“A savage hairy wildman of the bush with long bony fingers that it uses to tear its prey apart.”
Before the fences and the roads, Maori travellers in the high country knew there were places where you did not camp. The Maero are an iwi-atua — a supernatural people — of New Zealand tradition: wild men of the woods, covered in dark hair, powerfully built, armed with stone clubs and with long, bony fingers ending in nails sharp enough to serve as blades. They kill, and they eat what they kill.
Unlike the patupaiarehe, the mist-dwelling fairy folk with whom they share the ranges, Maero are mostly solitary and wholly hostile. Tradition places them in the mountains and forests of the South Island and the Tararua Range, with a northern cousin remembered in the name of the Moehau Range on the Coromandel — country that remains, even now, some of the least-visited in New Zealand.
The Legend
The Maero's rage has a genealogy. Tradition holds that they harbour anger toward the Maori, who arrived from Hawaiki and displaced them, ruining the tapu — the sacredness — of their homes and driving them into the inhospitable alpine margins. Their violence is not appetite alone; it is grievance. They kidnap men and women, fight to the death, and grant no quarter in their own country.
One Whanganui story, recorded by Walter Gudgeon in 1906, shows what killing one costs. The warrior Tukoio met a maero and cut it apart — limbs, then head — and carried the head home as proof. The head began to call out. Tukoio dropped it and fled, and the maero reassembled itself and retreated into the forest. The bush, the story warns, repairs its own.
The Record
Written documentation begins early in the colonial period: the missionary Richard Taylor set down wild-man traditions in 1848, and the ethnographer James Cowan later gathered accounts of the maero and the related mohoao — one description telling of a very tall, horrible-looking man with long yellow hair and teeth like down-bent tusks at the corners of his mouth.
Nineteenth-century scholars took the beings seriously as data. Edward Tregear raised the possibility that maero, maeroero and mohoao traditions preserved memory of a pre-Maori people pushed into the mountains, though he leaned toward a psychological origin for such demons of the waste places. The debate — folk memory or universal nightmare — has never been settled.
The Lore
The Maero belongs to a family of hairy wildman traditions that circles the entire Pacific, and New Zealand's version is distinguished by its bitterness: this is a wildman with a land claim. Its lore encodes real advice — the high bush is dangerous, the back country does not forgive, and some ridges are better left unclimbed after dark.
On the Coromandel, the old name outlived the old belief. The Moehau Range lends its name to the 'Moehau Man', a modern cryptid of ape-like sightings in the peninsula's forests that borrows the maero's territory if not its mana. Between ancient iwi-atua and modern bigfoot analogue, the hairy figure in the New Zealand bush has never entirely gone away.
Field Notes
- ✦ Said to wield their long, bony fingers like blades, and to carry stone clubs.
- ✦ The Moehau Range on the Coromandel lends its name to one regional version — and to the modern 'Moehau Man' cryptid.
- ✦ Stories portray them as displaced first dwellers of the forest, nursing anger at those who broke the tapu of their homes.
- ✦ In a Whanganui tale recorded by Gudgeon in 1906, a dismembered maero reassembled itself and escaped the warrior Tukoio.
- ✦ Wild-man traditions were documented by Richard Taylor (1848), James Cowan, and debated by Edward Tregear.
Case File
- Classification
- Wild forest-dwelling being
- Category
- Humanoid/Wildman
- Territory
- Forests and mountains, especially the South Island and Coromandel
- First Sighted
- Māori oral tradition
- Habitat
- Dense forest and remote mountain country
- Reported Size
- Roughly human-sized but powerfully built
- Also Known As
- Mohoao · Moehau