Beneath the Long White Cloud

In 1886, a massive volcanic eruption in New Zealand destroyed the Pink and White Terraces, “a pair of huge, silica sinter cascades, formed when the discharge from centuries-old hot springs tumbled down a hill.” At least, that’s what people always assumed. But did the terraces, sometimes called the Eighth Wonder of the World, actually survive? A feud has erupted over this question, pitting scientists against one another. In Now Voyager, a new magazine, veteran longform writer Sean Williams tells the story of the terraces and shows how it’s intertwined with the ongoing movement to protect Indigenous rights in New Zealand:

To local tribes, the scientists’ battle recalled pākehā fighting over access to Indigenous land—one of the oldest stories in New Zealand’s history. And when the country’s conservation minister, Eugenie Sage, travelled to Rotomahana to announce she would protect the area “for all New Zealanders,” the phrase alone raised alarm bells in the region’s many marae, where residents would gather to discuss news. 

“We were here before all of New Zealand,” Tipene Marr, a Ngāti Rangitihi spokesman, told me. Māori are thought to have arrived on the islands around the late thirteenth century, more than three hundred years before Dutch cartographers dubbed them “Nieuw Zeeland” after one of their domestic provinces. Sage “was only really concerned about keeping this area open for all New Zealanders.” Some politicians even mulled an underwater walkway where Kiwis could see one of their greatest natural treasures. It sounded a lot like the plans tabled by colonial leaders in the 1880s, and not a lot like much had changed, legally or culturally, in the intervening decades.