The second Kotuku Creek story Geyser in the Creek was prompted two decades later by a visit to the famous Whakarewarewa thermal wonderland at Rotorua. There was a flash entrance and a decidedly not-so-flash one. What was going on? The flash entrance was state-of-the-craft presentation, high-end international level bling, what you could call business class. I veered to the less flash entrance, the gates locked and chained, with a question for the elderly gatekeeper, how come there are the two entrances? The guide explained that the Crown had appropriated the favoured half for viewing the world-famous Pohutu Geyser.
‘The iwi,’ she sighed, ‘had to wait until the lease ran out. We have waited 95 years. We can wait another five. We are a patient people.’
I told her that my brother and I came here as children over half a century ago, when Guide Rangi was famous. We travelled from Matata, but we didn’t have to walk what was over 100 kilometres, like whanau did to help the iwi after the infamous 1886 Tarawera eruption which destroyed the Pink and White Terraces. I did not recall from my childhood any division of the geyser entrance between iwi and Crown. How come?
She shrugged sadly. I left puzzled, indignant at what seemed to me like another land grab by the Crown, and incredibly it was happening in the new millennium when there was now the mechanism for iwi to seek redress for colonial land grabs by the Crown. I stewed on the geyser situation all the way back home to my computer. Time to bring back my Kotuku village characters.
Rangi Rangihau had a critical role in the first chronicle Gold in the Creek, using the two iwi votes to save the bowling club from being sold to dodgy property developer Bob Rogers. Like his good friend former postmaster Jack Cavanagh, former stationmaster Rangi also had to fight the Crown selling off his house and the railway land at market rates neither could afford.
Geyser in the Creek opens with Rangi jolted out of his railway house bed by the earthquake that generates a geyser in the local creek. Social media and television coverage quickly spawn another invasion of this sleepy coastal village, this time by an avalanche of tourists. Among them is property developer Bob Rogers, keen to protect his illegal cash crop and exploit tourists who like to toke. His lad on the ground happens to be Rangi’s laid-back grandson Hemi, whom Bob plans to replace with more aggressive drug pushers. Bob also wants to check out for himself the media reports of the late local publican’s widow Ruby Brough running a legal brothel, with her assets on display that reputedly rivals the window ladies of Amsterdam.
Jack Cavanagh is trying to organise search and rescue for his mate Rangi, missing since the geyser appeared. Everybody else is trying to exploit the geyser traffic, including Hemi’s Rotorua cuzzie bros and Jack’s former boss, now trying to seal off the geyser viewing for the Crown. The iwi resist, building their own viewing stadium the other side of the geyser. Game on. When Jack’s grandson also goes missing near the geyser, everybody gets involved at inevitable cross purposes, none more so than the local police and bureaucrats. Once again Kotuku is in the national spotlight in a fashion that displeases the government as an election looms. Tourist gold can be just as hard to handle as the real gold discovered there a generation ago.
To the government’s horror, and despite active countermeasures, the media frenzy over iwi versus Crown could well decide the outcome of the election. The geyser is affecting much more than mere local climate change.