28 minute read
Christchurch
A Matariki hākari
Mahinga kai, the maramataka and Matariki all draw together for a special event at Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate Sheppard House
WORDS: HELEN BROWN • IMAGERY: KIRSTY MIDDLETON
The return of the lone star Puaka or the Matariki constellation to our pre-dawn winter skies has traditionally been regarded by Māori as a signifier of the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the new year. It is a time for wānanga and whanaungatanga, for coming together to share stories, pass on knowledge, remember those who have passed away, and plan for the year ahead.
It is also a time to share and enjoy the bounty of a full pātaka. So this year, as Aotearoa New Zealand marks Matariki as a public holiday for the first time, Nigel Harris (Ngāi Tūāhuriri), Pouārahi for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, decided to combine his professional heritage interests with his culinary skills and a lifetime of experience as a food gatherer to showcase and host a traditional hākari for whānau and colleagues at Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate Sheppard House in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Fittingly, Te Whare Waiutuutu is named for a stream flowing through the property, which is part of an interconnected network of waterways that flow into the Ōtakaro Avon River towards the Ihutai Avon estuary and were highly treasured by Ngāi Tahu as a mahinga kai area.
A pā kid, Nigel was born and raised at Tuahiwi, where he developed a passion for food when he was just a pēpi. As the youngest in the whānau, he was often left at home with his Taua Beck (Elizabeth Mataputaputa Harris (née Rūpene)) when his father (Ray Harris), a gun shearer and horse trainer, travelled away for work. When Taua Beck baked a batch of scones or her renowned plum duff, it was young Nigel’s job to bring in the wood and coal for the coal range, and mix the butter and flour or
Learn more about the Matariki Hākari in our video: youtube.com/ HeritageNewZealand PouhereTaonga
1 Nigel Harris preparing vegetables for the hākari.
2 Makarini Rūpene hanging tuna to dry in the whata.
3 Huia Pacey hard at work in the kitchen.
4 Tui Falwasser with samples of her weaving.
5 Nigel cleaning a tuna fillet. add the baking powder, carefully measuring quantities according to her instructions.
“That was the catalyst that really got me initiated into food,” says Nigel, who went on to become a professional chef and teacher of the culinary arts. Sitting around the coal range late into the evening with all the aunties popping in to play euchre and talking whakapapa, and working alongside his uncles in the cookhouse at the back of the marae, he also learned that food was about much more than just eating.
“It’s the gathering, the storytelling, the memories – making those intimate exchanges and connections over the years. The eating is just the icing on the cake.”
In preparing his Matariki feast, Nigel called upon his whanaunga, including mahinga kai expert Makarini Rūpene (Ngāi Tūāhuriri) and expert weaver Tui Falwasser (Ngāi Tūāhuriri), who also hail from the small rural settlement of Tuahiwi, just north of Kaiapoi, which is home to the Ngāi Tūāhuriri hapū of Ngāi Tahu.
The fertile soils of Tuahiwi once sustained extensive māra kai that supplied the nearby stronghold of Kaiapoi Pā, which was established by the first Ngāi Tahu tipuna when they settled Te Waipounamu, the South Island, in the early 18th century.
Later, Tuahiwi was incorporated into Kaiapoi Native Reserve 873, which had been set aside as part of the infamous Canterbury land purchase of 1848 that had had devastating consequences for Ngāi Tahu, including the loss of ownership and access to many of their traditional mahinga kai. Ngāi Tahu food gatherers have battled to maintain and reclaim those rights ever since.
But despite overwhelming impediments, the production and procurement of customary kai has remained central to Ngāi Tahu identity.
“I grew up around mahinga kai. I’ve always cooked and always done kai mahi,” says Nigel. “As kids, our toys were slug guns, knives, fishing rods and eel spears. Our time was spent down the Cam River
[Ruataniwhā] and other waterways – gathering kai, getting watercress, putting in traps for waikōura, and whitebaiting with our whanaunga.”
Tui agrees: “Every day there was something related to mahinga kai.”
Makarini recalls that one of his earliest memories is of visiting his Great-Uncle Mars (Te Marino Marsden Rūpene) at Tuahiwi and “watching the eels being smoked, as a little kid”. Makarini remains a committed food gatherer and regularly feeds his whānau and friends from a pātaka brimming with Ngāi Tahu delicacies such as pāua, tītī, tuna, īnanga and kōura.
Indeed, when we talk, he is pressed for time as he has 50 tuna hanging on his whata waiting to be smoked. When he is not gathering, he works as a Cultural Land Management Advisor, encouraging landowners to protect the mahinga kai values on their properties. He also plays a pivotal role as a Tangata Tiaki (customary fisheries guardian). In that capacity, he issued permits for some of the kaimoana that was gathered for the feast.
The three cousins did not grow up observing Matariki, but their whānau were (and are) driven by the maramataka – the Māori lunar calendar. The tides, the phases of the moon, and the seasons were an ingrained and essential part of the rhythm of life.
“You wouldn’t go eeling on the full moon, you’d go on the dark moon,” says Nigel. “On the flip side, you’d get pāua on the full moon because of the lower tide.”
In the appropriate seasons they collected cockles, netted flounders and herrings, gathered pāua and mussels, and speared eels at night or bobbed for them over the stopbank, making lures (known as ‘hui’) with a bit of rotten meat on a stick and some binder twine. Says Nigel: “The eel would latch on, and you’d whip it out!”
Many whānau also continue, as they have for generations, to make the annual trek to Wairewa (Lake Forsyth) during the tuna heke, digging drains in the shingle to catch the eels as they migrate out to sea. Those with ancestral birding rights, including Makarini, travel south each autumn to the remote Tītī Islands that surround Rakiura Stewart Island to harvest tītī. Such specialist foods are taonga and unobtainable in supermarkets, so Nigel’s carefully curated Matariki feast is a rare treat.
On the verandah of Te Whare Waiutuutu, overlooking the manicured gardens and a huge Peasgood Nonsuch apple tree laden with autumnal fruit, Tui lays out the banquet table with a long harakeke table runner dyed in the colours of the rainbow.
“Mahi toi and mahinga kai fit together,” she says as she dresses the dining tables. “They’re both about materials and gathering and utilising what you’ve got in your own backyard.”
High-quality harakeke grows in abundance at Tuahiwi, and the table decorations Tui arranges are mostly made from it. These taonga include ipu pāua (a pāua shell nestled inside a kono), harakeke strips, which have been prepared for weaving into a pākē, a tiny kete and a special tāhei made from muka and kiwi feathers.
The impressive centrepiece, a poi kawe, carries a special story. This large round woven bag is inspired by
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1 A Matariki hākari – the laden banquet table.
2 Tuna slices.
3 Tuna heads.
4 Colonial goose. hākari: feast hapū: sub-tribe harakeke: Phormium tenax, New Zealand flax hue: gourd īnanga: whitebait ipu: container, bowl kai: food kaimoana: seafood karakia: prayer kete: basket koha: gift kono: small food basket kōura: crayfish mahi: work mahinga kai: food and resource gathering work/site mahi toi: Māori art manuhiri: guests māra kai: food cultivations maramataka: the Māori lunar calendar motu: country, island muka: prepared flax fibre pā: village pākē: rain cape pātaka: food storehouse pāua: abalone pēpi: baby Pouārahi: Māori Heritage Advisor pounamu: New Zealand greenstone ringawera: kitchenhand tāhei: necklace taonga: treasures Taua: Ngāi Tahu term for grandmother tikanga: custom, lore tipuna: ancestors tītī: sooty shearwater, muttonbird tuaki: cockles tuna: eel tuna heke: eel migration wānanga: learning, school waikōura: freshwater crayfish whakapapa: genealogy whānau: family whanaunga: relations
whanaungatanga:
kinship whata: storage platform
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4 the design of a unique taonga that was found in a cave at Kura Tāwhiti in the 1980s and is believed to be at least 500 years old. Poi kawe were used to transport food and resources such as birds and pounamu, so it is a fitting focal point for a feast that celebrates mahinga kai.
Inside the poi kawe, Tui displays a small collection of hue she has traded with another weaver from Taumutu, who grew them. Such trade, or reciprocal food and resource exchange, is known as ‘kaihaukai’ and is integral to the tikanga of mahinga kai.
Back in the kitchen, Nigel and ringawera Huia Pacey (Kāi Tahu, Tūwharetoa) are cooking up a storm. Huia, who is Programme Coordinator Pou Horanuku Ancestral Landscapes at Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, has minced the pāua that the team gathered earlier in the week from Waipara on the North Canterbury coastline. Combined with cream and finely diced onion that has been sweated off in butter, the resultant ‘creamed pāua’ is a staple on marae menus around the motu.
Fresh herbs from the garden and an onion balsamic dressing add the finishing touches to a roasted vegetable salad of kūmara, carrots and potatoes. Nigel slices succulent chunks of smoked and fresh tuna, piling them high on serving plates – the eels were caught at Wairewa earlier in the week and ‘koha’d’ by Tuahiwi food gatherer and legendary hāngī-master Grenville Pitama (Ngāi Tūāhuriri). Grenville also provided ‘freshies’, or fresh tītī, from Pohowaitai, off the southwestern coast of Rakiura. The stuffed birds are still roasting in the oven.
Makarini artfully arranges tuna heads on a cake stand and plates his kōura salad. He caught the kōura at Koukourarata on Banks Peninsula at the weekend, and the salad is an old family recipe. Nigel steams a pot full of green-lipped mussels from Waipara and mixes a tomato salsa through them just ahead of serving on a bed of watercress.
Other dishes we carry through to the table include īnanga contributed by Natalie Leary (Ngāi Tūāhuriri) of the Kaiapoi Food Forest, karengo (a seaweed closely related to Japanese nori), sausages made from wild venison from Tāwera (Mount Oxford), a seafood salad, tuaki and pipi gathered from the mudflats of Te Riu-o-Te-Aika-Kawa (Brooklands Lagoon), and the wonderfully named marae favourite ‘colonial goose’. Nigel’s version of this dish uses schnitzel layered with bacon, spinach leaves and stuffing, which is rolled, baked, sliced into medallions and served smothered in gravy.
As the manuhiri gather, Makarini talks about his experiences birding on Pohowaitai, and Nigel shares his insights into mahinga kai and the values it engenders.
“At its heart it’s about whanaungatanga or family ties. It’s about manaakitanga, looking after our guests, and it’s about kaitiakitanga, ensuring that we look after our natural resources,” he concludes.
After karakia and a quick run-through of the menu, everyone sits down to feast. Plates are filled and refilled multiple times before Auntie Raelyn’s spectacular plum duff, based on her mother Taua Beck’s original recipe, is served with blueberry coulis and cream.
Plum Duff
(after Taua Beck)
v 2 cups sugar v 3 cups hot water v 6 cups self-raising flour v 1 cup soft butter v 2 teaspoons mixed spice v 500g dried fruit v pinch salt
Put one cup of sugar into a pot and cook until golden brown. Add the hot water and mix and heat until it forms a sticky, toffee-like consistency, reheating later to dissolve the caramel if necessary. Leave the mixture to cool.
Sift the flour and rub the butter through until it is fully ingrained in the flour, then add the mixed spice and a pinch of salt.
Add one cup of sugar and 500 grams of dried fruit. Make a hollow in the dry flour mix and add the cooled caramel.
Combine well to form a wet, cake-mix consistency. Place the mixture into a pre-prepared wet calico cloth that has been dusted with flour.
When the pudding mixture is in the cloth, bring the sides of the cloth together, leaving space for the pudding to rise. Tie off tightly with string.
Bring a large pot of water to the boil with a saucer at the bottom (to keep the pudding off the bottom of the pot), then lower the pudding bag into the pot and cook for one and a half to two hours. Remove the pudding from the pot, place on a plate and untie the calico.
Serve with custard, cream or ice cream. n
IMAGE: CLARE TOIA-BAILEY
Lock it in
Only two years after it was constructed, Arrowtown’s gaol was reported to have been “built so badly that prisoners can easily escape therefrom”. Surprisingly, then, it was still occasionally in use until 1987 to house unruly revellers overnight during the Christmas season.
While you can no longer ‘do time’ at the Category 1 historic place, the restored former prison is open to visitors; it remains a popular tourist attraction in Arrowtown, the Central Otago town that is recognised as a Tohu Whenua – one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s best heritage experiences.
tohuwhenua.nz/otago/arrowtown
TECHNICAL DATA • Camera: Nikon D800 • Exposure: 1/500, f4 @24mm
Way finders WORDS: JACQUI GIBSON • IMAGERY: SARAH HORN
A new approach to archaeological study is helping to foster talent in the field and bring together Māori and archaeological knowledge in a unique way
Taking part in an archaeological project five years ago has opened up a new career path for Kairākau Lands Trust trustees Stella August and Wikitoria (Wiki) Moore.
In 2017 the pair took part in a community-based project, Omaio ki Tua, to learn new ways to understand and protect wāhi tapu at Kairākau in Hawke’s Bay.
Omaio ki Tua was a partnership between the University of Otago’s Southern Pacific Archaeological Research (SPAR) unit, Pukehou Marae, Kahurānaki Marae and the Kairākau Lands Trust, which oversees 1500 hectares of Māori land in Hawke’s Bay.
Funded by the Department of Conservation, Omaio ki Tua aimed to help protect and conserve early Māori heritage in the Ngāti Kahungunu rohe.
Participants took part in workshops to recognise, record and monitor archaeological and heritage sites and developed a plan for managing and protecting sites on ancestral land.
Wāhi tapu and kōiwi tangata were at risk of loss caused, in part, by extreme weather and increasing coastal erosion.
Project lead Professor Richard Walter, also head of the University of Otago’s Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, warned about the degradation of coastal archaeological sites in Hawke’s Bay in an Autumn 2018 article by Naomi Arnold in Heritage New Zealand magazine.
“We’re losing a lot of archaeological sites very rapidly,” he said, noting that the sites at risk of loss ranged from very early settlements to major fortifications and pā sites and old pastoral and whaling sites.
The project had a significant influence on Stella and Wiki. Stella explains: “We hadn’t been involved in an actual dig before – and it was wonderful spending time with talented people like Richard and his team. We also learned more about the history of our land.
“It filled gaps in our knowledge and gave us insights into how archaeology demonstrates we have a history at Kairākau. It shows our people lived, worked and breathed there.”
Wiki says the project also gave them insights into the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act 2014 and further introduced them to the collaborative nature of archaeological field work.
“The project was about supporting our community to manage sites on our land and exercise our role as kaitiaki,” she says.
“It opened my eyes to how a professional archaeologist could partner with tangata whenua. I could see how you could offer your technical skills to a shared project but still be guided by them.”
Last year Stella and Wiki enrolled in the University of Otago’s new Master of Archaeological Practice, prompted by Hawke’s Bay archaeologist and mentor Dr Elizabeth Pishief.
As Kairākau Lands Trust trustees for more than a decade, the pair had developed a relationship with Elizabeth, seeking her advice on heritage protection at Kairākau and discussing the possibility of studying archaeology in the future.
“I immediately saw their potential,” says Elizabeth, principal consultant at Hawke’s Bay Heritage Services, who has a PhD in heritage studies.
“I started out in the 1960s and have pretty much had the archaeology of Hawke’s Bay to myself ever since. It’s a huge responsibility. Of course, it’s one I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, but it’s time for archaeological practice in this region to be mana whenua led – and who better to do that but Stella and Wiki?”
The University of Otago’s new programme, says Elizabeth, is ideal for people like Stella and Wiki. Both had studied before, experienced archaeology first-hand and used it to enhance their connections to ancestral land, she says.
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Launched in 2021, the master’s programme is an applied, professional qualification that aims to help graduates into the field of archaeological heritage management. Students can study full-time or part-time and on campus or by distance. They can take between 12 months and four years to complete the programme.
Professor Richard Walter and Dr Karen Greig, a specialist in archaeology and heritage management, led the design of the programme, which features three core papers, two elective papers, a research dissertation and an internship.
Richard and Karen hoped its flexible design and focus on practical archaeology would attract students from different walks of life and cultural backgrounds.
Karen explains: “It’s so exciting to have people like Stella and Wiki taking part in the programme. They bring a different set of values and ways to think about heritage. They’re able to bring together Māori and archaeological knowledge in a new way.
“In saying that, we do already have some exceptional Māori archaeologists in New Zealand. But they’re few and far between. We need more – especially in regions like Hawke’s Bay and especially given the increasing loss of Māori heritage resulting from development and climate change.”
Of the 10 students enrolled in the programme’s first cohort, five have either Māori or Pacific heritage, says Karen.
“Our goal is to prepare graduates for careers in the New Zealand and Pacific heritage sectors using the tools, approaches and skills of archaeology. We’ve had a lot of people in the heritage sector asking for a flexible, online programme like this. We’re interested to watch where our students go.”
1 Kairākau Lands Trust trustees Wiki Moore (left) and
Stella August.
2 Wiki and Stella sitting on either side of Hawke’s Bay archaeologist and mentor
Elizabeth Pishief.
3 Wiki and Stella will team up with Elizabeth as heritage consultants when the sisters graduate from the
University of Otago’s new
Master of Archaeological
Practice.
Already, says Karen, Stella’s and Wiki’s course work is breaking new ground.
For example, in Wiki’s first semester, she wrote a research paper exploring the need to develop tikanga that accounts for and respects archaeologists who are menstruating while working at Māori sites.
Stella, meanwhile, argued for a region-wide heritage plan for Hawke’s Bay.
“There’s been a lot of research work carried out over the past 150 years, starting with the early fossicking of Māori artefacts and, most recently, five separate scientific excavations,” she says.
“In my paper I asked the question: ‘With such a long history of interest in Māori settlement and occupation in Hawke’s Bay, why don’t we know more?’.”
The answer, she found, lay in fragmented and inaccessible information, as well as a lack of Māori representation in the archaeological work itself.
“In many cases, information is locked away in private collections and museums or buried in organisational reports that can be really hard to access. Sometimes it hasn’t been documented at all.
“When you can find it, it commonly lacks an indigenous perspective.”
In her paper, Stella argued for a review, synthesis and analysis of all forms of archaeological data in Hawke’s Bay, followed by a process of identifying gaps before any new work was prioritised.
Partnerships with hapū and iwi, she noted, were critical to ensuring that Māori knowledge, oral traditions and areas of cultural significance, and the aspirations of mana whenua, were properly recognised.
Supporting Māori communities to learn about and conserve special heritage sites is what Stella and Wiki hope to do when they graduate and become qualified archaeologists.
Wiki explains: “Most people come to archaeology because they’re drawn to the field. For us, the connection has come through our growing knowledge of our whenua and our ancestors who were there before us. That’s why this mahi matters to us. That’s why it feels like this is the path we were meant to be on.
“Everything we learn, everything new we discover, it reinforces the connection we have with our land. We want others to have that connection too.”
Right now, however, Stella and Wiki’s goal is to simply finish their studies.
After that, they are keen to take up Elizabeth’s offer to join her and daughter Kate Hooper as heritage consultants at Elizabeth’s firm in Napier.
“It’ll be wonderful to have them on my team,” says Elizabeth. “It’ll be even better to hand over to them completely one day. Archaeology has been slow to adapt to new ways of looking at the world and take on new knowledge. I’m confident Stella and Wiki will help change that.”
hāpu: sub-tribe kaitiaki: guardians kōiwi tangata: human remains mahi: work mana whenua: those with tribal authority over land or territory by virtue of possession and/or occupation rohe: area tangata whenua: people of the land tikanga: cultural protocol wāhi tapu: spiritual places whenua: land
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WORDS: MATT PHILP A MOVING EXPERIENCE
Shorn of its original context, is a relocated heritage building still the genuine article?
Māngungu Mission is what you might call a boomerang building. The simple Georgian structure, hub of the Wesleyan mission in Northland from 1838, radiates a sense of permanence and place. But it has clocked up some serious mileage, shipped by barge to Onehunga in 1855 to serve as a parsonage, shifted on well-greased skids further up Grey Street in 1921, then trucked in four sections and reassembled in its original setting at Hokianga in the 1970s.
The building’s nomadism is not unique among our built heritage. The former Aratapu Public Library (1874) shifted five times, doing the rounds of Dargaville before settling in Harding Park. Wellington’s Star Boating Club building (1886), built on skids as a hedge against harbour reclamation, has had three homes. Kaiapoi’s little Edwardian band rotunda has been as ambulatory as any brass brand, and Lawrence’s Poon Fah Joss House has done a Māngungu-like full circle, relocating from the Central Otago town’s 19th-century Chinese mining camp to Maryport Street, where it was repurposed as a crib, then back to the camp in 2016. There are many more instances of heritage buildings and other structures that have been relocated just the once.
“There’s a tradition in New Zealand – you could almost consider it a heritage tradition – of moving buildings around,” says Robin Byron, Senior Conservation Architect for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
Relocation, whether it be within a site or off site, may become even more frequent with urban and suburban intensification and ongoing housing supply pressures, not to mention the possibility that climate change may imperil some of our more tenuously sited heritage buildings. But under what circumstances is moving a heritage structure viable? And what becomes of its heritage values after a change of address?
As a rule, heritage practice is guided by the principles of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS): relocation is an absolute last resort. A structure’s setting is seen as an integral part of its heritage significance, and moving is only an option when all other means of protection are exhausted.
Retaining a place on its site is the ideal, but in some circumstances, in order to ensure the ongoing survival of places, structures need to be relocated – made easier in the case of our timber buildings as they are comparatively easy to shift.
The ICOMOS New Zealand Charter allows relocation to be a legitimate part of the conservation process in those rare circumstances when a site has reached a point of severely diminished associated value, or when relocation is the only way to save a structure. If relocation is to occur, a new location should provide a setting compatible with the cultural heritage values of the structure.
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1 Wellington’s Star Boating
Club building has had three homes.
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK.
COM
2 The Martha Mine No 5
Pumphouse, known as the Cornish Pumphouse.
IMAGE: ROB SUISTED
3 Stancombe Cottage,
Auckland.
IMAGE: AMANDA TRAYES
“Buildings are designed for the places where they were constructed. The moment you extricate them from those sites the heritage values will inevitably be diminished to some extent,” says Robin, who notes that by trucking away ‘touchstones’ from their settings you may also be undermining the historic fabric of a neighbourhood or wider context.
Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga is notified when councils receive consenting applications for the relocation of places entered on the New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero. And at times the organisation has submitted against a relocation, says Joanna Barnes-Wylie, a Senior Heritage Assessment Advisor and former Manager Heritage Listing for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
“From our perspective, it’s a last resort when all other options to preserve or save a building at its original site have been exhausted,” she says.
“Most examples I can think of were relocated in the face of a building otherwise being demolished.”
Usually these are one-offs, but not always. The Canterbury earthquakes resulted in a flurry of relocations, including high-profile structures such as downtown Christchurch’s oldest surviving timber commercial building, Shand’s Emporium, which was shifted from Hereford Street to a new site within the CBD.
And in Wellington in 2006 there was a mass relocation of Victorian and Edwardian workers’ cottages, shops and other buildings in Te Aro to make way for an inner-city bypass. The bypass went ahead despite vigorous opposition, including court action, with the then Historic Places Trust eventually giving archaeological consent that required large-scale archaeological investigations as a way of mitigating – among other things – the impacts of the relocations.
Some characterised the resulting heritage precincts of relocated buildings in Te Aro as ‘toy town’, a pastiche. That’s arguable, but the criticism gets to the nub of the problem with relocation – that it potentially blows a hole through a heritage building’s authenticity. Shorn of its original context, carted away from familiar landmarks and neighbouring structures, is it still the genuine article?
It’s a slippery question that heritage professionals chew over in other contexts – say when a heritage building is repurposed.
“Authenticity is clearly a difficult concept,” writes Jenny Gregory in a 2008 article, ‘Reconsidering Relocated Buildings: ICOMOS, Authenticity and Mass Relocation’, in the International Journal of Heritage Studies.
She argues that a rigidly purist approach to authenticity is flawed, and that the significance of a building “is not always linked inescapably to its setting”.
Still, lines have to be drawn. In this country when a heritage- listed building moves, it triggers a reassessment of heritage values. Joanna notes that there are close to 50 entries on the List requiring reviews following relocation.
“We have to undertake a review and reassess: is this place still worthy of heritage listing now it’s been taken out of its original context? In most, but not all, cases we find it still has heritage value, but there has been the odd case where we’ve taken something off the List because we feel that the effects of relocation
– and also sometimes the changes made to that building after it has been moved – are so significant that it no longer meets the threshold for heritage listing.”
She gives the example of a commercial building from urban Christchurch that was decamped to rural Canterbury and was subsequently removed from the List.
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t still important. At the end of the day, that building has been saved and restored by somebody, which is a wonderful thing, but it has just lost that contact with its original context.”
So when does relocation work? Robin Byron’s starting point is that either the building is at risk of destruction or its setting has become so compromised “that it starts to have little meaning in its context”. Ideally, the subsequent relocation would be short-haul – a move to another spot on the same property, or at least within cooee.
She gives examples. One is the Martha Mine No 5 Pumphouse at Waihi, known as the Cornish Pumphouse, which is a Category 1 historic place. In danger of toppling into the mine, it was shifted 300 metres closer to town in 2006, a three-month exercise that involved sliding the threestorey, 1800-odd tonne structure on Teflon-coated concrete beams.
“It retained a connection to the mine site – albeit at a safe distance from the pit – but had a beneficial result in that, being closer to the town, it became more visible and more part of it, and a kind of revered landmark for Waihi,” says Robin.
She also instances the relocation of the listed 1870s Baverstock Cottage in Flat Bush, Auckland. An early school in the area, it had become badly neglected, and its setting on the site and at the rear of a Buddhist temple “compromised any ability to really appreciate or use it”, she says. Relocated 1.5 kilometres to a site near Flat Bush School, it has since been restored and renamed Stancombe Cottage.
“It was given an appropriate setting where it could be enjoyed by the community. If a building has to be relocated, then it’s good if it can stay within the community that it has a connection with,” says Robin.
“Ideally, what you want to see is that the new context is sympathetic to the heritage values,” says Joanna, who gives the example of Old St Paul’s Schoolroom, a 19th-century Gothic timber building that when faced with demolition was relocated to Thorndon School.
“While it has moved, it’s still within Thorndon and it retains that connection to the early educational history of that area in Wellington.”
At times, however, relocating a historic building well away from its original setting may be the result of a choice made to avoid its demolition. Robin characterises it as the lesser of two evils, and notes among other benefits the sustainability gains.
“The reuse of a building, even in another context, is often better than demolishing it and having all those materials go to landfill. It can be adapted, repurposed and continue to have a valuable life on another site. Inevitably buildings have a way over time of growing roots on new sites.”
She’s not talking only of listed heritage buildings here.
“There’s a whole category of character or historic buildings that may not have the depth of significance of recognised heritage places, but still have intrinsic qualities and levels of craft and materiality worth retaining. Relocating them does make sense so they can continue to have important afterlives, as it were.”
A case in point is Sir Edmund Hillary’s 1950s Remuera Road home, now ensconced at Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Ōtara, a school founded by its namesake, where it’s used as a leadership centre.
“It continues to have an ongoing life and meaning in that new location. I’ve always thought that was a lovely result.”
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