'The Fairies of Moehau', translated and edited by Margaret Orbell, published in 1968
Fairies, or patupaiarehe, were said to be much like human beings, but with white skins and red hair. They lived on the mountain tops. Most of the time they could not be seen, though sometimes on a misty day a tohunga might catch a glimpse of them. One of the places most frequented by the fairies was Moehau, the high mountain at Cape Colville on the Coromandel Peninsula. Edward Tregear, in his book The Maori Race (p. 523), tells us that Moehau was so sacred to the fairies that few people dared approach it, but that ‘those who did so had wonderful stories to relate of seeing fairy-forts made of interlaced supplejack, and of finding plantations of gourds. If anyone attempted to lift one of these gourds it was found to be too heavy to move’. John White says that the fairies' pa were in dense forest on the heights of the mountain, and that no man could make a way through the woven supplejack that surrounded them ( Journal of the Polynesian Society , vol. 33, p. 211). The mountai...
