He Aitaka a Tāne

Today it is difficult to think of life without bread, but before European grain crops were introduced to Aotearoa, our tīpuna looked up into the forest canopy for a staple food source to fill their bellies.

Hīnau is one of the taller canopy trees of our native forests, growing to 15–20 metres. It produces a prolific crop of purplish berries the size and shape of olives that fall to the ground in summer and autumn.

Explorer William Colenso rated this tree as the third most important plant food source for Māori before the arrival of European grain crops.

If wild pigs did not find hīnau berries that had fallen to the forest floor first, our tīpuna collected them by the bushel, apparently in vast quantities.

Most sources suggest the flesh of hīnau berries is harsh and bitter in its raw state and was only rendered edible by being soaked in water, sometimes for lengthy periods.

Some references suggest it was the kernel that was used for food, but author Andrew Crowe says most authorities on traditional Māori food practices agree it was the flesh of the berry that was processed into a type of hīnau bread, while the hard kernels were removed and discarded.

The berries were covered with water in a wooden trough and left to soak, sometimes for months according to some sources. The pulp was rubbed by hand to separate the flesh from the stones, skins and stalks.

The resulting meal, called wai haro, was very oily and easily digestible which made it a nourishing tonic for anyone recuperating from an illness.

It was heated by dropping a hot stone in the dish and consumed as a liquid, or as gruel.

To make hīnau bread, the water was strained off and the coarse meal was sieved and shaped into a cake that was wrapped in leaves of rangiora or mouka fern to enhance the flavour. It was then baked in an umu for anything from a couple of hours to a couple of days, depending on the size of the loaf.

Various historical reports suggest hīnau bread had a texture like a dried linseed poultice, looked and tasted like dark brown bread with a slightly acidic flavour and, according to one source, was “far from disagreeable”.

Sometimes the loaf was made with honey. It kept well in storage and must have satisfied a traveller’s hunger because it was often carried by Māori on long journeys.

It was a highly prized food source and was often used for barter or in a formal exchange of gifts between villages.

Scientists say hīnau berries are a good source of essential fatty acids that are regarded as protective against cardiovascular disease.

The hīnau tree is found throughout Aotearoa between sea level and about 600 metres of altitude but it does not grow naturally on Rakiura.

Hīnau leaves are 8–15cm long and 2–3cm wide, with a toothed edge. Its delicate white bell-shaped flowers are about 8–12mm in diameter, and hang in clusters from branch tips in spring. The reddish purple fruit are up to 18mm long with a hard kernel like an olive.

Traditionally hīnau had a range of domestic uses, the most notable being the use of its versatile bark in dyeing fabric made from harakeke. It was also used for staining timber, and in the manufacture of a black pigment for tattooing.

In Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Māori, Herries Beattie describes the practice of pounding and breaking up hīnau bark, or the closely related pōkākā bark (both are listed separately in the Ngāi Tahu taonga species list) and soaking them in water to release a cream or pale yellow dye pigment.

The muka, whītau or kākahu made from harakeke fibre were then soaked in hīnau or pōkākā juice for a day, but the brown dye did not set permanently until it was soaked in paruparu pango (black mud) from a swamp for another two days.

This double treatment was essential to render the bright durable black colour permanent, as neither process would work without the other, Beattie’s sources told him. The fibre or garment was then washed and dried in the sun to fix the dye permanently.

A similar process was used to blacken the prow and sternposts of a waka by soaking them in hīnau dye for two nights, and then in a paruparu swamp for a night. The timber was then smeared with oil or grease to fix the colour permanently.

Hīnau bark was useful as small water carriers, or for making large bags for the preparation of bread from raupō pollen.

Eel pots of a type known as paka or kaitara were made from harakeke and the bark of tōtara, miro, hīnau or other such trees.

Hīnau bark is a powerful astringent. It was boiled in water and skin disorders, rashes and inflammations were bathed with the solution. A hot bath in a decoction of hīnau bark was said to cure the severest skin diseases, Murdoch Riley writes in Māori Healing and Herbal.

For tattooing, soot was wetted with plant sap, or the water in which hīnau bark had been steeped and was rolled into balls for future use. These balls were sometimes buried or wrapped in a kiore or tūī skin to stop them drying out, according to ethnographer Elsdon Best.

Best says Ngāi Tūhoe sources told him a gummy substance exuded from the hīnau tree was added to the pigment to prevent the moko fading.

Timber from hīnau is similar to tawa, with a strong tough grain that was traditionally used by Māori for palisades and small implements, such as spears and canoe bailers.

Young saplings were so flexible they could be tied into a knot and later cut, dried and shaped for use as walking sticks.

The grain of hīnau wood ranges in colour from pale off-white to dull brown. The whitish wood is less durable than the darker heartwood, known as black hīnau.

In more recent years, better grades of this timber have been used for housing, bridges, boats, cabinet-making, motor bodies and even runners for Antarctic sleds.

Hīnau is not the most conspicuous of our native trees but spring is a good time to identify it by its delicate bell-shaped flowers, or its prolific crop of olive-like berries in summer and autumn.

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