Kaipakopako Road

Kaipakopako Road runs off Ninia Road in Paraite, east of the Bell Block industrial area. The road was named after Kaipakopako Pā which once stood beside Mangaoraka Stream.

The pā consisted of defensive earthworks heavily fortified by palisades. It is famous for being occupied by Te Waitere Kātātore, a chief of the Puketapu hapū of Te Ātiawa. As archaeologist Alistair Gordon Buist (1920-1999) put it, by the middle of the 1850s, when the Pākehā population of New Plymouth was growing rapidly and settlers were hungry for more land, the hapu was “divided into land-sellers under the chief Rāwiri Waiaua and anti-sellers led by… Kātātore”.

On 3 August 1854 a party of 26 Puketapu men, under the command of Rāwiri Waiaua, were out cutting boundary lines to define a block of land they proposed to sell when they were attacked by Kātātore and a group of like-minded hapū members strongly opposed to more sales. Rāwiri was wounded and died three days later in the Colonial Hospital. His brother Pāora and three others were also killed, with the inter-tribal conflict dubbed the Puketapu Feud.

Tensions between factions continued. Kātātore was eventually ambushed and shot dead on 9 January 1858 near Bell Block, on the orders of Īhāia Te Kirikūmara. A high-ranking chief of the Otarāua hapū of Te Ātiawa, Īhāia was an ally of the slain Rāwiri. Kātātore was buried in the urupā at Kaipakopako but his death did nothing to prevent a wider war breaking out in Taranaki over the issue of land in 1860.

Despite its fraught past, the old pā site and its associated road later became known for sporting triumphs. Horse races were held there in the 1890s and in 1914 the mile-long Kaipakopako Bicycle Handicap was raced along the road as part of an annual Māori Sports Day, organised by the West Coast Māori Sports Club. In the 1920s the North Taranaki Hunt Pack held regular hare hunts at Kaipakopako. And Kaipakopako Tennis Club was formed by a group of young Māori men and women in 1932. After three years of planning and fundraising, courts were constructed along with a “punga pavilion” that the Taranaki Daily News described in 1933 as “very cosy”.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.