In 1876, Whakarewarewa residents Henare Te Pukuatua (Ngāti Whakaue) and Mohi Aterea (Ngāti Whakaue) placed a notice in the bilingual newspaper Waka Maori.Footnote 1 Targeting potential European tourists, Te Pukuatua and Aterea first extolled the curative properties of the village springs: “There are many kinds of diseases to which man is liable, and here we have waters powerful to cure all; for every peculiarity of disease we have a corresponding peculiarity of water – a panacea for all diseases…Many Pakehas [people of European descent] have experienced the healing virtues of these waters, and they are all loud in praise of them.”Footnote 2 The writers then highlighted the services they provided for convalescents, noting that they had “erected a house…for the accommodation of the sick, and…charges are reasonable.” The writers also promoted the sights in the thermal belt adjacent to their village: “To those of the Pakehas who delight in beholding boiling springs, there are none in the island equal to our springs…Some of them boil up violently at intervals throughout the day; and many beautiful things (petrifactions) are formed by them. Numbers of Pakehas have seen them, and they are matter of wonder and admiration to all.”Footnote 3
At the time this notice was published, the inhabitants of Whakarewarewa had complete control over tourism in their village and thermal belt. However, as this article will show, in this era settler government intervention altered Te Arawa's ability to control tourism from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth. The constitution and ideologies of the settler government changed over time, but the impact on Māori was consistent. Piece by piece, Māori control of the land that underwrote tourism activities, and the activities themselves, was lost. During this period, the New Zealand state increased its control of tourism generally: indeed, the formation of the Department of Tourism and Health Resorts in 1901 made New Zealand the first country in the world to have a government tourism department, signalling the importance of this activity to the settler state. Rotorua, with its already internationally famous thermal attractions and an existing infrastructure sustained by Te Arawa, was a critical piece of the potential tourist offering (the mountains, and West Coast of the South Island were others) and one of the earliest sites to be brought under government control. The ambitions of the settler state thus clashed with the economic and cultural interests of Māori. Tourism, then, albeit in a different way, still functioned like other forms of settler colonisation, including recently-ended wars and land confiscation, to dispossess indigenous inhabitants. As in other cases of dispossession, Māori devised strategies to retain links to land and culture. For Te Arawa, loss of tourism control also spelled economic loss. This article examines the agency of Whakarewarewa residents in controlling tourism in the village and thermal belt. It begins by exploring the extent of adaptation to, and control of tourism by Te Arawa, before turning to strategies used to assert agency within an increasingly governmentalised space. In particular it highlights activities around tolling and guiding to illustrate both the usurpation of control by government and Te Arawa work to resist this, culturally and economically.
From the earliest days of tourism in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the combination of Māori culture and a steaming, sulphurous landscape has drawn tourists to Whakarewarewa.Footnote 4 Situated in the central North Island, it is part of the rohe (territory) of Te Arawa, a confederation of Māori tribes who are descended from the crew of the migratory canoe Arawa. Te Arawa has a long-term relationship with Whakarewarewa which predates colonisation. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, it was important to a number of Te Arawa iwi (tribes) and hapū (subtribes). Indeed, during its history three iwi of Te Arawa – Tūhourangi, Ngāti Wāhiao, and Ngāti Whakaue – have periodically resided at the settlement. They utilised the area for its natural resources, for example, for the harvesting and drying of tawa berries for food and the collecting of red ochre to be used for painting and ritual adornment.Footnote 5 By the time Pākehā travellers first ventured into the region in the 1840s, Te Arawa's relationship with Whakarewarewa dated back more than 150 years. From the 1870s, Whakarewarewa residents welcomed tourists who came to take the waters, admire the awe-inspiring thermal landscape, or simply to “watch…the peculiar manners and customs of the ‘Maori at Home’.”Footnote 6 From the outset, villagers worked as guides. While initially almost essential due to the danger of roaming the thermal landscape without someone who knew the area, guides were also seen as providing visitors with an “authentic” experience. But this was not necessarily the case, as guides also acted as gatekeepers for the village, ensuring aspects of their culture remained out of the tourist gaze.
A number of academics have studied Whakarewarewa and its inhabitants.Footnote 7 Peter Waaka, in his analysis of the Māori settlement's development from its earliest days, argues that it was the villagers’ adaptability that allowed them “to meet the challenges [of tourism] as they saw fit, to suit their collective needs.”Footnote 8 Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, whose thesis on the “sociocultural impact of tourism” on Te Arawa centres on Whakarewarewa and the nearby settlement of Ōhinemutu, also contends that Te Arawa met the challenges brought by “the neocolonization of tourism.”Footnote 9 Rather than meeting her expectation that “tourism had ruined Te Arawa,” she found her research “became a celebration of resilience, and triumph” highlighting that Te Arawa had “demonstrated an inspiring adaptability to the rapacious onslaught of Western civilisation.”Footnote 10 She argued that “[w]ithin the pakeha, westernizing, system…it is possible to sustain, and manipulate, the covert, underlying structures of the traditional world.”Footnote 11 In The Beating Heart, a “political and socio-economic history of the Te Arawa people since colonisation,” Vincent O'Malley and David Armstrong complicate the notion of indigenous agency and victimhood suggesting that while “Te Arawa were ultimately and undeniably victims in certain respects, they also exercised considerable agency at times” and they “acknowledge…the cultural resilience of Te Arawa despite considerable odds.”Footnote 12 Nevertheless, when focusing on tourism, they argue that by the turn of the twentieth century, Whakarewarewa residents were “[n]o longer tourist entrepreneurs, owning and controlling the prime attractions of the Rotorua district.” Instead, they “had been reduced, as a result of the Crown's purchase activity, to little more than objects of curiosity for visiting tourists.”Footnote 13 This article builds on this body of work, in particular responding to O'Malley and Armstrong's argument that Te Arawa ‘were both [agents and victims] at different times and in different contexts’Footnote 14 and te Awekōtuku's argument that “[w]omen have played an essential and decisive role in the shaping of Te Arawa tourism.”Footnote 15
This article mainly relies on two types of primary sources. Firstly, sources held in the government archives, primarily contemporary letters or petitions written by Te Arawa to the government and Māori Land Court minute books for the Rotorua district. The Minute books provide a record of testimony given by local Māori in order to establish Native Land Court titles. Secondly, it draws from over 100 contemporary travel narratives including diaries, books and accounts published in local newspapers. It is important to note that “Pākehā-derived sources” such as these contain bias and therefore need to be analysed with care.Footnote 16 Furthermore, few early guides left a trace in the archives (celebrity guide and scholar Mākereti (Maggie) Papakura being one exception; with a diary and other materials held at the Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL)). Thus, alongside the sources mentioned above, oral and written guide memoires and sources from Waaka and Te Awekōtuku's insider histories were utilised to piece together the guides’ actions and motivations.Footnote 17
Te Arawa, tourism, tolling and the government, 1871–1900
In the early days of tourism in the Hot Lakes District (as visitors named the region), village residents had complete control over tourism at Whakarewarewa. Initially the site was more popular with health tourists – the “invalids” who came “seeking miraculous cures” in the thermal pools.Footnote 18 Of course, Te Arawa were well aware that their thermal waters had curative properties for “all kinds of skin diseases and rheumatic pains” and had “even…determine[d] which pools were able to cure particular ailments.”Footnote 19 Now they were able to capitalise on this knowledge. The villagers’ first foray into health tourism was to charge convalescents a shilling(s) to bathe in the thermal pools. However, they soon created further economic opportunities. For example, at this time the nearest “wharemanuhiri (guest-house)” was about 5 kms away at Ōhinemutu. The poor road linking the two villages could be problematic for convalescents.Footnote 20 Seeing an opening, Whakarewarewa residents began to rent out their whare (“traditional” Māori dwellings) to health tourists so that they could remain on site while “avail[ing] themselves of the hot springs.”Footnote 21 They then began to build whare specifically for the accommodation of visitors.Footnote 22 By the mid-1880s, during peak season up to fifteen convalescents could be staying in the village at any one time.Footnote 23 One Te Arawa landlord's records show that he was earning around £2 per person per month by renting out a whare.Footnote 24 Residents also increased their takings through accommodation upgrades – whare were usually assigned via a lottery system, but residents charged visitors another 5s to be able to “have [their] choice of the untenanted houses.”Footnote 25 They also offered supplementary services such as nursing, laundering, provisioning, catering, and transportation of guests across the unbridged Puarenga Stream. Villagers earnt “about £1 per week” per guest for providing food and doing the laundry.Footnote 26 These services were popular and for a number of years convalescents were residents’ principal source of revenue.Footnote 27
Meanwhile the government had already begun to “extend its tentacles” into tourism in the region.Footnote 28 At the time Aotearoa/New Zealand was a self-governing British Crown Colony, with a government that was determined to nationalise the country's key tourist attractions.Footnote 29 In 1881 it passed the Thermal Springs Districts Act, which allowed the government to declare a locality a thermal springs district, “thereafter, only the Crown could purchase land in that area.” This was applied to the Rotorua region. As Margaret McClure argues, the intention of the Act was “to develop [the district] in a way that the government could control…The legislation was also driven by an entrepreneurial vision that foresaw Rotorua as the sanatorium of the world.”Footnote 30 By the mid-1880s, the government had attained around 4000 acres at nearby Lake Rotorua – including many of the springs that were most popular with health tourists – where it built a number of bath-houses which competed with those in the village. Private enterprise also had an impact. From the mid-1880s, a number of European entrepreneurs built hotels and guest houses that competed directly with the accommodation provided by the village.Footnote 31 For example, in 1886 Mr WM Rogers opened the Geyser Hotel near the thermal belt, promoting “its suitability as a place of residence for INVALIDS.”Footnote 32 Health tourists chose these “great modern hotels” over the “somewhat spartan conditions of village life.”Footnote 33 Together, European-run baths and accommodation houses reduced Whakarewarewa's appeal as a health tourism destination in the eyes of European visitors, thus making it increasingly difficult for the local Te Arawa community to participate in the health tourism sector.
At the same time, however, Whakarewarewa was attracting increasing numbers of leisure tourists, with many travellers stopping to view its “geysers and other astonishing sights” en route to Te Ōtūkapuarangi and Te Tarata (the Pink and White Terraces).Footnote 34 The majority of these visitors were happy to pay a 3s toll, which included the services of a guide.Footnote 35 By this time, the iwi (tribe) of Ngāti Wāhiao were residing in the village. They established a village committee to, among other things, manage the income from tolling which with guiding and bathing fees were placed “into a common fund”.Footnote 36 The same year village residents built “the first toll gate” at the bridge across the Puarenga Stream. A year later the committee paid local residents to erect a toll house.Footnote 37 A key reason that Ngāti Wāhiao charged the toll was to work around the restrictions created by the Thermal Springs District Act (1881). As one iwi member noted at the time, they tolled in order to “rais[e] a revenue, seeing that under…[the Act they were] debarred from giving leases to Europeans and raising revenue in that way.”Footnote 38
Yet the Crown viewed the practice of tolling as “levy[ing] blackmail” on visitors and as part of its inexorable quest to wrest control of tourism from Te Arawa, it determined to reduce and eventually remove the Whakarewarewa toll.Footnote 39 While Te Arawa still owned the thermal belt the government had little control over this, and thus resorted to bargaining. In 1885, at a hui (meeting) to discuss improving the crossing over the Puarenga Stream at the entranceway to the village and thermal belt, Minister of Native Affairs John Ballance, called Ngāti Wāhiao to task over the “exorbitant” 3s they charged tourists to see the springs. Using the future bridge as leverage, Balance argued that “in recognition of the fact that we are providing a bridge for you, you ought to meet us by reducing the charge; for by erecting the bridge we are giving greater facilities for tourists to come and visit your places.”Footnote 40 The village committee responded that they would agree to Ballance's request and would reduce the toll to 1 shilling (s) 6 pence (d) – but only if “the Government alone…[bore] the cost of making the bridge.”Footnote 41
While it would appear that in this situation the government exerted control over Ngāti Wāhiao tolling practices, in actual fact the villagers came out on top. Ballance had been misinformed about the Whakarewarewa fee schedule. While tourists did pay 3s, only 2s of this was the toll – the other 1s was the compulsory guiding fee.Footnote 42 A further 6d of the 2s was “for crossing the bridge made by the Maoris over the Puarenga for the convenience of tourists.”Footnote 43 Charging the 6d for crossing the bridge separately suggests that village residents only made the charge in order to recoup their costs in the building of the bridge, which at that stage was a ‘few shaky planks’ residents had placed between the boulders in the stream.Footnote 44 In exchange for reducing the toll by 6d, they gained a much sturdier and safer foot-bridge which would “increase the number of tourists” visiting Whakarewarewa and thus increase overall toll revenue as well as the income earned through guiding.Footnote 45 Overall, I would argue, the villagers successfully asserted their agency to benefit from this particular governmental attempt to erode their control over tourism on their land.
The following year, an event took place that had a lasting impact on Te Arawa. In June 1886 nearby Mount Tarawera erupted. For Te Arawa, in particular the iwi (tribe) of Tūhourangi, the eruption was a cataclysmic disaster that destroyed settlements and killed over one hundred Māori. It also destroyed their tourist livelihood, obliterating Te Ōtūkapuarangi and Te Tarata. Both Te Arawa lives and the face of tourism in the district were transformed forever. Following the eruption, many Tūhourangi survivors joined their Ngāti Wāhiao relatives at Whakarewarewa.Footnote 46 The eruption had another unexpected impact – it intensified activity in Whakarewarewa's thermal belt, thus creating new sights and bigger attractions. After an initial decline in visitor numbers, tourists flocked back to the region. No longer overshadowed by the Pink and White Terraces, and with bigger and better geysers, the thermal belt became “the most wonderful” sight in the Hot Lakes District.Footnote 47
However, by 1896 the Crown had purchased the thermal belt from another iwi of Te Arawa.Footnote 48 The government used the purchase to erode village residents’ control of the popular tourist attraction. As the Under-Secretary for Lands and Survey noted at the time, “one of the principal objects in purchasing the Whakarewarewa Springs was to remove [the] obnoxious toll.”Footnote 49 The government also created a right of way through the settlement in order to stop residents tolling tourists who had to cross their land to reach the (now) Crown-owned thermal belt.Footnote 50 Although residents had lost ownership of the site, they continued to resist the government's attempts to exert control over the land. They ignored Crown requests to stop tolling and more than a year after the sale government officials were dismayed to report that Ngāti Wāhiao were still charging tourists a fee to enter the thermal belt.Footnote 51
At the same time, the iwi lobbied the government for the right to continue tolling. In early 1897, at the opening of the new Wāhiao Bridge, village residents exhorted governmental representatives to allow them to continue “to levy [a] toll on visitors crossing the bridge, as it was and has been for a long time their means of livelihood and they now ask it especially in the names of their women and children.”Footnote 52 Later that same year, when the Minister of Public Works visited Whakarewarewa “a deputation of Natives asked [him] that they should be allowed to continue the toll levied on visitors.”Footnote 53 They also petitioned the government and informed the local road surveyor (who on behalf of the government had told them “to cease using the ‘toll-gate’”) that they would continue “to charge them in the meantime.”Footnote 54 Furthermore, they warned him, “if the toll [was] done away with suddenly they [would] fence in their land and charge tolls on it” instead.Footnote 55
The Whakarewarewa residents’ petition was unsuccessful and they followed through with their threat, introducing a 1s/6d charge (the same as the previous toll for viewing the thermal belt) for “admission” into the area of the village “containing the pools and springs used by [residents] for domestic purposes.”Footnote 56 They also continued charging a guiding fee to show visitors around the thermal belt.Footnote 57 As tourists were “never tired of watching…the ‘Maori at Home’,” visiting the village was a popular experience.Footnote 58 By shifting the toll from the thermal belt to their own village, Ngāti Wāhiao were able to mitigate governmental interference in the practice of tolling. However, the villagers still faced a drop in income following the loss of revenue from the entrance toll into the thermal belt.Footnote 59
This reduction in revenue, alongside Te Arawa's disenfranchisement from participating in health tourism, meant that the practice of tourist guiding became an essential part of Whakarewarewa's tourist economy. For the village men, this work was too irregular to offer a viable alternative to their full-time employment in forestry.Footnote 60 For the village women, however, guiding provided an important economic opportunity to run their own small business – particularly as they could easily fit it around their whānau (family) responsibilities.Footnote 61 Earning one shilling per tourist, most guides significantly increased their family income. For comparison, a servant made around ten to twelve shillings per week including board.Footnote 62 Yet, while the economic benefits of this work were substantial, most village women were unable to earn enough to attain full financial independence from guiding alone because of its seasonal nature.Footnote 63 To boost their income (among other reasons) the guides also organised or participated in cultural performances put on for tourist audiences as well as creating and selling ‘souvenirs’ including traditional items such as kete (baskets), models of whare, pātaka (storehouses) and anchors, as well as items designed to appeal to the modern tourist, such as decorative picture frames.Footnote 64 In these enterprises, the Tūhourangi survivors of the eruption shared the skills and knowledge they had developed catering to tourists at the Terraces. Women like Ani Waaka “had the training on how to get the tourist dollar, from their experience on the…Terraces. Coming [to Whakarewarewa] they applied the same sorts of things – souvenirs, hakas, poi dances. [Waaka] organised all this to ensure that the people didn't starve. She herself taught them how to carry on with these crafts.”Footnote 65 However, guiding also gave the women the opportunity to create another form of agency, as highlighted by Ani Waaka's experience of guiding as outlined below.
Imagined Whakarewarewa: Te Arawa guides and the making of “place” as another form of agency, 1896–1915
Late one autumn afternoon in 1908, a group of tourists straggled into Whakarewarewa hoping for a tour of the Māori settlement and the adjacent geothermal area. Resident and guide Ani Waaka quickly took charge of the visitors, reassuring them that, although “[i]t is rather late…you will be able to see the sights.”Footnote 66 First, she led them through the village, where she “initiated” her guests “into the mysteries of a Maori kitchen.” “Lift[ing] a sack off a steam hole,” Waaka showed them an “evening meal in course of cooking [i]n little flax baskets…while alongside [was] a kettle standing in the water and boiling merrily.” Next she guided them around the “sights” of the thermal belt. She “show[ed them] Waikorohihi – the whistling geyser, round the mouth of which a beautiful terrace is forming.” Directing her visitors to Hinau's Cave, Waaka shared with them the history of Te Tukutuku, a chief who “hid from his enemies [there] for two years.…” “Unfortunately…his hiding place was eventually discovered, and his enemies, after cutting off his head, took out his brains and carried them to the Brain Pot” – another stop on Waaka's circuit. She then pointed out the boiling mud holes, one of which the villagers had “not inappropriately…called ‘The Flower Pot’ [as it] forms bubbles of fantastic shape…no great power of imagination is necessary to see roses, tulips, and who knows how many other flowers.” To finish her tour, Waaka “turn[ed her guests] back and in a few minutes [they were] gazing upon a…magnificent…sight…From the bowels of the earth comes a roaring noise, and the next instant…a column of water standing fully fifty feet in the air…Waikite, the present day pride of Whakarewarewa.”Footnote 67
By the time these visitors toured Whakarewarewa, the thermal belt was physically under government control. But guiding offered an imaginative solution to this loss. Visiting tourist destinations such as Whakarewarewa “involve[d] the human capacity to imagine or to enter into the imaginings of others.”Footnote 68 However, such an entry could be manipulated. Ani Waaka's tour exemplified this process as she invited tourists to enter into her imaginings of Whakarewarewa. Indeed, guides like Waaka created and controlled “Whaka” for their visitors through an interlinked “oral, visual [and] kinesthetic social” process akin to “performance cartography”: As the guides walked their charges through Whakarewarewa, they kinaesthetically controlled the route, selecting some locations but omitting others.Footnote 69 Then, while the guides visually shared their selected location with visitors, they also shared a related oral text, typically a Te Arawa history. Thus, sites were transformed into sights.Footnote 70 Within the village, for example, guides led their guests to see Parekohuru a former “cooking hole,” where they recounted the history of why it was made “tapu” (“prohibited, restricted”) and, therefore, could no longer be used for cooking.Footnote 71 Miriam Wikiriwhi “piloted” her visitors “among the geysers and porridge pots of boiling mud to a hot pool, in which the villagers used to cook until an unfortunate Maori fell into it, since which it has been tabooed.”Footnote 72 Guide Sophia Hinerangi's visitors viewed the “tapu cauldron” while she related the “tale of a native who accidently slipped in – and disappeared.”Footnote 73 Through this process the guides constructed an “imagined geography” of Whaka as a circuit of sights made up of “specific geographic places” (such as Parekohuru and Hinau's Cave) and “specifically located performances” (such as village children diving for pennies and the geysers erupting).Footnote 74 While Parekohuru lay within the village, Hinau's Cave was situated in the thermal belt. This highlights an important point: the guides incorporated sights from both Te Arawa and Crown-owned land into their circuit.Footnote 75 Tourist accounts rarely noted a distinction between the two sections of land, suggesting that they had absorbed a mental map of Whaka from the guides in which the “two” pieces of land were seen as “one.”Footnote 76
Over time the guides made alterations to their representation of Whakarewarewa. One way they did this was by adding “new” sights. In the late nineteenth century, for example, the mud pools in the thermal belt did not feature in the Whaka circuit.Footnote 77 From the early 1900s, however, the guides had reconstructed Whaka to include the various “pots” of “boiling mud,” turning them into sights by naming and narrating them based on either an amusing or dramatic visual or aural aspect.Footnote 78 The visual sights “created” by the guides included the “flower pots”; the “catseye” (where “[p]etroleum in the mud pool causes the bubbles as they rise to assume momentarily a startling likeness to the eyes of a cat”) and the “frog pond” (where “blobs of hot mud…[resembling a small frog were] perpetually leaping to a height of some eighteen inches”).Footnote 79 An aural “sight” which the guides added to the circuit and that tourists found particularly amusing was “the Grunting Pig” or “Poaka mud pool” where guides “invite[d] [their visitors] to look down a very deep crevice and hear the old pig grunting.”Footnote 80 These “specifically located performances” never disappointed visitors (unlike the geysers, which did not always erupt on cue) and were very popular, as demonstrated by their regular and often detailed descriptions in tourists’ travel narratives.Footnote 81
The guides were not the only tourism entrepreneurs in the village to recreate Whaka for their visitors. Penny diving, where visitors threw pennies for the village children to retrieve and keep, was a tour highlight for many and one of the key sights on the circuit. In the early days of tourism, the children swam for pennies under the bridge and dived for them in the pools or occasionally from the sides of the stream.Footnote 82 By 1904, though, the children had modified the circuit by changing both the location and the content of their penny diving. They redeveloped their performance so that it took place exclusively from the top of the bridge over the Puarenga Stream and involved a twenty-foot jump into the water.Footnote 83 These changes must have been supported by the adults of the village as a platform was built on the side of the bridge for the sole use of the penny divers.Footnote 84
While sources do not reveal why the guides and village children altered Whaka, economic concerns were the likely drivers of change. For the children, moving their performance ensured a captive audience, as tourists had to cross the bridge to enter Whakarewarewa. At the same time, by adding a six-metre dive from the top of the bridge, they also created a more spectacular performance. Both these changes would have led to greater economic rewards from their Pākehā audience. In the guides’ case, following the Crown purchase of the thermal belt, the villagers’ tolling revenue dropped.Footnote 85 Therefore, in the early 1900s income from guiding became even more important. At the same time, the government had laid paths throughout the thermal belt, making the sights more accessible and reducing the risk of physical harm to visitors without a guide.Footnote 86 This likely made hiring a guide less appealing to some. The guides possessed the business acumen to understand that by adding new and previously unknown sights such as the pots to their circuit, they would increase the appeal and value of their services to tourists and thus boost their income. As Salazar argues, the “identities” of tourist sites are “endlessly…(re)created in a bid to obtain a piece of the lucrative tourism pie.”Footnote 87
Of course, the guides (and village children) were not the only ones to devise imagined Whakarewarewa – tourists also had their own preconceived “personal imaginings.”Footnote 88 Unsurprisingly, these two imagined “places” sometimes diverged. The guides created Whaka taking account of their lived experience in the village and the associated cultural and economic expectations that this entailed. In contrast, many tourists envisaged Whaka as a living museum with unlimited access. Moreover, actual Whakarewarewa did not always match either groups’ construction of place. The tensions between these various imaginaries were revealed when tourists and guides came together in the “otherwise lived space” of Whakarewarewa.Footnote 89 In this situation, the guides still controlled their creation of Whaka, resolving disparities through a range of strategies that I term suppression, reconciliation, and misdirection.
For the guides, aspects of Māoritanga (Māori culture, practices and beliefs) took precedence over tourists’ imagined Whakarewarewa. Here the economic incentives of guiding were intertwined with aspects of cultural reassertion. For example, while many visitors perceived the urupā (burial ground, cemetery) as simply another sight, the guides did not. Here the guides suppressed tourists’ imaginings by restricting physical access to the urupā, excluding it from their circuit. Visitors noted that they were barred from entering the urupā “as it is taboo” or “tapu” and, as one visitor noted, “woe be to the intruding pakeha who dares to cross its threshold.”Footnote 90 In a similar vein, the guides also restricted female tourists’ access to the “carved house.” One visitor, much chagrined, noted that “[i]n the village is a Maori house, which they charge for showing, but will not let ladies into, although the guides that show it are women, Sophia and her grand-daughter.”Footnote 91
The guides not only suppressed the kinaesthetic creation of Whaka by restricting physical access to certain parts of the village; they also suppressed the oral creation of Whaka by restricting the sharing of certain iwi histories and mātauranga (knowledge). For example, Bella Papakura instructed her trainee guides to withhold narratives about the “burial caves up in the reserve.” Bubbles Mihinui recalled that “[s]he showed us where some of them are but she said…‘Don't ever talk about these caves in ordinary conversation. Not all your visitors need to know everything. You can assess when people might have a specialist interest, like historians or conservationists, then you can choose exactly what ought to be said.’”Footnote 92 In addition, the guides usually only shared particular kinds of histories – those directly related to the geothermal objects of the tourist gaze (i.e., the various hot pools, mud pools, and geysers) – and while the guides may have shared “Maori legends dating over 100 years ago,” in relative terms these only represent some of the iwi's more recent histories.Footnote 93 Key Te Arawa narratives (including “deeper origin histories”) are conspicuous by their absence, hinting at important differences between the “imagined Whakarewarewa” that the guides created for tourists through sharing certain narratives and the Whakarewarewa that existed in Te Arawa's “collective consciousness.”Footnote 94 The guides’ use of suppression highlights that they did not always pander to the desires of tourists in their creation of Whaka.
Not only was there divergence between the tourists’ and guides’ versions of Whaka but sometimes actual and imagined Whakarewarewa also diverged. Many tourists visited the thermal belt with the expectation of seeing “the famous geysers” erupt, but when they “refused to perform their part,” the disparity between reality and tourists’ imaginings caused visitors “much…disappointment.”Footnote 95 In response, the guides often took pity on their visitors and utilised the strategy of reconciliation, actualising the tourists’ Whaka by physically altering the landscape – throwing cut-up bars of soap into the geysers to make them erupt – thus reconciling, at least temporarily, actual and imagined Whakarewarewa.Footnote 96 Hinerangi was well known for using this soaping technique. In 1896, following the Crown's purchase of the thermal reserve, she was appointed as official caretaker and told by the government engineer that soaping “must be henceforth discontinued” by both guides and visitors, as it was “supposed to have a deleterious effect on the thermal action.”Footnote 97 Clearly the government remained anxious to protect its tourism assets. Despite the ban, Hinerangi still “‘put up’ the Geysers for [visitors’] gratification.”Footnote 98 Unfortunately, “this became so frequent at last, that the incensed Govt [sic] – to again use Sophia's own expression – ‘Sacked her out.’”Footnote 99 There were clearly some limits to the extent of indigenous agency under a colonial tourist regime.
Once again, the archive does not fully reveal the reasons why guides such as Hinerangi went to such extents to reconcile real Whakarewarewa with tourists’ imaginings. Hinerangi told her visitors that she had “considered the matter and decided that as many of them came from long distances to see these wonders of her country, it was a great pity their desires should not be gratified.”Footnote 100 However, visitors also noted that while her “kind heart was touched with the visitors[’] disappointment,” so was “her palm with their money.”Footnote 101 Perhaps Hinerangi saw it as part of being a good host or perhaps initially in a win-win situation, she was happy to reconcile these disparities in favour of visitors’ imaginings because it also satisfied economic imperatives. Yet soaping could also be read as a form of resistance to the government's ongoing attempts to erode the villagers’ control and to enforce its laws on land that had only recently left Te Arawa hands.
At other times when there was a disparity between tourists’ imaginings and actual Whakarewarewa, the guides chose the strategy of misdirection. For example, visitors expected their guides to have Māori names. On one particular occasion, celebrity guide “Maggie” was asked for her Māori Christian name. “Mākereti,” she replied. The tourist then wanted to know her Māori surname. Mākereti's surname was Thom. However, the tourist “persisted” in wanting to know her “Māori” name.Footnote 102 Mākereti “glanced round for inspiration and saw the geyser Papakura bubbling away nearby. ‘My surname is Papakura,’ she replied straight-faced.” Superficially, this incident would seem to portray a guide reconciling real Whakarewarewa with the tourists’ imagined Whakarewarewa. Yet, while Mākereti met her visitor's expectations, at the same time she subverted them – the recounting of this event by guide Rangitīaria Dennan (her daughter-in-law) makes it clear that Mākereti was having “fun” at the tourists’ expense. This is also indicated by the reaction of Mākereti's friends: when she recounted the story to them, “they erupted in gales of laughter.”Footnote 103 Furthermore, it is evident from Mākereti's diary that she had a strong sense of humour, did not suffer fools gladly, and did not do anything that she did not want to do.Footnote 104 Taken together, this suggests that her act of re-naming was misdirection.
Finally, while guiding tourists around the village and thermal belt the women of Whakarewarewa spatially constructed “Whaka” as a single entity or “place” – with no distinction between Te Arawa and Crown-owned land. As tourists were physically present at Whaka, they embodied the borders constructed by their guides as they walked the land.Footnote 105 Furthermore, many tourists published their cognitive map of Whaka as a single place in books or newspaper travelogues, disseminating Whakarewarewa's narrated boundaries (or lack thereof) to a wide readership.Footnote 106 Thus, the guides’ construction of the village and thermal belt spread far beyond visiting tourists. However, just as loss of ownership of the land meant the guides could only imaginatively reintegrate Whakarewarewa, so too could they only have limited impact on the narratives published by their visitors. However, guiding created an opportunity for the women of Whakarewarewa to “articulat[e] spatial power and control related to territoriality” over land no longer in their ownership to a wide audience.Footnote 107
While providing only a snapshot of villagers’ engagement in health and leisure tourism from the 1870s, this article highlights Te Arawa agency in resisting and mitigating governmental attempts to take control of tourism at Whakarewarewa. With the government's actions forcing residents out of health tourism and the Crown purchase of the thermal belt and subsequent drop in tolling revenue, tourist guiding came to play a major role in the village economy. This not only provided a unique financial opportunity for village women, but also enabled them to assert another form of agency: creating and sharing imagined Whakarewarewa with their visitors. Whether making the village and thermal belt more appealing to tourists; supporting the cultural expectations of their iwi by following protocol and protecting mātauranga (knowledge); or resisting the colonial government, the guides continually created and re-created “Whaka.” They controlled this (re)creation by selecting which sights they showed and histories they shared, and in how they dealt with the disparate versions of Whaka as well as actual Whakarewarewa. Through this process, the women conceptually re-possessed land they no longer “owned,” ignoring legal boundaries and undermining the substantive sovereignty of the Crown.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Andreas Greiner and Mikko Toivanen for their assistance and encouragement. Thanks also to Andreas and Mikko and participants in the ‘Colonial Baggage’ workshop for their helpful feedback. My grateful appreciation to John Waaka who kindly shared with me knowledge about his tupuna (ancestor) Ani Waaka. Finally thanks to Associate Prof. Aroha Harris and Dr. Felicity Barnes for their ongoing supervision and support.
