Earlier this year, Ngā Iwi o Taranaki and the Crown initialled the historic Te Ruruku Pūtakerongo, Taranaki Collective Redress Deed. The deal officially changes the mountain’s name from Mt Egmont/Taranaki to Taranaki Maunga. The national park’s peaks, regarded as tūpuna by Māori, will jointly become a legal person named Te Kāhui Tupua. The national park will also be renamed – Te-Papa-Kura-o-Taranaki, meaning ‘the highly regarded and treasured lands of Taranaki’.
Taranaki Maunga was taken in 1865 as part of the confiscation of 1.2 million hectares of Māori land for the ‘rebellion’ of the Taranaki Wars.
The process of renaming the park requires formalities that could take up to two years more. But to all intents and purposes, the name change has already occurred.
So, to help socialise the park’s new name, Wilderness will consign the name Egmont National Park to the archives and in future refer to it as Te-Papa-Kura-o-Taranaki.
It is important to embrace these name changes. They go some way towards righting wrongs and connect all New Zealanders to an iconic mountain in a way that ‘Egmont’ simply never could.
DOC’s Dave Rogers talks about these changes and much more in the feature ‘Walking in two worlds’, on page 46. Among the other changes he discusses is the way visitors to the park are no longer doing multi-day trips.
“The bulk of our park visitors now are short-stop travellers at the road ends,” he says. “The three/four day tramp is history; a long trip for them is probably an overnighter.”
That seems to have led to an underinvestment in some park infrastructure. In recent years, the focus has been on the one-day Taranaki Crossing, touted as an alternative to the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. Meanwhile, the Round the Mountain circuit has fallen into disrepair and is under a long-term closure due to large slips.
It’s important to acknowledge the changing use of an area just as much as changing names. But losing access to a multi-day circuit in Te-Papa-Kura-o-Taranaki is a blow to those who want to immerse themselves for more than a few hours in the wilderness.
