Wairau Bar

...

this is a winery owned, um, and operated by a long-standing Maori family who, uh, chronicle their... who trace their genealogy to some of the first, uh, voyages and first landings in New Zealand, and one of those was in the far north, but one of them was actually in Marlborough by the Wairau Bar, which is when we... in... there's a region of Marlborough called the Wairau Valley.

And if you go-

Mm-hmm

... out to the coast, there's a, a sandbar called the Wairau Bar.

This was where some of the first Pacific settlers landed, and this is where Te Pa makes some of its wine from this area, and they make some Pinot out there, but they really have some of their Sauvignon Blancs.

So they have one, I think their seaside Sauvignon Blanc grows right on this kind of sandbar, like a stone's throw from the Cook Strait, from the, from the ocean, and it's salty and vivacious and energetic, and you, you taste the wind and the sea in these wines.

He thanked Francis Turner for access to Otago University specimens.

Roger Duff of Canterbury Museum supplied a fragment from Wairau Bar in Marlborough.

Those acknowledgments show a network behind the work: field localities, laboratories, and collections, with pieces of stone moving between people who could ask different questions of them.

Nor does their New Zealand connection mean that hydrogrossular exists only here.

More than 125 years after a Kiwi feather cloak was given away, it's finally being returned by a British museum to the iwi that made it.

The Kiwi kahu had been gifted by Ngāti Raroa and Ngāti Toa rangatira to British doctor, Dr. George Cleghorn, this was back in 1900, for the work that he'd done around Wairau Bar.

Lorraine Eade is a descendant of one of the iwi leaders and chair of the Ngāti Raroa o Te Wairau, Wairau Society, finally managed to track down the cloak, uh, in Mount Rivers Museum at Oxford University.

Lorraine joins us now.

What made you go looking for this cloak?

Um, well, we're, we're on a wee bit of a mission.

Uh, Haparita, Ori Pukahou, Merete Hiko, and a number of other rangatira from Wairau Bar provided a number of taonga to dignitaries, um, in those early years, um, from, uh, um, around about 1890 all the way through to 1930.

Mm.

A load of stone could connect people at its source with people far away, who would shape it, wear it, exchange it, or pass it on.

Tangiwai has been reported from early archaeological sites at places including Wairau Bar and Papatawai.

Raw material in museum collections also records its presence at Redcliffs and Meraki.

A piece might pass through several hands before it reached its maker.