By Sorrel Hoskin
Mrs Hayward couldn't believe her eyes. There, chatting among a group of old Māori women on Whakatāne's bustling main street was a white woman.
Dressed in black with a fair complexion, large light blue eyes and snowy white hair the diminutive woman stood out among the sea of colourfully dressed kuia.
Even more startling was the woman's resemblance to her own mother - could this woman be a relation?
She remembered the story of her mother's missing sister who was taken from the family half a century before. Could this be her? She stopped to ask, but the woman, Hera Ngoungou, couldn't remember her origins.
Mrs Hayward wrote away to her mother, living in Lower Hutt. She rushed to Whakatāne with her brother to meet the white woman who lived among the Māori.
Their sister Caroline Perrett had fallen on a hot fire grate as a small child. If this woman was Caroline she would have a scar on her neck and one below her left breast.
Shyly Hera Ngoungou showed them the white mark on her neck, then lifted her top to reveal to her sister the little scar on her chest.
It was 1926. Caroline Perrett had been "missing" for 52 years.
A kidnapping
So what happened to Caroline? How had she seemingly disappeared off the edge of the world for 52 years?
The "truth" about Caroline's disappearance is cloudy. Stories, all plausible, pop out of the woodwork.
In 1874 her father William Perrett, a contractor for the new railway line, had ignored a tapu on a Māori burial ground at Sentry Hill and dug up the site to move the bones to a new area.
He had been cautioned by local Māori not to tamper with their dead. Trouble would come to his family, they warned.
Caroline came from a large family - her mother had just had her fifteenth child. They lived on a smallholding at Manutahi (Lepperton). William picked up extra income as a contractor for the railway.
Just days after he began work on the Sentry Hill site the eight-year-old Caroline (known by her family as Queenie) was sent out to fetch the cows in for the evening milking. She didn't come back.
Another story puts Queenie's kidnapping down to utu (revenge) - six year-old Ngatau Omahuru, later William Fox, had been taken from his family and put into European society in 1868.
Or did the little fair skinned girl just appeal to the Māori who took her away?
A little European "pet" to bring up in Māori ways may have been an attraction.
The last person to see Queenie was Dick Bridle, a bushman who had been splitting posts in a lonely clearing about three miles away from the Perrett homestead. The small blue-eyed blonde girl was standing on a log, crying bitterly, surrounded by a cluster of Māori. They caught sight of the approaching bushman and disappeared into the bush with the girl.
Queenie's family, local farmers and the armed constabulary searched for days. The surrounding bush echoed her name, called over and over again by desperate voices. But the bush revealed no secrets - Queenie had been spirited away.
Queenie's mother Mary Anne was heartbroken.
Rumours and false alarms
William Perrett and his sons continued the search by following up any rumour, though many were false alarms or malicious. They often left their farming work to comb the King Country in a fruitless search for the little girl. The weeks turned to months, and the months to years, but still Queenie was kept just out of reach of her searchers.
A Daily News column from 1960 gives a rather farfetched account of a meeting in 1889 between a "Mr Peacock" who had lost his daughter when he was working on the railway 10 years before and a group of surveyors who had just returned from the upper Whanganui River. It holds just enough truth to be plausible:
"They casually mentioned they had seen a white girl living with the Māori.
Eagerly the old man asked if the surveyors could take two of his sons to see the girl. A man named Cox agreed to take them.
It took a week, up rivers and through bush to reach the settlement where the girl had been seen.
And there they found her, an unmistakable Pakeha, and across her neck, the burn scar received as a toddler!
The difficulty was to talk to the girl, for the women of the settlement were shy and modest and jealous of their charge. The men discovered the girl had no recollection of her former life - or English.
Speaking in Māori, Cox introduced the rough bearded young men with him as the woman's brothers.
'My brothers!' she exclaimed in Māori with an incredulous laugh. 'Not these ugly men!' Her reaction was plainly one of disgust. She darted away like a frightened bird.
The brothers and their guide sat down and considered the position. She certainly wouldn't go home with them willingly. The girl was obviously happy and had forgotten about her European family. They decided to explain the situation to their father who would surely understand.
But the journey out gave them time for consideration. 'Father would never agree that she be left here.' They realised that he, a recent convert to the Salvation Army, would never agree that she could be better off in heathen ignorance.
To get her out would take the Armed Constabulary and maybe, the war all over again!
So they told their father a lie - which they did and regretted always - or risk a military incident which, even if successful, would, in their opinion, have ruined their sisters happiness.
'So we told our old man it was not our sister,' young Peacock related to Cox when they met 40 years later. 'We told him she was a half-caste.'"
This story puts Queenie in the upper reaches of the Whanganui River.
Years later, at the opposite end of the island, Queenie's sister Mary Ann was nursing in Northland when she met a surveyor named Coxhead. He described meeting a young white woman who had been splitting wood not far from a pā. When he tried to question her she had been called away by a group of Māori. Coxhead remembered seeing a scar on the woman's neck.
The search was renewed and a reward of £150 offered for information. But no-one came forward.
The search for Queenie became an obsession for William Perrett. He believed that by ignoring the tapu on the burial ground he had lost both his daughter and his wife. Although he married again, William Perrett was a broken man. In 1898 he was bludgeoned to death on his own doorstep (by an unknown assailant) dying without seeing his daughter again.
Caroline's story
After her discovery in 1926 Queenie became a national sensation. Stories, many of them false, popped up in newspapers around the country about the woman who had lived as a Māori for 52 years. What European society couldn't understand was - why did she want to remain a "Māori" when "civilisation" was awaiting her?
In 1929 Queenie was interviewed by a reporter from The Sun newspaper in Auckland. She told him the compelling story of her extraordinary life.
The resulting manuscript is a tale of life worlds away from the one she had been taken from. A tale of hardship, courage, bravery and friendship. A copy of the full manuscript is available at Puke Ariki.
"My memory is very indistinct, because I have worked hard and passed through great troubles, so I must be excused if there are things I cannot tell.
"My first conscious memories begin from the time when, as a small girl, I was digging (kauri) gum with a band of wandering Māoris in the Kaipara district.
I could not speak Māori then, so it must have been shortly after I was kidnapped."
Ignored by most of the tribe, Māori who had been drawn together from around the North Island to dig gum, Queenie was taken under the wings of several women.
They taught her Māori and looked after her, putting her to work with their children in the gum fields..
"Every morning at day break, I used to go out with a spade and spear and dig until sunset…in the evening we sat in the camp and scraped the gum."
Sacks of gum were carried 16 kilomtres to the nearest shop and sold, the money used to buy bags of flour which the children carried back to camp.
"As to clothes, I got just enough to keep me covered and no more. Print dresses ready made were what I usually wore. Boots I never saw at all. In fact, it was not until my second marriage that I wore boots."
Eventually she made friends and became part of the tribe, thinking of herself as Māori.
She married again at age 20 and moved south with her husband, Ngoungou Hikitene, leaving her daughter behind with family up north. She and Ngoungou farmed land at Poroporo near Whakatāne.
They had seven children. Through contact with local settlers Queenie regained her English. She wasn't asked about her origins or why she came to be among the Māori. So it came as a big shock when her European family appeared.
"It was news to me… that I am Caroline Perrett who was kidnapped from Lepperton, Taranaki 55 years ago... It seems so incredible to me that I can scarcely grasp it yet. In my mind however, I am Māori. I think as they think, just as I have always lived their life outwardly. All my interests and friends are Māori, and my children also. So why should I seek to change my life now?
Was I happy with the Māoris? Well when I look back over my long life with them I think I can say yes. Hard work has roughened my body, but it has strengthened me inwardly. I know what trouble is, and I know what it is to fight and endure in the face of tremendous difficulties... I might feel out of place among the Pakehas, for their ways are not my ways, and it's too late to change my habits now."
Caroline's blood family: Queenie's brothers are in the front row - John (left) and William (right).
Image: Ngoungou family collection
Sarah kept in touch with her long lost family, but never left her beloved Poroporo. She died at her home in July 1943 aged 78.