The Great New Zealand Road Trip: Life in one of New Zealand’s most isolated villages, Te Hāpua

The NZ Herald-MTF Great New Zealand Road Trip is under way - for two weeks, editor at large Shayne Currie is travelling the length of the country to meet extraordinary New Zealanders and to uncover great stories from our communities. Today, we visit one of the country’s most isolated villages - while we also meet one of our most experienced road trippers, who shares nine hidden gems, and we catch up with fishing TV legend Matt Watson for our daily 9 Questions.

A lone, white horse strolls down the waterfront road, holding up the sole car with its city slicker. Cows also roam freely. There’s not a human in sight. This is life at the very end of the line.

Down a dusty, corrugated 10km gravel road off State Highway 1 near Cape Rēinga – to a small protected harbour – this is Te Hāpua, one of New Zealand’s most isolated settlements, likely the most isolated in the North Island.

Population: Approximately 200. Marae: 1. Church: 1. Schools: 1. Shops: 0.

Tranquillity: Off the scale.

Te Hāpua sits 421km from Auckland – a five-hour-plus drive on pock-marked highways, many of them suffering from a lack of maintenance.

It is the first stop, after Cape Rēinga, on the first leg of this year’s NZ Herald-MTF Great New Zealand Road Trip – a two-week journey weaving our way south through New Zealand.

As more than 35,000 people marched on the hīkoi to Parliament yesterday, there was not a soul on the waterfront road in Te Hāpua.

I knocked on a door; the man who answered ushered me to his neighbour’s house. There I met “Mama” Jewel Sucich and her daughter Eileena.

Mama Jewel Sucich, 85, has lived in Te Hāpua for 65 years.

Over a cup of tea, Mama Jewel, 85, explained her incredible life story – she’s lived in Te Hāpua for 65 years, since 1959. “When I first came here, I went gum digging, my husband was still digging gum and selling gum because his father was a gum seller.”

She was there in 1975 when Dame Whina Cooper led the famous land march from Te Hāpua. She walked with her, briefly, then returned to the kitchen where she had been working to clean up.

A van-full of locals left on Monday to join the hīkoi in Wellington. But here, today, over a cup of tea, the conversation steers away from politics.

“We are blessed, this is paradise,” says Eileena, who returned home to Te Hāpua from Australia several years ago to look after her mum.

“Everybody knows everybody, the kids are safe, they walk down the road, they play everywhere like we used to do when we were children. You know, when Mum and Dad could leave us. They knew that we were riding horses or swimming or out there, but we were safe.

″We know who all the children are and who they belong to. Our tamariki [children] are awesome here. They are so respectful and so beautiful.”

Road Trip Leg 1

The local primary school, Te Hāpua School, has a roll of 22. The secondary school kids have to travel two hours to Kaitāia on the bus each day, and another two hours back. That’s how the internet came to Te Hāpua – Kaitāia College introduced some e-learning several years ago.

“Life up here is simple,” says the school’s deputy principal, Kevin Low. “You don’t have to keep up with the Joneses. Everything is fine.”

If you need groceries or other shops, that’s also a journey to Kaitāia, slightly quicker in a car but still an hour and a half away.

But locals are always looking out for each other, sharing kaimoana (seafood) and meat from their hunting expeditions.

For the mainly Māori population – most of them Ngāti Kuri – fishing is an important recreational and economic contributor. Te Hāpua has restricted outside boats coming in for now, because of the dangers of the invasive caulerpa seaweed. It spreads quickly, forming undersea fields.

“It can compete with other species for space and upset the balance of local ecosystems,” says the Ministry for Primary Industries. “This presents a risk to recreational, cultural, and commercial marine activities.”

Writer Paula Morris wrote beautifully in 2022 of visiting Te Hāpua. “There’s a profound tranquillity, something close to peace.”

She had been there as part of her research into the life of Matiu Rata, perhaps Te Hāpua’s most famous son. The former Labour Party Māori Lands Minister and Māori Affairs Minister was born here 90 years ago. He was a devout member of the Rātana Church, an ordained minister, and he was buried here, in his robes, in 1997 after his death from injuries suffered in a car accident.

Victoria Brown, originally from Te Hāpua, now lives just up the road, on State Highway 1. One of our northernmost residents.

She’s been back in the region for the past 20 or so years – another who answered the call of home – and is helping project-manage an iwi incentive programme to help couples own their own homes. Over the next two years, they hope to help some 40-plus families. “It’s bringing whānau back into their own land.”

Her husband Abbey looks after the Cape Rēinga grounds and several campsites in the Far North, including the Tapotupotu campground.

He and others also work as voluntary emergency personnel.

“It’s a lot of work but because everyone loves the place, they will do whatever it takes to protect it, and the people,” says Victoria Brown. “We don’t have neighbours, it’s private but everyone is family. Everyone looks after each other.”

Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor