Kurangaituku
[5][2] Contemporary writers Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Whiti Hereaka have both retold versions of the story from Kurangaituku's perspective.
[10][11][9] Te Awekotuku's tale focuses on Kurangaituku's creative and nurturing nature, including through providing her home as a refuge for birds and other creatures.
[10][12] Hatupatu was the youngest of a family of brothers said to have arrived in New Zealand on the ancestral waka (canoe) of Arawa, and who lived on Mokoia Island in the centre of Lake Rotorua.
[13] In some versions of the tale, the young Hatupatu is hunting for birds in the forest when he encounters Kurangaituku, described as having wings on her arms, claws instead of fingers and a beak instead of a human mouth.
[5][2] One day while Kurangaituku is out hunting, Hatupatu uses her taiaha (traditional weapon) to destroy her pet lizards and birds and steals her treasured korowai (feather cloaks).
[19] In a 1966 version published by Harry Dansey in bilingual magazine Te Ao Hou / The New World, Hatupatu was described as the slave of Kurangaituku who had intentionally killed her pet birds out of mischief.
[18][21] One of the birds (which a number of versions of the tale describe as a riroriro)[13][6][22][17] is able to escape and tell Kurangaituku, who returns and chases Hatupatu through the forest.
[4] Elsdon Best, in Maori Religion and Mythology Part 2 (published posthumously in 1982), related a version of the tale he had collected in which Hatupatu meets Hine-ingoingo and does not realise she is a turehu (supernatural being).
[18] Best comments that Hatupatu "seems to have made but a poor return for the kindness displayed towards him by Hine-ingoingo, and he also appears to have left her to do all work in the collecting of food supplies.
[26] In 1980 Hone Tuwhare translated a version of the legend from the Māori language, and his notes (held by the Alexander Turnbull Library) record that he and his family used to stop at this rock and leave coins.
[37][38] Since the 1990s Rotorua's Travel Centre has featured a mixed media collaborative artwork depicting Kurangaituku designed by Ata Armstrong and created by local women.
[40] In a review for The Pantograph Punch, Ariana Tikao notes that the structure "is much like Māori oratory – not linear, but existing in different times, cycles, and spaces all at once, then looping back on itself".
[42][43][44] The name originates from a 1 m (3 ft 3 in) tall trophy depicting Kurangaituku carved out of a totara tree by Pine Taiapa and used since the tournament began.
