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Tamaki is a suburb of the city of Auckland, in the North Island of New Zealand. It is located in the east of the city, 11 kilometres from the city centre, by the banks of the estuarial Tamaki River, which is a southern arm of the Hauraki Gulf. The suburb is between the suburbs of Point England to the north and Panmure to the south.
Volcano
To the west of the suburb is Mount Wellington, a 137-metre volcanic peak which is part of the Auckland Volcanic Field, and which was formed by an eruption around 9,000 years ago.
Robert Muldoon
For many years, Tamaki's most famous resident was the somewhat volcanic Prime Minister of New Zealand Robert Muldoon, who was Member of Parliament for the Tamaki electorate (which included parts of several adjoining suburbs, mostly north and north-west) from 1960 until 1991.
Related names
By a quirk of geographical naming, the suburb of East Tamaki is located several kilometres to the south of Tamaki.
The name Tamaki is of contested origin. It is an ancient Polynesian word for battle; it can also mean full of people, i.e., heavily populated - an ironic possibility given that the Maori name of the heavily populated Auckland isthmus in Maori is Tamaki-makau-rau. A third possible origin of the names is Ta-Maki, meaning successful attack by Maki, which was the name of a local tribal chief.
The name has become a surname. See, for example, Brian Tamaki of the Destiny Church.
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