Welcome to the home of Aotearoa Hunt Nation
Please note: This is a website dedicated to hunting wild game. There are images of animal carcasses displayed on this website. If this offends you, please redirect to another website. Aotearoa Hunt Nation reserves the right to display images of animal carcasses that will be used for KAI to feed the people of our communities.
‘Haha kai rau, kai tangata’
‘Hunting of many different sources of food, a testing ground for the willing’
Our Story
In 2012 Daryn Te Uamairangi from Atene and Koroniti Marae and Chris Kumeroa (both former Military), from Parikino, Pungarehu, Koroniti, Matahiwi, Otoko Marae developed a concept of implementing a hunting and food festival programme that would kindle and foster the opportunity to have inter-generational hunting back onto Maori and other land blocks, farms within the Whanganui Region. The intent was have our older generation share knowledge of the more traditional foods gathered to those respective hunting groups and participants and would look to broaden awareness of what they are to a wider ethnic audience and event goers. This would be a key driver in developing a simple community marae based project that would effectively bring people back to the marae and onto the whenua and support a fund raising activity.
In previous years, the process has been well received and driven by the host marae for the marae. Local hunting groups and general public, including Maori trusts and Maori Incorporations, have placed huge weight and support into the effort and this has been the main thrust to continue and develop for further use across the Whanganui Iwi and perhaps the motu (country).
Sponsors played a significant part of providing product and cash for raising funds for the marae, this would include hunting gear, food product to be sold at the event at stall locations and much more. In essence Event Management Team promoted their associated sponsor brands and products at the event to aid in building sustainable and meaningful relationship for both parties in the future.
Print and television media contributed locally and regionally to the overall exposure of the event and enabled sponsorship mileage and generally increased coverage for regional tourism. Hunting Aotearoa covered the pilot event at Atene in 2013 and it went nation- wide on Maori Television with a number of celebrities making their way for the event, which included; Neil Waka (TV One Presenter), Brendon Pongia (Good morning Breakfast host), Shane Cameron (Former NZ Heavyweight), Matua Parkinson (Hunting Aotearoa Presenter). This year Hunters Club (Choice TV) will provide coverage but at a later date with Chris Kumeroa on one of the blocks as part of driving local tourism allowing for some mileage of the various and wonderful landscapes of the region. Local print media, such as the Whanganui Chronicle, Te Putake provided wonderful exposure for the event leading up to and during the entire programme.
The Parikino Marae Steering Committee (PMSC) had a number of sponsors that came to the party with both product and cash. This included large to small cash injections from various Government and non-Government entities, Incorporations and local enterprise. Products were far and wide and really bought about awareness of the key local supporters in our community. We had a grand total of nine thousand dollars ($9k) worth of prizes to give away with two and a half thousand dollars’ worth of cash to top up it all up for the hunting groups.
One our greatest challenges for any event of this type, particularly with the use of firearms and Department of Conservation Land, farming areas that will be in use during hunting; is managing the risk associated with these types of events. Farming alone has recently come into the limelight because of the industry’s challenging risks and large quantities of incidents. There has been increasing pressure from Government and public sector around hazard and hazard management. This is largely driven by a wide range of accidents that occur within the industry. Firearms has also had its fair share of mediacoverage, public outrage and a lot of pressure groups, looking to place further control measures around firearms use, distribution and management. The implementation of the new and revised version of the Health and Safety Law will mean that executives of large land owner groups will own these such risks and the liability will sit squarely on their shoulders. For long periods, people have been able to apportion blame for an incident as operator negligence, or unserviceable gear etc; but as at 4 April 2016, this will no longer be the case and the Steering Committee saw this as a recipe for disasters for our entire stakeholder group, if provisions were not in place to manage it. There was a special focus on the ensuring we maintained some visibility on what that looked like and worked hard at staying abreast of this new legislation. A comprehensive Safety Management Plan was developed and implemented to decrease any form of exposure.
Excerpt taken from the Post Event Report | Whanganui Hunting Competition & Food Festival 29 April – 1 May 2016 written by Chris Kumeroa
The Hiruharama Whanganui River Hunting & Food Festival Competition 2017 has now finished. The 2018 event will be held at Paraweka marae, Pipiriki.
