PAPA PĀNUI TE TŪHURATIA • NOTICEBOARD RĀRANGI • EXPLORE THE LIST
Dearly departed WORDS: DENISE IRVINE • IMAGERY: MARTIN JONES, HERITAGE NEW ZEALAND POUHERE TAONGA
Built in 1936, the Mercer morgue is a rarity – one of only a handful of such structures known to have been built within cemeteries in New Zealand When Kerryn Walker came to live in the north Waikato town of Mercer a few years back, she took her dog Lily for a stroll most days and became intrigued by a lonely concrete building with a rusty roof hidden among vines near the cemetery on Glass Road. She asked local people about it: some said it had been a bus stop; others suggested it was a pumphouse. Kerryn joined the Mercer Community Committee and one of the members, Ray Katipa, told her that it had been the town’s morgue. It had probably last been used for this purpose in the early 1960s; it was something that Ray – and other long-time Mercer residents – had always known about, but its origins had become lost over time.
8 Ngahuru • Autumn 2022
Kerryn was further intrigued. “Who finds a morgue while they’re walking the dog?” she says. She delved into the morgue’s unique history, spent hours at her computer trawling old newspapers and records, and compiled a portfolio of information on the little building to which bodies that required examination for a coroner’s inquest had been taken. The Mercer Community Committee subsequently applied to have the former morgue entered on the New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero, and in July 2021 it was listed as a Category 2 historic place. “We are all so excited,” says Kerryn. “Now we want to tidy it up and celebrate its huge heritage.”
The Mercer morgue is a rarity – one of only a handful known to have been built within cemeteries in New Zealand. Most purposebuilt examples in the early and mid 20th century were attached to institutions such as hospitals and sanatoria. Martin Jones, Senior Heritage Assessment Advisor for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, who produced the morgue listing report in consultation with Māori Heritage Advisor Tharron Bloomfield, says the Mercer building is an uncommon survivor. “It is still so well preserved so many decades after it was last used for its original purpose.” The morgue’s story began in June 1936, when New Zealand Truth, a colourful and
controversial tabloid newspaper, ran a story denouncing unsanitary rural town morgues that were typically located in hotels – the key community gathering places. Truth illustrated its shockhorror story with a photograph of a morgue that was most likely in the yard of the Mercer Hotel, with a pigsty adjacent to the makeshift premises that held tūpāpaku ahead of a coronial inquiry. Less than a month after the damning article, the Mercer Town Board commissioned and funded a purpose-built morgue for the community, to be located at Mercer Cemetery to the east of the township. The cemetery site was part of an ancestral landscape known
Heritage New Zealand
