Matakana

Since I only have Keith's photos, I'll show you Matakana, a little town in the middle of nowhere, an hour's drive to the north of Auckland:

Keith took these!

I never understand why Keith takes the photos he takes. Mind you, he can never understand why I take the ones I take either, but whatever!  And maybe, if Keith can explain what he's done to make me once again lose my photographs, AND UNDO IT!!!!, I'll be able to add a few of mine to this post.

However, what makes Matakana so interesting, apart from a terrific public toilet, is the big snit-fest happening there at the moment. 

What's going on is that Auckland yuppies, tired of the rat race and after a Sea-Change/Mountain-Change/Tree-Change, have started moving in in great numbers because here, what with sea, mountains and jungle, plus a very large dose of The Scenic, they get all three in one and so are now building million dollar "batches" and getting very uppity indeed with the locals.

The latest stosh is that they want the name Matakana pronounced differently.  Rather than simply Ma-ta-ka-na they want it to be Mah-tah-kah-nah, because they think the broader "A" with a longer elide sounds more ... sophisticated?  The local Maori thankfully think they're all a bunch of pretentious tossers and insist they sod off and leave the name alone. And I'm with them on this one!

But isn't the name Matakana fascinating, although you undoubtedly have to speak Fijian to think so.  And if you don't speak Fijian, to us it means "eye food" and, although eyes were, once upon a time, considered a great delicacy, it's such a bizarre name for a place they'd never ever use it. However, as we know, Maori is 5000 year old Fijian, so I couldn't work out what on earth this name meant to them; if perhaps this is where, once upon a time, Maoris ate eyeballs, or something like that, and somehow thought it was a very fine name for a place.

Because there had to be a story behind it, I asked Lois what Matakana meant in Maori and she said it was "sentry post". It seems that Matakana was once the spot where the Northern Maori had guard posts watching out for land and sea attacks by the Southern Maori.

So, isn't that very, very interesting:  in 5000 years the Fijian words "eye food" turned into the Maori "place to watch out for attack", which, when you think about it, is probably pretty much the same thing and the language hasn't really changed that much at all.