Mana moana, mana tangata Testimonies on depletion and ...

inanga, whitebait, have all disappeared in the lower Kaituna catchment. They’ve been destroyed by the
saline, saltwater and they’ve gone further up the river and there’s not a lot when they come back in
because whitebait always seem to go back to their breeding ground. We don’t get much whitebait in
Maketu anymore.
Interviewer #1 – So a direct result is there’s no kai for the table isn’t it?’
Interviewee #27 – There’s no kai for the table
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Interviewee #27 - Maketu was well known for the kai<strong>moana</strong> and when I was young, there was more
people on that pipi bed and diving than you’ll see today and I’m, that’s really serious about that and
there was just multitudes of people here back in the ‘50s and early ‘60s and the awa and the estuary
deteriorated, saw them dropping off.
Interviewer #1 – So there’s no way you can teach the next generation lessons in relation to the estuary
because there’s nothing there.
Interviewee #27 – No, there’s nothing there. There’s nothing nice about it to talk about. When you, if I
look at the back of the estuary there, they could see what I’m talking about, the fauna and the flora that
was, they’ve all gone, disappeared. There’s an island behind the marae. It’s only half the size of what it
was. There’s an island behind that one four times bigger that completely disappeared because of the
saltwater caused the erosion. The growth of fauna died with the saltwater and the islands eroded.
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Interviewee #27 - I can remember as a young fellow the Kaituna River all the way up there, right up to, it
went as far as the Waitangi Bridge. It was magic. It was like in a different world when you left the urban
locality of Maketu at the time, which was a few hours around, but up there was like going up the, like
the Amazon River. It was magic and I recall all that and it is sand I got there now, just dead (?), dead
everything. Even the flax are dying because the saltwater goes up so far now. … not just the saltwater,
the farm effluent.
Interviewer #1 –… we’ve gone from a state of abundance down to a state of, I guess, (te kore?) isn’t it?
Nothingness?
Interviewee #27 – Nothingness.
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the Kaituna used to wind its way down to Maketu like a snake. They’ve straightened all that river out to
get rid of the water quicker and now the width of the Kaituna would have been, in the old days, some
place 10 metres, some places 15 metres, no wider than that, but used to greeny-coloured water. ... was
still abundant of flax as a young fellow. There was millions of bird life. We didn’t have to go to lengths
to get a fish or a mussel. ... My father went up there once a month because he wanted a feed on the
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