Hoturoa Statue
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The statue here is Hoturoa and he was the captain of the Tainui waka. He is carved in a Tahitian style to represent the fact that there was no kind of indigenous New Zealand art; they were all from the islands. And so all these plants are the plants that we here natively when the waka began arriving. Lots of these native plants were used as foods or textiles, or other kinds of useful things by the early Maori. They discovered that these plants had medicinal uses or you could eat them.