The History of the Māori Rock Carvings
The Ngātoroirangi carvings at Mine Bay are modern, not ancient — begun because a grandmother asked. Who Matahi Brightwell was, how the site was found, and what the figures mean.
The Māori rock carvings at Mine Bay are not ancient. They were finished in 1980, sculpted over four years by master carver Matahi Brightwell and four assistants. Visitors often sound faintly deflated when they learn this, and they are wrong to be: the story of why the carving exists is better than the one they had assumed.
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It started because a grandmother asked
Matahi Brightwell’s grandmother, Te Huatahi Susie Gilbert, asked him to create a likeness of her ancestor Ngātoroirangi — on a tōtara tree, so that her family would have a permanent connection to the land.
He could not find a suitable tōtara anywhere near Taupō. The commission might reasonably have died there. Instead, while out paddling on the lake, he came across a rock alcove at Mine Bay — a cliff face rising straight out of deep water on the western shore — and understood that he had found something better than a tree.
The detail worth sitting with is that he was in a small boat when he found it. Everyone who visits the carvings arrives the same way he did, because there is no other way.
Who Matahi Brightwell was
Brightwell is described as one of the last traditional marae-taught carvers — tohunga whakairo — in New Zealand, trained in the old way rather than at an art school. He had completed a ten-year apprenticeship with Māori elders before beginning the work.
He is also a 27th-generation descendant of Ngātoroirangi. He was not carving a historical figure he had read about; he was carving his own ancestor, at his grandmother’s request, in a place he found himself.
Four artists worked with him: Jono Randell, Te Miringa Hohaia, Dave Hegglun and Steve Myhre. The work took four summers and was completed in 1980.
Who Ngātoroirangi was
Ngātoroirangi was a navigator and tohunga who guided the Tūwharetoa and Te Arawa people to the Taupō region more than a thousand years ago — the ancestor through whom those iwi trace their arrival and their claim to this land.
He is a figure associated with fire and with the volcanoes south of the lake, and carving him facing the water of Taupō, reachable only by water, is a deliberate placement rather than a convenient one.
What is actually on the rock
Most photographs show one face and crop everything else out. There is more there.
Ngātoroirangi himself is the main figure, rising roughly 14 metres above the water. The scale is the first thing that surprises people — from a boat deck you are looking almost vertically upward.
Tupuna and kaitiaki. Smaller carvings surround him depicting tupuna (ancestors) and kaitiaki (guardians) pivotal to the history of the local iwi.
Two Celtic figures. Brightwell also carved two smaller figures of Celtic design, in recognition of the cross-cultural nature of modern New Zealand. They depict the south wind, and Ngātoroirangi stopping the south wind from freezing him.
That last pairing is the one people miss most often, and it is worth asking your skipper to point out — it is the moment the carving stops being a single monumental face and becomes a composition with a story running through it.
So how old are they, really?
Forty-six years old as of 2026, and unfinished business from a thousand years before that.
The objection that they are “not real” because they are modern does not survive contact with the site. A thousand-year-old carving in that position would have eroded to nothing long ago — the rock spends its life being hit by lake water. What exists instead is a major work of contemporary Māori art, made by a direct descendant of its subject, using traditional training, because a woman asked her grandson for a link between her family and the land.
Seeing it for yourself
The carvings remain reachable only by boat. Six trips go: motor cruises of 90 minutes and two hours, three sailing trips of 2.5 hours, and a four-hour guided kayak tour that arrives the way Brightwell did.
If you want the story told properly on the day, the trips with live commentary are the Chris Jolly scenic cruise, Ernest Kemp’s lakefront cruise and the classical sailing trip, whose crew are singled out in reviews for exactly this.
How to get there → · Which trip suits you → · What is at Mine Bay →
See Ngātoroirangi the Only Way You Can
Fourteen metres of carved rock, no road, no track, no viewing platform. Free cancellation up to 24 hours before you sail.
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