Do You Know …
Manawatū?
North Island, New Zealand
The Shape of the Place
A river that went the wrong way, and a gap that the wind found first
The Manawatū is flat in the middle and mountainous at both margins — the Ruahine Range to the east, the Tararua Range to the south — and at first glance it seems a straightforward enough piece of country. Plains, sheep, dairy farms, wind. What geography textbooks call “typical lowland pastoral.”
Then you look at the river.
The Manawatū River rises on the eastern flank of the Ruahine Range, which is to say on the inland, Hawke’s Bay side. It ought, by any sensible reading of the terrain, to flow east into Hawke’s Bay. Instead it turns west, cuts directly through the Ruahine Range via a steep-sided gorge — the Manawatū Gorge — crosses the plains, and empties into the Tasman Sea on the opposite coast. It is the only river in New Zealand to do this: to start on one side of the main dividing range and finish on the other. Geologists will tell you the range actually rose around the river, which had been flowing there for longer than the mountains — an arrangement that tends to make a person feel briefly vertiginous about geological time.
The gorge that resulted became the critical land crossing between the lower North Island’s east and west. For centuries Māori passed through it in waka; from the 1840s Europeans began to follow. A bridle track in 1867, a carriage road in 1872, and then the slow argument about how to keep that road open against a hillside that was perpetually trying to close it. In April 2017, a slip closed the road for good. A new route on a different alignment finally opened in 2025 — over 150 years after the first track was cut.
The geography has one further gift. Between the Tararua and Ruahine Ranges there is a lower saddle, and the prevailing westerlies, which blow hard across New Zealand’s latitude, funnel through this gap with particular force. Wind speeds at turbine height on those ridges average around ten metres per second — a figure that compares favourably with the best wind sites in California. Both flanks of the gorge are now lined with turbines, and on any clear day you can count dozens of them from the plains below, turning slowly against the green hills.
The Name
What happens when you follow someone else’s heartache across the landscape
The name comes from a song — a waiata about an ancestor named Haunui-a-Nanaia who was not, it must be said, on a pleasant errand. He had set out from Taranaki in pursuit of his wife and her lover, tracking them south. As he went he crossed and named rivers: Whanganui (the expansive mouth), Whangaehu (cloudy waters), Turakina (so swift he felled a tree to cross it). When he finally came to the river that would bear the region’s name, he stopped. His heart stilled at the sight of it, either from fear or from something larger that he did not name.
There is a useful honesty in this. The Manawatū was not named by surveyors or committees. It was named by a man in the middle of something difficult, who paused at a river and left that pause behind him in the language. A thousand years of subsequent settlement have not shifted the word.
The region’s Māori history reaches back to Whātonga, one of three chiefs on the Kurahaupo waka, whose arrival predates European contact by several centuries. Whātonga paddled the Manawatū River upstream and, from a high vantage on the Tararua Range, looked down at the vast forests and called them Te Tapere Nui o Whātonga — the great food basket of Whātonga. The district that filled a man’s heart with wonder at one end of its history, and stilled another man’s heart with dread at the other, kept both names.
People
Farmers, satirists, a disgraced prime minister, and the unluckiest racing driver in history
He arrived in the Manawatū in 1866 carrying more baggage than most settlers manage. Monrad had been Prime Minister of Denmark when the country was defeated in the Second Schleswig War by Prussia and Austria in 1864, losing roughly a third of its territory. The humiliation was profound enough that he emigrated — not to a comfortable exile in some European capital, but to a bush block at Karere, near the future site of Palmerston North, where he set about clearing trees with his family and five young Danish farmhands. He built what was likely the first European house in inland Manawatū, established the first dairy operation in the region, and spent his evenings working on a new Danish translation of the Bible. He returned to Denmark in 1869. His sons stayed. The art collection he left behind is now held at Te Papa Tongarewa. His countrymen, inspired by his example, would soon be arriving in their hundreds to clear the rest of the bush.
The son of a sheep farmer from Bulls, Amon learned to drive at the age of six on the family farm, was racing competitively at sixteen, and by nineteen was driving in Formula One. By the late 1960s he was Ferrari’s lead driver — the only New Zealander ever to hold that position — and was widely considered one of the finest natural talents in the sport. He started 96 grands prix. He won none of them. Fuel pumps failed, transmissions seized, engines expired. Jackie Stewart called him one of the most skilful and natural drivers ever to race in Formula One. Mario Andretti delivered the line that followed Amon for the rest of his life: “If Chris Amon was an undertaker, no one would die.” He won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966 alongside Bruce McLaren, won the 1969 Tasman Series, and retired to his family farm in New Zealand in 1976. He had simply seen enough people killed. The racing circuit at Feilding now bears his name.
Ball was born in Feilding in 1939, the son of an All Black. He drew cartoons for the Manawatū Times while hoping someone would notice him and put him in the All Blacks instead — which very nearly happened. When cartooning won out, he moved to Scotland, then London, where his Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero ran in Punch for over a decade. In 1976 he created Footrot Flats: a sheep dog called Dog, a farmer called Wal, a Northern Manawatū farm that never quite existed and somehow represented everything that did. The strip ran until 1994 in more than 120 newspapers worldwide, sold six million copies in book form, and spawned both an animated film and a stage musical. Ball quit it in the end because he felt he had made himself into a spokesman for a version of rural New Zealand that the Rogernomics era had already destroyed. He was furious about that and said so in interviews. He died with Alzheimer’s in 2017 at the age of 78. He never revealed the Dog’s name. Not once, in twenty years, and not in the twenty-three years after.
Clarke grew up cycling between Palmerston North and outlying towns like Bunnythorpe, absorbing the cadences of farming uncles who could say anything in a particular intonation and make it funny without telling a joke. In the early 1970s he turned this into a character: Fred Dagg, black singlet, gumboots, crumpled hat, seven sons all called Trevor. Dagg was a mockery of the Kiwi bloke and a celebration of him simultaneously, and the country could not get enough. Fred Dagg’s Greatest Hits (1975) was one of New Zealand’s best-selling records of the decade. In 1977 Clarke moved to Australia, where his satirical range expanded considerably. He wrote for The Games, collaborated with Sam Neill, and for years appeared in deadpan political sketch interviews with Bryan Dawe. He died on a bush walk in Victoria in 2017, aged 68. The last public service he rendered Palmerston North was suggesting they name the city landfill after John Cleese.
Place Names
Some informative, some accidental, one the result of a feud
- Bunnythorpe Village between Palmerston North and Feilding The name has no particular story attached to it — it was simply chosen for a small settlement on the Manawatū Plains and has been quietly extraordinary ever since. In 1904, a company called Joseph Nathan and Sons set up a dried-milk factory here to process surplus dairy milk. The product was originally called Defiance, then renamed Glaxo — from lacto, because the name Lacto was already taken. Sold under the slogan “Glaxo builds bonnie babies,” it grew into one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. GlaxoSmithKline, with revenues in the tens of billions, traces its entire existence to a factory in a village of 740 people. The Glaxo sign is still visible on the building, which is now a car repair shop.
- Dannevirke & Norsewood Tararua District, on the Manawatū fringe Named by the New Zealand government for the Scandinavian settlers who cleared the Seventy Mile Bush in the 1870s. Dannevirke commemorates the Danevirke, the ancient Danish earthwork in Schleswig; Norsewood simply advertises its founders’ origins. The settlers were recruited after Bishop Monrad’s family demonstrated that Scandinavians could clear heavy bush efficiently. At least one Polish immigrant — a man named Jan Iskierka, travelling from Hamburg — listed himself as Danish on the passenger manifest in order to qualify for the free passage. He went on to clear bush in the Manawatū alongside the genuine Scandinavians and nobody seems to have minded.
- Feilding 20 km north of Palmerston North Named after Colonel William Henry Adelbert Feilding — note the spelling, which differs from the word and from the novelist — who negotiated the purchase of 100,000 acres of Manawatū land in 1871 on behalf of the Emigrants’ and Colonists’ Aid Corporation, chaired by the Duke of Manchester. The first settlers arrived in 1874 aboard the Duke of Edinburgh, mostly working-class English families who found the bush considerably denser than the brochure had implied. The town has since won New Zealand’s Most Beautiful Town award sixteen times, runs a livestock saleyard in its centre every Friday that has been called one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, and produces, on its outskirts, approximately half the world’s supply of bovine serum albumin.
- Mt. Cleese Awapuni Resource Recovery Park, Palmerston North In 2005, John Cleese visited Palmerston North during his “My Life, Times and Current Medical Problems” tour and subsequently described it as “the suicide capital of New Zealand.” The city’s mayor suggested he might need medication. About eighteen months later, in 2007, the city quietly installed a sign renaming a landfill mound “Mt. Cleese.” The suggestion had come from John Clarke, who had proposed calling it the “John Cleese Memorial Tip — All Manner of Crap Happily Recycled.” A shorter version prevailed. “We’re all backing off from the responsibility,” said the city’s water and waste manager. Eric Idle, on a later tour, climbed the mound and surprised Cleese by playing footage of the expedition at their show that night.
- Papaioea The Māori name for the site of Palmerston North A trader named Charles Hartly, passing through in 1846, noted the crumbling remains of a Rangitāne stockade on a clearing surrounded by white pine, matai, rimu and totara. The township that replaced it was called Palmerston, then Palmerston North when someone noticed there was already a Palmerston in the South Island. Now usually called Palmy. Papaioea — which roughly translates as a place of much glittering water — has had a quieter career.
Songs & Signs
A waiata, a product slogan, a gumboot song, and a landfill sign
The region has produced an unusual density of lines that have entered the language. Some from waiata, some from advertising, some from comedy that turned out to be the most accurate description available.
Ka tatū e hine ko Manawatū
(The heart stills, girl — this is the Manawatū)
— Opening line of the waiata from which the region takes its name; the song of Haunui-a-Nanaia naming the river during his search for his wife
Glaxo builds bonnie babies
— Advertising slogan for the dried-milk baby food produced at Bunnythorpe from 1904; ancestor of one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. The word “Glaxo” was derived from “lacto” because “Lacto” was already taken.
Gumboots they are wonderful, gumboots they are swell
‘Cause they keep out the water, and they keep in the smell
And when you’re sittin’ round at home, you can always tell
When one of the Trevs has taken off his gumboots
— John Clarke as Fred Dagg, The Gumboot Song, 1975. Dagg’s seven sons were all called Trevor. Fred Dagg’s Greatest Hits was among the highest-selling debut records by a New Zealand artist until Lorde.
Mt. Cleese
The full version, as proposed by John Clarke: “John Cleese Memorial Tip — All Manner of Crap Happily Recycled.” The shorter form was chosen. Nobody admitted to making the sign.
Road closed 2017. River still flowing. Mountains still rising. A new road will be built when we find somewhere the hill won’t follow us.
Did You Know?
Things that happened here that you wouldn’t necessarily expect
- The Manawatū River is the only river in New Zealand that rises on one side of the main dividing range and reaches the sea on the other — not because it found a gap, but because it was there before the mountains were, and simply kept going as the range pushed upward around it.
- New Zealand’s first commercial airline, Union Airways — the forerunner of the National Airways Corporation — began operations at Milson Airport, Palmerston North, in 1936. The Manawatū Aero Club, founded in 1928, had been lobbying to make the region a major air terminal. It worked.
- Bishop Ditlev Monrad — former Prime Minister of Denmark — settled in the Manawatū in 1866 and spent three years clearing bush at Karere. His dairy operation is considered the first in the region. The art collection he left behind is now in Te Papa. He returned to Denmark in 1869; New Zealand apparently did not give him cause to stay longer.
- The name Glaxo — as in GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s ten largest pharmaceutical companies — was coined at a factory in Bunnythorpe. The product was first called Defiance Dried Milk, renamed Glaxo when someone noticed the name derived nicely from lacto. The Glaxo sign is still on the building. No heritage plaque. No visitor centre. Just the sign.
- The first government-assisted Scandinavian immigrants arrived in the Manawatū in February 1871. Among those who followed was a Polish immigrant named Jan Iskierka who listed himself as Danish on the passenger manifest in order to qualify for free passage. He cleared Manawatū bush alongside Danes and Norwegians and the record does not indicate whether anyone noticed.
- Chris Amon, raised on a sheep farm near Bulls in the Manawatū, started 96 Formula One grand prix races and won none of them. He won Le Mans, he won the Tasman Series, he led races in Spain, Belgium, France, Canada, and Britain — and retired from each of them with mechanical failure. He recommended his successor at Ferrari. That successor was Gilles Villeneuve.
- Murray Ball never revealed the name of the Dog in Footrot Flats. Not during the strip’s eighteen-year run, not in the twenty-three years after he stopped drawing it, and not at any point before his death in 2017. His family have maintained the silence. A species of crab was named Flatsia walcoochorum after Wal and Cooch in 1991. The Dog received no taxonomic commemoration.
- Feilding has won New Zealand’s Most Beautiful Town award sixteen times. A factory on its outskirts, owned by an Iowa company called Proliant, produces approximately half the world’s bovine serum albumin — a substance used in vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and medical research. These two facts coexist without apparent friction.
- In 2003, Palmerston North City Library issued more materials than any other public library in New Zealand, ranking second only to Wellington in visitor numbers. The city John Cleese described as the suicide capital of New Zealand was, that year, its most active library town.
- The Te Āpiti wind farm on the Ruahine Range, opened in 2004, was the first wind farm in New Zealand to connect directly to the national grid. The Manawatū Gorge creates what wind engineers describe as an exceptional funnel effect. The site ranks with the best wind resources in the world. The gorge was doing this long before anyone thought to put turbines on it.
Sources: Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand; Manawatū Heritage (Palmerston North City Library); DigitalNZ; Engineering New Zealand; Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; NZ on Screen; RNZ; NZ Herald; Autosport; GSK plc corporate history; Meridian Energy; Footrot Flats Ltd.