Alfred Warbrick: His Brave Rescue Attempts

Ngāti Rangitihi

Guide Alfred Warbrick, a grandson of Mokonuiarangi of Ngāti Rangitihi, saw the great eruption of Tarawera from a bush hut on his ancestral lands.

“As I watched that sacred burial mountain of our ancestors rent asunder, throwing forth its flames and rocks, I thought of my mother who had been laid to rest in a cave on its shoulder and of the innumerable dead whose last home was shattered and hurled aloft in that fearful blast.”

He set out to help where he could and on 14 June, after lowering a whaleboat and skiff down a cliff of mud, he led a party of nine people across the lake to discover the fate of the people living in the small kāinga of Te Ariki and Moura.

They arrived at Moura to find near-liquid mud totally covering the place. They were very shocked at the scene but kept going, despite the mud, to Te Ariki to try and help. They landed there in the late afternoon only to find that the village had completely disappeared.

At the same time, a different party of Ngāti Rangitihi, from the Rangitaiki plains, had set off in the direction of Rotomahana and they met up with Warbrick’s party near Te Ariki. The two parties shared great shock and grief at all they had seen.

Some time after the eruption, Alfred was asked to lead a party into the Rotomahana area, where the famous Pink and White Terraces had been, to see what had become of them. Along with a reporter from the Auckland Evening Star, he was lowered by rope into a sulphur-filled pit to try and locate the lost terraces. He thought he could just make out the Pink Terrace under some mud, but the ground was too unstable for their investigation to go on. The terraces have remained buried ever since.

In the years after the eruption, Alfred became well-known as a guide, taking groups of people to the ravaged landscape of Tarawera and through Waimangu Valley, but again witnessed the terrible force of nature when he watched on helplessly as his brother (the legendary rugby player Joe Warbrick) and three other people were killed by the Waimangu Geyser in 1903.

Alfred Patchett Warbrick passed away aged 80 in 1940 after having been part of some of the most extraordinary events in New Zealand’s history.

This story comes from the original Great Te Arawa Stories website created by Ngā Pūmanawa e Waru (NPeW) Education Trust in 2018. To ensure consistency, minimal updates were made to the text before it was transferred to this new site.