Love and devotion

In the Hawke’s Bay settlement of Pakipaki, the connections to the French Catholic nun Suzanne Aubert run deep

WORDS: ANN WARNOCK • IMAGERY: TOM ALLEN

A treasure trove, a hidden jewel, a pot of gold – the host of adages cannot capture the significance of a small, steeply pitched church with a soupçon of rural France in the Māori settlement of Pakipaki near Hastings. Situated a stone’s throw from Houngarea Marae – one of three marae in Pakipaki – the tiny timber ecclesiastical building is Gothic Revival in style, without a spire, bell, altar or pews.

Outside, weatherboards have LOCATION

Pakipaki is situated southwest of Hastings at the intersection of State Highways 2 and 50A.

waned. Inside, nesting swallows are having a ball.

But the dilapidated condition of the Church of the Immaculate Conception is immaterial in the face of its deep resonance within the terrain of European missionaries, Māori Catholicism and the papakāinga of Pakipaki. Constructed in 1880, the church is the oldest surviving building in New Zealand connected with the French Catholic nun Suzanne Aubert – nurse, social worker, impassioned advocate for tangata whenua, proficient speaker of te reo Māori and one of the most important women in the nation’s historical trajectory.

So momentous is Aubert’s footprint on Aotearoa that her current status is Catholic saint-inwaiting as the Vatican deliberates her canonisation.

Future glory notwithstanding, the impact of the small-framed Frenchwoman who lived alongside the people of Pakipaki from 1871 to 1883 and reputedly helped to fund the church from an inheritance received on her father’s death continues to be felt today.

“We’ve always viewed her as someone very special and, just like the church, she’s part of us and always has been. She lived in a hut not far from here and we understand she never enjoyed good health,” says Hera Ferris, Pakipaki kaumātua and chair of the Pakipaki Whare Karakia Charitable Trust.

The trust is spearheading a full-scale restoration of the church, underpinned by a recently commissioned conservation plan, as a salute to its status in New Zealand’s social and religious landscape. As part of the process, the church has attained a Category 1 listing with Heritage New Zealand.

“The importance of Mother Aubert is increasing and a growing number of pilgrims are visiting Pakipaki seeking out its deep connection with this amazing holy woman,” says trainee deacon Charles Ropitini of the Pakipaki Māori Catholic Mission.

Suzanne Aubert came to New Zealand from France with Bishop Pompallier in 1860 and initially worked among Māori in Auckland before moving south to Hawke’s Bay, where she was instrumental in re-energising the Marist Mission and growing the region’s Catholic narrative.

She later referred to her time in Hawke’s Bay as the happiest period in her life.

The construction of the Church of the Immaculate Conception on tribal land gifted by rangatira Urupene Pūhara – whose father Pūhara Hawaikirangi had been patron of the Catholic Māori Mission in Hawke’s Bay – was perceived as the culmination of Aubert’s mahi in the area.

Heritage New Zealand Heritage Advisor Central Region Kerryn Pollock says the little church reflects the dissemination of organised Western religion into Māori communities but is framed within te ao Māori.

“It captures a dynamism and openness to new ideas so evident in Māori communities, even after the hugely damaging New Zealand Wars period,” she says. “And it’s a great story of Māori agency intertwined with the incredible energy and commitment of Suzanne Aubert.” No concrete information is known about the instigator of the building of the church, and

there are no records or letters referencing its design credentials, but there is speculation that Aubert herself may have sketched its plans.

Interestingly, the church’s composition and adornments signalled nothing of her close affinity with Māoridom.

The church was devoid of indigenous elements but stamped with the influence of her homeland – French lacework and embroidery, French altar vessels and a pearl chandelier in the nave. Regardless of its decoration, the Church of the Immaculate Conception was a powerhouse of Māori-imbued Catholicism.

In 1944 it was the scene of a joyous and ground-breaking mass celebrated by New Zealand’s first-ever Māori Catholic priest,

kaumātua: elder mahi: work papakāinga: ancestral home rangatira: chief tangata whenua: people of the land te ao Māori: the Māori world

Wiremu Te Āwhitu, who’d been ordained in Napier the day before.

While the building was reconfigured over the years – its fourth lancet windows were removed to create an altar boys’ dressing room and a sacristy – its encapsulation of the essence of Suzanne Aubert remained intact and it served its community for almost 90 years. Dramatic change, however, came in 1967.

Deemed by some to be in poor condition, and further fuelled by a Vatican edict requiring a new orientation of the altar that allowed the priest to face the people during mass, the church was decommissioned and moved 40 metres west on its site to make way for a John Scottdesigned replacement (pictured left), which opened in 1968.

“It’s still a bit of a mystery as to why it all happened and who paid for the new church,” says Hera Ferris.

The interchange wasn’t without tears. Hera, who was baptised, confirmed and married, and whose four children were baptised in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, says her late father, Pakipaki kaumātua Jim Kenrick, was devastated by its closure.

“Dad thought the replacement looked like a dance hall. He was the last person to lie in state at the old church. My uncle says as Dad’s coffin was carried from the marae past the new church, it suddenly went heavy and they thought they’d drop it. Once they walked on towards the Church of the Immaculate Conception, it lightened,” says Hera.

In the late 1980s, the empty church housed a carving school for unemployed young people. A hardboard surface installed to protect the original timber floorboards remains today.

Around the same time, a huge mural depicting religious figures and the proclamation ‘Faith, Hope, Peace and Love’ was painted in the sanctuary.

While there’s no debating the jaw-dropping disparity of a fullgloss, turquoise frieze adorning a highly significant historic church, one can’t help thinking that Suzanne Aubert would nonetheless be content.

After all, distributing faith, hope, peace and love was the theme of her life and the function of the petite church she brought to life at Pakipaki. RETURN TO CONTENTS

Free spirits

Barracks built in the 1870s to house an influx of immigrants to New Zealand offer a window into the world of those new arrivals

WORDS: JAMIE DOUGLAS • IMAGERY: HERITAGE NEW ZEALAND

They might not have been students in Dunedin in the early 1870s but these ‘freshers’ in the gold-rich ‘Edinburgh of the south’ certainly knew how to party. So much so that the influx of immigrants under Premier Julius Vogel’s ambitious public works and government-subsidised immigration scheme were slated in one Otago Daily Times report in 1874 as “certified scum” for their boozy antics. Welcome to New Zealand.

The gathering place for the new arrivals, who were predominantly from England, was the former Caversham Immigration Barracks.

Completed in 1873, these barracks were a great improvement on what immigrants to Dunedin had previously endured. Prior to 1870, they had been housed on the beach in a 20-metre-long hut, with single women at one end, married couples in the middle, and single men at the other end.

That the barracks have survived is nothing short of a miracle given their use after the immigration scheme ended in 1882. They were disused for more than a decade before becoming home to the New Zealand Wax Vesta Company – a match factory… in a wooden building. The barracks then became a care facility for scarlet fever cases for a short period in the early 20th century, under the auspices of the Department of Public Health, before the building was sold to John Overend Hewton, who dismantled it to build workers’ cottages.

Hewton relocated one complete wing, however, to nearby Mornington in 1907. Today it is still in use as four apartments and is one of the few survivors of colonial architect William Clayton’s standard plan for government buildings.

Great interest remains in the stories the building’s walls could tell. The New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero report prepared for the Category 1-listed property details the efforts made

by builder Alexander Jerusalem Smyth to adhere to William Clayton’s blueprint, in keeping with 19th-century sensibilities and morals.

But while the architectural theory was nailed, it couldn’t stop the free spirit of youth, combined with a drink or two and a wilfully errant mind, from playing up a bit. As the listing report notes, with reference also to the Otago Witness newspaper: “The form of the building reflected its purpose, which was to ‘keep each class of immigrants entirely distinct from the other, and, once within the building, the chances of communication between the single men and women, for instance, is as remote as if one or other were at Timbuctoo’”. The north wing accommodated single women and the south wing single men; dormitories each contained 96 bunks. Rooms were also provided for warders, whose duty was “to enforce the regulations and suppress the joviality of the young bloods when it exceeds the bounds of propriety”.

Rowdiness was passed on to those arriving under Vogel’s updated scheme, with the Otago Daily Times describing some immigrants as “drunk and frolicsome”, with their behaviour “of the coarsest description”. “The life of the former Caversham Barracks has a rich depth to it that you can’t simply see from its appearance today, a partial version of the original LOCATION

Dunedin lies at the head of Otago Harbour on the South Island’s southeast coast.

uprooted from its first address and now in Mornington,” says former Heritage New Zealand Heritage Assessment Advisor Susan Irvine. “We often say that these places are all about the people – and with the barracks it is the people who really bring them to life on a social and historical scale.

“The architectural merit of the barracks is relatively simplistic but nonetheless very important in the overall context of why they were built and who they were built for. They certainly sent an early message to those who were destined to live in them that expenses were spared for their accommodation!”

Today’s barracks at Mornington retain their accommodation purpose, with a number of original or near-original interior features remaining.

The exterior appears much the same as it would have done 150 years or so ago and fits the listing description of an institutional building: long, narrow and rectangular, without decoration.

For Susan, here lies the true appeal of the place.

“The barracks may be a plain building, but its aesthetic is what imparts its value as an example of architect Clayton’s standard plan. Functional, temporary and a public facility – those were the key elements he designed to. A decorative flourish was not in the thinking.

“We are lucky that John Overend Hewton made few changes to the barracks at Mornington, so we can appreciate what they would have looked like originally.

“Sadly, Clayton’s plans for the barracks have not survived, but photographs clearly show his design style to be timber, twoor three-storeyed, multi-winged, of plain, rectangular form, and with a hipped roof.

“Today the barracks are very important as this section appears to be New Zealand’s last remaining structure built specifically for immigration purposes under Vogel’s public immigration scheme.”

Perhaps important enough, indeed, to raise a glass to.

RETURN TO CONTENTS