Daily Photo – Kapukataumahaka / Mount Cargill

Long before Europeans arrived on the shores of New Zealand and set about naming everything after themselves, their friends, or somewhere they’d left behind in England, Māori already had perfectly good names for pretty much everything.

Here in Dunedin, the prominent mountain we now know as Mount Cargill was known to Kāi Tahu as Kapukataumahaka. While the name doesn’t lend itself to a neat, literal translation, it carries the meaning of a place where food was gathered, particularly where birds such as weka and kererū were hunted and snared while feeding on the berries of the kapuka, or broadleaf tree.

So, long before Mount Cargill was Mount Cargill, it was a place where people went looking for dinner. Which, when you think about it, is probably a far more useful name for a mountain.