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A spirited Waitomo clan have filled their lives with art and adventure, exploring every nook and cranny of their region and sharing some of its best bits with visitors

WORDS JANE WARWICK P HOTOGRAPHS TESSA CHR ISP

A Waitomo farming family has explored every nook and cranny of their region and now shares the best bits with visitors

NEARLY 60 YEARS ago, Ann Jago visited New Zealand after her tour as a member of the English Women’s Cricket team. Little did she know then that a Kiwi farmer would bowl her over and that she would eventually go into bat for three children. She had even less idea that those children would go rambling in a subterranean playground with moa bones as their playtime props — if she even knew what a moa was.

She knows now. She knows about moa, extinct giant penguins, prehistoric shark’s teeth, incredible giant snails, how to spell speleology and not to panic when her children go bouldering or when they disappear into the bush with torches. She also understands that there are teeny-tiny native orchids that get her stoic husband, Alister, all misty-eyed. She knows without a doubt that in a country that is spoilt with fabled terrain, she has landed somewhere special in Waitomo in the King Country.

Her daughter, Biddy Stubbs and sons, Angus and Ben Stubbs, know, too. How could they not when every way they turn the Waitomo landscape — with rolling hectares of bush on top and pockmarked limestone below — fans out beneath them? It’s a backdrop that rearranges every hour — this way under the sun, the other in the rain; here in the breeze, there in that.

And in the very beginning, did the first Stubbs on this land, Hugh, who took over as farm manager in 1914, realize what a treasure it was? When he arrived, the paddocks were littered with felled trees. The surname “Stubbs” is purported to come from the Anglo-Saxon for an area covered by tree stumps, so perhaps such a landscape, from deep in the mists of his DNA, was not so abstract? But more than 100 years later, with the Stubbs family now owners of the land and not employees upon it, the sweeping hectares of deep Aotearoa-green foliage prove that slash and burn has long gone.

If the landscape is remarkable, what lies underneath is even more extraordinary. A network of limestone caves echoes and drips beneath the farm and throughout the district. Although known to Ngāti Maniapoto, the caves were unexplored by iwi. Then, in 1887, rangatira Tāne Tinorau and English surveyor Fred Mace braved the maw of the most well-known cave, Waitomo (after which the district is named), and journeyed deep into the cavern on a flax raft, their path lit only by candlelight.

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2022-09-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thisnzlife.pressreader.com/article/281603834281850

NZ Lifestyle Magazine Group