Whakapapa Stories

What these are

Not our writing. Our documenting.

These are not stories anybody in this family made up. They are already there, in a manuscript, in land court minute books, in newspapers and in what the old people carried. What we are doing is reading them properly and setting them down so they can be found: the lineage of this family, and the whakapapa of the people who come from this part of the country.

Karen wrote sixty feet of her family’s whakapapa out by hand at a wānanga at Waikawa. Her sons have been working through it with her and putting the stories back out one at a time, into the rooms where the people they name actually lived. Waitohi. Picton. Te Awaiti. The Sounds.

Nearly every one below has already been put out, and those are reproduced here word for word as they went. The line under each title says where it went and when, or says plainly if this page is its first home. Where something could not be verified it is not in the story, and where two records disagree the story says so and leaves it open.

14 stories

From the manuscript, and the records behind it

Steven / Tēpane · Aotearoa New Zealand History, 25 August 2026 Joe Timms His great grandfather, in Joe’s own recorded words. Whaling, Gallipoli, and a man who counted himself lucky in a hospital bed. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · WAITOHI STAR 27 August, Aotearoa New Zealand History The Throat And The Belly Two men name a valley and a hill after their own child and their own body. The words are still on the road signs today. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · WAITOHI STAR, 28 August 2026 The Sacred Fire Takune Hika Mapu. Named for the rite that calls up flame, and recorded by a government survey as sole owner of forty thousand acres. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · Aotearoa New Zealand History, 28 August 2026 The Man Who Would Not Lie The compiler, and the seven separate times he refused to make his own family’s history better than it was. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · WAITOHI STAR, 29 August 2026 One Of The Eight William Keenan holds a pā with three cannon in 1832, whales at Te Awaiti for forty years, and at the end the register records his wife as two words. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · Aotearoa New Zealand History, 30 August 2026 The Four Women Behind the Chair Everyone at the 1934 presentation was named. The four Waikawa women who worked the panels were nearly not. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · Aotearoa New Zealand History, 30 August 2026 The Shark Man of Fishing Bay Oswald Te Āhuru Huntley, known as Ossie, and the working world of Cook Strait whaling. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · WAITOHI STAR and Aotearoa New Zealand History, 30 August 2026 The Woman Who Sang Tamai Rangi asks to sing a lament before they kill her. It works. And her son leaves his name on the Kaikōura coast. Read it Steven / Tēpane · WAITOHI STAR, 31 August 2026 The Woman Who Could Look Tāmairangi and Ngā Whatu, the Brothers Islands: a woman of standing, and the one person the recorded tradition says could look. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · WAITOHI STAR, 31 August 2026 The Face That Went To London Te Pehi Kupe carries his whakapapa on his face into England, sits for a painter in 1826, and is dead two years later. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · Aotearoa New Zealand History and WAITOHI STAR, 31 August 2026 The Pā That Held William Keenan, three cannon, and a pā at Ōtaka that did not fall. Read it Anthony / Āhuru · WAITOHI STAR, 1 September 2026 The Chair That Never Came Home His uncles wrote to the Queen of England to ask for their grandmother’s chair back. It is still not home. Read it Steven / Tēpane · Aotearoa New Zealand History and WAITOHI STAR, 2 September 2026 The Eye Puanaki refuses to hand his relations to Waikato, fights the man who would become the first Māori King, and loses an eye to him. 1821. Read it Karen settled it in her own hand, 23 August 2026 · first published here The Chair The 1934 presentation, and the thing nobody had noticed: three of the four women who worked the tāniko were sisters, and the fourth was their sister-in-law. One of them is Karen’s grandmother. Read it

Separate to this

The brothers’ own writing

Anthony and Steven also write their own, in their own voices, about their own lives. That is a different thing to this page and it lives on its own.

Go to the writing