PAPA PĀNUI Tūhuratia te Rārangi • NOTICEBOARD • EXPLORE THE LIST
The rear of what was the home's main building and water tower (centre), with staff and children's dining rooms and laundry rooms to the right, and senior boys' block to the left.
WORDS: CAITLIN SYKES • IMAGERY: JASON DORDAY
Home again Memories of life in an orphanage offer personal perspectives on an Auckland historic place
For Raymond Bates, now in his mid-80s, helping to build the archive of a Category 1 historic place started at an early age. It was around 1947, and Kodak was running a story competition among children at Auckland orphanages, offering one of its latest cameras as the prize. Raymond, a resident at the Wyllie Road Orphan Home in Papatoetoe, which at the time was home to 110 children, was the overall winner. The prize came with a single roll of film, but the home’s Matron, Miss Wilbraham, made Raymond a deal. “She’d long wanted to have a photographic record of the home itself – the kids and everything
10 Kōanga • Spring 2021
else in the home. And every year they used to send a photographer out to take photographs of the kids and buildings and so forth for the archives, but she particularly wanted them taken of the kids just as they were,” recounted Raymond during an oral history interview carried out late last year. “So she said to me, ‘I will buy the film once a month, you can have three or four photographs for yourself, [and] we’ll take the rest and put them in the archives for the orphan home, for future use.’ Which is what we did. Then years later, when I came to dig up all the information on the home, I got my hands on all the loose photos – a massive great box full. And what do I find? All these
photos that I’d taken as a kid.” That passion for photography ignited at the home continued, with Raymond going on to work as a professional photographer. The passion for recording life at the home also lingered. Raymond has documented pages of memories of the years from 1937 to 1951 he spent at the home, covering everything from daily routines and friendships made to cleaning and personal hygiene regimens, plus his wider research into the historic place. A desire to pass on the information led him last year to connect with the Auckland office of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, and in particular to administrator
LOCATION Papatoetoe sits northwest of Manukau, 18km southeast of Auckland. Pauline Vela, who later undertook an oral history interview with him. Listed as St John’s Home, reflecting a change of the building’s use and name in 1963, the home was built to replace an orphanage in Parnell that had been devastated by fire. It was designed by architect George Goldsbro, who offered his services for free in memory of his father who had been an honorary medical officer at the institution.
Heritage New Zealand
