Our History

The Ramanui Family

Aoturoa Tamati Ramanui was born in 1868 at Whakatane and moved to Mangatangi with his wife and six children in about 1922.

Aoturoa Tamati’s sister married a great Maori chief named Te Kooti and Aoturoa was one of his few body guards. He settled on a farm at Mangatangi now owned by Messrs. Henry Bros. and Edgar Smith and later in 1927 moved across the road to the farm now owned by Graeme Yern. Aoturoa had a family of seven children altogether, one dying at a very early age and two others at five and seven years old. The others were Peter Tamati, Joe Hokari, Annie and Mac Rotohiko. Annie and Mac both went to Mangatangi School.

My father, Joe Hokari Ramanui, was born in 1906 and took over the Monument Road farm from his father who died in l962. He had nine children altogether. Three from his first marriage and six from his second marriage. Many will remember his second wife, Polly. My sister Joyce (Mrs. Stephens) and myself, Wally Ramanui, remain from the first marriage, while Murline (Mrs. Karipa), Maywin (Mrs. Seymour), Glenda (Mrs. Tuhoro), Gloria (Mrs. Simmonds), Wayne and Tom Ramanui are all from the second Marriage.

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ramanui landscape

I took over the farm from my father after he passed away in l962, and continued to farm until I sold it to Yern in l970. The family maintains an urupu on the old farm in Monument Rd.

I now live at Mangere with my wife, Charlotte, and our three sons, Takawai and the twins Joseph and Riki. They all attended Dilworth School.

Rotohiko, known as Mac, lived with his brother Joe and family and he worked at the Cunningham Brothers coal mine for 21 years. Mac remembers as a small boy collecting kauri gum which was sold at a shop somewhere on the hills near the Findlay farm at Miranda. A profitable sideline, fetching 2/6 ~3/- a pound.

Wally Ramanui,

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