One sunny morning last summer, Hazel Nash invited us on a Whanganui River expedition. The ethereal Whanganui River; first in the world to be granted legal personhood; admired by so very many travellers by road, by foot, by water craft, subject of David Young’s Woven By Water: Histories from the Whanganui River.
Woven By Water recalls a time, in living memory, when the river bed was clean stone and the water tasted like kowhai.
It tells the tales of many river people - a 'hidden' prophet, living with over a thousand followers at a place now deserted; a Pakeha-Māori making gunpowder using charcoal made from willows grown from cuttings taken from Napoleon's grave; a riverboat magnate building a fiefdom on 'the Rhine of Māoriland'; arsenic and flour poisoners - and always, the river itself.
