Geologist believes natural hazards hidden in Maori mythology

FUTURE flood, quake and eruption clues are hidden in Maori tales of giant lizards and taniwha, a geologist suggests.

Auckland researcher Dan Hikuroa became sure indigenous legends, known as purakau, held vital information needed by natural hazard planners after learning of the disastrous Matata flash floods in 2005.

The Bay of Plenty town received more than 300 millimetres of rain in a day, causing a landslide and destroying houses and roads. But Matata’s three marae were unscathed.

Hikuroa was visiting the town when he heard about a local legend of a giant lizard with a flicking tail.

‘‘The lizard is the stream, or resides in the stream, and its head is in the headwaters and the tributaries are its limbs. And the tail starts where the [Waitepuru] stream enters the flat plain.

‘‘When you get floods, it

naturally through centuries and millennia would flick from side to side and that was the tail,’’ the Nga Pae o te Maramatanga research director said.

Hikuroa planned to examine other purakau for concealed natural hazard observations. Other scientists had looked into Maori oral histories for records such as tsunami, though Hikuroa would be broadly looking for observations of earthquakes, eruptions and flash floods.

After the Christchurch quakes it was noted how reluctant Maori had been to settle in pre-European swamplands around the city.

One Wellington legend Hikuroa thought might be a record of past natural disasters was the tale taniwha Ngake and Whataitai.

‘‘It talks about Wellington Harbour being a lake and then one of the taniwha decides he has had enough, can hear the ocean out there and smell it . . . Ngake bashes his way out, forms the opening to the harbour. Whataitai is not so keen, but pines for his

of friend and decides to do it as well.

‘‘But he doesn’t make it and becomes the land that is Whataitai [or Hataitai], the low-lying area that is the airport.

‘‘If I was to sit down with the local people, I’d be thinking . . . it might well be seismic activity or a tsunami, if you’ve got water rushing in,’’ he said.