June 14, 2016
Island launch for Auckland Matariki
Auckland Council is teaming up with Ngati Paoa to launch Matariki on Waiheke Island, where distance from the city should allow a better view of the seven stars coming over the pre-dawn horizon.
Mayor Len Brown says he first became aware of the importance of the midwinter event to Maori from his primmer four teacher Sonny Taari, but has taken a while for the rest of the country to catch up.
"Matariki is becoming the event of the middle part of our year, the time of the new plantings, the new dawn, the time Pleiades shows its seven-sistered face in the east, and it is really a month of celebration, of acknowledgement of all things Maori," he says.
The Matariki launch takes the form of a dawn karakia starting at 6am by the Mata Kupenga pou carvings at the Waiheke Library in Ostend.
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