On a personal note, I spent a short part of my childhood living near the shores of Lake Tarawera, looking across to Mount Tarawera, and I travelled on the school bus past the gates of the very village every day. The stories of the approximately 110 lives that were lost and the villages that were destroyed when Mount Tarawera erupted in 1886 made a deep impression on me as a child, as did the stories of what preceded that and what happened afterwards.