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| Kororipo Pa |
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The terraced pa site, Kororipo, that encloses and shelters the Kerikeri basin was doubtless once a stockaded fortress but not in European times. When the missionaries lived here in the early 1820's, it was the site of an unfortified village where some of Hongi Hika and Rewa's people lived.
Hongi Hika and Rewa were chiefs of the hapu, Ngai Tawake, part of the confederation of tribes that called themselves Ngapuhi. Their main area of occupation was at Te Waimate, Kerikeri was on the perimeter of their tribal land. It was their seaport, the place where they came to fish, to collect shellfish and keep their canoes.
According to a tribal history, 'The Puriri Trees Are Laughing' by Jeffrey Sissons, Wiremu Wi Hongi and Pat Hohepa, this desirable area formerly belonged to another tribe, Ngati Miru who had probably lived here for centuries till they were attacked and driven away by Ngapuhi. This occurred in the time of Hongi Hika's grandfather, a chief called Auha who built a pa called Te Waha-o-teriri (mouth of war) which, it is believed, was the old name for Kororipo. After the conquest and subsequent division of the land, Ngai Tawake acquired Kerikeri and a related hapu Ngati Rehia, had the area on the north side of the inlet from Rangitane and across to Takou Bay. From that time, about 1770's, Ngapuhi carried on an intermittent war with the people on the south side of the Bay of Islands, Ngare Raumati finally defeating them in 1826 and taking over most of their land. Until the early 1900's, a little monument to these forgotten wars existed in the channel near the basin in the shape of a protruding rock, known as Te Karu-o-te-Tawheta, where, it was said, the head of a defeated Ngare Raumati chief, Tawheta, was impaled, c 1800. Unfortunately it was knocked off by a careless scow.
Hongi Hika and his people left Kerikeri to live at Whangaroa at the end of 1826 and Hongi Hika, after being wounded in battle there in early 1827, died in 1828. In 1830, Rewa and his people also moved away from Kerikeri to live at Kororareka (Russell) and other places on the shore of the Bay of Islands to be nearer the shipping and Kororipo was deserted.
Rewa sold seven acres of the pa-site to James Kemp in 1831 to be part of his farm and in 1838 the remaining six acres were sold by two sons of Hongi Hika, Hongi and Puru, also to James Kemp. This six acres was presented to the nation by E.S. Little in the 1950's.
Today it is a historic reserve administered by the Department of Conservation.
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