Rarotonga / Mount Smart

This guide to Rarotonga, also called Mount Smart, in Auckland traces an 87-metre volcanic cone that once rose here, not eroded but quarried away over almost a century. It follows the mountain's Maori names, Rarotonga and Te Ipu Kura a Maki, the pa terraced into its slopes by Tainui descendants, its 1840 renaming by surveyor Felton Mathew, and the crews who worked its scoria from 1865 into the 1960s. Picture the crater once at its summit as you listen, long before any of this ground was hollowed out.