Ultimately Marion Chase-Seymour’s dream is to build a family home, with her husband Stephen, overlooking Lake Taupō and with a view across the water to Tauhara Maunga.

The house will be on a prime spot, close to the water and town.

It would be a place her seven children could come back to.

While the house is a way off yet and may be preceded by other revenue-earning options, the family celebrated a wedding over Anzac Weekend on the inherited land Chase-Seymour has spent years arranging to have partitioned.

“We wanted to do something joyous on the site,” she said of her daughter’s wedding, staged in a marquee on a cleared strip of property on one of the last large raw land areas close to Taupō.

Chase-Seymour has spent years arranging title to a 6500-square metre section of the nearly 70-hectare Paenoa Te Akau block that runs along the lake side of Acacia Bay Rd, from opposite Jarden Mile to the shops at Acacia Bay.

The process she began looking into in 1998 was finally sorted in 2015.

Her connection comes via her great-great-grandmother through her father, while her cousins next door – with whom Chase-Seymour got access to a 1.13-hectare share in 2015 and then halved – derive their land from a shared grandmother.

“Different sources but we are the same family.”

The Chase-Seymour land will be owned by her family trust and remain classed as Māori freehold land.

“Whilst it is partitioned land and looks and feels like a general title, it is still under the protection of the Te Ture Whenua Act,” she said.

The Paenoa Te Akau land block was created in 1975. Generations later, the block has 2465 owners (up from 2068 in 2015 and around 1200 in the late 1990s when Chase-Seymour and cousin Dave Davies first started looking at gaining title).

Several owners live elsewhere on the block in old houses and caravans, but there is no sewerage system or sealed roads, she said.

Chase-Seymour, who has encouraged others to do as she has, and even volunteered her time to help, said there were about half a dozen more applications for partitioning on Paenoa Te Akau before the Māori Land Court.

“A big reason why it’s worked for us is because our family got all of the people involved, kept them informed and all have the vision that they can do something. It’s their right to have this land.”

Her success had come about with the support and sacrifice of her husband and children, she said.

“And my cousin Wattie Newton who would often sit beside me in court to give me moral support.”

While she acknowledged the process had caused some contention with other landowners, she felt a sense of togetherness was forged eventually.

As she was educated and lived elsewhere, there was initial resistance.

“It was, ‘What do you know? You don’t know anything…’

“But we have come to know people more… I feel it has brought us closer together as a people. We’re able to connect as family, we are extended whānau.”

The project her family is considering first, container homes – some high-end, some cheaper accommodation – aims to keep the land pure and green. Some glamping down near the lake until their family home dream can be realised is another possibility.

Chase-Seymour is hoping work will begin around November this year.

“We are keen to do it off-grid, and it makes sense.”

She admits her offer to help others through the process has come back to bite her.

“I said email me – and they certainly did.”

But she is happy to assist.

“I help out with the paperwork, trying to find their connections. It only costs me my time …

“I have had people from all throughout the rohe, the whole of New Zealand, asking me how do I do this because there’s so much Māori land tied up in incorporations and ahu whenua trusts, and big blocks and there’s nothing happening on them.

“I think it could be really good for families. It annoys me no end to see our whānau, especially in the Taupō area, living rough, living in their cars and even the little shanty town shacks that they throw up on the land, it’s just not good.

“They all have children and babies, and it’s going to be cold soon. So I am trying to do that as much as possible and help them and there is a lot of progress, people are looking more unified and definitely more hopeful for the future for themselves anyway.”

Credit: Stuff.co.nz