Friends Committee member Richard Norman embarked on our Taranaki & Tongariro Tour, which took place November 11 -16, and shares his thoughts on joining the Friends tour with us below!

Taranaki’s spectacular scenery was enhanced with insights on geography, history and economics from tour leader Richard Willis, Senior Associate with the School of Geography, Environment, and Earth Sciences. Richard has in-depth knowledge and a wealth of stories about Taranaki because of running field trips for university students and personal experience of growing up on a 100-acre dairy farm in the 1950s.

The farm site, near Manaia and Hawera, is now part the production station for gas from the offshore Kupe field. In the 1950s there were about 100 dairy factories in Taranaki, each the centre of small communities and close to the farms. Since 1992, there has been just the one factory, near Hawera. A short distance from the Willis family farm are spectacular sea cliffs alongside the Kapuni stream, where Taranaki iwi created pa defences which enabled them to retain their land against invading iwi from the North during the ‘musket wars’ of the 1820 and 1830s.

Tourism has become a significant new industry, with a major focus on the volcanic mountain known as Taranaki, instead of Egmont. The new Manganui Gorge suspension bridge near Stratford, symbolises this shift in the Taranaki economy.

A stay at the Whangamōmona hotel on the ‘Forgotten World’ highway between Stratford and Taumaranui highlighted the economic change in hilly land opened up by a rail line built between 1900 and the 1930s which is now used for rail cart tours.

From bush to farm, petro-chemical industries with an uncertain future and tourism, Taranaki provides a dramatic illustration of the impact of humans on Aotearoa / New Zealand’s short human history.