of an area which eventually became the Ōtuataua Stonefields historic reserve. Under the then Minister of Conservation, Nick Smith, the stonefields were purchased from the landowners—the Rennies, the Elletts and the Mendelssohns.

Of the 8000 hectares of volcanic stonefields that once existed in Auckland, Ōtuataua is all that remains. The only reason part of Ihumātao is a reserve and part isn’t, says Veart, is that it’s divided by land boundary lines created by Pākehā. The border of the reserve doesn’t reflect Māori land occupation.

Veart happily agrees to show me around despite a recently torn calf muscle. We meet at the Kaitiaki Village, and locals coming and going greet the archaeologist warmly. He’s no stranger here. Although he has walked these fields a thousand times before, he still regards them with wonder.

“It’s one of those places where the past speaks really clearly,” he says.

Veart’s Scottish ancestors first came to New Zealand in the 1840s. He says this place is what they would have called “caol áit”, a “thin place”.

“The scientist in me disappears when I come out here. I feel a different connection.”

We follow a boundary wall near the edge of the quarried Ōtuataua crater. Ahead of us stand two spreading Moreton Bay fig trees, once the guardians of the Mendelssohns’ farmhouse. Beyond that, there’s another wound in the land where Maungataketake once stood.

“Hold up your palm with the side of your thumb along the skyline,” he says, pointing over at the small rise that remains, “and that’s about how high the maunga would have stood.”

Much of this place’s history—the traces of its first settlers—has already been lost.

“The Ōtuataua pā was spectacular; there are wonderful aerial photos by Geoff Fairfield of three-metre-high stone-faced terraces, two metres of shell midden. It was an amazing place and it was almost completely intact up until the mid-1960s, when it was quarried completely away for the benefit of the private land owner, the Ellett family. The excuse was it was in the way of aeroplanes for the airport. Largely they used it to build the runways.”

We come to rest atop a flattish mound, the former site of a whare, three metres by two metres in size, its shape still etched in stone into the earth.

“This is a chief’s whare,” says Veart. “It’s got the dimensions, it’s got the location. People were building whare next to these big heat sinks—you’ve got this great big warm rock at your back.”

Veart says it’s important to add the Wallace block to the historic reserve, because it is the only remaining major piece of land adjacent to a stonefield system in Auckland, and because it spans the complete history of Māori food production from the land. The reserve tells part of the story, but not all.

“We’ve got these early intensive kūmara gardens down there, the more open ones over here. We’ve got taro growing around the various wetlands. Then after the 1840s, suddenly you’ve got this big market on the other side of the Manukau Harbour.” Veart gestures in the direction of the Sky Tower.

“They start using the tuff ring part, where the Special Housing Area is, to grow wheat. There’s a mill, people are moving onto new forms of agriculture. And this is the only place we’ve got all of that on one site, which is one reason that block there is so important. And secondly, it provides a buffer to one of the most delicate, complex archaeological landscapes in New Zealand.”

We make our way carefully through the uneven terrain, admiring playful yellowhammers and a pair of exotic rosellas. The stonefields are home to a number of native lizards and shorebird species, including the South Island pied oystercatcher, royal spoonbills and most of the world’s population of wrybills. In late summer, Ihumātao is the holiday home of the bar-tailed godwit, which Māori traditionally believed accompany the souls of the dead. There’s a native cucumber found here that grows nowhere else.

“I am of an opinion it’s actually a war crime to destroy a culture’s heritage,” says Veart.

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BUT IT ISN’T a crime. The conflict at Ihumātao isn’t between heroes and villains, or between a community and a corporation, but between world views. Between people who own the land and people who belong to the land.

The main problem with SHA62 is not the impending subdivision, but how historical grievances should be resolved, and how New Zealand legislation has no mechanism for addressing injustices that took place on land that is held privately rather than publicly.

“While there is little doubt that the inhabitants of the area were unfairly treated by the Crown,” noted an Auckland Council consent hearing in 2013, “those matters cannot be addressed through Resource Management Act processes. We note that a remedy for historical grievances is not provided by our jurisdiction in terms of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Act either.”

There is no forum that can recognise the grief of the people of Ihumātao for the degradation of their land. The choices they have made to fight the development or to negotiate with the developer were made in the absence of other choices, yet with the same goal: to maintain a connection with the land they belong to.

In the case of Ihumātao, no legislation has been able to recognise the existence of a special relationship between land and people who do not own it.

The legacy of colonialism is an acceptance that land is to be owned and history is to be forgotten. Māori collective memory, however, remembers both the grievance and the value of land as a provider, an ancestor and a constant that will remain long after we have gone. Whatungarongaro te tangata, toitū te whenua—as man disappears from sight, the land remains.

The tension between these values lies at the heart of the fight for Ihumātao. The people of Ihumātao remember. The land remembers.