“Sweet as ” by Ray McVinnie.

Notes on the kumara or New Zealand sweet potato as a taonga or treasure. Like many Aucklanders, the people of New Zealand’s largest city, I live on the slopes of one the region’s many extinct (we hope) volcanoes, known as “Maungawhau”. Anyone who walks over these grassy cones can tell you that European New Zealanders like myself were not the first people to live here. Today Maungawhau still shows clear signs of the terraced contours and ditches that made up the defences of a traditional Maori pa or hill fort, which the area’s first inhabitants either retired to in times of war or permanently inhabited. Also evident are numerous shallow pits of great significance because many were used to store kumara- sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas). This tuber was the Maoris ’ most important food crop. Evidence of pre-European kumara gardening and storage is found over most of the North Island and the top half of the South Island of New Zealand. This paper will give a brief account of how the kumara came to be considered a taonga, or treasure, by both Maori and Pakeha (European) New Zealanders. Several conflicting scientific theories attempt to explain how the kumara came from its home in South America to eastern then western Polynesia, but it was with the Maori that it later came south to New Zealand about 1000 years ago. Transporting this tropical plant by sea in open canoes and successfully cultivating it 1000 kilometres south of anywhere it had previously grown testify to the Maoris ’ skills as cultivators. They brought other plants from their ancestral homeland of Hawaiiki, such as taro, gourd, paper mulberry tree, breadfruit, tropical cabbage tree and coconut. Most failed in New Zealand’s colder climate. Of those that survived, the kumara, taro and ya