Heritage New Zealand magazine, Kōanga Spring 2020

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Issue 158 Kōanga • Spring 2020

PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

NZ $9.95 incl.GST

TRUE COLOURS

Choosing the right shades for heritage projects

A CLASS ACT

Landmark school restored and adored

ON THE BUTTON

Telling heritage stories in the digital age

Te whakanui i ngā wāhi o

AOTEAROA

Celebrating Māori place names

Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga • Spring 2020 1

100% Kiwiana. shop.heritage.org.nz Now open online

NGĀ KŌRERO O ROTO • CONTENTS

20 Kōanga • Spring 2020 Features

Explore the List

12 Coming home

8 Change makers

Stunning hoe whakairo have become the focus of Steve Gibbs’s life and work

On an unassuming suburban Christchurch street sits the internationally significant Kate Sheppard House

16 True colours How do you go about choosing the right colour scheme with which to honour heritage buildings?

20 Te whakanui i ngā wāhi o Aotearoa Three passionate te reo Māori exponents discuss place names that are significant for them

24 Being there Digital technologies are helping to tell stories of our heritage in innovative ways

30 A class act An Onehunga landmark former primary school is now restored and adored

08

10 Double takes The head-turning Whakatāne Airport Terminal has always evoked strong responses

Journeys into the past 42 A living system Manuhiri are being invited to experience Te Urewera from a new perspective

42

48 Communication stations A small Irish island is seeking global recognition for its role in a communications revolution

36

Columns

36 Staying power The owners of Waiorongomai Station in Wairarapa keep an eye on the past as they look to the future

3 Editorial 4 Noticeboard 52 Books Exploring ‘firsts’ – from the school dental chair to a city mission

54 Our heritage, my vision Challenges present opportunities for Māori heritage preservation

Heritage New Zealand magazine is printed with mineral oil-free, soy-based vegetable inks on New Silk paper. This paper is Forestry Stewardship Council® (FSC®) certified and manufactured from pulp from responsible sources under the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System. Please recycle.

Heritage New Zealand

30 Kōanga • Spring 2020 1

Make the most of your member benefits!

Can’t travel overseas? Well-known places like the Kerikeri Stone Store, and lesser known spots like Hurworth Cottage near New Plymouth, are waiting for you to visit right here in Aotearoa.

PHOTO: GRANT SHEEHAN

As this magazine lands in your postbox you may be planning your big Kiwi summer road trip, or even gearing up to hit the road before the masses...

If that’s the case, make sure you take your Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga membership card with you. There are lots of places to visit and you are entitled to FREE entry with your membership card. For a list of attractions and destinations, head to our website and add them to your itinerary.

We’re developing driving tours and other related activities to help you make the most of your adventures, so be sure to keep an eye out for these.

Actively visiting these places and introducing friends and family to them keeps them alive and loved.

PHOTO: RICHARD ROBERTS

NGĀ MIHI • THANK YOU As well as benefits to you, supporting Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga through your membership is the best way you can help protect heritage for the future. But many of you also regularly make donations to support our work and we can’t thank you enough for this.

Some of you are kindly acknowledged below, but many more have chosen to give anonymously.

Mr Ian & Mrs Mary Nelson

Mr B & Mrs V Clarke

Mr Brian & Mrs Linda Dawkins

Mr & Mrs Reive

Mr Alan & Mrs Ann Jermaine

Mrs Bettina Brown

Mr Granham Mansergh

Dr Peter Baugh

Mr P M and Mrs J M Corner

Mrs R Wainwright

Ms Barb Cuthbert

Mr David Thompson

Mr Brian & Mrs Rosemary Hedge

A J & M R Richards

Elaine Hampton & Michael Hartley

J C Horne

Bruce Harrison & Gary Collis

Mr S & Mrs P Sedgley

Mrs Isla Lewis

Mr Neville & Mrs Christine Anderson

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Issue 158 Kōanga • Spring 2020

PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

NZ $9.95 incl.GST

TRUE COLOURS

Choosing the right shades for heritage projects

A CLASS ACT

Landmark school restored and adored

ON THE BUTTON

Telling heritage stories in the digital age

Te whakanui i ngā wāhi o

AOTEAROA

Celebrating Māori place names

Heritage Issue 158 Kōanga • Spring 2020 ISSN 1175-9615 (Print) ISSN 2253-5330 (Online) Cover image: Professor Rawinia Higgins ‘Te whakanui i ngā wāhi o Aotearoa/ Celebrating Māori place names’, p20

by Brad Boniface Editor Caitlin Sykes, Sugar Bag Publishing Sub-editor Trish Heketa, Sugar Bag Publishing Art director Amanda Trayes, Sugar Bag Publishing Publisher Heritage New Zealand magazine is published quarterly by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. The magazine has an audited circulation of 11,512 as at 30 September 2018.

The views expressed in the articles are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.

Advertising For advertising enquiries, please contact the Manager Publications.

Phone: (04) 470 8054 Email: advertising@heritage.org.nz Subscriptions/Membership Heritage New Zealand magazine is sent to all members of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. Call 0800 802 010 to find out more.

Tell us your views At Heritage New Zealand magazine we enjoy feedback about any of the articles in this issue or heritage-related matters.

Email: The Editor at heritagenz@gmail.com Post: The Editor, c/- Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, PO Box 2629, Wellington 6140 Feature articles: Note that articles are usually commissioned, so please contact the Editor for guidance regarding a story proposal before proceeding. All manuscripts accepted for publication in Heritage New Zealand magazine are subject to editing at the discretion of the Editor and Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.

Online: Subscription and advertising details can be found under the Resources section on the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga website www.heritage.org.nz.

Heritage New Zealand

Time travels What a difference a few months makes.

The country was in lockdown when we were finalising the story list for this issue back in March, and we were still unsure when, or even if, we might again be able to travel around the country and photograph locations. Given that imagery plays a major role in how we tell our stories, we had to think a little outside the box.

For example, one of our regular contributors, photographer Rob Suisted, provided some beautiful images that he’d previously shot while working on a publication celebrating 50 years of Country Calendar.

To accompany his images of Waiorongomai Station, which has been home to the Matthews family for seven generations, another of our regular contributors, writer Matt Philp, got on the phone to the family and penned the accompanying piece outlining the family’s heritage connections to the Wairarapa property.

Being unable to visit locations physically has had a broad impact on our society and prompted most of us to explore new ways of doing things, often online. Lockdown and other travel restrictions have hit operations driven by tourism – including heritage properties – particularly hard, and this has put rocket boosters on the digital strategies of many organisations.

It’s a phenomenon that writer Jamie Douglas explores further in his feature on page 24, looking at how digital technologies – from virtual reality ‘visits’ to podcasts and guided tours via apps – are helping to tell stories of our heritage in new ways.

We’re now including ourselves in that mix, with this issue marking Heritage New Zealand magazine’s first foray into video

storytelling. With the move to lower alert levels in May and June, we were able to get out and produce video stories to accompany our magazine pieces on two Category 1 properties featured in this magazine: Kate Sheppard House in Christchurch and the (Former) Onehunga Primary School (known in the community as Onehunga Community House). We’ve included links to the videos in the stories, and we’d love you to take a look and let us know your thoughts.

Our transition into September brings with it the national celebration of Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, as well as Mahuru Māori – the challenge to speak only te reo Māori for the month. In recognition of this, writer Naomi Arnold spoke with three passionate te reo Māori exponents for this issue about Aotearoa New Zealand place names that are significant for them.

She also asked how they feel New Zealand is progressing in the adoption, use, and understanding of te reo Māori place names – a space that continues to generate conversation and debate in communities around the country.

These are discussions we absolutely need to have, striking at the heart of our understanding of our heritage. As one of the interviewees, Hinewehi Mohi, notes in the piece: “Place names should be pronounced correctly, especially the indigenous names of our country. Erasing the true meaning of the word erases the value and disrespects the history of this land. The use and understanding of te reo Māori enriches us all, so it’s appropriate to be able to share the correct meaning of a place.”

Ngā mihi nui Caitlin Sykes Editor RETURN TO CONTENTS

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Kōanga • Spring 2020 3

PAPA PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD

Letters to the editor

The story of St John’s Church, Wakefield (157, Winter 2020) has interesting ties to St Mary’s, Wreay, in the UK – it too having been designed by a woman.

We had seen a short item mention St Mary’s, a short distance south of Carlisle, reckoning it merited a short diversion from our route. We were well pleased to have taken the deviation. This delightful church was designed and built in 1840 – only six years prior to St John’s. Its designer was Sara Losh, an apparently strong-willed daughter of a local landowner. She designed not only the building but most of the fittings too.

When she took on the task – or rather managed to convince the church elders to allow her to do it – she then insisted that she be left alone to do as she wished. And, bless them, they acquiesced.

The result was a church quite different from any other in the UK at the time and filled with exquisitely carved wooden and stone elements – all begging to be caressed and appreciated.

Many of these items refer to death, rebirth and eternity, but others focus on flowers, insects, birds and more.

The main array of 20 (plus) coloured glass windows above the altar is small but beautifully proportioned and sets off a wonderfully warm feeling and focus. A similar row of tiny windows follows the ceiling at the rear.

4 Kōanga • Spring 2020

What was meant as a 10-minute break from the tedium of British motorways turned into a restful and rewarding 60 minutes of admiration. Well worth the side trip.

One final curiosity is the similarity of names: St Mary’s in Wreay and St John’s designed

by Marianne Reay.

Mike Regan Te Aro, Wellington The Winter 2020 edition of Heritage New Zealand magazine contains an article describing the efforts and achievements transforming the Dunedin Prison.

It was disappointing to see that neither Owen Graham as Chair of the Dunedin Prison Charitable Trust nor the author of the otherwise excellent article made mention of Stewart Harvey QSM. Stewart founded the Dunedin Prison Charitable Trust in 2012 and drove its efforts until close to his death in 2017. He also founded the Historic Cemeteries Conservation Trust of New Zealand in 2002 and was a foundation trustee of the Orokonui Ecosanctuary. Without Stewart’s efforts the Dunedin Prison would not be as it is now.

The Dunedin Prison Charitable Trust may never have come to exist.

Errol Chave Chingford View, Dunedin Editor: Given the length of our pieces and their scope, there are sometimes aspects of stories we don’t have the opportunity to include. Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga noted Stewart’s valuable contributions to the heritage community with an obituary that it ran in 2017, but we hope running this letter will draw readers’ attention to Stewart’s involvement, in particular with the prison trust.

MEMBER AND SUPPORTER UPDATE

... WITH BRENDON VEALE We’re so pleased that throughout the changes to Covid-19 alert levels, you – our members and supporters – have continued your support of heritage and renewed your membership, even when things haven’t been easy for you.

While historic places were closed, we hope that initiatives like the new monthly Member Club newsletter have brought heritage into your home and allowed you to enjoy history ‘from your armchair’.

As an aside, if you're not receiving these member emails

Correction

Kumara, not kūmara Our apologies have gone out to David Field for an error we introduced to a letter he sent to us, and which subsequently appeared in the Autumn 2020 issue of the magazine.

In editing we altered a reference to his greatgrandfather Peter Gourdie’s connection to the gold rush in Kumara, to mistakenly state he had been a grower of kūmara. We often need to abridge letters due to limited space; most of the time we get it right, but this time we didn’t. We hope this sets the record straight.

from us, please get in touch.

It probably means we don’t have your email address and we certainly don’t want you to miss out. It seems we’re all more online now, and email allows us to get information to you in a much timelier way.

Don’t be a stranger!

Look out for more digital content and activities coming your way. You’ll also be pleased to know that we’re already working on member events and travel experiences that get you reacquainted with many of the places where New Zealand’s history happened.

This is more important than ever, given how travel overseas is severely affected by border controls and issues.

As ever, we thank you for your continuing support.

Brendon Veale Manager Asset Funding 0800 HERITAGE (0800 437482) bveale@heritage.org.nz

HERITAGE NEW ZEALAND POUHERE TAONGA DIRECTORY Antrim House PO Box 2629, Wellington 6140 63 Boulcott Street Wellington 6011 (04) 472 4341 (04) 499 0669 information@heritage.org.nz Go to www.heritage.org.nz for details of offices and historic places around New Zealand that are cared for by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.

Heritage New Zealand

THREE QUICK QUESTIONS WITH PHOTOGRAPHER AND FILM MAKER MIKE HEYDON

Places we visit

Whakatāne, p10

1

You produced a video story to accompany our piece on Kate Sheppard House in this issue.

What's something new you learnt about Kate Sheppard in the process?

I learnt that Kate Sheppard owned a parrot while living at her Christchurch property!

Considering how much we know about the suffrage movement, I think it’s amazing it was only relatively recently discovered that this was the house in which so much of Kate Sheppard’s work was done during that period. It was quite a powerful experience being in the very same rooms where there must have been so much activity, angst and energy.

Onehunga, p30

Te Urewera, p42

2

This is Heritage New Zealand magazine's first foray into video storytelling. Why do you think video makes a great vehicle for telling stories, particularly about heritage?

Text and photographs are such tangible ways of consuming stories; you can hold a magazine in your hands and take your time digesting it all. Video offers something entirely different.

The viewer can hear and see people speaking about the subject with passion, energy or emotion – something that a written story can’t always provide.

Often it’s much easier for the viewer to imagine themselves at the property too, when they can see how it all links together, or they can hear the wind in the trees or the creak of the floorboards. And video storytelling is a really efficient way for the viewer to learn about a subject or property. You can learn a lot about something in only a few minutes. I often say it’s easy to produce a five-minute video but hard to make a one-minute video; the challenge is knowing what’s relevant and which parts to leave out.

3

You've covered many heritage sites for the magazine over the years. Which has been the most memorable?

A few years ago I photographed the Dominion Museum Building in Buckle Street, Wellington (Winter 2010). It’s such a great building, with lots of detail and beautiful architecture. The highlight of the shoot, though, was photographing a Massey University fashion design student posing on the stairs out front wearing her bright red dress with a 20-metre-long train. It was even better when the image was used on the cover of that issue.

Ngā Taonga i tēnei marama Heritage this month – subscribe now Keep up to date by subscribing to our free e-newsletter Ngā Taonga i tēnei marama Heritage this month.

Visit www.heritage.org.nz (‘Resources’ section) or email membership@heritage.org.nz to be included in the email list.

Heritage New Zealand

Waiorongomai Station, p36

Christchurch, p8

KIA KAHA TE REO MĀORI

With Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (14-20 Mahuru) and Mahuru Māori, September brings with it a celebration of all things te reo Māori.

We think it is a great time to introduce to the magazine this new regular feature in which we shine a light on words relating to the world of heritage.

pouhere binding post

taonga heritage

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Kōanga • Spring 2020 5

PAPA PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD SOCIAL HERITAGE

... WITH JAMIE DOUGLAS Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Social Media Manager

6 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Story time

reached, capping off a triple treat of 10,000-plus people posts.

Interest in the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Facebook page continues to grow, with more than 8900 followers. To all of you who follow the page – thank you, it is really appreciated.

kaupapa: principle or policy koroua: male elder maunga: mountain

“He is like a wonder of Tauranga,” pukapuka: book says Tamoe Ngata (above), of the tangata whenua: sacred maunga Mauao. “But we people of the land tangata whenua of Tauranga refer to wāhi tapu: him as ‘koro’ because he is like our sacred site koroua and we must nurture and care for him. No matter if you’re young or old, Māori or non-Māori, there is always a sense of awe about the beautiful story of Mauao.”

Around three years ago Tamoe first put pen (and paint) to paper to capture that story, producing the children’s picture book Mauao – Caught by the Dawn in te reo Māori and English.

“At the time, my husband and I were kapa haka tutors at St Mary's Catholic School," says Tamoe. "It was often part of our teaching to retell the oral tradition about Mauao, but we, the people of Tauranga, had never had a book about Mauao to share. At the library, I asked the librarian if there were any picture books telling local traditions and there were absolutely none. Then she looked at me and suggested, ‘Maybe you should write one’.”

Tamoe is a Pouārahi Māori Heritage Advisor in the Tauranga office of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga and wrote the report to support the listing of Mauao when it was recognised as a wāhi tapu in 2009. The mother of two both wrote and illustrated Mauao – Caught by the Dawn, which was recently captured in a new way: as part of a storytelling kaupapa for Matariki, a video crew recorded Tamoe reading the book at her marae, Wairoa Marae.

With a vision for te reo Māori to become more normalised and accessible, Tamoe has another pukapuka idea on her radar, relating to an ancient tradition held by her own hapū in Tauranga. “My vision is that the first loving word spoken to every Māori newborn is in their Māori language and that they grow up in a home where te reo Māori is their first language, but not their only language.”

To view the video version of Mauao – Caught by the Dawn, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVbZ4xfEJ_g.

Heritage New Zealand

IMAGE: COURTESY OF BAY OF PLENTY TIMES

Who would have thought that measuring distance using linked chains would send Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga social media followers into a bit of a frenzy? But so it proved with the 23 May Facebook post that delved into how early land surveyors in New Zealand used a method known as chain surveying to measure the land.

The post reached more than 16,800 people, with more than 2300 engagements and 428 reactions, comments and shares.

It goes to show you can never tell what angle will appeal to people.

The last week of May turned out to be a golden period for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga on Facebook. Three days on from the linked chain post was an appeal for more information on the history of Te Waimate Mission in the Far North, and the people who had lived and worked there.

More than 12,800 people were reached and almost 300 reactions, comments and shares were received. One comment was particularly delightful: “I visited recently – I grew up in the area and wanted to go back.

What I noticed immediately was the incredible location, on top of a natural plateau in the land.

It’s possibly the most beautiful place in New Zealand. The trees themselves should be protected; they’re old and venerable. I love this place!”

Closing out May was a nod to The Luminaries phenomenon sweeping the country and the dangers that sailors faced navigating rough West Coast waters. The Eleanor Catton novel is set in Hokitika and was the subject of a recent television mini-series. The 31 May post had 364 reactions and 333 comments and shares; 15,500 people were

TICK TOCK Every Friday afternoon, Ronnie Pace has a small but important task to complete.

As Property Lead at Wellington’s Old Government Buildings, Ronnie keeps the hands of time moving on the Category 1 building’s iconic clock by winding its mechanism every week.

“I take this big old original key that’s used to open the big old original lock on the big old original door, which creaks like an advancing avalanche when it opens,” he explains.

Heritage New Zealand

“Then you enter this little room, and there’s a big old handle that you have to slot in and wind about 140 times for the minutes, and slightly fewer times for the hours. Then you’re away for another week.”

There are very few such remaining clocks in New Zealand that require physical winding; Ronnie believes there is just one other, with the rest now being automated.

So when no-one was in the building during lockdown in March and April, the inevitable happened.

“Time really did stand still,” Ronnie says.

“Once the clock wound itself out during lockdown, that was it – it stopped. To my knowledge it had only ever stopped one other time in the 25 years prior.”

One issue with the clock stopping is the potential for its original 200-kilogram weights, which hang off long cables, to become entangled. However, this was one of the issues remedied (by shortening the cables) during recent servicing and conservation

work that was carried out on the clock by timepiece repair specialist Time Central at its workshop in Rotorua. The clock was reinstated in June (see image above, centre left) and Ronnie is clearly happy with the results.

“Before, it was covered in oil and dust, but now it’s been cleaned it’s a really lovely thing to look at,” he reports.

“And it makes a completely different sound now than it did before; the ‘tick tock’ is totally different – it’s beautiful.”

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Kōanga • Spring 2020 7

PAPA PĀNUI TE TŪHURATIA • NOTICEBOARD RĀRANGI • EXPLORE THE LIST

LOCATION Ilam is a suburb of Christchurch about five kilometres west of the city centre.

Change makers On an unassuming suburban Christchurch street sits a house that tells an internationally significant story WORDS: ANN WARNOCK • IMAGERY: MIKE HEYDON

See more of Kate Sheppard House on our video: www.youtube.com/user/HeritageNewZealand/featured

8 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Kate Sheppard, elegantly clad, a rosette-trimmed bodice, a pearl brooch at her neck, and hair piled loosely atop her head.

It’s a formal photograph of a steady-gazing woman circa 1905, one that we recognise in a flash: Sheppard – the feminist, campaigner and revolutionary thinker, whose endeavours in the suffrage sphere in the late 1800s form the subplot in New Zealand’s social reform narrative.

The story of Sheppard’s life has been well documented – her birth in Liverpool, her fervent patronage of social justice, cultivated as a child during time spent in the Scottish township of Nairn, where her uncle was a minister, and later her family’s move to Christchurch, where her married sister lived, shortly before Sheppard’s 21st birthday.

But 17 years ago, there was an extraordinary discovery.

During a period of heightened interest in Sheppard’s work during the suffrage centenary celebrations in 1993, the owners of a villa in the Christchurch suburb of Ilam discovered an old certificate of title.

The certificate revealed that Sheppard and her husband Walter, a prosperous businessman 12 years her senior, had built the house in 1888 and lived there for 14 years – a tract of time that encapsulated Sheppard’s most intense drive for social progression.

At the villa, Sheppard stagemanaged a story of national and international courage, activism and accomplishment.

From her Ilam address, Sheppard headed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the suffrage campaign, later the National Council of Women, penned her trailblazing leaflet Ten Reasons Why the Women of New Zealand Should Vote (1888) and was editor of the WCTU’s newspaper The White Ribbon.

In its front rooms she planned campaign strategies with leading feminists of the day, including

Heritage New Zealand

Margaret Sievwright, Amey Daldy and Ada Wells, and key political allies Alfred Saunders and Sir John Hall.

And on her dining room table she reportedly pasted the pages of the third and final 32,000-signature suffrage petition onto reams of wallpaper.

This momentous document – which travelled by wheelbarrow from Sheppard’s dining room and was unrolled ceremoniously down the aisle in Parliament’s debating chamber – initiated landmark legislation in September 1893, making New Zealand women the first in the world to win the right to vote.

Sheppard quietly celebrated the victory at 83 Clyde Road, Ilam.

In September last year – more than 125 years later – New Zealand harnessed the opportunity to celebrate Sheppard in the domestic space and rooms in which she lived.

Heritage New Zealand

The Christchurch villa came on the market for the first time in 34 years and the government acted.

Kate Sheppard House, bordering the University of Canterbury, was purchased for $4.5 million and is now managed by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga as a Category 1 historic place.

Dr Christine Whybrew, Manager Heritage Assets South for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, says the discovery of Sheppard’s connection to the house unveiled “an international story in an unassuming suburban street”.

“We’re now able to acknowledge her contribution to our lives by commemorating the place where she lived and where her social change movement was born,” she says.

But Sheppard and her cause will not be commemorated as a frozen-in-time house museum.

The eight-roomed, symmetrically

designed villa will operate as part interactive visitor centre and part academic research and education centre for social change – in collaboration with the University of Canterbury – and part function centre.

Stereographs of imagery providing 3D Victorian virtual reality will form part of the visitor experience in the front four rooms of the house. The Covid-19 lockdown in March/April stalled progress at the house, but at the time of writing it was on track to open within the next six months.

“It’s a place that holds huge mana,” says Helen Osborne, Kate Sheppard House Property Lead. “It will explore the essence of Sheppard and the incredible social change she led, and on a personal level provide a sense of pride in the ability of our country to unite against discrimination and social injustice.”

Practical considerations have shaped the future use of the house. In 1902 the Sheppards sold up, propelled by Walter’s desire to settle in England, with the couple’s only child, Douglas, studying at the University of London.

The house was purchased by John Joseph Dougall, a barrister and solicitor later elected Mayor of Christchurch, who transformed the Sheppards’ modest dwelling – indicative of their having “financial means but no wish for an ostentatious home” (Heritage New

Zealand Registration Report 2010) – into a more substantial residence in the Arts and Crafts genre.

The property passed through the hands of five further owners, each making their mark while maintaining its overall form.

The site was subdivided in 1944 and in the mid-'50s interior feature timber in the house – largely kauri – was painted white and the owner offered the two front reception rooms for functions and weddings.

It then became a family home with a doctor’s surgery, and later, in 1989 and under its most recent owners, architect Kerry Mason of Warren and Mahoney designed a post-modernist extension in response to its villa form – at the time there being no knowledge of its provenance.

Christine Whybrew says unravelling the functionality of the house during Sheppard’s proprietorship has “involved a forensic-style investigation”.

A detailed catalogue of roomby-room household effects published in an auction sale notice in the Lyttelton Times (15 March 1902) has been a piece of gold.

Conservation architect Tony Ussher says floor access has provided evidence of the original foundations, verandah steps and removed chimneys, giving clues to the likely layout of Sheppard’s house.

He says the exterior appearance of the original villa, however, is still uncertain, owing to alterations and concealments.

But removed chimneys and chattels aside, Kate Sheppard House has something special.

Helen Osborne experienced it first-hand recently when a group of young tradesmen arrived at the house, tools in hand.

“They were in their early twenties and were clearly moved by being in Sheppard’s home; they were filled with respect and curiosity. One young builder said he felt short-changed not learning about Sheppard at school or knowing she’d lived in his neighbourhood.”

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Kōanga • Spring 2020 9

Double takes

LOCATION Whakatāne is located 90km southeast of Tauranga and 89km northeast of Rotorua.

10 Kōanga • Spring 2020

A gateway to the ‘sunshine town’, Whakatāne Airport Terminal has always evoked strong responses

WORDS: NICOLA MARTIN

It has been called everything from ugly to Disneyland to the essence of tourist architecture, but whether you're a supporter or a detractor, there is no escaping Whakatāne Airport Terminal’s unique presence.

An iconic example of 1970s award-winning New Zealand architecture, in 2019 the Whakatāne Airport Terminal entered the New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero as a Category 1 historic place.

Designed by Wellington-based architect Roger Walker, the terminal has sparked debate

ever since it opened in 1974, says Alexandra Foster, Heritage Assessment Advisor for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.

“It’s Category 1, so it’s one of our most significant places, but it’s also a really interesting piece of architecture,” she says.

"The region argued for and worked really hard to get a design for the building that was different and would put Whakatāne on the tourism map."

The visually playful building, which nods to the Japanese Metabolism movement, was commissioned jointly by the Whakatāne County Council and the Whakatāne Borough Council as regional tourism gained importance in the local economy.

Heritage New Zealand

IMAGERY: ALAMY.COM

PAPA PĀNUI TE TŪHURATIA • NOTICEBOARD RĀRANGI • EXPLORE THE LIST

Its distinctive design sought to make the ‘sunshine town’ of Whakatāne appealing to visitors as a holiday destination and contribute to a distinctive regional identity.

Alexandra says the building’s shape, with its incorporation of the control tower, gives the structure height and points clearly to the nearby Moutohorā/Whale Island, which is visible on the horizon behind it.

For the first time in New Zealand, the airport terminal and control tower were combined into one building, with a design that represented a unique form of New Zealand architecture.

This new design caused controversy, however, for the then Ministry of Works, which was required to officially approve public buildings.

“The story is that the local MP at the time, Percy Allen, had to get involved to push the design across the line with the ministry, which favoured a more traditional airport design,” says Alexandra.

Roger Walker says he designed the building during a time when young architects were deliberately stepping away from traditional designs and trying to establish their own New Zealand styles.

He says the terminal is a representation of that ebullience in form-making and colour. Concrete pipe windows and skylights, and exposed timber with a mix of cellular forms and strong colours are hallmarks of its design.

He remembers being commissioned to design the building and arriving in Whakatāne to find an old Thames 800 van parked in the main street.

“It was painted with blackand-white chequers and it turned out that it was the airport control tower. Planes would fly in and this little van would whizz out to the airport and help them land.”

Roger says that, after that, he sought approval to combine the

Heritage New Zealand

“The region argued and worked really hard to get something different for the building that would put Whakatane on the tourism map”

control tower and the terminal into one building.

“My concept was to build a replica of Whale Island. The committee didn’t want a flat building that would disappear into the landscape, and combining the tower gave the structure height.

“The building made perfect sense to me. It’s the only airport in New Zealand where you can arrive at the front door and see your aircraft waiting on the tarmac.”

He says its colourful palette was an antidote to New Zealand’s beige syndrome; the terminal was designed to be cheerful and welcoming.

“I remember there was a lot of trouble getting approval from the Ministry of Works at the time. I was told it was a silly design and we should be building something that people would recognise as an airport.”

The year after its construction, however, the building won a Tourism Design Award, with the judges describing it as “excitingly different”, and in 2013

it received an NZIA Bay of Plenty Enduring Architecture Award.

In 2011, when a new airport plan suggested the building was at risk of demolition, a group of architects and architectural historians came together to protect the building and it was saved. In 2017 it was included in the Whakatāne District Plan as a heritage building.

Alexandra says that the addition of the terminal to the List represents a series of firsts for the building. It is the first airport terminal on the List, the first Roger Walker-designed building on the List, and the first Category 1 listing in Whakatāne.

She says the building still draws its supporters and detractors, 45 years on from its opening.

“The building still functions as an airport today, but perhaps more importantly, as was intended in the design, the sheer originality of it still causes double takes from members of the visiting public today.”

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Kōanga • Spring 2020 11

PAPA PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD WHAKAAHUA • PROFILE

Created and exchanged by his tīpuna, a collection of hoe whakairo has become the focus of Steve Gibbs’s life and work

WO R DS : MAT T P H I L P • I MAGE RY: B R E N N A N T H O MAS

12 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Last October, taonga from five overseas collections were returned on loan to Tūranganui-a-Kiwa/Poverty Bay. The nucleus of an ongoing exhibition at Gisborne’s Tairāwhiti Museum called Tū te Whaihanga, the taonga include cloaks, weapons, a poupou and eight carved and painted hoe whakairo that had been exchanged with the crew of James Cook’s HMB Endeavour in 1769.

They returned like homecoming ancestors, treated to a powerful pōwhiri before being introduced to their Tūranganui and Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti descendants.

“People were able to touch, feel and spend time with them,” says Ngāi Tāmanuhiri artist, art educator and museum trustee Steve Gibbs, who designed the exhibition and played an instrumental role in bringing the taonga home.

“As a human thing, it was powerful; they were given a life they hadn’t experienced for 250 years.”

For Steve, an associate professor at the Toihoukura School of Māori Visual Art & Design in Gisborne, the exhibition is the culmination of a decade of research and his own art practice focused on the hoe whakairo, which are part of a larger group of hoe held mostly in overseas collections.

Steve’s interest is at once professional – these 18th-century hoe are the oldest surviving examples of kōwhaiwhai painting – and personal: his tīpuna carved and painted the beautiful blade-like items, which were exchanged during an encounter with the Endeavour off Whareongaonga, south of Gisborne, on 12 October 1769.

As an artist, Steve finds the hoe and other exhibited taonga deeply impressive.

“The artwork is exquisite, and they tell us a lot about the intellect and capabilities of the people who designed and made them,” he says. “These are no ordinary works.”

This has been his consistent response since he first set eyes on the Endeavour hoe at a 2010 presentation to Ngāi Tāmanuhiri by New Zealand anthropologist Amiria Salmond, one of several scholars who over time have been able to link definitively a number of hoe to the October 1769 encounter. The hui, held at Muriwai School, was to share knowledge of the existence and whereabouts of the hoe with the artists’ descendants.

In a chapter in the book Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums, Steve relates his reaction when Amiria showed the images of the Whareongaonga

Heritage New Zealand

Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga • Spring 2020 13

WHAKAAHUA • PROFILE

hoe to those in the room. There was pride; also a sense of responsibility. And something else: “I felt the magic of seeing something that had been removed from our creative consciousness being returned.”

In 2015, as part of a PhD project to locate, analyse and document the hoe, he visited museums in the UK and Europe and was able to photograph and sketch them in detail.

“When you analyse their design systems, you realise you are dealing with a kind of handwriting,” he says.

“You can tell that one group of people has done these designs because they replicate themselves. On the shafts is a beautiful carved manaia system; the ends of the hoe resemble the head of a pakake.

“Most of the blades have painted pigment on both sides, which suggests they were designed as tohu, items of mana and prestige that would have been freely exchanged between iwi, pre-European.”

Subsequently, Steve incorporated the hoe patterns in a series of 10 paintings – titled ‘Trade Me’ – that “reference the creative genius that existed in Tūranganui for the 800 years before the arrival of Europeans to this region”.

“My preoccupation has been the origins and manipulation of those design systems we now call kōwhaiwhai,” he says.

“And the basis of my work has been about the recovery of that knowledge – and the dilemma we have when we talk about owning it.”

Ownership is very much a live issue. In the years-long process leading to the staging of Tū te Whaihanga, Steve created a database of Ngāi Tāmanuhiri taonga held in collections here and overseas. The message from tribal elders was clear: “We want them back.”

14 Kōanga • Spring 2020

hoe whakairo: decorated waka paddles kai moana: seafood kaitiaki: guardian kōwhaiwhai: painted geometric swirls manaia: mythological creature pakake: minke whale poupou: wall panel pōwhiri: welcome ceremony taonga: treasured artefacts tīpuna: ancestors tohu: emblems wānanga: schools of learning whenua: land

But it’s not a simple matter. The exhibits on display at Tairāwhiti Museum are on loan for 12 months, secured through a complex series of dialogues.

In 2016 Steve and others formed a pan-tribal governance group called Hei Kanohi Ora to negotiate with the institutions and develop those relationships. It wasn’t necessarily smooth sailing, even with goodwill on both sides.

A small provincial museum, Tairāwhiti has had to meet demanding expectations of how to handle and display the taonga. Power lies mostly with the institutions – but not solely.

“We are the living face of those tīpuna who made these taonga. The power we have is the mātauranga, the knowledge of these taonga. That’s ours,” says Steve, adding that it is hoped these items exchanged 250 years ago will eventually be repatriated.

His view on ownership? It’s more about having a connection. “We’re saying they belong to all of us.”

There’s still much to learn about these beautifully wrought taonga, he adds.

“It’s been great bringing them home, but once the emotional side of that has subsided, what’s the real value?

We need to understand how they made these taonga, the materials and pigments, and what tools were used.”

Meanwhile, researching the hoe has uncovered old information about the locations of pā sites, burial places and the settings of wānanga around the southern coastline, including significant locations such as Tikiwhata and Whareongaonga. Whakapapa records have been re-examined, and new narratives have come to light.

“When you learn about taonga,” he says, “you are actually learning about the human history of a place.”

Heritage New Zealand

Te Wherowhero Lagoon, Muriwai, south of Gisborne I was brought up close to Te Wherowhero Lagoon. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, looked after me there until I was five. I have a special memory of being four and riding with her in a horse-drawn gig down to Wherowhero on a hot summer’s day to collect kai moana. It’s a beautiful tidal inlet, but it’s also a sacred place for our iwi.

I once got told by one of my aunties to “go talk to the kaitiaki”.

I had no idea what she meant, but I went and stood in the lagoon’s

knee-deep water. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a huge shoal of fish. I went back and told her, and she said, “That’s it; that’s what I’m talking about.” It put me into a spiritual place.

Te Wherowhero is an important connection point for me to my whenua, to the births of my mother, my grandmother and my grandmother’s mother. I’ve gone back there at times of trouble and stress, and I always walk away feeling better.

My mother, who is now in her late eighties, spent a lot of time

there when she was a child, and I like to take her back there.

A narrative from Muriwai people is that Wherowhero is the resting place of the Horouta waka. My mother remembers as a child playing in the lagoon and jumping off what they thought was the Horouta waka.

There’s a little film in the Tairāwhiti Museum in Gisborne in which two uncles, both in their late eighties, talk about how the waka made itself known, but then a storm came and it disappeared.

Later an attempt was made to

dig it up, which got stopped by the local people, I think.

There have been other archaeological attempts to find it. In our history, archaeologists are treated with distrust because they have tended to represent the desecration of what we consider to be our sacred places in the process of looking for proof.

In our oral history, the consensus is that the lagoon is the resting place of the Horouta waka. Like many things in our history, it’s a narrative. For us, that’s good enough. n

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Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga • Spring 2020 15

PAPA ME PĒHEA PĀNUI • HOW • NOTICEBOARD TO 1

WORDS: CLAIRE MCCALL • IMAGERY: BRAD BONIFACE

True colours Choosing an appropriate colour scheme is an important consideration in honouring heritage buildings. But how do you go about getting it right?

When it comes to coaxing secrets from heritage sites, Tracey Hartley has ways of getting walls to talk.

“Each building has a different story depending on its fortune – how many times it has changed hands, and whether it was lavished with lots of attention or neglected,” says the chartered conservation surveyor with Auckland’s Salmond Reed Architects.

When restoring the paintwork on an historic building, be it a listed property, a commercial premises or an olde-worlde home, it pays to think like a detective.

Paint colours are not just the outer skin of decoration

16 Kōanga • Spring 2020

but an indicator of the times. That’s why, says Tracey, those who are charged with honouring history – or who simply have a passion to do so – should put some effort into discovering these shades of the past.

Peeling back the layers to reveal the original colour scheme takes patience and a multi-pronged methodology. For significant projects, it involves carefully lifted paint scrapings being examined under a microscope, complemented by background research to ensure an informed understanding of a building’s ‘colourful’ history.

Heritage New Zealand

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1 Architect Ian Bowman

developed the Heritage colour chart for Resene.

2 9 Tonks Grove, relocated

for the Wellington Inner City Bypass, reinstated in original colours.

3 Heritage buildings on the

corner of Tonks Grove and Cuba Street feature Resene ‘Nelson Red’ based on the original colours.

4 Microscopic cross-section

of paint flake taken from exterior joinery at Highwic.

IMAGE: DONALD ELLSMORE 5 Heritage buildings relocat-

ed for the Inner City Bypass, reinstated in original colours.

Heritage New Zealand

But in New Zealand, Tracey acknowledges, that type of accurate scientific analysis is difficult to come by since there are no full-time architectural paint researchers here. Highwic, a Gothic timber building in Auckland built in 1862, is one exception that has benefitted from such an approach.

“Its restoration was undertaken based on analysis by Dr Donald Ellsmore – an architectural paint specialist from Australia,” she says.

Still, if you’re a homeowner keen on recreating an authentic palette, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a decent stab at doing the investigative work yourself.

Before heading to the paint shop, you’ll need a reference or physical specimen to be colour-matched.

Begin by gathering as much information as possible.

Are there old photographs (albeit black and white) that might hold clues on the tones of colour used, or written records and specifications to consult? Could previous owners impart an oral history of the colours they remember?

Once these avenues have been explored, a broad picture emerges and it’s time to get practical.

“Most on-site examination involves scraping back the layers of paint to find a sample,” says Tracey.

On this point, Tracey has a warning. In your enthusiasm, she says, don’t remove important historical evidence forever.

“Stripping paint completely from a heritage building is destructive. Unless the paintwork is so deteriorated that it compromises timber weatherboards or window frames, avoid this.”

Instead, the canny would-be conservator should seek out overlooked fragments in those nooks and crannies

5

(or basements or attics) that may have escaped the attention of the brush.

With the colour identified, it would be tempting to rush out and buy, but there are a couple more boxes to tick before you can get stuck in to the job.

“Painting a heritage building is quite a different proposition from painting a brand-new house,” says Laura Kellaway, Conservation Architect at Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.

“You need to take into account what you are putting the new paint on top of.”

Firstly, she says, consider the composition of previous coats. This could range from the organic formulations and washes used in the 1860s and 1870s to the lead-based systems that were prevalent in the 1980s and the modern-day water-based enamels.

Laura adds that it pays to get a sample identified and/or tested prior to choosing a product and if you suspect there may be lead in the paint it’s imperative to use a test kit to find out one way or another.

“If you don’t, your family could end up with bad headaches or, at worst, lead poisoning,” she says.

“It’s not just the fumes that are a health-andsafety risk; if you’re scraping lead-based paint from a building and it ends up in the ground, then you have contaminated land too.”

Kōanga • Spring 2020 17

PAPA ME PĒHEA PĀNUI • HOW • NOTICEBOARD TO

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1 Ian Bowman stands

outside Wellington’s heritage-listed Hazel Court apartments with reinstated coloured soffits.

2 Ian inspects the original

colours on a heritage building, corner of Tonks Grove and Cuba Street, Wellington.

3 Highwic, a 19th-centu-

ry Gothic mansion in Auckland, was painted in a modern white and grey colour scheme prior to research and redecoration (see image 5).

IMAGE: SALMOND REED 4 The pretty-in-pink

paintwork at Fyffe House in Kaikōura honours its history.

IMAGE: PETER DRURY 5 Highwic after redecoration

in the traditional colours identified as part of an in-depth paint analysis.

IMAGE: SALMOND REED

18 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Secondly, if you’re repainting wooden structures or features, she says, there’s another important consideration.

“Up to the 1970s, heritage buildings were made of native timbers, which have a tendency to bleed.”

A wood primer will be necessary, so Laura suggests asking the paint supplier for the best solution.

Finally, when painting a listed or heritage building, or even a villa or bungalow in a heritage area, remember that the local council might have approved colour schemes. Resource consent could be required.

The message is: get expert advice before you get busy with the brushes.

Colour through the decades

Architect Ian Bowman, who holds a Master of Arts in conservation studies from the University of York and has practices in Nelson and Wellington, agrees that research is key to unearthing these chromatic clues.

In-depth investigation is worth it, he says, because he’s never met a building that didn’t look better dressed in the colours its architect intended. “It just works.”

Ian’s home in Wellington is a mid-rise apartment block designed in the 1950s where, as is fitting, a pastel palette of pale salmon and pale green still softens the walkway soffits and balconies.

Having studied historical colour analysis in workshops around the world throughout his career, Ian has analysed some of New Zealand’s most beloved buildings to reinstate historical colour schemes.

These have included the Dunedin Railway Station (basalt and Oamaru stone with dark-red and green window surrounds, dark-red down pipes and pale-green cupolas), the cottages at Tonks Grove, relocated as part of the Wellington Inner City Bypass

construction (buff weatherboards with a combination of Resene’s rustic Nelson Red and dark-green window surrounds and salmon-pink lacework) and the heritage-listed two-storey Cuba Street shops on the corner of Tonks Grove (all Nelson Red).

It’s a subject dear to his heart so in the early 1990s when Resene approached Ian to develop a heritage colour chart, he was delighted.

He set out the document chronologically, beginning in the 1840s and ending around 1945.

“I stopped post-World War II because after that you could essentially have any colour whatsoever since there was a change in chemicals available.”

Until then, buildings had been painted in colours made from natural pigments. Post-World War II, the ready availability of the synthetic pigment titanium dioxide meant that suddenly, sharp white was achievable.

“Prior to that, white was really an off-white or cream,” says Ian. Colours were also limited.

“In the early colonial days, paint was made with oxide, some form of oil for ease of application and a thinner, which would evaporate and leave the colour behind. The main pigments available were brown, blue, red, black, green and yellow, which were mixed for different colours.”

Moving through the eras from the mid-19th century, when earth and timber cottages were lime-washed – an inexpensive treatment that was also considered hygienic because of its antibacterial properties – to the mid-Victorian years, when dark reds and greens started to appear on doors and window surrounds, and weatherboards were painted light beige, and on to the beginning of World War I – when dark browns, toffee tones and even crimson were introduced – the palettes are reflective of both innovation in paint-making techniques and evolving architectural styles.

This shows us that the current penchant for making villas homogenous in colour – either brilliant white or

Heritage New Zealand

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A WHALE OF A TALE

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grey – is inaccurate and does nothing to acknowledge these features. Historically, villas had different colours to enhance them, sometimes just variations of the same pigments and at other times, dark green or red on the trims, which offset buff-toned weatherboards.

Between the wars, reflecting an era of positivity, there was an explosion of soft green and pink, vermilion, bright orange and midnight blue, which brought sass and splash to the geometric designs of the Art Deco age.

By the 1950s a rainbow of opportunity had opened up. Ian’s dad, architect Alex Bowman, designed New Zealand’s first Modern Movement concrete-block house.

“He painted the gable a rich post-office red and the panelled front door a different red.”

Both Ian’s and Tracey’s fascination with reinterpreting historical colour in modern-day life is addictive, perhaps because these paint schemes are so integral to our vernacular architecture.

From the deep-green and dark-red features that signified propriety in Victorian villas and reflected the values of ‘Mother England’, to the dulled matte shade of red oxide widely used on agricultural buildings and corrugated rooftops – and also on whare and wharenui – these are colours that tell a unique New Zealand story.

Heritage New Zealand

Pink is not the first shade that springs to mind for a former whaling-station homestead. But at Fyffe House it’s a goodand-proper acknowledgement of a pioneering heritage – and the locals have grown to love it.

In 1996 Bill Edwards, former property manager of Fyffe House, started his journey of discovery to reinstate the original paint scheme of the oldest surviving building in Kaikōura. It had been constructed in three stages between 1842 and the 1860s, when colonists came to the area to hunt tohorā (the southern right whale).

Black-and-white photos provided scant evidence as to the earliest paintwork, but some rootling around in the bushes came up trumps. Hidden inside a boxthorn hedge behind the house was a stack of old verandah posts.

“They had been replaced in the 1970s when the Ministry of Works took over administration,” says Bill.

Paint scrapings from the posts revealed an unexpectedly rosy past – a pale pink hue. But that wasn’t the only clue: when the original wrought-iron nails were being conserved, their heads were gently lifted and the pink-hued circles that emerged bolstered the theory.

Final confirmation came when part of the foundations of the cooper’s cottage – the earliest wing – were replaced.

A built-in bench seat was pulled out and behind it was a well-preserved paint-stirring stick. Its tip was pink.

Bill describes the shade as “a warm colour that reflects the setting sun” and while that sounds romantic, this choice in the early part of the 19th century would have been pragmatic, the result of red and white lead mixed together.

“When we sent samples of the original paint to be tested in the lab, we found that it was not vegetable-oil based but animal,” says Bill.

The likely explanation is that whale oil was used.

The colour was matched and once the painting was done, locals were invited to a ‘pink party’ to celebrate.

Today, the house glows blush-proud on the peninsula.

Visitors can take tours before picnicking in the cottage gardens with a view of the vast ocean and the chance to spot the great mammals of the deep as they pass freely by. n RETURN TO CONTENTS

Kōanga • Spring 2020 19

PAPATAPUWAE NGĀ PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD O NGĀ TŪPUNA • MĀORI HERITAGE

Te whakanui i ngā wāhi o

AOTEAROA

IMAGERY: ROB SUISTED, MIKE HEYDON

Naomi Arnold speaks to three passionate te reo Māori exponents about Aotearoa place names that are significant for them, and ask how they feel New Zealand is progressing in the adoption, use, and understanding of te reo Māori place names

20 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Heritage New Zealand

KAHURANGI RANGIMĀRIE NAIDA GLAVISH, DNZM, JP, NGĀTI WHĀTUA Kahurangi Rangimārie Naida Glavish made headlines in 1984 when, as a toll operator for New Zealand Post, she answered the phone with ‘Kia ora’, sparking a national debate. A member of the Māori Heritage Council at Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, she has been a lifelong advocate of te reo Māori.

My place is Kaipara Harbour, the second-largest natural harbour in the world in this little country of ours. My marae is on the shores of the harbour. I live in West Auckland, which is a 40-minute drive home. That is fortunate for me in that I’m only 40 minutes’ drive from my marae and my beloved Kaipara Harbour.

‘Kaipara’ is about the para fern root, which was a major source of food. We learned things from the Kaipara; we understood the pull of the tide as it related to the moon’s cycle and the behaviour of the seabirds and the fish, and the tuna whakaheke, the eel migration to the ocean. And all of that related to the planting season for our vegetables, for our gardens. All that knowledge is learned by the shores of the harbour.

I was raised by a grandmother from a young age and I don’t even remember learning my reo. My grandmother couldn’t speak English, so my reo was absorbed by me and it was such a natural thing. Both my mother and grandmother were strapped for speaking reo in school, and my mother had her name changed by a Pākehā teacher because the teacher couldn’t pronounce it.

When I went to school, there wasn’t a single thing in there that looked like me, sounded like me or was me, so I had a very rebellious school background.

I am hearing more reo on mainstream TV and radio. It’s not a natural, flowing thing, but it’s more than it was between 1984, when ‘Kia ora’ hit the headlines, and 1987 when te reo Māori became an official language of this country. The thing is, of course, that it’s the heritage of this country; it didn’t arrive yesterday, and it should be respected.

It may become respected more as the truth of New Zealand’s history and occupation is told. There seems to be more courage among a lot of the foreigners coming in who are happy to know our country’s true history, but it’s white New Zealand itself who are opposed to the teaching of our true past.

What happened, happened. It doesn’t mean to say we should live in that past, but we have to know what our past is in order for us to move forward. I think there should be more courage in the country to do that.

Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga • Spring 2020 21

PAPATAPUWAE NGĀ PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD O NGĀ TŪPUNA • MĀORI HERITAGE

Hinewehi Mohi is a songwriter and performer who is arguably best known for singing the New Zealand national anthem only in te reo Māori at the 1999 Rugby World Cup. Although it caused outrage at the time, her performance also helped New Zealand develop a more mature response to te reo Māori.

I was born and raised in Hawke’s Bay and returned here with my whānau four years ago.

Te Mata Peak is a central lookout point across the Heretaunga Plains area; it’s really very beautiful.

You can reference Pakipaki, just south of Hastings, where my marae is. As legend tells it, our ancestress Hinerākau and the Waimārama chief Te Mata fell in love. Her people demanded the young chief prove his devotion to her by biting his way through the hills between the coast and the plains, so the people could come and go with ease.

Te Mata died proving his love for Hinerākau, choking on the earth, and his prostrate body forms the outline of Te Mata Peak. When the first European settlers came

22 Kōanga • Spring 2020

here and heard this story, they referred to the form of a man lying across the range as the ‘Sleeping Giant’.

I think it’s significant to all people who live in this region, and particularly so for our hapū and iwi, as the personification of our landscape. For me it’s home, and it gives me a real sense of spiritual and emotional connection to the people and the place.

I know in Aotearoa there is sometimes resistance to pronouncing Māori place names correctly, and that’s the same with Te Mata Peak because there is no real understanding of how it got its name. Knowledge can help people to better understand the significance of a place. It doesn’t take away from anyone or anything, and if a place has been given a name of significance, then we should preserve it.

Sometimes place names have been anglicised so that they don’t make sense anymore, or the first surveyors made mistakes in writing down place names, which really changed the meanings.

Place names should be pronounced correctly, especially the indigenous names of our country. Erasing the true meaning of the word erases the value and disrespects the history of this land. The use and understanding of te reo Māori enriches us all, so it’s appropriate to be able to share the correct meaning of a place.

Heritage New Zealand

COMPOSITE IMAGERY: SARAH HORN, ROB SUISTED, BRAD BONIFACE

HINEWEHI MOHI, MNZM, NGĀTI KAHUNGUNU, NGĀI TŪHOE

PROFESSOR RAWINIA HIGGINS, TŪHOE Professor Higgins was appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor Māori of Victoria University of Wellington in 2016. She is a member of the Waitangi Tribunal and Ngā Pae o Te Māramatanga Māori Centre of Research Excellence. In 2015 the Minister for Māori Development appointed her Chair of the Māori Language Advisory Group, which shaped the Māori language legislation enacted in April 2016. In 2018 she was appointed Chair and Commissioner for Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori – The Māori Language Commission.

Te Urewera captures many of the places that I hold special. Clearly, it’s linked to my identity as a Tūhoe person, but more specifically it’s the name of one of my hapū. That sense of home is important to me, having that genealogical connection to my ancestors, a sense of place and of being grounded in that place.

My fond memory, aside from being connected to that place, was having the opportunity to be a part of Te Kotahi a Tūhoe, which was the trust that helped with the Treaty settlement and Te Urewera getting its own legal personality. That transition from a national park to being the first in the country to get legal personality was an achievement in itself.

[Since then], I think one of the things I truly notice the most is that the land itself feels very much the same – you get that sense of having a deep breath and just thinking, “Yes, I’m home” – but in a post-settlement frame, the thing I notice the most is our people. And the change in our people in knowing that the things our ancestors fought so long for were worth fighting for.

This doesn’t mean that we have to stop; we still need to pass the philosophy down to our children and grandchildren of how significant Te Urewera is for us

Heritage New Zealand

and how it’s tied to our identity. I feel that when I do go home – that deep sense of pride.

As a nation, we are starting to become more aware that bilingualism is more the norm than not.

As a country, for quite a while we have been “doggedly monolingual in practice and attitude” (as once expressed by Te Taura Whiri Māori Language Commission foundation member Dr Ray Harlow).

Those attitudes are starting to break down a lot more as we try to think about supporting those who want to restore language in their families. It takes one generation to lose a language but three generations to restore it – it’s a long journey to rebuild that space, and the efforts of previous generations are really starting to flourish now. But we still have quite a way to go.

There are always those who will steadfastly maintain, “That’s not how we’ve said it for the past three or four generations”, but the younger generations, who have had less language trauma than others, are embracing te reo Māori even more. That’s spreading out further as we learn more about our history and understand who we are, not just as Māori but as a nation.

Te whakanui i ngā wāhi o Aotearoa: Celebrating Māori place names

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Kōanga • Spring 2020 23

PAPAWHARE NGĀ PĀNUI •MAHI NOTICEBOARD • BUILDINGS AT WORK

Being there

WORDS: JAMIE DOUGLAS

From virtual reality ‘visits’ to podcasts and guided tours via apps, digital technologies are helping to tell stories of our heritage in new ways

24 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Heritage New Zealand

IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga • Spring 2020 25

PAPAWHARE NGĀ PĀNUI •MAHI NOTICEBOARD • BUILDINGS AT WORK

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When it comes to making sense of events, being there is everything, as they say. But how is that possible for events of the past? New technologies may hold the key.

“Take the Category 1-listed Ōtuataua Stonefields in Tāmaki Makaurau, for example,” says Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Chief Executive Andrew Coleman. “This is a very special heritage landscape. Its significance is well told on paper, but imagine a virtual reality experience that could bring those words to life.

“Watching the arrival of waka, the formation of Māori communities, the early agriculture and gardening approach of Māori, the marketplace being created and the transition to pastoral and dairy farming... the important and significant stories of the Ōtuataua Stonefields become that much more accessible, understood and appreciated.”

Bringing information into your home has come a long way since the days of volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica lining the bookshelf; today almost everyone has access to a smartphone, tablet or computer.

Having the ability to search, download apps, take in virtual reality experiences and, for many, utilise unlimited broadband, allows us to enjoy travelling the many interesting and informative routes the electronic highway provides. Heritage, historical and cultural experiences are becoming fantastic stopover points in new digital technology platforms.

And as the country has moved through the various Covid-19 alert levels, the spotlight in the heritage

26 Kōanga • Spring 2020

“Good digital interpretation is founded on good storytelling principles …

The aim is to produce an awesome experience”

sector is being shone on how people remain connected to heritage places when closed signs prevent them from visiting.

It hasn’t exactly been an ‘a-ha!’ moment, but more a confirmation that digital technology is a brilliant tool for highlighting, studying and conserving cultural heritage and bringing it to life.

Andrew sees digitisation as an opportunity for heritage to be showcased and appreciated in a different way.

“Heritage is an important aspect of any future and a focus must be maintained to ensure that this is realised. Digitisation, and especially the likes of virtual reality opportunities, is a crucial part of delivering experiences that help conserve and promote heritage and educate people.

“We are doing that already, but it’s increasingly obvious that technologies such as virtual reality mean places and experiences that we have previously only read about or seen in photographs can be brought to life.”

In recent years there have been some extraordinary uses of digital technology. These include Kā Huru Manu, the Ngāi Tahu Cultural Mapping Project in which global information system technology captured and mapped Ngāi Tahu place names and associated stories onto a digital atlas (see Heritage New Zealand, Winter 2019), and projection mapping onto building exteriors – a feature of the World War I centenary commemorations.

Permanent exhibitions at the National Library of New Zealand of He Whakaputanga/the Declaration of Independence, Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi, and the Women’s Suffrage Petition, in which visitors use touchscreens to navigate and explore the exhibition content, are further examples.

One example of cultural content being used appropriately was at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, a leader of digital innovation in the museum space, when virtual Ngāti Toa Rangatira instructors taught the actions of the Ka Mate haka.

Heritage New Zealand

3 4

1 There is great potential

in the digital space for the Category 1-listed Ōtuataua Stonefields.

IMAGE: CHRIS GIN 2 Presenting properties

such as Kate Sheppard House on video enhances heritage awareness.

3 Storytelling is a key part

of the Rangihoua Heritage Park experience.

4 The High Street Stories app

details the Christchurch earthquakes with great impact.

Heritage New Zealand

Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga projects in the digital space have included: a podcast series featuring interviews with staff on what heritage means to them; continually adding to its digital catalogue of collection items, including the organisation’s impressive wallpaper collection; a 3D scan of the Timeball Station in Lyttelton; and the driving tour app series Path to Nationhood, covering stories related to places where Māori and Pākehā first met in Northland. The Waikato War, covering the sites in the region of battles from 1863 to 1864, and High Street Stories, detailing the huge losses of Christchurch’s High Street precinct after the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, are further examples. And featured in this issue is a new initiative for magazine subscribers – access to video footage accompanying selected articles.

Digitisation connects communities with their heritage, and helping to achieve this has been the primary focus of Dr Michelle Horwood.

Michelle is Kaiwhakahaere Rārangi Kōrero/Manager Heritage Listing for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. She contributed to He Whare Hangarau Māori: Language, Culture & Technology, published in 2017 by Te Pua Wānanga ki te Ao/Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato. While the chapter drew attention to digital initiatives in the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector, it’s a natural crossover into the heritage space.

A particular focus was on innovations in the taonga Māori space, and Michelle sees digitisation as one tool that has enabled Māori and Pacific cultures to retell

their history and heritage through their eyes, not those with a colonial lens.

“When we think about the ways we engage with communities and heritage, it is no longer appropriate to provide the authoritative narrative,” says Michelle.

“Communities have their own voices and it is up to us in the heritage sector to enable those voices to be heard, telling their stories from their perspectives. Such innovation has strengthened the preservation of heritage and increased engagement with a wider audience.”

The Antarctic Heritage Trust (AHT) is another organisation using the power of digital technologies to bring heritage and history to life. This year AHT will launch a fully immersive virtual reality experience of Sir Edmund Hillary’s hut at Scott Base, Antarctica.

The project, which is being carried out in partnership with Auckland University of Technology, has been a career highlight for AHT General Manager Operations and Communications Francesca Eathorne. Hillary’s hut was used by the explorer’s 23-man team as part of the 1955-58 Trans-Antarctic Expedition in which Sir Edmund led the first overland journey to reach the South Pole since Captain Robert Scott in 1912.

“Following AHT’s extensive conservation of this building, it’s wonderful to have an opportunity to share this incredible legacy we care for with the rest of the world, and especially New Zealanders,” says Francesca.

“It’s powerful to be able to share this iconic building and some of the stories of Sir Ed’s team furthering science and exploration in the world’s most extreme environment. It’s not a place where you can just buy a ticket and go and see it.”

The fully immersive experience with a headset will take you inside the hut as if you were there. It will be available on the Steam gaming platform and via selected public exhibitors, and a version has also been created to download on an app.

Andrew Blanshard, Senior Heritage Advisor for the Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai, is in no doubt about the key principles that make for the best digital experience, citing Rangihoua Heritage Park, cared for by the Marsden Cross Trust Board and the Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai.

“Good digital interpretation is founded on good storytelling principles,” says Andrew. “It’s no different from an interpretation board or a guide at a property or place. The aim is to produce an awesome experience.

“Rangihoua Heritage Park is one of the few genuinely cohesive visitor experiences we have – starting with an on-the-ground interpretation from 2013-14 that has since rolled out into a digital experience. At the end of the day, digital is just another tool – it adds another element to what is told. It’s about telling good, effective stories.”

Digitisation allows for differing perspectives to be told and should encourage people to visit and experience the place.

“You want people to experience that visceral, emotional attachment to a place by visiting it. The website was always meant to be where you find additional information before going to visit and enjoying the experience itself.”

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Kōanga • Spring 2020 27

PAPA WHAKAAHUA TINO PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD • BEST SHOTS

28 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Heritage New Zealand

A Swedish connection WO RDS AND IMAG E : RO B S U IST E D

Goodwood Estate Stables, part of the Category 1 Goodwood Farmstead in North Otago, were built by my ancestor Charles Suisted (Sjöstedt) in 1849 and are among the oldest farm buildings in New Zealand. Whenever I pass that way, I’m drawn to have a cuppa with the Kensingtons, who farm Goodwood today; I love spending time wandering in the place where my ancestors lived.

Charles, a Swedish sea captain, was New Zealand’s second Scandinavian settler. After arriving in Wellington, he took over the famous Barrett’s Hotel in November 1842 before sailing south with Johnny Jones on the Frolic in 1847 to land on the beach by Bobby’s Head (named after Charles’s father-in-law Robert Richmond, as am I). He became the first European settler in North Otago, at one stage farming around 81,000 hectares, all the way from Waikouaiti to Oamaru. From there he exported wool, wheat and cheese, with the money from the sales taking a year to return from London.

The stables were built using a traditional Swedish design, filigree and paint colours, all still evident today. Shortly afterwards, in 1851, the large Goodwood House (including the ballroom, continuing the warm hospitality Charles was known for from Barrett’s Hotel) was built and its gardens were established.

If I time my visits right, I can enjoy the fruit from my greatgreat-great-grandfather’s large and ancient trees.

Since this photo was taken, painting and other remedial work has been carried out at the stables, which sit on private land at Pleasant River, Goodwood.

TECHNICAL DATA Camera: Canon 1DsMk3 Lens: 24mm Exposure: 1/250, f6.7 ISO: 100 RETURN TO CONTENTS

Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga Kōanga••Spring Spring2020 202029 29

PAPA TE HAPORI PĀNUI• •COMMUNITY NOTICEBOARD

1 The building’s Queen

Anne-influenced architecture was associated at the time with progressive ideas and secular education.

2 Audrey Ritchie and

Laurie Mathews of the Friends of Onehunga Community House.

30 Kōanga • Spring 2020

See more of Onehunga Community House on our video: www.youtube.com/user/HeritageNewZealand/featured

Heritage New Zealand

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WORDS: CAITLIN SYKES • IMAGERY: JASON DORDAY

A class ACT

Thanks to years of hard work, tenacity and a whole lot of love from a group of committed volunteers, Onehunga’s landmark former primary school is now restored and adored

Heritage New Zealand

The trick to good management, the saying goes, is to get ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

“And I like to think of us like that,” says Tony Broad, the genial, smiling coordinator of Onehunga Community House. “Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

Housed in the Category 1 (Former) Onehunga Primary School, the community centre is run by a management committee called the Friends of Onehunga Community House.

While they’re a group of dedicated locals with many talents – and who have learnt much about heritage through their association with the building – none of them are heritage experts.

Yet the scale of their heritage achievements is, as Tony describes, extraordinary.

Once slated for potential demolition, the large building has been steadily restored over a period of 15 years by the Friends, who have raised a total of almost $1 million to undertake the work.

Today it sits in its prominent position in the Auckland suburb in a state befitting its heritage values, which are recognised in Auckland Council’s Unitary Plan with Category A status, and by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, which last year upgraded the building’s listing status from Category 2 to Category 1.

Kōanga • Spring 2020 31

TE HAPORI • COMMUNITY

1

2

3

“We knew we wouldn’t be able to do it all at once – you can’t just get $1 million one day – so it had to be planned as an ongoing process” 1 Tony Broad, John

Bedkober, Bridget Graham, Audrey Ritchie and Judy Robinson of Onehunga Community House.

2 Bridget Graham, pictured

in Room 8.

3 Ordinary people doing

extraordinary things, says Tony Broad, have driven the restoration of the Category 1 building.

4 Room 4.

32 Kōanga • Spring 2020

And the wider community clearly sees its value. Tony notes that 3500 people use the building each month, on average, for everything from yoga, karate and Scottish dance classes to meetings of Toastmasters, cellists and patchworkers. Past pupils of the school also meet there for annual school reunions.

“There’s also a lot of social use,” says Bridget Graham, Chair of the Friends of Onehunga Community House.

“We have birthdays, weddings, christenings – we’ve even had funerals here. An increasing number of people in the area live in small apartments and don’t have the space to host large gatherings, so to see the community use the building for those important family occasions is hugely gratifying.”

The building has always occupied an important place in its community. Built in 1901 and designed by Auckland Education Board architects John Mitchell

and Robert Watt, its Queen Anne-influenced architecture was associated at the time with progressive ideas and secular education.

With five large and two small classrooms, two teachers’ rooms and two in its basement, the building’s large scale reflected the size and importance of Onehunga – at the time the second-largest settlement on the Tāmaki isthmus.

The building flexed and adjusted to meet the changing needs of the school community over ensuing decades – it served as a high school from 1903 to 1912; large rooms were partitioned from 1919; a pool (one of the country’s first for learners, and still in use today) was constructed in 1945; and fibrolite extensions were added to some rooms in 1968.

But nearly 80 years after its construction, and in a diminished state, the building was in peril.

Heritage New Zealand

4

Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga • Spring 2020 33

TE HAPORI • COMMUNITY A new adjacent primary school had been built, and the plan was to demolish the old school once that opened.

However, in 1980 the principal at the time, Lee Drummond, called a meeting suggesting the old building be retained for use as a community centre, and with local support the building became Onehunga Community House in 1982.

Although run by a committee of locals, the building remains owned by the Ministry of Education and initially the Friends held only a licence to occupy the site. Without the security of a long-term lease, it was difficult for the community group to gain funding for restoration work, so gaining the lease of the building was pivotal to kickstarting the project in the early 2000s.

The Friends commissioned heritage architect Antony Matthews to come up with a plan for the restoration; crucially, they wanted one that could be tackled in stages.

“We knew we wouldn’t be able to do it all at once – you can’t just get $1 million one day – so it had to be planned as an ongoing process,” says Bridget, who alongside Tony and other Friends has put in countless, painstaking hours applying to various funding bodies.

Restoration work began in 2005, and the first stage saw the restoration of much of the building’s highly decorated exterior, including removing three of four fibrolite add-ons and installing a replacement belfry (the original was removed in 1947), which now houses the original school bell.

The second stage, which involved the restoration of three rooms and their connecting passageways, was another milestone, says committee member and archivist Audrey Ritche, as it allowed for the creation of the building’s museum.

Audrey’s connection to the building spans decades. In 1980 she joined the school’s staff as a teacher assistant, her now-adult children both attended the school, and she was an early attendee of classes when it became a community centre. Alongside Bridget, she joined the Friends in 1992.

She also inherited the school’s archive from a former pupil, and as she organised and updated the records, it became clear that a home was needed for the burgeoning amount of material.

Today the museum houses not only the school’s records and memorabilia – much of which continues to be donated by former pupils – but also materials that help to tell the wider social history of the area, such as blankets from Onehunga Woollen Mills.

The museum is open to the public on Thursday mornings, and is staffed by Audrey and fellow

“It’s a really nice example of a heritage building being reused by its community for community activities”

1

34 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Heritage New Zealand

2

3

volunteer John Bedkober, who is undertaking an inventory of the museum’s materials.

Restoration work is ongoing – “I think we’re at about stage six now!” says Bridget – and throughout it all the Friends have been committed to keeping the house open for community use at affordable rates.

A dance teacher for 60 years, Johanna Lees has taught highland dance classes at Onehunga Community House for more than two decades. She says affordable hire rates are one reason for her staying committed to running classes in the building, but primarily it’s down to the building’s construction.

“It’s the wooden floors,” she explains. “One dance we do, for example, has 192 hops, and if you’re doing that regularly on a concrete floor you’re going to end up with injuries. But this building has kauri floors, and it’s ideal for the kind of dancing we do.”

The community’s love of the building was expressed through the number of submissions supporting the elevation of its listing status when it was reviewed by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga last year.

There were 20 submissions in total – 18 from interested parties (individuals and community groups), with six of those signed by multiple individuals, totalling

Heritage New Zealand

4

192 signatures – the largest number of submissions received for a listing in the Northern Region at the time.

Alexandra Foster, Heritage Assessment Advisor for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, carried out the listing review at the request of the Friends and in recognition of the restoration work undertaken and changes to listing criteria since the building was first listed.

“It was wonderful to see the community demonstrating their support for the place through that process, as well as through their ongoing use. It’s a really nice example of a heritage building being reused by its community for community activities,” says Alexandra.

“And it’s still such a landmark in Onehunga – you can still see this substantial building on the hill from the middle of town – and its scale reflects not only its importance in the community, but also how important Onehunga has been in the settlement of Auckland.”

Tony says the Category 1 listing is wonderful recognition for those who have worked long and hard to preserve the school.

“It recognises the transformation of what was a derelict building to the historic, iconic landmark it is today, and is confirmation of the long-term commitment, perseverance and tenacity it took to get us there.”

1 The building’s wooden

floors make it ideal for the highland dance classes Johanna Lees has been teaching there for more than 20 years.

2 The building is a

prominent landmark in its Auckland suburb.

3 The building’s museum.

4 Tony Broad and

Bridget Graham.

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Kōanga • Spring 2020 35

PAPA TE TUAWHENUA PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD TUKI IHO • RURAL HERITAGE

STAYING

AHEAD The owners of the 2976-hectare Waiorongomai Station in Wairarapa are continuing a remarkable tradition of innovation while steadfastly conserving its heritage

WORDS: MATT PHILP • IMAGERY: ROB SUISTED

36 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Heritage New Zealand

Charlie Matthews at Waiorongomai Station, with Lake Wairarapa behind.

In 2016 regular Heritage New Zealand magazine contributors Matt Philp and Rob Suisted captured the story of the Matthews family of Waiorongomai Station for a book celebrating 50 years of Country Calendar. Here Matt reconnects with the family to share their story with Heritage New Zealand magazine, told alongside images captured

by Rob during the original book shoot.

Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga Kōanga••Spring Spring2020 202037 37

PAPA TE TUAWHENUA PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD TUKU IHO • RURAL HERITAGE

As a kid, Charlie Matthews had to grin and bear monthly services at the family church on Waiorongomai Station (pictured above).

Today he feels far more fondly about the little 1920s chapel.

“It’s not the religious aspect that means so much to me, it’s more about why it was built and the fact it’s still standing,” says Charlie, the sixth generation of Matthews to farm the historic sheep and cattle property bordering Lake Wairarapa, near Featherston.

“Plus, it’s kind of cool to have a church on your farm.”

Built by the sons of Charlie’s great-great-grandparents Alfred and Hannah, the church was stipulated in Alfred’s will to be a place for community worship and a monument to the district’s pioneers.

The 2976-hectare station is one of Wairarapa’s largest and most arresting properties, a 12-kilometre stretch beside the lake, its feet in protected wetlands and its wind-blasted tops in the Remutaka Range.

To an exceptional degree, the productive country is punctuated by thick stands of rewarewa, kānuka, kahikatea, karaka and other natives that successive generations of the farming family have left untouched.

That instinct to conserve began with the station’s founders Elizabeth and Charles Matthews, who broke in a nearby coastal property, Wharepapa (which Charlie and his wife Karla purchased two years ago), before buying the Waiorongomoai blocks from the Crown in the 1850s.

Charles, a leatherworker with no farming experience, took on 8000 hectares of bush, scrub and swamp.

“He must have been driven by something,” says Charlie, “because they were tough times.”

Tough times too for Charles’s successor Alfred, who responded to poor returns and the unsuitability of the station’s original merino stock by shifting his focus to Romneys. The Romney stud he established in 1875 is New Zealand’s oldest.

Under Alfred and his successor Raymond ‘RW’ Matthews, Waiorongomai became a leader in quality fleece production and a notable cattle property. As it grew, it became an almost self-contained world, with up to 18 staff and their families, most with on-farm housing, plus a schoolhouse and the church.

38 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Waiorongomai flats.

Heritage New Zealand

Charlie has added his stamp to the station after taking over from his parents, Susie and Ray, continuing a Waiorongomai tradition of innovation by bringing a new cattle breed into New Zealand, investing in a dam to cope with the changing climate, and undertaking various other developments.

Any changes he has made have been motivated by that strong sense of stewardship.

“Because I’ve been here forever, I want to see the place improve. But that doesn’t mean increasing stock numbers and making more money. It’s about improving the whole aesthetics of the farm.

“We spend a fair bit of time refencing stands of bush, and we’ve pretty much fenced the entire lakefront in the past 10 years, as well as big chunks at the back that border the Remutakas. We get no return from it, but I think it’s important that we care for this stuff so that others can enjoy it.”

He thinks too of the commitment his ancestors made. “Knowing how bloody hard it must have been to create what they created, we try to maintain what we can.”

His grandfather Jack, who took over from RW in 1951, was a huge influence in that respect.

“Waiorongomai was his life and, rightly or wrongly, he saw me as the person who was going to take over,” says Charlie.

“He taught me so many things about the place, not so much about stock – that was more my father Ray – but about the bush, the birdlife, why the individual paddocks were given their names, the history of this place. Jack was very much about that history.”

Charlie with a Speckle Park bull, a breed that the Matthews family helped bring to New Zealand.

Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga • Spring 2020 39

PAPA TE TUAWHENUA PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD TUKU IHO • RURAL HERITAGE A Waiorongomai Station staff meeting.

“Our children know what this farm means … that it’s special, that it’s not ours or theirs, and that there’s a bigger thing going on here”

To a degree, looking after the station’s built heritage has been complicated by the evolution of the farming operation.

The historic workers’ accommodation, for instance, has long since been surplus to requirements and was potentially at risk of deteriorating. Some years ago, Charlie and Karla started renting out cottages and the former homestead as holiday accommodation to help with their upkeep. As a bonus, they’ve met many guests who have their own history with the station.

“Because we had such a huge staff here once, a lot of people out there have connections to Waiorongomai. It’s bizarre how many visitors say, ‘My aunty such-and-such used to work here’.”

40 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Karla Matthews (with mug) has been instrumental in turning the Waiorongomai former staff cottages into holiday accommodation.

Heritage New Zealand

Pig hunting is a favourite Matthews family pasttime.

Charlie is hunting with son Josh.

Succession remains a question at Waiorongomai, which is held in a trust.

“There’s no pressure on the kids; they can make their minds up when they’re ready,” says Charlie. “The only certainty is that it’s not going to be chopped up and sold off.”

To ensure that future, they have made off-farm investments to give them options, including an equity partnership in a farm in Dannevirke.

They’ve also made sure the next generation is keenly aware of what’s at stake at Waiorongomai.

“Our children know what this farm means to me and Karla and their grandparents, that it’s special, that it’s not ours or theirs, and that there’s a bigger thing going on here,” he says.

“Really, that’s the only safeguard we can put in place: instill in them that we want Waiorongomai to remain as it is.”

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Heritage New Zealand

Kōanga Kōanga••Spring Spring2020 202041 41

PAPA PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD KŌPIKOTANGA • DOMESTIC TRAVEL

42 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Heritage HeritageNew NewZealand Zealand

WORDS: JACQUI GIBSON

A LIVING

system IMAGE: ROB SUISTED

Manuhiri are being invited to experience Te Urewera in a new way

Heritage HeritageNew NewZealand Zealand

Te Urewera has long been shrouded in mystery: a mountain region of emerald forests, clear rivers and blue-green lakes populated by Tūhoe, the fiercely independent and enigmatic iwi known as Nā Tamariki o Te Kohu, the Children of the Mist.

The region is generously endowed with enough jawdropping scenery to warrant its own Great Walk at Lake Waikaremoana, and with more culture and history to enthral any heritage-conscious traveller.

Fitting snugly between the Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay, Te Urewera – the first natural landmark to be recognised in New Zealand law as a legal entity in its own right – is signposted by the villages of Tāneatua to the north, Murupara and Ruatāhuna to the west and Wairoa to the east.

“We’re asking people to completely rethink their experience of Te Urewera when they come here,” says Tūhoe leader Tamati Kruger.

“Instead of seeing nature as a set of discrete resources to be

managed and used, we’re asking people to see Te Urewera as Tūhoe does – as a living system that people depend on for survival, culture, recreation and inspiration. It’s about relating to Te Urewera as its own identity in a physical, environmental, cultural and spiritual sense.”

It’s 8.30am on a Monday morning when I arrive in Tāneatua for a walking tour of the tribal headquarters of Tūhoe with Tamati and fellow Tūhoe leader Kirsti Luke.

An iwi of 40,000 people, Tūhoe has a governance board led by Tamati as Chair, a tribal authority led by Kirsti as Chief Executive, and a 110-person staff responsible for the care of Te Urewera and providing health, education and social services to iwi members.

Kōanga • Spring 2020 43

KŌPIKOTANGA • DOMESTIC TRAVEL

kaitiaki: guardians kaitiakitanga: guardianship karakia: prayer

1

kaumātua: elder kaupapa: goals kōrero: discussion

Tamati, Kirsti and I start our kōrero over a cup of tea and reflect on the law that brought an end to Crown ownership of Te Urewera National Park in 2014. The world-first law recognised the 212,673-hectare area as a legal entity and the people of Tūhoe as its legal guardian.

“The settlement heralded huge change for both iwi and visitors,” explains Tamati.

“It ended several decades of the DOC system – a system people are very familiar with – for an approach that’s based on tribal practices such as kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga.”

As we finish up and head outside, I ask Tamati and Kirsti what visitors to Te Urewera should make of this new era.

“People need to know they’re welcome here,” says Tamati.

“My advice to manuhiri is to come as you are. Be yourself. Bring your friends and your children. Enjoy this wonderful place – its rivers, its trees and its birds.

Revel in its mystery. Meet our people. But also take time to hear our stories and learn our history. Be open to experiencing this place in a new way.”

It’s 11am when I reach Whakatau Rainforest Retreat in the village of Ngaputahi.

Driving on the only road in to one of New Zealand’s most isolated rainforests, I watch paddocks and rundown farm houses give way to dense tawa and rimu forest and scraps of milky-white mist start to appear in the bush canopy like wisps of flyaway candy floss.

Tūhoe guide and eco-lodge owner Hinewai McManus greets me at the roadside wearing a camouflage tracksuit, embroidered leather cowboy boots and

44 Kōanga • Spring 2020

a pair of blue mirrored aviators. She’s lived in Te Urewera off and on for most her life and has an in-depth knowledge of the ngāhere thanks to a childhood of hiking and hunting with whānau.

Today, from a well-forested site on whānau land, she offers tourists a chance to immerse themselves in nature by staying in bush whare and joining her on guided walks throughout the rohe.

Typically, she welcomes visitors with a mihi whakatau – a traditional settling-in ceremony that introduces people to Te Urewera through karakia and waiata.

“From a Tūhoe perspective, it’s the land, the people and our culture that define our concept of heritage,” Patrick McGarvey, Māori Heritage Council member for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, tells me.

“For us, a hillside or an ancient waiata has as much meaning and history as a building belonging to another era.”

During my overnight stay, Hinewai shares stories of Hine-pūkohu-rangi, the mist maiden who lured Te Maunga to Earth from heaven and with whom she coupled to create the people of Tūhoe.

I take part in a tree-planting experience, called Tāne Mahuta – God of the Forest, designed to teach guests how to care for the forest and drawing on mātauranga Māori.

On a half-day bush walk in Whirinaki Te Pua-aTāne Conservation Park, Hinewai and I discuss the government deal in 2014 that settled the Crown’s historical wrongs against Tūhoe and recognised Te Urewera as having its own legal identity.

“Did the settlement change much for me, personally?”

Hinewai asks in reply to my question during lunch by

manaakitanga: hospitality manuhiri: visitors mātauranga Māori: indigenous knowledge maunga: mountain miromiro: North Island tomtit ngāhere: bush rohe: region tamariki: children tīkanga: cultural practice waiata: song wharenui: meeting house

1 Te Urewera, New Zealand.

IMAGE: ROB SUISTED 2 Tamati Kruger, Tūhoe

Chair, and Kirsti Luke, Tūhoe Chief Executive.

3 Bush whare, Whakatau

Rainforest Retreat.

4 Whirinaki Te Pua-a-Tāne

Conservation Park.

5 Miromiro sculpture,

Whakatau Rainforest Retreat.

IMAGERY: JACQUI GIBSON

Heritage New Zealand

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3

“Revel in its mystery. Meet our people. But also take time to hear our stories and learn our history. Be open to experiencing this place in a new way”

4

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Kōanga • Spring 2020 45

PAPA PĀNUI • NOTICEBOARD KŌPIKOTANGA • DOMESTIC TRAVEL 2

3

1

HOW TO PLAN YOUR TE UREWERA ADVENTURE

1.

2.

Drop in to one of the new Tūhoe information hubs located at Tāneatua, Waikaremoana and Ruatāhuna. A hub in Waimana is due to open soon.

Set aside time for a road trip to all three hubs – each one is distinct and has its own information and resources. Do the road trip in a couple of days or over time if you want to keep returning to, and exploring, the region.

3.

Tramp, fish, hunt, stay on a marae, go horse-riding or enjoy a bush kai experience with a local Tūhoe guide who can tell you about Te Urewera and the culture and ways of Tūhoe (Tūhoetanga). n

4

5 7

6

46 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Heritage New Zealand

the river. “Not especially. I’ve spent so much of my life here in the bush. I’ve always seen myself as one of the many kaitiaki of Te Urewera.

“But I’m proud we were the first in the world to introduce such legislation. I’m pleased people from all over the world are coming here to see what being kaitiaki means in practice.”

Talking to Brenda Tahi in Ruatāhuna the following day, she says welcoming tourists to Te Urewera has long been part of Tūhoe culture.

A former government manager and company strategist and now head of a trust responsible for a range of tourism, economic and social ventures in Te Urewera, Brenda also runs Manawa Honey Tours.

Tours take visitors to see Manawa beehives on foot or horseback and sample delicious wild bush honey straight from the hive.

“Many people don’t realise tourism in Te Urewera dates back to the 1800s. In Ruatāhuna, we have some really well-established tourism providers, like Richard and Mariann White at Ahurei Adventures, who offer hiking, horse-riding and marae stays.

“We’re also seeing amazing social enterprises pop up, like The Blackhouse, a small-scale restaurant run by the Mitai whānau from their home.”

During dinner at The Blackhouse, I learn that all the food on my plate has been locally sourced – either grown by tamariki in school gardens or, in the case of the wild Te Urewera venison, caught by local hunters. Most of the proceeds go into social activities, such as free music lessons for tamariki.

“As Tūhoe, our challenge is to manage tourism in a way that aligns with our aspirations and our culture of looking after this beautiful natural environment for future generations.

“When people come here to spend time with us, they’re buying in to that vision. They’re getting behind our communities and supporting our kaupapa.”

I spend my last day in Te Urewera at the historic marae of Maungapōhatu with Tūhoe kaumātua Richard Tūmarae and his whānau.

On a morning bush walk he tells me: “So many of our young people live outside Te Urewera in cities and overseas. When I can, I like to bring groups – school kids, older people, sometimes tourists – here to walk the land and understand its history.”

In 2019 Maungapōhatu marae was the site of a formal government pardon. The pardon acknowledged the hurt and shame suffered by the people of Maungapōhatu more than 100 years earlier when their ancestor, Tūhoe prophet Rua Kēnana, was illegally arrested and Maungapōhatu was raided by 70 police officers.

Walking between the wharenui and the kitchen, I see stones commemorating two men, Te Māipi Te Whiu and Toko, the son of Rua, shot dead during the 1916 police raids.

Heritage New Zealand

8

TAKE A SELF-GUIDED WALKING TOUR OF TE KURA WHARE Te Kura Whare is the tribal headquarters of Tūhoe, located at 12 Tūhoe Street in Tāneatua.

Completed in 2014, Te Kura Whare is an awardwinning, sustainably designed building based on international principles of non-toxic, environmentally friendly ‘living buildings’.

Built from materials such as dead and fallen trees within Te Urewera and mud from local rivers, Te Kura Whare generates renewable energy, and collects and treats its own drinking water and greywater.

Today it is one of a growing network of living buildings within Te Urewera, which includes Te Kura Tanata in Ruatāhuna and the striking black tribal office set among wetlands at Lake Waikaremoana.

To get to Te Kura Whare, take a 15-minute drive inland from Whakatāne, then park in the main visitors’ carpark. Head in to the main reception area to start your self-guided walking tour of the building. n

1 Brenda Tahi of Manawa

Honey Tours (left) and Hinewai McManus of Whakatau Rainforest Retreat.

2 Manawa Honey Tours

beekeeper Nick Mitai.

3 Maungapōhatu marae

grounds.

4 Bush kai served on a 5 Manawa Honey Tour

(4) and at Whakatau Rainforest Retreat (5).

6 Horse trekking with

Manawa Honey Tours.

A banquet dinner of crayfish, oysters, chicken, vegetables, salads and Māori fried bread served inside the wharenui by candlelight – considered a no-no in Māori culture – spoke of the unconventional take on tīkanga by Rua, and his special place in the history of Tūhoe as an independent thinker.

The next morning Richard shows me the remnants of the wooden cottage Rua shared with 12 wives. Standing on the hillside, we imagine a time when the tennis courts, now overgrown, were in full swing, and we’re amazed at the lengths the community went to to haul a concert piano into this isolated mountain settlement.

“They came here because they wanted independence and the freedom to express their culture. This story is part of my heritage now and it’s what I’m reminded of each time I come here,” Richard tells me as we turn back down the hill and head for home.

7 The Mitai whānau of

The Blackhouse, a social enterprise that serves visitors local kai while supporting community initiatives.

IMAGERY: JACQUI GIBSON 8 Te Kura Whare, Tāneatua.

IMAGE: TE URU TAUMATUA

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Kōanga • Spring 2020 47

PAPA PĀNUII •TE HAERENGA NOTICEBOARD AO • INTERNATIONAL

1

COMMUNICATION

stations WORDS: LYDIA MONIN

2

48 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Heritage New Zealand

1 Foilhommerum Bay on

Valentia Island.

IMAGE: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM 2 Valentia Island.

IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM 3 Professor Alexander

Gillespie.

IMAGE: PETER DRURY

3

As a birthplace of globalisation, a remote outpost in the southwest of Ireland is an unlikely setting.

But in an age when it took two weeks, weather permitting, for a message to reach North America from Europe, with all communications sent by boat, Valentia Island in County Kerry became a bridge between the old continent and the new, and the world would never be the same again.

The idea of a transatlantic cable was first proposed in 1839, but it took nearly 30 years and a catalogue of mishaps and misadventures for stations on Valentia Island and Heart’s Content in Newfoundland, Canada, to be connected and open for business. For the next 150 years, communications technology developed rapidly and Valentia Island’s contribution to the information revolution was largely forgotten.

Then a New Zealander and heritage expert heard about this small island off the coast of Kerry and its key part in the communications revolution.

Professor Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato law professor and former rapporteur for the World Heritage Convention, was working on a study of Ireland’s natural and cultural heritage when his father-in-law in Kerry mentioned the Valentia story.

Alexander recognised the island’s global significance, setting a UNESCO World Heritage bid in train.

Heritage New Zealand

With the help of a University of Waikato law professor, a small Irish island is seeking global recognition for its founding role in a communications revolution

“A monster” is how Alexander describes the process of joining the prestigious World Heritage List. A site has to garner support at local, national (it must be placed on a country’s tentative list before it can go forward for UNESCO consideration) and, finally, international level.

“But that’s only the beginning of the story,” he says.

“After that, you have to build up the museums and build up the infrastructure to support your bid, to make sure that the core of the heritage – what you’re protecting – has a lot of integrity and quality.”

The ongoing commitment to save priceless heritage comes with many rewards though: prestige, an international profile and tourist income.

The birth of global telecommunications was a difficult one. Cable manufacture began in early 1857 and by the end of July it was aboard two naval ships: America’s RMS Niagara and Britain’s HMS Agamemnon.

The ships departed Valentia Harbour on 5 August, but just four miles out the cable snapped and had to be repaired. Six days in, the cable broke again and the attempt was abandoned.

The following year the two ships met mid-Atlantic, where they joined their respective ends, only for the cable to break almost immediately. They tried again – and again. Finally, in July 1858, the ships, laden with cable, met mid-Atlantic. They spliced both ends

Kōanga • Spring 2020 49

PAPA PĀNUII •TE HAERENGA NOTICEBOARD AO • INTERNATIONAL

“The innovation will assist in telling the heritage story and we’ll evolve it over time so that it becomes almost like a living museum” 1

2

50 Kōanga • Spring 2020

together and carefully uncoiled the cable – one end headed for Newfoundland and the other for Valentia Island. It worked and the two continents were joined.

But only temporarily. Communication was established with the message: “Glory to God in the highest; on Earth, peace and goodwill to men”, but within three weeks, high voltages had damaged the cable and communication ceased.

Seven years later, in 1864, American entrepreneur Cyrus Field recommenced the job, using the world’s largest ship, SS Great Eastern. More than 1900 kilometres of cable was laid before the line snapped. Numerous attempts to retrieve the broken end failed. In 1866 the Great Eastern tried again – and succeeded. The cable was open for business.

The venture was driven by commercial necessity – the US was a young and growing economy and needed better access to financial markets.

“Globalisation began when continents started talking to each other and supply chains could be developed and people could connect,” says Leonard Hobbs, Chair of the Valentia Transatlantic Cable Foundation.

Leonard’s great-grandfather was one of the first four local young men trained in cable technology at Valentia’s station.

A whole community developed around the station, which still stands. Men lived upstairs and worked on the cable downstairs, while their families lived in houses nearby.

By the 1900s the station employed more than 40 telegraph workers. Leonard says the island had a great social life and many of the cable men later travelled the world and settled in different places.

“It sort of internationalised that part of Kerry… It had an amazing effect on the locals as well.”

But as communications technology moved on, radio and satellite took over and the glory years of Valentia

Heritage New Zealand

1 The crew of the SS Great Eastern work together inside

the ship to lay the transatlantic cable.

3

IMAGE: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, PAINTING BY ROBERT CHARLES DUDLEY. GIFT OF CYRUS W. FIELD, 1892.

2 Professor Alexander Gillespie holds a piece of the

cable.

IMAGE: PETER DRURY 3 The Cliffs, Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island – the

point at which the shore end of the cable was landed on 22 July 1865.

4 At Heart’s Content on the day that the laying,

recovering and testing of the transatlantic cable was successfully completed.

IMAGERY: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, PAINTINGS

BY ROBERT CHARLES DUDLEY. GIFTS OF CYRUS W. FIELD, 1892.

4

Island faded. The station closed its doors in 1966, 100 years after opening.

Valentia Island has yet to be added to Ireland’s tentative list, but Leonard is very confident that it will go forward to UNESCO as a joint transnational application with Heart’s Content in Newfoundland, the site at the other end of the transatlantic cable.

New Zealand was hooked up to the rest of the world in early 1876 when a cable was laid between La Perouse in New South Wales and Wakapuaka near Nelson, known as Cable Bay. In the first message, the governor of New South Wales congratulated his New Zealand counterpart “on the successful completion of an enterprise which brings New Zealand into telegraphic communication with all the commercial centres of the civilised world”.

The Wakapuaka station burnt down in 1914, but an even older specimen, the Marlborough cable station at Whites Bay, which was established in 1866 to link the North and South Islands, still stands. It has survived several periods of disrepair.

By the turn of the 20th century, even Stewart Island was linked in. The cable from Bluff was laid in six days in 1902 after Sir Joseph Ward used a stint as acting premier to suddenly fulfil a promise to his island constituents. A former telegraph boy, Sir Joseph immediately messaged the governor from “the most southerly cable station in the world”.

“With regard to the telegraph cable in New Zealand, we were the end of the line… we were the last country to be connected up to it, so there’s a story to be told there,” says Alexander.

Like Ireland, he says, New Zealand has considerable heritage that has yet to be capitalised upon and remains largely invisible. He thinks we’re too modest about what we possess. “For a country like New Zealand to have only three [World Heritage Sites], when we’re one of the most amazing countries on the planet, is just a travesty.”

Places such as the Art Deco district in Napier, the volcanic cones of Auckland and the Waitangi Treaty Grounds are on New Zealand’s tentative list, but Alexander believes that Kaikōura, because of its geological, natural and cultural significance, and

Heritage New Zealand

Pacific navigation (potentially linking key sites), because of the incredible human achievement involved, have greater global significance.

The Valentia Island story is set to come full circle, with a return to the cutting-edge status it once enjoyed.

The old cable station will house the very latest in augmented reality, virtual reality and the internet of things, says Leonard.

“We’re going to have a mix of heritage and innovation; hopefully, the innovation will assist in telling the heritage story and we’ll evolve it over time so it becomes almost like a living museum. It’ll be something that’ll transform itself every couple of years.”

There’s just one small issue: the possibility of a 21st-century break in the cable. The Valentia Island station doesn’t have broadband. There’s a list for that too though: a priority list for a high-speed broadband rollout in rural areas of Ireland.

So Valentia Island is onto it. And while World Heritage status is probably another three or four years away, the broadband should be connected in time.

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Kōanga • Spring 2020 51

NGĀ PUKAPUKA • BOOKS

WORDS: M A RI A N NE T R E MA I N E

First and foremost Exploring ‘firsts’ – from the school dental chair to a city mission There is a magic around the idea of a thing being the first of its kind. In Terry Moyle’s book, The First – The Walsh Brothers and the Aeroplane Days of Edwardian New Zealand (New Holland, $44.99), the author explains how the mystique of flight captured the New Zealand imagination.

The concept of something heavier than air being able to rise above the houses and treetops and join clouds in the sky was almost too exciting to believe possible. People wanted to see the phenomenon for themselves.

But novelty can stimulate doubts as well as enthusiasm. As a new venture, there were often problems to overcome, including, for Thomas Sopwith, having to pay unbudgeted customs tariffs. Thomas planned to use imported parts to assemble

52 Kōanga • Spring 2020

a cheaper aircraft rather than pay customs charges on the whole aircraft, but he reckoned without the determination of the customs clerk who painstakingly calculated charges on each and every individual part.

Along with aeroplanes, Terry also deals in this book with the Victorian bicycle craze and the first motorcars.

He has dedicated himself to finding historical photographs showing the involvement of many men and women on the occasions of auspicious firsts.

The photographs are just as fascinating and important in telling the stories as the words.

Similarly, in Tooth and Veil: The Life and Times of the New Zealand Dental Nurse, by Noel

O’Hare (Massey University Press, $49.99), the photographs of clinics and dental nurses in uniform beside children in the chair at the ‘murder house’ bring an instant sense of being there to this history of the early days of dental nurses in New Zealand.

The concept of the dental nurse was introduced to deal with the problem of extremely poor dental health in New Zealand children.

Once trained and sent into the community, dental nurses had to deal with multiple extractions, outdated rules and equipment, and sudden transfers to clinics in far-flung parts of the country.

Most problems grew from dentists’ fear of giving dental nurses any knowledge, training or equipment that might allow them to compete with the dental profession. Dentists wanted to protect their professional standing and tried to confine dental nurses to a lesser status.

This is a well-written historical account, particularly fascinating if you lived through the dental nurse era. As a child you accept what you experience, but there is so much more to understand about the reasons for dental nurses being introduced into the health system and why they had to struggle so hard to gain the recognition and working conditions they deserved.

As with dental clinics, reading James Cook’s name or hearing him mentioned evokes memories of school days, in which the teaching tended to focus on the fact that Cook was the first to circumnavigate New Zealand.

However, 100 Days that Mapped the Nation: Captain James Cook 250th Commemorative Edition 1769-2019, by Graeme Lay (New Holland, $65), gives a much more detailed version of Cook’s preparations, his companions on board, his determination to solve the problem of scurvy and his contribution to the calculation of longitude.

The places at which Cook anchored as he sailed HMB Endeavour around New Zealand and his interactions with Māori – some positive and others negative – provide insights into the differences among settlements and tribal ways of life.

Alongside hearing the name ‘Cook’ and feeling a familiarity that may go little further than name recognition, the name ‘McCahon’ often summons up the category ‘artist’. But for those who would like to go more deeply into Colin McCahon’s art, here are the books for you.

These two weighty volumes, Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction, Vol. 1 1919-1959

Heritage New Zealand

GIVEAWAY We have one copy of 100 Days that Mapped the Nation to give away.

and Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land? Vol. 2 1960-1987, by Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, Vol. 1 $75, Vol. 2 $79.99), are awe-inspiring and overwhelming at the same time. They are magnificently thorough and comprehensive, covering all McCahon’s art, work and life, as well as his relationships with other artists and writers.

These two books also show you McCahon’s work in context, and place particular art works within his development as an artist. In other words, for a mere $150 you can immerse yourself in his work and prepare in advance for a visit to a gallery that holds one of his paintings.

Knowing the background behind a particular painting adds more depth to experiencing his work.

Just as a knowledge of the context of a painting can help you feel a closer relationship with the painting itself, Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman, by Alexander Aitken (first published 1963, Oxford University Press; second edition 2018, Auckland University Press, $39.99), feels authentic and reliable because it is a different type of war history.

This one is written by a soldier about his own experiences,

Heritage New Zealand

rather than a researcher using historical materials, and as a New Zealander the author creates a closer bond with readers. This second edition of Alexander’s book has been edited by Alex Calder.

Alexander’s voice comes down to us through the decades – a clear, modest, thoughtful voice.

He chooses not to write about anything that he feels others have dealt with more thoroughly than he could. For example, he does not deal with the night life in Cairo. He prefers to spend his free time playing his violin.

He talks of the “cloud of official silence” surrounding Gallipoli and his shock after arriving the previous night to a strangely quiet camp. In daylight he saw the reason – the pitifully small number of men left in the New Zealand Infantry Brigade. His own 10th North Otago Company, even after being joined by Alexander’s own platoon, was still only a third of its initial number. His calm and measured account makes the story he tells even more shocking.

Another first is detailed in Guts and Grace: Christchurch City Mission – A History, by Geoffrey M R Haworth (Wily Publications, $34.99). This book

surprised me by confronting me with my own assumptions.

I had assumed that the work of a church had always included supporting people in need.

But it took a particular man, Bishop West-Watson, who had experienced Barrow-inFurness in northern England, an area with high social needs, to recognise how critical it was to create a city mission in Christchurch, even without funds. He convinced others of the importance of “making a small experiment” (page 20) that might grow in time.

This work took place during the Great Depression, with extremes of unemployment and poverty. Being determined to provide practical help to people needing food, clothing and shelter took both ‘guts’ – the courage and determination to overcome obstacles – and ‘grace’, the sense of an overwhelming necessity – as well as a human desire to help those in need.

The book documents the practical steps that helpers took to provide food, shelter and support for the hungry and homeless.

Beginning with little more than a recognition of need and a few willing volunteers, the Christchurch City Mission came into being step by step, adding

To enter the draw, send your name and address on the back of an envelope to Book Giveaways, Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, PO Box 2629, Wellington 6140, before 30 September 2020.

The winner of last issue’s book giveaway (Pākehā Settlements in a Māori World: New Zealand Archaeology 1769-1860) was Dr Jill Wrapson, Auckland.

new services when more problems demanded more ways of helping. Photographs show the people who worked to bring about change for the mission with their appeals, street vans, Christmas meals and all the things that would never have happened without their overpowering belief that they must happen.

Books are chosen for review in Heritage New Zealand magazine at the discretion of the Books Editor.

Due to the volume of books received, we cannot guarantee the timing of any reviews that appear and we are unable to return any copies submitted for review. Ngā mihi.

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Kōanga • Spring 2020 53

PAPA Ō TĀTOU PĀNUI WĀHI • NOTICEBOARD INGOA-NUI, TAKU KITENGA • OUR HERITAGE, MY VISION

kaitiaki: guardian mātauranga: knowledge taonga: treasured heirlooms wharenui: meeting houses whenua: land

Relationships and RENEWAL Ambrosia Crum discusses how emerging challenges, such as climate change and Covid-19, also present opportunities for the future of Māori heritage preservation IMAGE: MARCEL TROMP

54 Kōanga • Spring 2020

Heritage places are all around us and incredibly diverse.

They’re the places where we live, our marae, where generational and community-based mātaurangā is practised and celebrated.

They’re the ecosystems where our natural resources thrive, where we gather in search of guidance from a higher power, where we bury our dead.

They’re the whenua marked by significant events that reinforce the connections between people and place that helped to shape our world today.

I’m of both Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Whātua descent, and the heritage places that are most important to me are found in Te Tai Tokerau – specifically Hokianga and Kaipara Harbours – and are very much linked by histories of origin, ancestry and identity.

The place to which I feel the deepest connection is our home – our whenua at Huatau, north Hokianga. This is where I’m most settled and grounded. To the north of this whenua are forests of ancient kauri and to the south, the place where tidal saltwater and fresh river water meet.

Working in heritage places means I’m always learning; it is a constant process of observing, experiencing and absorbing.

Through relationships based on people, place and taonga comes an always-evolving understanding of what Māori heritage is now and can be in the future.

The complex challenge of how we best care for these places will always be further complicated by new and evolving influences. At the start of 2020, I would have highlighted climate change as a leading issue affecting Māori heritage into the future. Today, I add the challenge – or opportunity – of understanding what recovery looks like in the post-Covid era.

Navigating these challenges will be a further test for all kaitiaki. But these current challenges can also be the catalysts we need to explore solutions that stretch beyond our existing capabilities. We can be bold in considering new possibilities and envisioning new ways of doing things.

I believe outcomes for Māori heritage will continue to improve through consistent and long-term support – particularly through research, innovation and education.

In our current climate, new and exciting opportunities are possible and national and regional investment can help to bolster a new vision and support the renewal of communities.

There are so many ways we can do this – from investing in research on climate change and other environmental impacts with an emphasis on collaborations with communities, to ensuring all communities have access to transformative technologies and IT tools and creating practical, kaitiakibased internships and work placements through schools.

Ambrosia Crum holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in architecture and last year graduated with First Class Honours from the University of Auckland’s Master of Heritage Conservation programme. While studying, she led a world-first study investigating seismic retrofitting of wharenui published by the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

As Pouārahi Tautiaki Taonga Māori Built Heritage Advisor for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, she supports marae communities to care for their taonga by assisting with restoration projects.

RETURN TO CONTENTS

Heritage New Zealand

s irie L qu AL en smSMall for t TtoOoO pen EevNenT O O EnoV N

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Tel: (09) 524 5729 highwicfunctions@heritage.org.nz

Tel: (09) 403 9015 pompallier@heritage.org.nz

Tel: (09) 846 7367 alberton@heritage.org.nz

Highwic

Mt Albert, Auckland

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