Calder: Skies and heads hang low as taonga farewelled

The farewelling had barely let up through the night as hundreds moved through the park and across the slopes for their last glimpse of the city's most famous and most visible tree.

But the 100 or so who gathered before dawn on the summit of the mountain known variously as Maungakiekie and One Tree Hill were weighed down by the sombre sense of occasion.

The sky, a grey dome of low and heavy cloud, glowing faintly with the reflected lights of the suburbs below, seemed to hang its head as well.

The 20m Monterey pine, mortally wounded by two chainsaw attacks in 1994 and 1999, seemed to sag, dragged down by the steel cables tethering it. A wind, laced with drizzle in the darkness, reminded us of how tenuous the tree's link now was to the land that had nourished it for a century and a quarter.

The keening, hypnotic chant of the karakia had started soon after 5 am. Among the mourners as the last rites were read, Maori faces predominated, most with eyes lowered.

Elderly kuia and kaumatua were wrapped in blankets or overcoats against the cold. In one hand was an intricately carved ceremonial tokotoko (walking stick), in another a taiaha (spear) topped with a feather, tokens of respect at the tangi of a great and wounded warrior.

Yet if there was bitterness against Mike Smith, whose 1994 attack on the tree to draw attention to Maori grievances had been the first toll of the pine's death knell, it was referred to only obliquely. As light seeped through the cloud and night became day, as we stood to preside over a death, the talk was of new life.

"We've walked some rough roads, you and I," Orakei kaumatua Takutai Wikiriwhi told the assembly, "but I'm sure that together we can make a better tomorrow."

Auckland mayor Christine Fletcher was similarly determined to ensure that the morning belonged to those who had come to take part in it.

She saluted a place where we had "come to frolic as children, or as teenagers when our mothers didn't want us to."

She drew our attention to the fact that, at the foot of the wounded trunk, new seedlings had taken root, small symbols of the new relationships we could and should celebrate. The television lights moved across the face of the crowd as voices murmured the Lord's Prayer.

In that atmosphere, the short, sharp speech by a young man wanting to call attention to the present-day destruction of rimu forest for "toilet seats and bookcases" seemed oddly out of place.

No one shouted the intrusion down - everyone had been invited to speak and the inclusive etiquette of the marae prevailed - but there was only a reluctant smattering of supporting voices for his concluding waiata.

The same sentiment had, in any event, been expressed earlier, more subtly and poetically by Te Warena Taua, who described himself as "from Tamakimakaurau [Auckland]" and who had reminded us that "the tree has bled as our hearts have bled" at the slaughter of native forest.

Pakeha voices were conspicuously silent but Pita Turei, a Treaty of Waitangi claims researcher, filled the gap, standing boldly on the paved edge of John Logan Campbell's grave and saluting the "pakeha fella" whose legacy had been the summit obelisk as the monument to what he believed was a dying race.

"There was a time I used to spit on his grave," he told us. But yesterday he stood to speak in his honour.

Ceremony over, the summit was cleared for the workmen to move in.

Yet as we made our way down the road, the uphill stream continued, of joggers with dogs, of mothers with pushchairs shrouded against the rain, of the curious and thoughtful, the angry and the sad.

No one seemed to want it to end. But it did, yesterday. To the accompaniment of a helicopter's chatter and rumbling crane, one of the symbols of the city's past was lowered to the ground.

The future, which starts today, may be for us all to write.

Herald Online feature: Tree on the hill

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