Te repo

Before the drains, a great deal of this country was swamp.

The Hauraki Plains. The Waikato. Kaipara. Wairarapa. Huge repo — wetlands — that were neither land nor water, and that Pākehā settlement understood as wasteland to be got rid of. More than ninety percent of Aotearoa's wetlands are gone. Drained, ditched, converted to pasture. It is one of the largest and least discussed ecological losses in this country's history.

Hine-tīterepo is that country. The woman of the swamp. And to understand what was lost you have to understand what a repo actually was to the people living beside it.

It was a pantry. Tuna — eels — above everything: fat, abundant, and preservable, taken in hīnaki (eel trap) and in pā tuna built into the channels, timed to the maramataka (Māori lunar calendar) because the great runs happen on particular dark nights. Īnanga (whitebait). Kākahi. Watercress later on, and before that raupō (bulrush), whose pollen was collected and baked into cakes and whose roots were eaten. Kuta and kūmarahou. Birds everywhere — pūkeko (swamp hen), matuku the bittern with its booming call, and the ducks.

It was a pharmacy. Harakeke (flax) on every margin — the whole textile economy of this country came off wetland edges, and there were named varieties, cultivated deliberately, chosen for fibre or for softness or for weaving mats. Raupō for house walls. Kuta for sleeping mats. Rongoā (traditional medicine) plants throughout.

It was defence. A pā set behind a swamp is very hard to attack. Whole settlements chose their ground because of what surrounded them.

And it was an archive. This is the extraordinary one. Wetlands do not let things rot. Everything organic that went into a swamp — waka (canoe), carvings, tools, house timbers, kete (basket), whole trees — was preserved. The great carved pieces we have from centuries ago mostly came out of swamps. Kohuora, Kaitaia, Te Tāhuna. They survived because a wetland held them in the anaerobic dark and would not let them go. Even the ancient kauri (great forest tree) that people now mill for furniture came out of buried swamp.

Pantry, pharmacy, fortress, archive. And it was called wasteland.

So the loss is not only ecological. In te ao Māori a drained swamp is a dead relative, and the whakapapa that ran through it — the eels, the birds, the harakeke, the knowledge of who fished which channel and when — went with it.

There is something else in Hine-tīterepo, and it is about the in-between.

Wetlands are neither one thing nor the other. Not land you can build on, not water you can boat across. Māori thought is comfortable with that. Te ao Māori is full of thresholds — dusk and dawn, the space between the ātea and the whare (house), the time between death and burial, and the long night of Te Pō before anything took form. The in-between is not a failure to be resolved. It is where things happen.

Which means she is also the atua for the parts of your own life that are unclear. The transitions. The seasons where you cannot say what you are yet. Anyone who has been between jobs, between relationships, between one version of themselves and the next has been standing in her country.

The first step is simple, and I want you to do it properly. Find the nearest wetland or waterway to where you live — the real one, not the pretty one across town. It may be a drain. It may be the muddy edge of a park. Go and stand at it for five minutes.

Learn its name if it has one. Notice what is living in it. That is how a relative stops being a landscape.