Heritage New Zealand Hōtoke Winter 2023

Heritage

New Zealand

PAPER TRAILS

Exploring a family’s documentary heritage

SPICE OF LIFE

A tasty tour of Auckland’s Sandringham

TUNNEL VISION

Celebrating an engineering icon

SHINE ON The jewel in Napier’s architectural crown

Tribute

Portraits from the collection of Avenal McKinnon

27 April –

25 June 2023

10am – 4pm Wed - Sun

FREE

Te Whare Waiutuutu

Kate Sheppard House

83 Clyde Road

Christchurch

Programme of events at katesheppard.co.nz

Séraphine Pick, Portrait of Katherine Mansfield , 2014 With special thanks to the McKinnon family.

Heritage New Zealand

Hōtoke / Winter 2023

Features

12 Spice of life

A walking tour of Auckland’s Sandringham offers a tantalising taste of the neighbourhood’s history

16 Tunnel vision

One of New Zealand’s great engineering feats, the Ōtira Tunnel still inspires awe 100 years on

22 Paper trails

Much of the nationally significant Clendon Papers collection is still housed in the Northland family home from which it came

30 Change of scene

It’s been 40 years since this magazine was first published. What’s changed on the heritage scene?

34 Power of attraction

A Napier architectural icon, the National Tobacco Company Building continues to thrive as a commercial space

40 Art house

Artists have been offering the public a fresh look at the interiors of Wellington’s Turnbull House while it is closed for significant strengthening and refurbishment

Explore the list

8 Star power

From ship to tourist attraction, house and museum, a Gisborne landmark, the Star of Canada, has survived through many guises

10 A snapshot in time

From within Wellington’s Berry & Co Photographers Building, an important photographic collection has been unearthed

Journeys into the past

44 Screen legends

Once a year Ōtaki becomes a magnet for makers and lovers of indigenous film, and an almost century-old community hub is at the heart of the action

48 A rare bird

The story behind the kiwi carved into an English hillside –and how it has endured for more than a century since

Columns

3 Editorial

4 Noticeboard

52 Books

54 Our heritage, my vision

Learning from the past is key to preserving precious places like the Marlborough Sounds

Heritage New Zealand

Pouhere Taonga cares for 45 sites here in New Zealand that you, as a member, can access for free. So what are you waiting for?

From the Stone Store to Stonehenge, remember your member benefits!

Your membership card opens the doors to over 1,500 heritage places overseas (including the Stonehenge UNESCO world heritage site).

Stonehenge, England

Make the most of visiting unique heritage in Aotearoa this winter. Check the visitheritage.co.nz website for the opening hours. If you are heading overseas, remember to take your membership card to access a world of heritage during your travels. And if you need to renew before you go, please allow plenty of time for postage!

Ngā mihi | Thank you!

We are very grateful to those supporters who have recently made donations towards our Antrim House restoration appeal. Whilst some are kindly acknowledged below, many more have chosen to give anonymously.

Mr Robert and Mrs Susan Geck

Wendy Hinton and Charles Finny

Ms Helen Geary and Mr Murray Holdaway

Mr Arnold and Mrs Marjorie Turner

Mrs Margaret and Mr Robert Coldham

Ms Alison Kagen

Mrs Margaret Shanks

Mr Lyndsay and Mrs Lorraine Jacobs

Mrs Helen and Ms Gillian Hawke

Mr Ross and Mrs Jan Dunlop

Mrs Anne and Mr Allan Tolley

Ms Angela and Mr Kim Campbell

Mr Alan and Mrs Ann Jermaine

Mr Russell and Mrs Anne Hohmann

Connie Christensen and Vince Eichholtz

Mr Samuel and Mrs Frances Edwards

Ms Leanne and Mr Brian Karl

Mr Rod and Mrs Patrica Syme

Mr David and Mrs Yvonne Mitchell

(In Memory of) Peter Entwisle

Mr Alistair Aitken and Shona Smith

Mrs Lynley Dodd

Mr Bruce and Mrs Beverly Dean

Mr Bob and Mrs Joanne Gumbrell

Mr Joe Hollander

Mr Michael and Mrs Viviane Lloyd

Miss Edith Tripp

Mrs Gloria Jenkins

Mrs Sondra Wigglesworth

Mr John and Mrs Kathryn Peebles

Mr William and Mrs Lorna Davies

Mr David Meldrum and Ms Susan Falconer

Dr Pat Campbell

Mr Charlie Shailer

Stone Store, New Zealand

Looking back, looking forward

Happy birthday to us!

Heritage New Zealand

Issue 169 Hōtoke • Winter 2023

ISSN 1175-9615 (Print)

ISSN 2253-5330 (Online)

Cover image: Clendon papers by

This issue of Heritage New Zealand magazine marks 40 years since this publication, then known as Historic Places in New Zealand, was first published in June 1983.

Jess Burges

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 had a circulation of 7507 as at 30 March 2023.

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 Publishing.

Phone: (04) 470 8054

Email: information@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 heritage.org.nz

To recognise this milestone, I canvassed the views of some veteran heritage advocates for a story on what’s changed in the heritage landscape over those four decades.

Wellington-based conservation architect and recently retired Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga board member Chris Cochran, for one, recalls how in the early 1980s places such as the Wellington Town Hall and the Public Trust Building were threatened with demolition. That such icons could be destroyed seems unthinkable today, and the threat, he says, ultimately led to a groundswell in grassroots heritage activism in the city.

In the story (see page 30), Chris also notes that a wave of heritage-focused publications in the 1980s, including this magazine, helped to galvanise wider public support for heritage preservation.

It’s an aspiration that was articulated by Neil Begg, chair of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust, in his introduction to the first issue of the magazine, when he stated that he hoped it “will encourage those who are working in their own towns or districts to preserve historic places and inspire people who are not yet actively involved in preservation efforts within their local communities to become involved”.

While I’d flipped through the first issue on other occasions, delving deeper into its content while writing this story was a great exercise.

Sure, our ideas of magazine typography and layout have evolved since (as you’d expect), but I was struck by the variety and readability of the stories, and by the photography, which would still capture readers’ attention today. The originators of this magazine laid a solid foundation – one on which I hope we’re continuing to build.

This issue certainly has variety – and I hope you’ll find it readable too. We visit one of the country’s most recognisable heritage places – Napier’s iconic National Tobacco Company Building – to see how it’s still operating as a commercial space, and we learn how artists have been creating work inside Wellington’s Turnbull House as it undergoes major strengthening and restoration work.

Then there’s a tour of the food heritage of Auckland’s Sandringham; a peek inside centenary celebrations for one of New Zealand’s great engineering feats, the Ōtira Tunnel; and a story on the significant collection of documents associated with Clendon House in Rawene.

Back in 1983 Neil Begg stated that “the magazine will unashamedly push the barrow of historic preservation”. With the stories we tell in 2023, we hope we’re still progressing that vision.

Ngā mihi Caitlin

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

LETTERS...

I’ve finally decided to burst in to print after reading the article ‘Taking a spin’ (Heritage New Zealand magazine, issue 167), where it mentions the Hastings Municipal Building was “closed in 2014 after being assessed as being earthquake prone”.

My dictionary gives a description of prone as ‘tending or liable to’, so I find myself wondering why so many people refer to buildings, bridges etc as earthquake prone. To me it is the earth that fits that description. My understanding is that structures on it are more likely to be prone to earthquake damage than prone to earthquakes.

Why, I wonder, have we come to adopt the wrong description?

Jeanette Baylis

Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Senior Conservation Architect Robin Byron responds:

Earthquake prone is a commonly used term for structures that are vulnerable in the event of a seismic event. Yes, as you identify, it is the ground that is prone to quakes (and different localities are more at risk of this occurring than others), but by extension earthbound structures that are not constructed or designed to resist this movement are then also prone, and damage may well be the consequence (but in some instances, even if prone, may be lucky to escape damage).

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment notes: “A building, or part of a building, is earthquake prone if it will have its ultimate capacity exceeded in a moderate earthquake, and if it were to collapse, would do so in a way that is likely to cause injury or death to persons in or near the building or on any other property, or damage to any other property.”

Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga is supportive of heritage owners’ efforts to ensure that their places, if prone, are strengthened to be safe, primarily to protect lives, but also with the hope that the heritage place itself will survive in the unfortunate event of an earthquake.

What is heritage? (Heritage New Zealand magazine, issue 167.) This question resonates with me as the area of heritage that interests me is road passenger transport. Like most transport history, its preservation is left mainly to

individuals and incorporated societies. When I first started work for the MOT in Christchurch, I knew nobody [working in this area], but I saw an item in The Press that said a group of chaps were building a tramway at Ferrymead.

I went down and one of the workers said, “Don’t just stand there, grab a shovel.” I think at 72 I’m still carrying it, but it’s getting heavier!

After getting an MA (Hons) in historical geography and while working for the Land Transport division of the MOT helping the police and setting policy for the road passenger transport industry, I became interested in this area of history. There is nothing quite so ephemeral as a bus or coach going along the road, and there were many characters involved in the industry whose tales should be preserved.

Peter Rendall

Abridged

Just a correction to the article ‘He tohu maumahara’ (Heritage New Zealand magazine, issue 168). The first Māori Contingent did not leave New Zealand for Egypt in February 1914; the Great War had not yet started.

After training, the men left in February 1915 and were sent on as garrison troops to Malta. They arrived at Gallipoli in July 1915, when there was a manpower shortage in the New Zealand and Australian Division. They fought, attached to the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, in the August offensive, which was the last major Allied attack there.

The date error is unfortunate and really obvious. It should have been picked up during the writing, editorial or proofreading stages. Apart from all the New Zealand resources, Wikipedia also has the correct date.

Neil Frances Abridged

You’re right Neil – this is very unfortunate. You were among other readers who picked up this error, and we apologise that it slipped through despite our checks. – Editor

We’re sorry!

In our review of the book Fossil Treasures of Foulden Maar: A Window into Miocene Zealandia in the Autumn 2023 issue, we incorrectly noted the book’s publisher as Oxford University Press when it is, in fact, Otago University Press.

MEMBER AND SUPPORTER UPDATE… with Brendon Veale

As I write, work is winding up at Wellington’s Antrim House, the Category 1 historic place that many of you have helped to protect through your kind donations to the reroofing and seismic strengthening project.

In fact, by the time you read this, much of the work will be complete and I look forward to sharing the results with you.

In my last update, I mentioned I often receive notes accompanying donations. I love hearing about people’s connections to the places we care for and how these places intersect with the lives of New Zealanders.

One note I recently received was from a long-time member, Jocelyn, whose family enjoyed a wedding at Antrim. Jocelyn offered to share photos of the event with us in the hope that they may be useful in promoting heritage places for this type of activity in future.

Never ones to pass on such an offer, Tamsin Falconer, Heritage Asset Manager for the Central Region, and I met Jocelyn and heard about her daughter’s special day.

It was lovely to see the images, including some showing Antrim in its best light. But more than that, I loved seeing a building like Antrim used as a backdrop to create memories; a place to bring whānau together to share important moments.

I can’t wait to see what stories the next restoration project will elicit from our supporters!

Brendon Veale Manager Supporter Development

0800 HERITAGE (0800 802 010) bveale@heritage.org.nz

BEHIND THE STORY... with photographer Sarah Horn

You undertook your assignment for this issue in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle. How did the cyclone and its aftermath impact on you and your work?

I’m based in the small seaside settlement of Te Awanga, close to both Hastings and Napier. We were lucky – there was no flooding at our house and we only had the power and phone out for five days. Initially we had no idea of the massive devastation that had occurred, but as news filtered in I had a deep sense of sadness. For a week Hawke’s Bay stood still: no work, no travelling, no shopping or other day-to-day activities – just waiting.

In the following weeks, as photography assignments were back on and bridges were deemed safe to drive over, I saw some of the devastation first-hand. It was mind-boggling. There was so much wood along the beach between Clive and Napier, a railway bridge had gone and the railway tracks on either side had been twisted into fluid shapes.

Elsewhere, houses were surrounded by silt and mud, but what struck me most was the emptiness of the buildings and the grey, alien landscape in which they sat.

Your assignment involved photographing the iconic National Tobacco Company Building in

Places we visit

Napier. Did you have a connection to this place?

This building has been part of my whole life. It was once the Rothmans Building and still is to me. My main association with it isn’t actually the beautiful façade at the main entrance, however, it’s the smell that emanated from its walls – of cigarettes!

What’s your favourite heritage place?

Sadly, my favourite heritage building – the Wool Exchange by architect Guy Natusch – no longer exists. My father was a wool trader, so I have childhood memories of spending time in this building on Napier’s Marine Parade. It’s a shame it was lost to progress.

sarahhorn.co.nz

HERITAGE NEW ZEALAND POUHERE TAONGA DIRECTORY

National Office

PO Box 2629, Wellington 6140

Antrim House

63 Boulcott Street

Wellington 6011

(04) 472 4341

information@heritage.org.nz

Go to heritage.org.nz for details of offices and historic places around New Zealand that are cared for by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.

Ōtaki, p44

Napier, p34

Sandringham, Auckland, p12

Rawene, p22

Marlborough Sounds, p54

Ōtira, p16

CROSS PURPOSE

They’re three small wooden crosses, but they have a big story to tell

Carved recently from archaeologically examined timber washed up over the years from the wreck of the HMS Buffalo –which has lain off the Coromandel coast near Whitianga since 1840 – the crosses represent the fulfilment of a French-Canadian dissident’s wish expressed 185 years ago.

After participating in a failed uprising against British rule in Quebec, Francois Xavier Prieur and 57 other French Canadian dissidents were banished to New South Wales; the ship on which they were transported was the Buffalo

It was an horrific experience, as recounted by Francois in his book Notes of a Convict of 1838. Privations included hunger, unsanitary conditions and widespread seasickness, which led him to make a request.

“A wounded man preserves as a memento the bullet or piece of shrapnel that has been extracted from his lacerated flesh,” he wrote in the 1869 memoir.

“Well, I, too, would like to possess a little cross made from the wood from which this vessel was constructed, and within whose sides my heart and my body have been lacerated by unworthy treatment.”

Bill Edwards, Northland Manager for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, came across Francois’s story last year while researching the French influence on New Zealand history. Bill’s investigations led to public screenings of Land of a Thousand Sorrows Revisited – a documentary on the dissidents by Canadian filmmaker Deke Richards.

The discovery then sparked a community-led initiative to fulfil Francois’s long-desired wish.

Mercury Bay Museum and the HMS Buffalo Re-examination Project, with support from Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, organised volunteers from the Whitianga Community Menz Shed to make three small wooden crosses from timber washed up from the Buffalo over the years.

Following a blessing in April by the local Roman Catholic community, the crosses were sent to Canada. There they were presented to Francois’s descendants and his home parish to coincide with National Patriots’ Day on 22 May, which honours patriots who fought against British colonial powers in Quebec.

SOCIAL HERITAGE… with Paul Veart, Web and Digital Advisor, Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga

You may have noticed that back in March the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga website underwent a significant transformation.

This digital metamorphosis was many months in the planning, with everything from user pathways and page layouts to visuals and language analysed and adjusted to make the site as clear, inclusive and user-friendly as possible.

The resulting changes help us to highlight the many interesting and useful resources that had been buried previously beneath a number of pages, links and menus.

It is particularly exciting to be able to draw attention to Dr Rosemary Baird’s fantastic podcast series Aotearoa Unearthed, as well as a range of educational tools. The new website also allows us to display a selection of archaeological authority reports from the Archaeology Digital Library – a previously hidden gem.

Of course, the most popular area of the website is the Rārangi Kōrero/New Zealand Heritage List (the List), with many thousands of users each year. The new website not only allows for intuitive searching of the List, but also (we hope!) presents information in a clearer and more considered way.

The final stages of the site’s creation were undertaken during Cyclone Gabrielle, and it was the significance of this event that reinforced the need for a website that is simple to navigate, even in stressful and complicated conditions.

If you haven’t explored the new site yet, dive in – we’d love to know what you think. And I’d like to say a final and fond farewell to our old website, which is now safely preserved for internet researchers of the distant future in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Ngā Taonga i tēnei marama, Heritage this month – subscribe now

Face value

Portraits by significant artists including Rita Angus, Frances Hodgkins, Leo Bensemann and Seraphine Pick have been at home recently at Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate Sheppard House.

Since April, the Category 1 historic place in Christchurch has been hosting an exhibition called Tribute: Portraits from the collection

of Avenal McKinnon. Held in collaboration with the New Zealand Portrait Gallery

Te Pūkenga Whakaata, the exhibition showcases portraits collected over more than 50 years by the late Avenal McKinnon, curator, writer, art historian and longtime director of the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata.

Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate Sheppard House Property Lead Helen Osborne says the collection of portraits tells

visual stories that capture moments in time, making them a great fit for exhibition at historic places.

“These portraits are important recordings of our nation’s people and visual history, and this collection of leading Aotearoa New Zealand art strengthens the partnership between our nation’s art, culture and heritage,” she says.

The exhibition, she adds, has particular resonance at Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate

Sheppard House. “Kate Sheppard herself had a deep interest in art and she was one of the first to enrol at Christchurch’s newly opened School of Art in 1882.

“A significant exhibition like this really helps that story come alive.”

The exhibition runs until 25 June. For more details and a programme of events, go to katesheppard.co.nz

IMAGE:

Wayne Youle, Friends and Strangers, c. 2017, Collection of Avenal McKinnon

Star power

From screen actor turned US president Ronald Reagan to former pro wrestler Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, there’s no shortage of stars who’ve enjoyed varied and long careers.

But for sheer longevity in the public’s affection, few could surely rival a Gisborne landmark called the Star of Canada

A Category 2 historic place, the Star of Canada started life as a cargo ship, built in Belfast in 1909 and designed to transport chilled and frozen goods. But this life was cut short when the ship ran aground off Gisborne’s Kaitī Beach on 23 June 1912.

All, however, was not lost. Her captain’s cabin, chartroom and wheelhouse were salvaged then transported to an empty section where William Good, a local jeweller, turned the structures into what became a tourist attraction and, for a time, a home for his daughter Lorna.

When Lorna died some 70 years later in 1983, she left the Star of Canada to the city of Gisborne. And the city heartily embraced the gift. Led by the Gisborne West Rotary Club, funds were raised to move the Star of Canada in 1985 to its current site in Kelvin Park, where it overlooks the Taruheru River and forms part of Tairāwhiti Museum.

Eloise Wallace moved from Napier to take up her role as Tairāwhiti Museum director eight years ago and has since joined the Star of Canada’s legion of local fans.

“As an historian and a keen sailor, I’m always interested in maritime history, and knowing there was this unique part of the museum was one of the things that attracted me here.

“Because what better way is there to explore and learn about the past than in an historic building? You can stand in the ship and imagine its voyages, the people who worked on it and the night it was wrecked on the beach,” she says.

As detailed in its Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga listing

From ship to tourist attraction, house and museum, a Gisborne landmark has endured through many guises

WORDS: CAITLIN SYKES

IMAGERY: TAIRĀWHITI

report, the Star of Canada was built in 1909 by Workman, Clark and Company for the Tyser Line. Able to carry 130,000 carcasses of mutton, it first travelled to New Zealand in 1910 in order to transport frozen meat and other produce from here and Australia back to England.

The ship had made six trips to New Zealand before that fateful night in 1912, just two and a half years later, when its anchor came away in a storm and it was wrecked on rocks on the Gisborne foreshore. Despite tremendous efforts over several days to empty the ship of its cargo and save the ship, the vessel ultimately had to be abandoned.

Salvage of the parts of the ship that today comprise the Star of Canada was undertaken by AC Mitchell; the parts were first purchased by a tobacconist, Mr Miller, and then by jeweller William Good for £104. William had the structure moved, by greased railway lines and a steam roller, to a section beside his own home on Childers Road, where he set about turning it into a popular maritimethemed tourist attraction.

Among the many items related to the Star of Canada held by Tairāwhiti Museum is a visitors’ book that records those who set foot on the ship during this era; the first to sign the book was then Prime Minister Sir Joseph Ward.

When William’s daughter Lorna married in 1927, a kitchen, bathroom and other facilities were added to the rear of the structure to provide the couple with a home. While Lorna ultimately returned to live in her childhood home next door, she

continued to maintain the Star of Canada as a private museum.

In the years immediately after Lorna bequeathed the building to the city, public fears arose about its condition. This prompted locals, led by Rotary New Zealand members, to shepherd the Star of Canada to its next iteration – as a public maritime museum. A public parade, which included a complement from the HMNZS Hawea and the Gisborne City Brass Band, escorted the Star of Canada to its new site, where it remains today.

More than 30 years later, Eloise reports its popularity hasn’t waned.

“The community has a real attachment to it. Older people remember when it was still a house, some remember when it was moved in the ’80s, and for every young person who comes here on a school trip or with their family it’s probably their favourite part of the museum.”

Some of the Star of Canada’s original fittings and fixtures are still in situ, and these artefacts add to that feeling of connection, she says.

“The buckets, the bells, the footplates – they all help to join the dots that this is part of the actual ship that ran aground all those years ago. An overall theme of the museum is the importance of the sea, and of voyaging and vessels to our region, and the Star of Canada really brings that to life.”

To further share the story of the maritime disaster, Heritage Tairāwhiti plans to erect interpretation signage at Kaitī Beach that will direct the public back to the museum building. The building itself is owned by Gisborne District Council, which shares maintenance duties with Tairāwhiti Museum – a model that will ensure the historic place’s ongoing protection, Eloise adds.

“With its shared maintenance and public accessibility, everyone is behind the Star of Canada being cared for and preserved in the long term. I don’t think anyone will ever forget about her; we have a lot of love for her.”

heritage.org.nz/list-details/3554/ Star of Canada

A snapshot in time

An important photographic collection, thought to date from 1900 to the early 1930s and revealing a cross-section of central Wellington society, was unearthed by a tenant in the Berry & Co Photographers Building decades later

Those walking through busy central Wellington would be forgiven for passing the sandwich shop that occupies the ground floor of 147 Cuba Street without giving the building a second glance. But those who look up are treated to the striking Edwardian Classical façade of the Berry & Co Photographers Building, a Category 2 historic place that played an important role in the social fabric of Wellington in the early 20th century.

The building was designed by notable architect William Crichton and constructed in 1900 by WL Thompson. It was commissioned by William Berry to be a purposebuilt photography studio, and the four sets of south-facing windows and glazed skylights allowed plenty of natural light for the renowned portrait photographer to practise his craft.

Berry stopped operating on Cuba Street in the late 1920s, but the upper floors remained a photography studio until 1968, when pioneering art dealer Peter McLeavey opened an art gallery in the space. The gallery, which works with New Zealand contemporary painters and photographers, is now run by his daughter Olivia McLeavey, who says her father fell in love with the building at first sight.

“He was completely knocked over by how beautiful it was,” she says, adding that he was particularly impressed with the sweeping timber staircase, decorative ceiling and two stunning stained-glass windows.

“He loved the feel of being in an important heritage space, reminiscent of the buildings he’d seen in London, and decided it was the perfect place for the gallery.”

Blyss Wagstaff, Senior Heritage Assessment Advisor for Heritage

WORDS: ANNA DUNLOP / IMAGERY: MIKE HEYDON

New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, says the Berry Building is a distinctive part of the Edwardian streetscape of Cuba Street Historic Area, but it’s not just its architecture that sets it apart.

“It has attracted some interesting occupants, and it’s what has happened in the building that I think is especially important, both historically and culturally.”

Blyss is referring to the discovery of around 3000 glass-plate negatives, thought to date from 1900 to the early 1930s, which were unearthed in a cupboard by a tenant of the building in the 1990s. Among what became known as the Berry & Co Collection, which is housed at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, are almost 80 portraits of World War I servicemen in uniform posing with family and friends, and 93 portraits of Chinese New Zealanders.

Despite some minor degradation, the photographs are clear, showing the subjects posing formally in the fashions of the time. Studio props – a wooden chair, a five-step staircase with a wrought iron balustrade, a canvas backdrop of trees – appear repeatedly throughout the portraits.

According to Michael Fitzgerald, Honorary Research Associate at Te Papa, the Berry studio was where ordinary people went to have their photos taken for special purposes.

“The collection is a revealing crosssection of central Wellington society and is incredibly valuable as a social document,” he says.

This is particularly true of the portraits of Chinese New Zealanders, which were taken at a time when the community was subject to prejudice, discrimination and racist policies. The images show mostly men (although there are a few women and children), which, Michael explains, was due to immigration rules.

“From 1896 to just before World War II, Chinese immigrants had to pay a poll tax of £100 [around 10 years’ wages]. It was unaffordable for them to bring their wives and children, so the community was predominantly male.”

It’s for this reason that Michael suspects many of the portraits are, in fact, passport photos. “The men often returned to China, either to get married or to visit their families.”

Why Berry was the preferred photographer of central Wellington’s Chinese population is unclear, but according to the site’s listing report, from 1910 to the 1990s the ground floor was occupied by various Chinese fruiterers, which may have played a part. It was also close to Haining and Frederick Streets, then

the heart of Wellington’s Chinese district and still the location of the Tung Jung Association of New Zealand, one of the first Chinese community organisations founded in New Zealand (in 1926).

It was the Tung Jung Association that Michael contacted when he started the Te Papa Family Ties project, which aims to identify the Chinese New Zealanders in the portraits and reconnect them with their descendants.

Records show that in 1928 there were around 600 Chinese people living in Wellington, and a number of them would have been part of old, established Chinese families, he explains.

“I reached out and the community and family networks kicked into action.”

To date, 39 of those pictured have been identified by their families, with many of them having emigrated from a close network of villages in China’s Guangdong region.

“It was very localised, what’s called chain migration,” says Michael. “One brave young man goes in search of new opportunities, and others soon follow.”

However, unlike in Dunedin, where the Chinese went to work in the goldfields, in Wellington many became market gardeners and laundry owners.

For Michael, a couple of stories stand out. One is that of James Young, also known as Young Woon Gung, who was identified by his four surviving children. Young emigrated to New Zealand aged 16, then returned to China at 21 to marry Ng Wong Sue. They settled in Wellington where they had six children and ran various businesses.

“He features in several of the photographs, and always looks very smart – quite the ‘man about town’,” says Michael.

Young was very involved in community affairs and sports: he was a founding member of the Wellington Chinese Sports and Cultural Centre and the president of various football and basketball clubs. He died in Wellington in 1979, aged 76.

The other man Michael finds particularly interesting is Wing Lee, a laundryman. Despite facing racism and discrimination – “he was bashed up in his laundry by a young lout, defended himself, and then he’s the one who ended up in court” – he did well, running various businesses around Wellington. Newspapers report him attending a high society fancy-dress fundraiser ball in 1911.

“Lee went dressed up as a Chinese laundry,” says Michael. “Apparently he was a great success.”

heritage.org.nz/list-details/5363/Berry & Co Photographers Building

To hear more from art gallery manager Olivia McLeavey, view our video story here: youtube.com/ Heritage NewZealand Pouhere Taonga

Spice of life

WORDS: JACQUI GIBSON

A walking tour of Sandringham with food historian André Taber offers a tantalising taste of the Auckland neighbourhood’s history

Food historian André Taber is standing on the edge of Sandringham’s Edendale Reserve when he tells me his favourite projects are the ones dreamt up by other people.

The walking tour we’re about to start is a case in point, he says.

The 0.6-kilometre route takes in 13 stops on Sandringham Road in a city suburb dubbed Auckland’s ‘Little India’ due to the growing number of South Asian eateries and shops.

André was commissioned by a Sandringham community group to research the food history of Sandringham and design an app and walking tour for the 2020 Auckland Heritage Festival.

Community facilitator Joanne Harland says the group, called SPiCE (the Sandringham Project in Community Empowerment), wanted to create a heritage walk for the community as a response to Covid-19.

“I loved the project and found out a lot of things I didn’t know about the area,” says André, who led two sell-out food heritage tours of Sandringham during the festival.

To learn that Sandringham’s food heritage encompassed everything from early Māori gardening to fresh-milk vending to some of the city’s first Chinese fruit shops, as well as the traditional foods of Samoan migrants, was fascinating, he says.

Born in Montreal to British and American parents – both classical musicians – André moved to New Zealand from the Netherlands as a teenager. He’s lived in Auckland ever since.

“Like many Aucklanders, I’m curious about how the city evolved. Worldwide, people are exploring cities on foot led by tour guides knowledgeable about food heritage – and now Auckland is joining the trend.”

Today’s guided tour starts near the kūmara- and crop-growing terraces of Ōwairaka (Mount Albert).

Pulling out my phone and opening the SPiCE app, I learn that the reserve on which we’re standing was once a wetland of tī and tuna , common foods of local iwi.

Outside the Edendale Supermarket, our next stop, André explains that the unremarkable-looking shop was originally a general store set up by Sandringham’s first shopkeeper, Norwegian settler Anders Eriken, more than a century ago.

“To learn the food heritage of a place is to understand its wider cultural and social history,” says André, as we duck into Satya Chai Lounge Sandringham a bit further down the road.

“This place references another important chapter in Sandringham’s food history — the arrival of its first restaurants, all of which were Asian,” he says as we sit down.

IMAGERY: MARCEL TROMP, JACQUI GIBSON

“Thai restaurant Doy Luang Thai was one of the first on the scene in the 1990s. Then came others like Satya, a popular South Indian restaurant, and this millennial hipster bar next to it, run by the owners’ son, representing the village’s second generation of Asian restaurateurs.”

A taste for history

As we share a plate of spicy fish pakora, André explains his longtime interest in food writing, which increased on a trip to Tahiti exploring the Pacific nation’s traditional cuisine in 1993.

It peaked when André was in his twenties and reading the weekly New York Times food column during a year he spent living with his grandfather in the US.

“At the time, food writing was coming into its own in New Zealand and around the world. Histories about great men doing great deeds were on the wane. Instead, people wanted to know about the histories of ordinary people – who they were, what they did, where they went and what they ate. The rise of food journalism was part of that trend.”

Locally, Wellington journalist David Burton reviewed restaurants and wrote books about the country’s culinary culture. Cuisine magazine was the authority on recipes to try at home and the country’s best places to eat.

For his part, André spent much of the 1990s studying French and history at the University of Auckland, writing papers on topics such as the food harvests of 19th-century England and New Zealand’s female farm workers, who were responsible for boosting food production during World War II.

In 2002 he graduated from Auckland University of Technology with a diploma in journalism and ready to give full-time food writing a go.

“But I found the opportunities for food journalists just too limited. You couldn’t make the same kind of living in New Zealand that you could in places like London and the US. So I pursued a career in television programming instead, fitting in food writing projects where I could and parenting my son.”

By the mid 2000s he’d written guidebooks on buying New Zealand olive oil and the great New Zealand pie. The former earned him a finalist spot in the 2007 New Zealand Guild of Food Writers Culinary Quill Awards – Book of the Year.

In 2012 Random House commissioned André to write an essay on the history of fast food in New Zealand for The Food Truck Cookbook by Michael Van de Elzen.

A year later he wrote a series of articles on the food and drink of the naval ship HMS New Zealand for an exhibition run jointly by Auckland War Memorial Museum and the National Museum of the Royal New Zealand Navy.

These days he contributes to the Aristologist, New Zealand’s food history journal, and regularly attends the annual New Zealand Symposium of Gastronomy & Food History alongside teaching food history at Auckland’s Selwyn College.

“To learn the food heritage of a place is to understand its wider cultural and social history”

The origins of our Chinese cuisine

Right now, says André, as we finish a plate of ‘Xtra Hot Crispy Chicken’, he’s researching a book on the history of Chinese restaurants in New Zealand. Funded by grants from the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, it is due to be published by Massey University Press next year.

André promises the book will feature interesting new insights into the country’s food heritage and cast doubt on the officially recognised date of Chinese migration to New Zealand.

Heading back outside to Sandringham’s busy main road, he explains: “I’ve tracked down some fascinating clues as to where and when the first plate of chop suey was served, which is a cool piece of food history.

“But I also write about New Zealand’s first – that we know of – professional Chinese chef, John Jackson, who arrived in Wellington in 1859. That’s seven years before the first Chinese miners arrived in Otago.”

At the site of the former Prague Bar and Cafe, we reach the end of what’s been a 90-minute interview, a delicious lunch and a first-hand experience of the SPiCE walking tour.

As I read the final entry on the app, I learn that the neighbourhood bar opened in 2011, marking the end of Sandringham’s enduring dry period introduced by Scottish Methodists in the 1890s.

“That’s what I loved about researching this food tour and New Zealand’s food heritage more generally,” says André. “You get to look beyond the surface of a community and discover new, often unexpected, things about the people who once lived there.”

My favourite place

The Occidental Hotel on Auckland’s Vulcan Lane is probably one of my favourite heritage places in the city. I credit my knowledge of its history to Perrin Rowland, my friend and an experienced chef and food writer, also based in Auckland.

I don’t go there a lot now, but I did as a student in the ’90s. I remember the first time I walked in I was struck by how small it was. But that was the case for a lot of hospitality businesses in the early days of the colony. I remind people of this in the food history class I teach at Selwyn College. There were so few people compared with now, so hotels of the time weren’t huge. Stylish, yes. And an ornate Victorian-era building like this, packed with an extraordinary collection of interesting art and objects, was certainly stylish.

tī: cabbage trees

tuna: eels

To access SPiCE’s Sandringham food history tour app, visit spice.org.nz

I tell my students it speaks to the aspirations of the era. Built in 1870 and run by Edward Perkins, a flamboyant ex-sailor, it shows you how connected New Zealand was to the global economy even back then. People here wanted fancy hotels as much as the citizens of London or New York did, and Edward catered to these tastes. And the fact that it has continuously operated as a restaurant, bar and hotel for more than 150 years is amazing to me. n

The Occidental Hotel is a Category 1 historic place: heritage.org.nz/list-details/624/Occidental Hotel

IMAGERY: MARCEL TROMP, JACQUI GIBSON

TUNNEL VISION

The construction of the Ōtira Tunnel in the Southern Alps is considered one of New Zealand’s great engineering feats – and it’s still inspiring awe 100 years on

WORDS: SIMON WILLIAMS / IMAGERY: GEMMA FLAY-HUGHES

The TranzAlpine train about to enter the Ōtira Tunnel at Arthur’s Pass.

Passengers travelling on the TranzAlpine train might barely notice the Ōtira Tunnel – it is, after all, one of many tunnels on the 223-kilometre journey between Christchurch and Greymouth, of which most are unremarkable. The Ōtira Tunnel, however, is not.

An 8.5-kilometre hole through the Southern Alps, the Ōtira Tunnel is one of New Zealand’s greatest engineering feats. Construction began in 1908, and when it opened 15 years later on 4 August 1923 it was lauded as the longest rail tunnel in the British Empire and the seventh longest in the world.

Symbolically and practically it joined Westland and Canterbury by rail for the first time, when previously a nightmarish coach road over Arthur’s Pass had been the only option.

As part of its ‘Engineering to 1990’ project, the Institution of Professional Engineers of New Zealand (now Engineering New Zealand Te Ao Rangahau) deemed the tunnel significant to the development of Aotearoa New Zealand – a significance that is also recognised by the Selwyn District Council.

The importance of the Ōtira Tunnel is not lost at a grassroots level either. For more than a year now, a committee of Ōtira Tunnel enthusiasts from the West Coast and Canterbury has been planning the tunnel’s centenary celebration – and they haven’t been afraid to get their hands dirty in the process.

The committee normally meets every month at Ōtira or Arthur’s Pass, but in the lead-up to the

centenary they’ve been undertaking working bees as well. At the Ōtira, or western, end of the tunnel, members have been clearing tracks, removing vegetation from around one of five original survey monuments, and building a replica tunneller’s cottage.

Ōtira Tunnel Celebrations Committee Chair and Co-ordinator Di Gordon-Burns and her husband own an art gallery housed in Ōtira’s old post office. They love where they live – and the tunnel.

“What a privilege to live surrounded by a national park. We couldn’t be luckier,” says Di. “And this town exists because of the tunnel.”

On 4 August 2023, 100 years to the day since the tunnel’s opening ceremony, the group will be joined by others from around New Zealand for celebrations honouring the men who completed the mammoth project.

Plans for the day include a special train from Greymouth, additional carriages on the TranzAlpine train from Christchurch, speeches, exhibitions, a plaque unveiling and bus trips to the Ōtira hillside tunnel entrance.

A specially minted medallion replicating the one presented to Prime Minister William Massey at the opening ceremony in 1923 is being produced and a centenary ball will be held at the Bealey Hotel near Arthur’s Pass.

A book written by Bruce Shalders, the South Island field officer for the Rail Heritage Trust of New Zealand –along with his fellow committee members Di and Chris Stewart – is being produced to mark the centenary.

1. Bruce Shalders and Fiona Neale choose tunnel construction photos for the centennial book ThroughtheAlps

2. Ōtira Tunnel Celebrations Committee Chair and Co-ordinator Di Gordon-Burns at her Ōtira gallery.

3. Committee member Fiona Neale sorts out the photographic displays for Arthur’s Pass and Ōtira.

4. Committee members at the site of the original construction workshops near the tunnel mouth at Ōtira.

5. Ōtira

Tunnel Celebrations Committee members plan centennial events.

“The tunnel was a marvel for its time,” says Bruce. “So many men worked from both ends for 15 years. Their perseverance in the face of horrible amounts of rain, weeks and months in the semi-dark, breathing foul air, the weather outside, the water inside – it was incredible.”

Long and steep, the tunnel is KiwiRail’s most challenging piece of infrastructure, adds Bruce, and requires emergency safety measures such as breathing gear on board. Locomotives travelling through the tunnel have two sets of breathing gear in each cab, and six identical kits are stationed in cupboards along the tunnel. While an emergency event inside the tunnel is highly unlikely, the walk out could take some time through foul air and, at times, fog. The tunnel is remarkable in that it’s still used for the purpose for which it was built, he says, and 3.5 million tonnes of machinery and freight travel through it annually.

At the Arthur’s Pass, or eastern, end of the tunnel, committee member and motel owner Fiona Neale is creating a large-format photo exhibition for display in both villages during the centenary. She and Chris recently gave two talks on the tunnel to locals, and she says while many know about the tunnel’s importance, they perhaps don’t know much of its history.

“We have to honour all those men who made it happen,” she says.

Challenging conditions

There are many stories of the tunnellers’ hellish working conditions, but Di has a special interest in the role that women and children played during the construction. In the chapter she wrote for the centenary book, she notes that many workers brought their families with them. They lived in three-room cottages, whereas the single men lived in pairs in tiny huts.

“So many men worked from both ends for 15 years. Their perseverance in the face of horrible amounts of rain, weeks and months in the semidark, breathing foul air, the weather outside, the water inside – it was

The late Tom Ferguson, whose father worked at the Ōtira end of the tunnel for nine years, said that when his mother arrived with him as a baby, she thought it was the end of the world.

“It rained for weeks, she cried for weeks – she didn’t like it at all.”

Di’s research has revealed that in spite of the rain, cold and snow, and a lack of electricity and running water, life in the tunnellers’ villages (there were three at Ōtira and one at Arthur’s Pass) was not always unpleasant. Despite the muddy conditions, women took great pride in keeping their homes pristine, she notes, and there were shops, a visiting dentist, schools and street names.

For Bruce, it is the technology used to construct the tunnel that is particularly astounding.

“The project was cutting edge, [using] all the latest techniques that had been studied in Europe. Power stations were built at each end to provide electricity for the compressed air drills and for a narrow-gauge railway to take workers in and the [excavated materials] out.”

Five survey monuments, used in geodetic and land surveying, were built in line of sight to the tunnel. That work was led by surveyor John Howard Dobson, and was often hampered by rain, snow and summer heat haze that impaired visibility. His endeavours, however, paid off, with the final alignment varying by only a few centimetres.

The committee has recently cleared a survey monument at the mouth of the Ōtira Tunnel, with only one of the five now remaining to be found, says Bruce. “[It’s] high up in the bush, but we intend to find it.”

Steam locomotives couldn’t use the tunnel due to its steep grade, he says, so electric traction was pioneered (in New Zealand) in the tunnel. The system was only replaced in 1997, when the introduction of diesel engines meant the run between Westland and Canterbury could be made with no stops to change systems.

Still rolling

These days, it’s the job of Anit Lal and his team to keep a professional eye on the tunnel. Anit is the Field Production Manager in charge of the Midland line for KiwiRail. His team inspects the line, including the tunnel, twice a week.

“The steep grade has special issues,” he notes. “Our vehicles have to have good dual-braking systems. Going up from Ōtira, there are also special arrangements for flushing out bad air.”

Mike Morgan is one of a small group of KiwiRail drivers based in Ōtira who are authorised to drive trains through the tunnel, using four dedicated locomotives called bankers. Mike loves his work and his colleagues – and even the area’s weather.

“In the cab we have a sophisticated monitor to measure oxygen, nitrogen and carbon monoxide levels. We also have a thing that looks like the kit a scuba diver wears, which includes gas bottles and a professional mask.”

A new state-of-the-art communications system installed in the tunnel, he says, has been a great addition. But as Mike attests, even as the tunnel approaches 100 years old, it remains an awe-inspiring piece of engineering.

“With trains limited to 28 to 30 kilometres an hour, it takes a while to get through,” says Mike. “Being very long and dark, it’s not for the faint-hearted.”

“With trains limited to 28 to 30 kilometres an hour, it takes a while to get through. Being very long and dark, it’s not for the faint-hearted”

1. The Ōtira portal with the original 1923 electricity sub-station.

2. Mike Morgan, locomotive engineer and tunnel banker driver, based at Ōtira.

3–7. Natalie Canton in front of and inside her restored tunnel worker’s cottage at Arthur’s Pass.

Shining bright

When Natalie and Brendan Canton sit in their cottage at night, they summon up the life of a tunneller who sat in the same room, in front of the same fireplace, more than a century ago.

“If we turn off the lights and have the firelight filling the room, we can feel what it must have been like,” says Natalie. “So much hard work, so much toil to create something so important.”

The couple’s Arthur’s Pass cottage was built in 1910, originally to house one of the married men working to construct the Ōtira Tunnel. It’s one in a cluster of one-time tunnellers’ cottages at the western end of the village that were abandoned following the tunnel’s completion in 1923 and eventually sold to private owners.

At only 35 square metres, the Canton’s cottage has four small rooms, including one added in 1935, and a long drop outside. “If it has been snowing,” laughs Natalie, “you have to take a shovel to dig a path.”

When they bought the cottage seven years ago, it was furnished, including crockery, cutlery and linen – some of which dated back to the 1930s.

“We still use it all,” says Natalie, “to honour all the people who loved this cottage before us.”

The pair clearly love their home. Brendan laughs when he talks about repairing the interior wall scrim and sarking, behind which they found a newspaper dated 1910. It would have been too logical to install plasterboard linings, he says; instead, they replaced some of the sarking with fence palings, which happened to be the correct size, and repaired the scrim.

With emotion in his voice, he adds: “When I paint the corrugated iron on the outside walls, I think of the people who’ve done this before me for 110 years.”

The cottage has also been rewired and had its piles replaced and original floors oiled, while the original roll-top tin bath in the external bathroom has been repaired and painted.

“We carefully do all necessary maintenance to protect the cottage from the harsh climate,” says Brendan.

The couple’s work in restoring the cottage was recognised with a Canterbury Heritage Award in 2018. Says Natalie: “We wanted [a home] that connected to the past, to respect what it is, to honour those men.” n

PAPER TRAILS

Recently acknowledged for their significance to our documentary heritage, many of the Clendon Papers are still housed in the family home with which they’re associated

WORDS: JOHN O’HARE / IMAGERY: JESS BURGES

For David Clendon and his siblings growing up in the 1960s, Clendon House in Rawene was Aunty Marge and Uncle Trevor’s house.

The kauri cottage with its gabled attic was a place of family holidays, golden summers and rich memories. Little did David realise at the time the extent and nature of the memories associated with the house – and how far back they stretched.

Last year the Clendon Papers – a collection of family papers spanning almost 150 years – was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Register. They joined two writing slates (both Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga collection items) from Kemp House in Kerikeri, which had been added to the register in 2018.

Part of the Clendon Papers collection is located at Clendon House, a Tohu Whenua that was once the home of David’s ancestor James Reddy Clendon and his second wife Jane; other items are archived at Auckland Council Libraries Ngā Pātaka Kōrero o Tāmaki Makaurau (known as Auckland Libraries). In 1973, when Clendon House was acquired by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga (then the New Zealand Historic Places Trust), the collection went with it.

And what a collection it is. Besides obvious standouts like the certified manuscript copy of te Tiriti o Waitangi in te reo Māori, the Clendon Papers comprise 3000 items including personal, business and official correspondence, letterbooks, ephemera and photographs – and more.

The earliest items span the 1820s and ’30s and document James Reddy Clendon’s years in pre-Treaty Aotearoa – a rarity in itself as missionaries tended to grab the limelight with an abundance of documents recording their exploits.

Clendon himself is generally described as a Northland trader, merchant, settler and farmer, and as a government official and the first US consul in New Zealand – although this hardly does him justice.

Clendon made history as one of the few Europeans to have his name on both He Whakaputanga (the Declaration of Independence) in 1835 and te Tiriti o Waitangi on 6 February 1840. Investigate early Pākehā settlement in the Bay of Islands and Hokianga and it’s hard to escape his shadow. Figuratively speaking, Clendon’s historic DNA is everywhere.

A former Green MP, Northlander David Clendon wasn’t particularly aware of the collection growing up, though he certainly knew the house had history.

“As kids we were more interested in artefacts than documents, which in any case would have been in drawers and cupboards where we were not encouraged to fossick!” he recalls.

Copies of pages from Laurine Hansen’s 1907 hand-decorated school exercise book in the former schoolroom at Clendon House.

A family culture of preservation – which David exhibits in his own reluctance “to part with paper of all sorts” – may be one reason for the collection’s existence. That, and the fact that generations of Clendons lived in the same house for more than a century.

Auckland Libraries also owns a collection of Clendon papers acquired over the years, with other items placed there by the then New Zealand Historic Places Trust when the house changed hands. UNESCO recognition was given to the totality of the papers belonging to both organisations – indeed the submission was a joint one by Auckland Libraries and Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.

Retired manuscript librarian Kate de Courcy is familiar with the collection, describing it as “a remarkable survival of a family’s papers over 140 years”.

Kate knows remarkable when she sees it: taonga cared for by Auckland Libraries range from medieval manuscripts to Governor Grey’s letters and manuscripts, many in te reo Māori. The Clendon Papers collection, however, is unique.

“The papers up to the 1850s,” she says, “show the importance of family and financial links with England, Australia and the US, plus the development of government in New Zealand

and Clendon’s part in the Northern War [in the Bay of Islands] and administrative roles.”

Subsequent generations of Clendon lives are recorded in documentary material reflecting the evolving bilingual, bicultural society of Hokianga. The collection is the epitome of local place-based history and, in light of the new history curriculum, offers many opportunities for learning today.

“James Clendon and his descendants kept enormous amounts of paper documents and photographs,” says Kate. “No decluttering or minimalism here! This was the record of their lives, and I’m unaware of the existence of any other collection like it in New Zealand.”

Clendon House, however, was Jane Clendon’s home too, and the collection reflects this.

Jane Takotowi Cochrane was the daughter of Irish settler Dennis Brown Cochrane and his wife Takotowi Te Whata, and was a woman of influence and chiefly mana. Documents record Jane’s determination to clear the huge debt left by James following his death in 1872.

“Through sheer grit and enterprise, Jane –39 years younger than her husband – managed to pay her creditors, ensuring the house and its contents remained in the family,” says David.

“If it hadn’t been for her, it is unlikely that the collection would have survived.”

1. David Clendon – a descendant of James Reddy Clendon and Jane Clendon –on the verandah of Clendon House in Rawene.

2. Some of the many artefacts on display at Clendon House.

3. The Clendon House attic, which was once used as a schoolroom.

4. David Clendon revisits the attic with all its fascinating treasures.

5. The desk in the Clendon House office.

The Clendon Papers collection offers wonderful opportunities for researchers, but also some challenges, according to Kate.

“There is nothing like reading, say, the letter handwritten by Jane Clendon to [trader, judge and writer] Frederick Maning asking for his advice, in the house and landscape where she wrote it, and knowing that Maning was living further down the Hokianga,” she says.

“You wonder whether the letter would have been delivered on foot or horseback, or by boat, and how long it would have taken to get there and for his reply to come.”

The challenge is that these papers may be better kept centrally in a library, for example, rather than in their original site. Items become more accessible and are protected in secure, environmentally controlled conditions.

Nothing can compare with reading original documents, but technology can provide a solution for researchers.

“Digitisation can give superb-quality results, which can then be presented in a number of ways – including as transcriptions for ease of reading. It also saves wear and tear on the originals and can make items accessible online across locations,” she says.

“So many of our historic sites leave few relics that enable later generations to relive past events, but repositories like Clendon House keep our histories alive and in front of us”

The value of the Clendon Papers is in their content – though some, like historian Barbara Gawith, also acknowledge the power of their connection to place.

Barbara is a fifth-generation descendant of James Clendon and his first wife Sarah, and her interest in her ancestor was sparked when she read a book on Clendon by an English relative.

A research trip to Rawene followed for her MA thesis titled James Reddy Clendon: Trade, Entrepreneurship and Empire

“I first visited Clendon House at this time, and I was privileged to sit in Jane’s kitchen,”

she recalls. “Here was where my ancestors ate breakfast, chatted and shared stories. I was amazed and delighted when then curator Lindsay Charman produced document after document. Here was a living dossier on the life of James Clendon, and I felt that Clendon’s past was no longer ‘another country’ but was vibrantly present there in that kitchen.

“To have all this material in one place in the family home gave my research an immediacy that felt as if Clendon himself was still there, recounting the story of his life.

“The ability to handle primary documents brings the past alive considerably more than

2–4. Ephemera including a first-class certificate awarded to George Clendon, a first-prize certificate from the Hokianga Autumn Show 1907, and a programme for the Bachelors’ Ball, Kohukohu, from 1903.

1. David Clendon and Belinda Maingay.

reading an electronic version on a screen or copies of originals.”

Belinda Maingay, Collections Advisor for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, agrees, although she also acknowledges the need to keep collection items in secure and stable environments. Her role juggles the tension between access, context and preservation.

“It’s the totality of a place, which includes its collections, that gives it its real heritage value. We are able to modify the environments at sites to a degree to provide better levels of protection, as well as to encourage good housekeeping practice, monitor pest control and ensure good security is in place.

“We assess the risks at each of our sites around the country and mitigate accordingly.”

While digitisation is potentially a powerful tool, it has its limits, according to Belinda.

“People don’t go to Archives New Zealand to see a copy of the Treaty. They go there to see the original. It’s a bit the same with our collections,” she says.

That said, Belinda’s main concern is always to protect collection items – sometimes relocating them to offsite storage or places that provide better options for care, as occurred with the significant parts of the Clendon Papers collection that were relocated to Auckland Libraries in the 1970s under a storage agreement.

She is cautious about the practicality and desirability of museums and libraries housing collections currently located in sites around the country.

FOLLOWING THE PAPER TRAIL

When it comes to documentary heritage, it doesn’t have to be important to have value, according to David Clendon.

“It’s often the ephemera of daily life and relatively mundane events that bring history alive, and make it easier to connect to,” he says.

Much of the Clendon Papers collection falls into that category – not especially earth-shattering at face value, but if you dig a little deeper you might be amazed at what you find.

“Our collections are vast. The reality is that museums and libraries are unlikely to be able to take on entire collections such as those housed in many of our properties, which means the entirety of a collection could be lost and potentially devalued.”

And sometimes collection items just don’t make sense outside the places in which they’re kept.

“Take the collection of The Southdown and Reader’s Digest and other magazines associated with the Coates family at Ruatuna, for example. Away from Ruatuna they have little value. At Ruatuna, though, they say a great deal about the people who lived there.”

For David Clendon, the collection cannot be separated from the place.

“Some of the documents predate the Rawene house, but it is here where everything has come together and been retained,” he says.

“I hope it will continue as a ‘storehouse’ for much of the collection for a long time to come, as taking it elsewhere would seem to be a dislocation.”

Barbara Gawith agrees.

“So many of our historic sites leave few relics that enable later generations to relive past events, but repositories like Clendon House keep our histories alive and in front of us,” she says.

“It is from our past that our present identities are forged. A visual reminder that holds a written repository of its past occupants’ lives is a valuable and permanent link to our own and our country’s past.”

Pension applications, for example, contain priceless details of genealogy recorded for posterity in black ink. And while century-old horticultural show prize certificates for plants might appear to be candidates for recycling, Kate de Courcy sees gold.

“Information contained in items like these can build a background picture that can help present the place to visitors,” she says.

“The prize-winning plants could help inform the planting in the garden at Clendon House, for example.

“A collection like this can help with an integrated approach to looking after the building, its environs and the items inside the house.” n

To see more of the Clendon Papers, view our video story here: youtube.com/ HeritageNewZealand PouhereTaonga

Explore the collection https://bit.ly/Clendon

WORDS AND IMAGERY: PETER DRURY

A study in contrasts

On a recent campervan trip around East Cape, I was driving along State Highway 35 when, just a few kilometres short of Waihau Bay, I came across the majestic sight of Christ Church, in Raukokore.

The Anglican church, which is a Category 1 historic place, was built by Duncan Stirling in 1896. It is unmissable, situated on a small peninsula, and when I came across it, its newly painted white exterior and steep spire contrasted beautifully with the blue of the sky and sea.

In order to photograph the church in its unique location, I drove down the coast a little way to capture the sea in the foreground and the backdrop of the forest beyond.

Technical data

Camera: Canon EOS R6

• Aperture: f/16

• Lens: EF300mm f/4L IS USM

• ISO: 800

• Exposure: 1/800

CHANGE OF SCENE

This issue marks 40 years since this magazine was first published. We asked some veteran heritage advocates what’s changed on the heritage scene since 1983

WORDS: CAITLIN SYKES

Casting his mind back to Wellington in the early 1980s, conservation architect Chris Cochran MNZM lists some alarming examples of heritage buildings under threat at that time.

“The Wellington Town Hall was almost demolished, and the Public Trust and BNZ buildings on Lambton Quay and the Hunter Building at Victoria University of Wellington were all threatened. These are such extraordinarily important buildings to the city, it’s hard to fathom it now.”

His description of that perilous climate for the city’s heritage was echoed on the pages of the first issue of Historic Places in New Zealand (the predecessor to this magazine), which was launched in June 1983.

A profile of the massive refurbishment of the AMP Society Building on Customhouse Quay, listed as a Category 1 historic place that year, begins: “Demolition sites and halfbuilt tower blocks are a common sight in Wellington these days. But among the rubble and new concrete there is hope for those who cherish what remains of ‘old Wellington’.”

Chris, who recently retired as a conjoint member of the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Board and Māori Heritage Council, was among a growing community rising up against

the tide of heritage destruction wrought by the large-scale redevelopment of our inner cities. During that time he was a member and later chair for three years of the Wellington Regional Committee of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust – a group whose actions helped ensure that such buildings stand today.

While the rise of such activism was a direct response to specific heritage threats, Chris notes it was also due to a growing and wider appreciation of our heritage. He points to seminal events such as heritage preservation campaigns decades earlier (the campaign to save Wellington’s Old St Paul’s is one example), and later, in 1980, a popular professional seminar on adaptive reuse called ‘New Lives for Old Buildings’.

Awareness of the trust’s process of identifying and classifying specific heritage buildings to provide them with recognition was also growing through the 1980s, laying the foundation for today’s New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero.

Also contributing to the groundswell was a wave of publications in the 1980s highlighting our built heritage, including Jeremy Salmond’s Old New Zealand Houses 1800–1940, Geoffrey Thornton’s The New Zealand Heritage of Farm Buildings, and Chris’s own book, Restoring a New Zealand House

1. A spectacular aerial image of Te Kura a Maia pā in the Bay of Plenty graced the cover of issue 1.

2. Many stories in the issue were penned by New Zealand Historic Places Trust staff.

The trust hoped to capture the interest generated by the publishing wave with its launch of the magazine, as then-chair Neil Begg noted in his introduction: “We have wider hope for the magazine, that it will increase New Zealanders’ awareness of the variety and interest of their historic places and stimulate greater eagerness to see such places preserved and protected.”

Dame Anna Crighton’s involvement with heritage preservation was forged a decade or so later, with the 1996 campaign to save the Kaiapoi Woollen Mill from demolition.

The fight for heritage also drew the Christchurch Heritage Trust chair and former Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga board member (2003-10) into politics. Dame Anna ultimately served as a Christchurch city councillor from 1995 to 2007 and chaired the council’s arts, culture and heritage committee. Heritage hadn’t previously been on the council agenda, she says, but the emergence of the Resource Management Act 1991 offered scope for local authorities to begin identifying heritage assets and noting them in district plans.

“I thought, we need more protection for these places, and it needs to happen politically because it won’t happen just by advocating.”

Reflecting on the aspiration expressed in the magazine’s first issue –for the development of a greater understanding and appreciation of our heritage – Dame Anna is ambivalent about the progress we’ve made in the intervening years.

“I don’t think it’s improved dramatically. It’s been a slow, hard slog because people still seem to have the mindset that it’s not that old, so it can’t be that important. The developers and investors – the people with money and influence – do a lot of travelling. They see heritage buildings overseas and compare that heritage with our colonial heritage – and think ours doesn’t really matter. It’s taken a lot of work to get that mindset, that myth, dispersed.”

However, she says the loss of almost half of central Christchurch’s heritage-listed buildings following the Canterbury earthquakes has led to greater heritage appreciation in the city.

“It’s been post-earthquake that people have come to love and respect and want whatever’s left to be saved.”

1. A story on a major Wellington restoration project sounded a positive note during a perilous period for the city’s heritage.

2. Glossaries of te reo Māori terms used in stories were a feature of the magazine then – and are again today.

Heritage is not “a Pollyanna issue”, says Dame Anna, and while she says there’s a place for the success stories profiled in Heritage New Zealand magazine, she’d like to see more space given to “ugly stories”, where those in power are held to account for decisions that have led to heritage losses.

Local heritage activism is still strong, she says, but it took a hit following the dissolution of the trust’s branch committees with the advent of the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act 2014.

Dame Anna was the founding chair from 2010 to 2013 of Historic Places Aotearoa – the collective body of regional heritage organisations established following the demise of branch committees – and she says it has taken time to re-engage some communities with heritage causes and projects.

Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Board Deputy Chair and Māori Heritage Council Chair Sir John Clarke (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) says the introduction of the Act almost a decade ago “helped us to prepare for the 21st

and pass all these pou – these signposts across the land – to see the difference that’s made to our cultural landscape.”

Among further developments, Sir John notes two of particular importance.

One was the introduction, following the passing of the Act, of a new listing classification for Māori heritage – wāhi tupuna/tīpuna, defined as “a place important to Māori for its ancestral significance and associated cultural and traditional values”.

“Achieving wāhi tupuna status for the Waitangi Treaty Grounds in 2015 was a great and most appropriate first milestone for the Māori Heritage Council,” he notes, adding that this status was further enhanced when the site became New Zealand’s first National Historic Landmark in 2020.

Another was the release in 2017 of Tapuwae – the Māori Heritage Council’s vision document used to guide the Māori heritage work of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga and make the organisation’s work more relevant to iwi, hapū and wider society.

century”, ensuring the work of the board and council was grounded in the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Sir John says that under the previous legislation there were limited opportunities for Māori input, particularly in the archaeological consent process, and the changes gave greater recognition to Māori associated with many archaeological sites.

“Māori heritage is central to New Zealand’s unique identity,” he says. “It is New Zealand’s earliest heritage, the ‘footprint’ of iwi life and culture since the first arrival in Aotearoa some 800 years ago. It’s substantial and touches all parts of our country.”

As both a former cultural advisor to the Office of Treaty Settlements and a Waitangi Tribunal member, Sir John says the return of many sites of significance to Māori in conjunction with the Treaty settlement process has also affected the heritage landscape.

“You only have to drive along the motorway between Hamilton and Auckland, for example,

Māori heritage featured prominently in the first issue of the magazine, with a spectacular aerial image on the cover of Te Kura a Maia pā (listed as a Category 2 historic place in 1984) in the Bay of Plenty. The issue also carried a story on Te Miringa Te Kakara – the rare cross-shaped meeting house at Te Hape, near Benneydale, Waikato, which had been slated for restoration before it was shockingly destroyed by fire.

Fire remains an ever-present threat to our heritage places, but Sir John notes the emergence of other challenges that now loom large in the consciousness of those working in heritage. There’s increased awareness of the threats posed by earthquakes following the experiences in Christchurch and Kaikōura, as well as the effects of climate change, particularly extreme weather events such as Cyclone Gabrielle.

Reflecting on the past, but with an eye to the future, he says: “We must plan for greater resilience.”

sub-tribe

“Māori heritage is central to New Zealand’s unique identity. It is New Zealand’s earliest heritage, the ‘footprint’ of iwi life and culture since the first arrival in Aotearoa some 800 years ago. It’s substantial and touches all parts of our country”

POWER OF ATTRACTION

WORDS: JACQUI GIBSON / IMAGERY: SARAH HORN

The gem in Napier’s architectural crown, the National Tobacco Company Building still thrives as a commercial space as well

Just as Wānaka has That Wānaka Tree, Napier has the National Tobacco Company Building – a building so visually seductive that people flock to see it and photograph it and, in the case of one Wellingtonborn gin maker, dream of one day possessing it.

“I moved to Hawke’s Bay because I fell in love with this building,” says Blair Nicholl, formerly of Kāpiti and one of three directors who run Napier’s National Distillery Company from the distinctive Category 1 historic place on Ossian Street.

Blair first sighted the object of his affection as a teenager on a trip to Hawke’s Bay to play representative cricket. Years later, it popped into

his mind’s eye as Blair jotted down his life goals on a vision board. Some day he’d own the former tobacco factory, he promised himself.

“I’m not quite there yet,” says Blair, who moved to Hawke’s Bay in 2021. “But it’s a privilege to walk through those timber doors every day and know I’m a custodian of this incredible place.”

Constructed in 1926 and rebuilt in 1931 following the Hawke’s Bay earthquake, the National Tobacco Company Building is regarded as the jewel in Napier’s architectural crown, says Michael Fowler, historian and former heritage officer at the city’s Art Deco Trust.

1. Copper still, National Distillery Company.

2. Blair Nicholl, National Distillery Company.

2

Architect Louis Hay designed replacement factory premises and builder Harry Faulknor and his workforce of 150 men ensured the new factory was in use by 15 March 1931, just weeks after the February earthquake, he says.

The lavish office premises, also designed by Louis Hay, opened two years later in 1933.

“The building is a blend of Art Deco and Art Nouveau, strongly influenced by the Chicago School of architecture, which you can see in the rounded arch over the entranceway,” says Michael.

“There was no expense spared on the rebuild. The entry doors alone cost £600 to make – that’s about $85,000 in today’s money.”

Anecdotally, it’s believed to be the most photographed building in the region, he says.

“I’ve taken many tourists there over the years. I’m telling you, people have to be dragged away from it. It draws them in like a magnet.

“Everything about it stands out. From the muted pink and yellow colours of the simple, cubed façade to the arched entrance and the sculpted concrete raupō and roses you see on the building’s exterior.

“Then there’s the carved wooden doors, made by Hastings furniture maker Walter Marquand, the

“I’ve taken many tourists there over the years. I’m telling you, people have to be dragged away from it. It draws them in like a magnet”

1. Historian Michael Fowler.

2. Sculpted roses.

3. The National Tobacco Company Building frontage on Ossian Street.

TIMELINE OF A BUILDING

1926 Napier architect Louis Hay designs a new factory and offices for the National Tobacco Company Ltd on Napier’s Ossian Street.

1931 The National Tobacco Company complex is destroyed by the 7.8-magnitude Hawke’s Bay earthquake. Weeks later, a replacement factory opens, designed by Louis Hay and rebuilt by Harry Faulknor.

1933 A new office is added to the National Tobacco Company premises, also designed by Louis Hay.

1957 The National Tobacco Company merges with Rothmans of Pall Mall, creating a new company called Rothmans Tobacco Company Ltd.

1999 Rothmans Tobacco Company merges with WD & HO Wills (NZ) to become British American Tobacco (NZ) Ltd.

2005 British American Tobacco shuts down its Napier operation and moves cigarette production to Sydney, Australia.

2007 The site is sold to the McKimm family, owners of Big Save, initially for their national distribution centre and now for the Napier Ahuriri Business Park.

2018 The National Distillery Company moves into the former National Tobacco Company Building, alongside The Urban Winery, B Studio and others.

decorative brass handrails, a striking domed skylight and the Italian marble floors.”

The fact that it was commissioned by Napier tobacco baron Gerhard Husheer, a German émigré with a taste for chauffeur-driven limousines, expensive real estate and Alsatian dogs, only seems to have added to its impact, he says.

“Gerhard was a central figure in Napier in the ’20s and ’30s. He was a very wealthy businessman interested in culture and the arts. He was also extremely generous, reputedly paying staff well and giving away thousands of pounds every year to people hit hard by the Depression.”

The National Tobacco Company Building today represents a unique chapter in the region’s history, says Michael.

“For a small town like Napier to have such an iconic building is wonderful for the people who live here and for visitors to Hawke’s Bay.

“That it’s kept in such great condition is testament to the commitment of its current owners, the McKimm family, who have redeveloped the site on which it’s located, and tenants like Blair who continue to champion its legacy.”

Blair and business partners Ricardo Reis and Kate Whiting set up shop in the National Tobacco Company Building in November 2018.

Months before, winemaker Tony Bish had invited the trio to join him on the corner property and create a hub for locally made artisan beer, wine and spirits.

At B Studio, an independent craft brewery located at the rear of the National Tobacco Company Building,

1. The domed skylight.

2. The original National Tobacco Company reception area.

3. The leadlight windows and entrance to the National Distillery Company bar.

4. Handcrafted National Distillery Company spirits.

5. The refurbished National Distillery Company bar.

brewers made experimental beers. Next door at The Urban Winery, Tony Bish operated a popular tasting room and cellar door.

For their part, Blair, Ricardo and Kate would run a new spirits distillery, tasting room, cellar door and bar from the National Tobacco Company Building out front.

But moving into a Category 1-listed heritage property didn’t come without its challenges, says Blair.

Firstly, his team had to figure out where to install distillery equipment worth $2 million, including a commercial gas boiler, while complying with all relevant safety and adaptive re-use regulations.

“Luckily, I poked around and found a small sealedoff door leading to an existing boiler room once used by the original tobacco factory,” explains Blair.

“Honestly, it was both a relief and a game changer. The original drawings didn’t feature the room, but it was the perfect space for us. If we hadn’t found it, we may have had to rethink everything. To me, it was a sign we were meant to be here.”

Last year, the three directors refurbished the bar with velvet curtains and chic cane seating and bar stools.

A personal highlight of the move has been learning the history of the National Tobacco Company Building from locals and Gerhard’s elderly grandchildren, who live in Napier, says Blair.

“A granddaughter told me Gerhard would stand outside the local dance hall on a Saturday night and give out money, so the kids could enjoy their evening.

“I also found out that more than 95 percent of Gerhard’s staff were women, employed for their small hands and skills in hand-rolling tobacco,” he says.

Today, all Blair’s front-of-house staff learn the site’s history and give tours of the distillery on request.

“I see it as our duty to show people around. A big part of what we do here is education. We want everyone to leave with an understanding of the building’s forefathers and history, as well as a bit of knowledge about making spirits.”

Guests are also encouraged to take seats at the bar and try cocktails made from the National Distillery Company’s Adorn Rose and Art Deco gins, botanical spirits made in homage to the late Gerhard Husheer.

Fifteen percent of all Art Deco gin sales go to the Art Deco Trust, set up to preserve and promote the region’s heritage.

“Looking around, you can see roses and oranges are central motifs in the design of this building,” says Blair.

“That’s why they’ve become core ingredients in some of our gins today. We even found locally grown tobacco to make a one-off tobacco gin. Tobacco creates this unusual, rich flavour, which we’ll eventually add to our rum and whisky.”

Blair says the building and the story it represents are a constant inspiration.

“Sometimes I’ll be in the boardroom mulling over a tricky issue and I’ll think: ‘What would Gerhard do in this situation? What would he do if he were me?’”

THREE WAYS TO VISIT THIS WINTER

1. Dress up and arrive in a 1930s-themed costume for a tour of the building and, depending on how smartly dressed you are, enjoy a complimentary cocktail at the bar: nationaldistillery.nz

2. Contact Napier’s Art Deco Trust and sign up for the daily Art Deco Highlights Vintage Car Tour, which stops off at the National Tobacco Company Building: artdeconapier.com

3. Grab a ticket to a cocktail-making masterclass run by the National Distillery Company at this year’s winter Food and Wine Classic culinary festival over four weekends in June: fawc.co.nz

To see more of the National Tobacco Company, view our video story here: youtube. com/Heritage NewZealand Pouhere Taonga

ART HOUSE

A project inviting two artists to produce work in Wellington’s Turnbull House is offering unique perspectives on the building’s interior while its doors remain closed to the public

WORDS: CHERIE JACOBSON / IMAGERY: ADRIENNE MARTYN AND SHANNON NOVAK

Adrienne Martyn’s photographs of historic buildings evoke a sense of mystery. Empty rooms invite speculation: who inhabited these spaces, where have they gone and why? In her latest series, images of repeated grid patterns found in wood panelling and window panes at Turnbull House hint at a sense of order and formality, even among the peeling wallpaper and construction work.

For Shannon Novak, these same empty spaces in the Category 1 historic place inspired a series of temporary installations, documented through photography. The installations draw on the building’s history and are part of a wider project called Make Visible, designed to grow support, increase awareness and create positive change for rainbow communities in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.

Turnbull House is a familiar sight for central Wellington commuters as they hurry from the train station to the streets beyond. Built as the private home and library of avid collector Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull – who spent his life amassing a collection of books, maps, paintings, drawings, artefacts and much more – it was the original home of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

However, the public have long had to content themselves with an exterior view of the building after it was deemed earthquake prone in 2009 and closed to the public three years later to await further strengthening work.

That work is now underway thanks to a multi-year project under the care of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga that will include seismic strengthening, a full systems upgrade, a lift to improve accessibility, and interior refurbishment. Once completed, it’s intended that Turnbull House will return to public use; possibilities include offices, exhibition space and meeting and function rooms.

But while the building currently remains physically off-limits, it’s been possible to see beyond its walls – and gain new insights into its past, present and future – thanks to the work of Adrienne and Shannon.

Shannon is an Auckland-based, multi-disciplinary artist and founder of the Safe Space Alliance, a global LGBTQI+-led non-profit organisation that aims to help people identify, navigate and create safe spaces for LGBTQI+ communities.

Adrienne is a Wellington-based art photographer whose body of work includes portrait, abstract and landscape photography. Since 2017 she has been especially interested in photographing empty gallery and museum interiors, often in states of transition.

For both artists (who, incidentally, have never met), the opportunity to work within Turnbull House came about organically.

Shannon had been engaged with the Rainbow List project (see Heritage New Zealand magazine, Summer 2021) and was travelling to Wellington in October last year for Make Visible,

Above and left: The empty rooms of Turnbull House prior to seismic strengthening and refurbishment, as captured by photographer Adrienne Martyn.

while a Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga staff member was familiar with Adrienne’s work and felt Turnbull House at the start of its strengthening journey aligned with her other projects in historic buildings, such as Anderson House, the Robert McDougall Art Gallery and Golder Cottage.

Due to the earthquake-prone status of Turnbull House, the artists’ access to the building was under strictly controlled circumstances once the site had been secured. Working under such restrictions can create challenges, as Shannon notes.

“It means compressing a standard installation timeline into a matter of hours in one day. You don’t get to test work or play around with ideas over time – you have to turn up, rapidly test, develop, install, document, then de-install it within, on average, four to 12 hours. I find this high-pressure scenario extremely tough on the mind, body and spirit but, as a result, highly rewarding.”

The result of Shannon’s time in Turnbull House is Volumes –a series of nine installations documented as photographs. While his site-specific work is always influenced by the space itself, there was a topic he knew he wanted to explore with Turnbull House, which is evident in the installation Were They?. The work is quite literally a question written in large letters on a burgundy-coloured square, hung in a blank space above the fireplace in the groundfloor library where Alexander Turnbull’s portrait once hung.

The piece refers to speculation by historians and biographers about Turnbull’s sexuality. As with many historical figures,

there is no clear evidence of it. Many of the identifiers we use today would not have been recognised in Turnbull’s lifetime and this creates a tension between recognising and celebrating rainbow history and respecting the complex reality of life prior to the Homosexual Law Reform Act of 1986.

As Shannon sees it, “It’s about growing comfortable with the question mark. Not everyone fits or wants to fit with a specific identity or identities.”

Shannon’s work is rich in detail, often reflecting the research behind it. The colour and font used in Were They? were taken from the first book in Turnbull’s collection, while another work, Physique Pictorial, edits images of muscled men in underwear from four publications banned by the Indecent Publications Tribunal in 1965.

This work also has an element of real-world activism to it, as these publications remain classified as ‘indecent’ with restricted access, so he is working with the Classification Office to have them declassified.

Some of Shannon’s installations work with the fabric of the building itself and interventions undertaken as part of the initial stages of the strengthening project. The Glory, for example, co-opts a hole created in a bathroom wall as part of an asbestos survey.

Like Shannon, Adrienne describes her approach as intuitive. Entering Turnbull House last December, she was immediately drawn to certain rooms and the grid patterns she noticed in them, resulting in nine final photographs. She will return to

Above: Shannon Novak’s installations WereThey? and PhysiquePictorial in the former ground-floor library of Wellington’s Turnbull House.

these same nine angles over time to observe the changes during the strengthening process.

In the images there are contrasts between wood-panelled walls, richly coloured carpets and curtains, and spaces with the floors stripped bare or carpet beginning to lift at the edges, a temporary wall just visible and holes in the ceiling.

Adrienne’s first photographic series of an historic building in transition, Anderson House, featured drop cloths that created beautifully sculptural folds; this is echoed in the Turnbull House series, with curtains gathered in a practical manner that becomes a point of focus in the empty rooms. Architectural features are highlighted, and the play of light and shadow draws the eye to certain corners and details.

Although there can be a sense of abandonment in her photographs, Adrienne says her work isn’t about loss.

“It’s about revealing what is present after everything has gone. What remains.”

Both Adrienne’s and Shannon’s Turnbull House works are available to view on their websites. With many earthquakeprone buildings closed to the public, they agree that giving artists the opportunity to work within these sites helps people to engage with them. Bringing new perspectives to historic buildings can also introduce them, and their stories, to new audiences and build new connections, they say.

So perhaps, as a result of their work, some of those busy commuters shuffling past Turnbull House each day will be intrigued – and take a second look.

TURNBULL HOUSE THROUGH TIME

An eclectic mix of Scottish Baronial, Queen Anne and Medieval architectural elements, Turnbull House was completed in 1916. It was designed by William Turnbull (no relation) for collector Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull, whose stated main interest was “anything whatever relating to this Colony, on its history, flora, fauna, geology and inhabitants, will be fish for my net, from as early a date as possible until now”.

When Turnbull died in 1918, his collection was bequeathed to the nation, and the government purchased Turnbull House to enable the collection to remain in its home. It opened to the public as a research and reference library in 1920; however, the collection continued to grow and eventually found a larger home within Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, the National Library of New Zealand.

Since the collection’s departure in 1973, Turnbull House has been home to various tenants. In the 1970s, plans for a motorway access ramp meant it was threatened with demolition, but strong community opposition saw the proposal withdrawn. Prior to the current work, the building also underwent previous earthquake-strengthening interventions in 1955 and 1995. n

Above: The temporary installations, including TheGlory, which made use of a hole created in a bathroom wall for an asbestos survey, have been documented as photographs that can now be viewed online.

Screen legends

WORDS: NIKI PARTSCH

For a screen industry power couple, Ōtaki might seem an unlikely place to live and work. But for Libby Hakaraia and Tainui Stephens, the Kāpiti Coast town has proved the perfect base from which to create work – and make an impact.

With 25 years of screen industry experience, Libby (Ngāti Kapu, Ngāti Raukawa) has produced and directed many documentaries and films (she produced the recently released feature film Cousins). Tainui (Te Rarawa) is also a producer and director, and a well-known television broadcaster.

These days they’re also the driving force behind the Ōtaki-based Māoriland Charitable Trust. The trust runs the Māoriland Hub, a centre of excellence for Māori film and the creative arts, and the Māoriland Film Festival. They’re ventures that, while oriented to the couple’s community, have impacts far beyond Kāpiti and have made Ōtaki an international destination.

Ōtaki’s population of just under 4000 swells over summer with whānau visiting from out of town and other holidaymakers. But it receives another boost in early autumn when the Māoriland Film Festival is held.

Launched in 2014, Aotearoa’s international indigenous film festival showcases indigenous films

Usually a quiet seaside town, once a year Ōtaki becomes a magnet for makers and lovers of indigenous films from around the globe. And at the heart of the buzz is an almost century-old community hub experiencing a new lease on life

1. Film posters displayed at the entrance to the Māoriland Hub. Image: Niki Partsch

2. Tainui Stephens and Libby Hakaraia. Image: Supplied

3. The Māoriland Hub in Main Street, Ōtaki. Image: Niki Partsch

“It’s about honouring storytellers from the grassroots all the way through to award-winning indigenous filmmakers”

made by indigenous people. It’s now the Southern Hemisphere’s largest presenter of indigenous film content, and in 2023 its programme featured 148 events including screenings of feature and short films from Aotearoa and around the world, presentations, exhibitions and a red-carpet party featuring the Modern Māori Quartet.

Libby says the success of the festival is testament to the effort and dedication of the trust’s small, committed team.

“It’s about honouring storytellers from the grassroots all the way through to award-winning indigenous filmmakers.”

Libby says she and Tainui are passionate about the work they do, not just because they’re filmmakers but as a means to recognise the 380 million people around the world who identify as indigenous. She says showcasing indigenous stories and storytellers to a wider audience through the festival creates impact.

“We have a lot of Pākehā coming to our festivals and they say things like ‘I never knew what Māori were

trying to say about the Treaty, about loss, about all the effects of colonisation, and they [the festivals] have made us feel enabled to have a conversation with Māori and to continue that conversation long after the festival ends’.”

A community hub reimagined

The festival (along with the trust and its other ventures) takes its name from the Maoriland Films Company, a subsidiary of the New Zealand Moving Picture Co, which operated briefly in Ōtaki in the early 1920s.

The trust also embraced another aspect of Ōtaki’s heritage when it chose to base the Māoriland Hub in a building on Ōtaki’s main street that had a long history as a community hub of another kind.

From 1924 to 2014 the building was the home of the iconic Edhouse’s department store. Customers, many of whom were from farming families, viewed Edhouse’s as a destination and came from throughout Manawatū and Wairarapa.

The Edhouse family also originally lived in the building; Don Edhouse was born there, and after a lifetime working in and later running the store, he was the family member at the helm when the doors closed in 2014.

Libby remembers Edhouse’s well.

“When you walked through those shop doors it was like stepping back in time. You had menswear on one side and womenswear on the other and both those sections went all the way back,” she recalls.

“It could be packed to the gunnels, but it was always very quiet. It was a beautiful old trappedin-time kind of service for the community.”

The Edhouse family was well known for looking after their community and extended credit to most of their customers, many of whom lived with the financial uncertainties that came with farming.

“They did things for Māori, and Edhouse’s was a beloved and important part of our community. When it closed, the town was in mourning.”

Libby says no one knew what would happen with the building, although, as she recalls, some developers had approached Don Edhouse with plans to carve up or demolish the space.

1. A school group engaged at MATCH (the Māoriland Tech Creative Hub).

2. The iconic Edhouse’s building is light, bright and beautiful.

3. Maara kai/food garden at the rear of the hub.

4. Toi Matarau Art Gallery.

5. Matariki Ramaroa: Kāpiti Lights Arts Festival. Imagery: Supplied

“So when we came through the door and said, ‘We’d like to open a film and creative arts centre’, I think he saw an opportunity to keep the love he had for the community and the love the community had for this building.”

The almost century-old building had been empty for two years before the Māoriland Charitable Trust took possession of it, and its team began removing layers of dust.

“It was really sad because you could still hear the stories whispering from the walls,” Libby says.

The old carpets were removed along with the dust, but the beautiful wooden floors underneath were retained. The couple didn’t want to modernise the space, instead maintaining the character of the building to keep the space ‘alive’ for everyone.

“It allows storytellers to feel the old stories, but they can come in and actually tell their own stories too,” says Libby.

The Māoriland Hub opened in March 2017, and it has since hosted hundreds of events including film screenings, music and drama classes, community hui, art exhibitions, balls, and workshops on filmmaking and technology for school children.

The ground floor is where the public mainly come to enjoy the space – to visit Toi Matarau Art Gallery, spend time in the performance, work or theatre spaces (the hub is also home to the Māoriland Tech Creative Hub, or MATCH, and Māoriland Productions) or visit the community gardens at the rear of the building.

Upstairs houses office space and the Māoriland Filmmaker Residency. Last year the hub hosted its first filmmaker-in-residence, Leah Purcell – an accomplished indigenous Australian actress, writer and film director.

Light in the dark

Community is at the heart of another recent venture launched by the trust – the Matariki Ramaroa multidisciplinary arts festival. Ramaroa is a beacon or light emanating from the dark, and the festival is held over a month during Matariki.

ŌTAKI: GET YOURSELF THERE

 Matariki Ramaroa is a month-long multidisciplinary arts festival – including music, arts, theatre and community events – run throughout the Kāpiti region during Matariki. In 2022 it was bookended by two public light sculpture events at the beginning and end of July. For more information on the 2023 programme during Matariki, visit matariki.maorilandfilm.co.nz/about

 The Māoriland Hub is open year-round Monday to Saturday 11am–4pm and is at 68 Main Street, Ōtaki. For information on upcoming events, visit maorilandfilm.co.nz/maoriland-hub

 The Māoriland Film Festival runs for a week in March, sharing films from around the indigenous world, and celebrated its 10th year in 2023.

The first festival was held in 2021, but the 2022 festival was blighted by storms pounding the Kāpiti Coast. It was during this event that the trust discovered that what really resonated with people were the festival events that involved lighting beacon fires on the beach.

“We are drawn like moths to the flames and to storytelling and to singing waiata around the fire,” says Libby.

Matariki, as a time of seasonal change, is a great opportunity to bring the community together to have important conversations, she says.

“We provide a space for people to come together and to think and talk about what Matariki means to them. We want them to think about the maramataka of this whenua.

“We want to ensure that the Māori pūrākau around Matariki are at the forefront of everything that we do with this kaupapa, and that’s for everybody. It’s about that māramatanga for whānau.”

kaupapa: project, initiative or principle

maramataka: Māori lunar calendar

māramatanga: enlightenment

pūrākau: stories, traditional stories

waiata: songs whenua: land

A rare bird

WORDS: COLLEEN BROWN

In her book The Bulford Kiwi: The Kiwi We Left Behind, author Colleen Brown explores the story behind the creation of a monumental kiwi carved into a hill by New Zealand soldiers in Wiltshire in 1919. Here she reflects on how the kiwi came about – and how it has endured for more than a century since

On Beacon Hill, above the village of Bulford near Salisbury Plain in southern England, lies a surprising sight – a gigantic chalk kiwi. Essentially created as a farewell gift from New Zealand soldiers departing for home in 1919, the monument – located just a few miles from the famed Stonehenge – is now more than 100 years old.

The Bulford Kiwi is an astonishing sight and an optical illusion. If viewed from across a valley you can easily see the outline of New Zealand’s national bird; up close, however, it’s more like an elongated fowl that stretches down the hillside.

And while the sight of a kiwi so far from home is surprising, so is the tale of how it survived. After it was nearly lost, the kiwi was resurrected by a British soldier who understood its significance as an emblem of the sacrifices made by World War I troops, and was determined that their legacy would not be lost.

A parting gift

The location of the kiwi relates to the area’s heritage as a military camp site and in particular as the site of Sling Camp – New Zealand’s chief training camp in the UK during World War I. And following the declaration of armistice on 11 November 1918, this was where New Zealand soldiers were to be sent to await repatriation home. However, funnelling more than 40,000 New Zealand troops previously

deployed across Europe, all under the control of the British Army, back to Sling Camp was a logistical nightmare.

Sling Camp was designed to house around 4000 troops but by early 1919 it was bursting with around 6000 when a second wave of the influenza epidemic struck. Compounding matters were shipping strikes throughout the UK and the weather, which was cold and wet. It was a perfect storm. When planned repatriation sailings were postponed, the men became restive and trouble began brewing.

On 14 and 15 March 1919 the soldiers at Sling Camp rioted. While no one was killed, eight soldiers were court-martialled. Six of the accused were convicted (two of them were decorated, seasoned soldiers) and sent to Wandsworth Prison.

In order to keep the men occupied until their ships arrived, the camp’s commanding officers resurrected the idea of digging a giant kiwi into Beacon Hill above Sling Camp. What had previously been deemed an impractical idea when it was proposed earlier in 1919 was subsequently framed as a gift that the departing soldiers could leave behind – a memorial of the New Zealanders’ camp and a way to honour those soldiers who would never return home.

Three New Zealand soldiers were responsible for making the project a reality. Sergeant Major Percy Blenkarne drew the shape of the giant bird; Sergeant Major Victor Low was the surveyor who

1. The path to the summit

2. The Bulford Kiwi at the top of Beacon Hill.

3. The plaque on the cairn at the kiwi site. Imagery: Supplied

set it out; and Captain Harry Clark oversaw the men digging the emblem out of the grassed slopes using picks and spades.

Victor Low came from the first Chinese family in New Zealand (the Lo Keong family of Dunedin) and had served with the 5th Tunnelling Company in Arras, France.

The Beacon Hill site presented a number of technical challenges, with a 10-degree slope and a twist in the middle of the incline. Blenkarne’s drawing had to be transposed onto the site so it retained its proper perspective when viewed from a distance.

Harry Clark, a graduate of the Thames School of Mines (now a Category 1 historic place cared for by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga), was used to working in challenging conditions. He volunteered as soon as war was declared in 1914 and fought in the crags and hills of Gallipoli using his mining expertise to devastating effect against the Turkish forces. Harry kept precise records of his thoughts and war experiences in diaries that, once completed, he sent home.

The conditions at Gallipoli finally laid Harry low, when he contracted dysentery so badly he had to convalesce in England. Then it was on to the battlefields of France. After being concussed then buried alive while sheltering in a shelled dugout, he was again sent to England, declared medically unfit and discharged late in 1916. Once back in New Zealand, Harry worked to get himself fit for service again and reattested in October 1917.

By March 1918 Harry was back in England and after armistice was declared he was appointed works and barracks officer to Sling Camp, which was teeming with men anxious to get home. Harry used his organisational skills to get 400 of the remaining men up Beacon Hill every day to work on the giant bird.

Eventually, on 28 June 1919 – the same day peace was signed with the Treaty of Versailles – the exacting task of creating the kiwi was completed. And as Harry noted in a Marlborough Express article in September 1919, when the men left for home it was with the understanding that the giant bird would be looked after: “The height is 420 feet [128 metres], the length of the beak 150 feet [45.7 metres] ... With a little attention from time to time, the emblem should last for all time.”

An enduring landmark

Following the soldiers’ departure, the kiwi was maintained for a number of years by shoe polish firm the Kiwi Polish Company. During World War II it was covered over after the Luftwaffe used it as a landmark in its bombing raids on military targets, and following the war it was re-cut into the hillside by the Bulford Scout Group. Unfortunately, the original drawing of the kiwi had returned to New Zealand with Percy Blenkarne, so when the re-cut image of the giant bird was finally revealed the outline had changed significantly from the original. The situation changed again after 1950, when it was decided the New Zealand government would

1. The Bulford Kiwi viewed from an opposite valley.

2. Jonathan Cook (Brigadier rtd), Colleen Brown; Danny Fisher (Lt Col rtd) and Rosemary Meeke (former editor of Drumbeat) at the 100th commemoration of the Bulford Kiwi. Imagery: Supplied

take ownership of and care for the historic emblem. Unfortunately, those good intentions fell by the wayside with the turnover of government officials and indifferent record keeping. In October 1971, the government’s Bulford Kiwi file was stamped ‘closed’.

The kiwi then languished on Beacon Hill, with the surrounding trees obscuring it from public sight.

In 1980, when the Returned and Services Association was made aware of the plight of the kiwi, the British Army again approached the New Zealand government to help it look after the emblem; however, the government declined to do so.

It was around this time that a squadron of British soldiers commanded by Major Danny Fisher of the 249 Signal Squadron, which had just returned from a NATO operation in the Arctic Circle, stepped in.

Danny saw the overgrown bird and decided to fix it, noting in an interview for my book that it was a mission that could be carried out by present-day soldiers out of respect for those from a previous era.

On Danny’s promise of a few days off and some beers, the entire squadron resurrected the kiwi, carrying bags of chalk on their backs to fill the void within the body created by erosion over time. The kiwi has been cared for by all 249 Signal Squadron commanders and their units ever since, with members of the New Zealand High Commission pitching in to help clean it up for the annual Anzac Day commemorations that are held at the site.

In 2017 the Bulford Kiwi was listed as a scheduled monument with Historic England, recognising it as a nationally important archaeological site and protecting it from destruction and change.

For Danny, the kiwi is a “legacy passed down through the ages and between soldiers, not governments” – a sentiment echoed in his words inscribed on a cairn at the site of the kiwi on Beacon Hill. It reads: “To the old soldiers in the new country from the young soldiers in the old country. Our link is carved forever in the timeless hills of Salisbury Plain.”

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about The Bulford Kiwi: The Kiwi We Left Behind, visit colleenbrownbooks.com

“The height is 420 feet [128 metres], the length of the beak 150 feet [45.7 metres] ... With a little attention from time to time, the emblem should last for all time”

Kāwai: For Such a Time as This

Monty Soutar

RRP $39.99 or $49.99 HB (Bateman)

Monty Soutar is an excellent historian, a fact that both makes and occasionally threatens to break his phenomenally popular debut novel, Kāwai – the first in a planned three-volume historical fiction series and the best-selling work of New Zealand fiction in 2022.

Kāwai is destined from birth to be a warrior leader who will avenge the massacre of his tribe, and the narrative more or less follows the story of his life up to this climactic battle, just as Pākehā, with the twin tomes of muskets and Christianity, make landfall.

The book’s greatest gift to readers, and to New Zealand fiction, is to draw a line –unbroken, clear, and full of a powerful and transformative understanding – between past and present, so that readers are vitally aware of how recent Kāwai’s story is, and how present it remains.

One senses the author’s aim – that the knowledge and narratives of Māori life pre-colonial times be shared – and, research-wise, he delivers outstandingly well on this. The book is full of tangible heritage details on structures, tools, clothing, waka, landscapes, moko and weapons. And tribal life is detailed so thoroughly that a reader knows, by the end, how to prepare for a chief’s wedding, snare a bird and train for battle (amongst other things).

This valuable transfer of knowledge sometimes comes at the cost of the prose and the character development, but what emerges is, by the end, a fiction with justifiably different priorities, delivered in a way that ultimately fits its material well.

This is an epic story that in the framework of the book is told (not written) by a kaumātua to his mokopuna over rēwena bread and tea; a story that tells the listener who he is.

The prelude immerses us in Joanne’s childhood, via her family’s unofficial archaeological digs in Banks Peninsula. This signals the beginnings of a complex investigation into the value of objects and the stories they can tell, while exploring questions of land, belonging and identity. “Artefacts,” she writes, “are carriers of magic. They sing songs to the dead and herald the future.”

What follows is a different hybrid. The core narrative is a well-paced account of Joanne’s passage from curate’s wife to lesbian academic and writer, and all the challenges this entailed for her in the 1990s.

The Queen’s Wife

Joanne Drayton RRP $40 (Penguin)

The pitchline for Joanne Drayton’s memoir is an instant hook: ‘A modern love story: whakapapa, archaeology, art and heartbreak’. The chess pieces on the front cover –two queens, one Māori, one Viking – carved by Joanne, are line and sinker, promising an absorbing story of how she and her partner, artist Sue Vincent Marshall, left heterosexual marriages, blended lives and families, and connected with their respective heritages. And it’s all set against a rich backdrop of art history, painting and museum collections.

It stands solidly on its own, and a reader might wonder why two other threads are interspersed: one a fictionalised imagining of the history of the famous medieval Lewis chess pieces, which reads like a novel outline; the other, ‘Sue’s whakapapa’, an account of Sue’s Māori ancestry, told by Joanne. Like the museums, galleries and sprawling homes the book visits, this can feel cluttered and messy with appropriation, as well as charming.

Two threads remain hidden. The chess pieces on the cover are not mentioned until the final pages, while ‘the Queen’s wife’, Sue, haunts the account silently, spoken for, and sometimes over – although her astonishing paintings, featured in the photo insert, tell their own story.

The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi

Ned Fletcher

RRP $69.99 (BWB)

A calm, methodical voice belies the urgency of Ned Fletcher’s potentially radical thesis in this archival-based history of the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi –namely that the English and Māori versions of te Tiriti reconcile, contrary to the now well-entrenched narrative, and that the writers of the English version understood Māori ceding sovereignty as entirely consistent with Māori retaining rangatiratanga and self-government.

This understanding hinges on the meaning of the word ‘sovereignty’ in 1840, which the author shows beyond doubt did not mean an ‘indivisible’ power as it later came to. Rather it referred more specifically to control of foreign affairs, trade and some areas of justice, in a manner entirely consistent with plurality of government. The conclusion never states it, but this is a substantial basis from which to imagine co-governance.

The fight for indigenous rights has a history as long as the racism and greed that sought to dismiss Māori and deny their rights, and the book lays out some of that struggle from a British legal perspective.

It does this in extraordinary detail and accessible language, with the hook of a thriller (albeit a legal textbook one) in which you find yourself hoping the ‘good guys’ win. While it’s no spoiler to say they don’t – the ‘tsunami’ of unanticipated British immigration, the retreat of evangelical humanism and the rise of racism saw to that, as the book explains – the author’s research draws our attention to ‘a path not taken but that might have been’.

The personalities and opinions of the three framers of te Tiriti are foregrounded in the book, the most important of whom being James Stephen, the man who drafted Britain’s anti-slavery legislation – and nephew of abolitionist William Wilberforce.

Of Stephen, Ned Fletcher writes: “He was caring and idealistic without being sentimental or dogmatic”, which reads like a brief for a way forward. The same might be said of this book.

GIVEAWAY

We have one copy of Comrade: Bill Andersen – A Communist, Working-class Life to give away. To enter the draw, send your name and address on the back of an envelope to Book Giveaways, Heritage New Zealand, PO Box 2629, Wellington 6140, before 30 June 2023. The winner of last issue’s giveaway (The Fateful Voyage of the St Jean Baptiste) was Michelle Argyle, Invercargill.

Other titles of interest

Akatarawa: A History of the Sawyers, Settlers and Schools 1870s–1980s

Peter O’Flaherty

$75 (Email pjoflaherty@xtra. co.nz for a copy)

An endearing local history of the Akatarawa Valley drawing on the author’s 50-plus years in the timber industry, an economic mainstay of the area. Bush tramways, bulldozers and early log trucks feature, with hundreds of photos, maps and clippings, building a picture of how logging and railways have shaped this landscape.

Southern Celts: Stories from People of Irish and Scottish Descent in Aotearoa

Celine Kearney

RRP $40

(Mary Egan Publishing)

New Zealanders with Scottish and Irish backgrounds –including writer Keri Hulme, master carver Malcolm Adams and boxer Charlie Dunn –reflect on how they live out their cultural connections.

Ōtari: Two Hundred Years of Ōtari-Wilton’s Bush

Bee Dawson, with photography by Chris Coad

RRP $80 (Cuba Press)

The story of Ōtari-Wilton’s Bush, the only botanic garden dedicated solely to the collection and conservation of the plants unique to Aotearoa New Zealand. Colourful stories and botanical richness.

Comrade: Bill Andersen –A Communist, Workingclass Life

Cybèle Locke

RRP $49.99 (BWB)

New biography of a leading figure in New Zealand’s trade union movement.

Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa

New Zealand

Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley (eds) RRP $50 (Otago University Press)

A cross-disciplinary, benchmark exploration of intolerance and extremism from British settlement to the present day.

Tiny Statements: A Social History of Aotearoa New Zealand in Badges

Stephanie Gibson and Claire Regnault

RRP $40 (Te Papa Press)

A small book with a big heart delves into collections of over 1600 badges at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Tatau: Samoan Tattoo, New Zealand Art, Global Culture

Sean Mallon, Nicholas

Thomas and Peter Brunt, with photography by Mark Adams

RRP $75 (Te Papa Press)

A revised and extended new edition, with a handsome large format and texts by distinguished scholars; a cultural treasure.

Pakeha Ta Moko: A History of the Europeans Traditionally Tattooed by Māori

Trevor Bentley

RRP $39.99 (Upstart Press)

A hidden history of European men and women traditionally tattooed by Māori.

Death Among Good Men: First World War Reflections from New Zealand Major General Lindsay M Inglis

Nathalie Philippe

RRP $69.99 HB (Bateman)

A poignant insight into everyday life in France during World War I, written by a down-to-earth Kiwi soldier who rose to the rank of Major General. n

Feel the history

For author and historian Helen Beaglehole, learning from the past is key to caring for the future of special places like the Marlborough Sounds

INTERVIEW: JACQUI GIBSON / IMAGERY: MIKE HEYDON

Afond memory I have of the Marlborough Sounds is swimming at Meretoto Ship Cove. I recall drifting near a heron standing in the shallows, its delicate grey feathers and chest markings almost within reach. A few nights later, while boating, I saw dolphins swimming, their bodies outlined by phosphorescence.

I first went to the Sounds in 1977 on a stormy sailing trip from Wellington with my husband Tim and our three children. The kids and I were seasick, but the sun finally came out when we reached the sheltered waters of Tory Channel. That trip began what was a 40-year exploration of the Sounds as a couple and with family and friends.

The natural beauty and charm of the Sounds immediately drew us in. We loved its bays, its walking and cycling tracks and landmarks like the Perano Whaling Station and, in more recent times, the carved pou whenua by Reg Thompsett (Tainui, Ngāti Maniapoto) depicting Kupe at Meretoto Ship Cove.

Over the nine years of writing my latest book, the details of its history drew me in too. Life in the Sounds has played out in complex ways. You have the interplay and tensions of Māori and Pākehā, of land and sea, and of the boom and bust of industries such as farming, fishing, aquaculture, mining, milling and, most recently, forestry.

In researching my book, I found the Marlborough Sounds to be a place that’s been overdeveloped and environmentally exploited over time, particularly as European settlement got underway. I hope we can learn from what’s happened in the past and turn our minds to the future, and to caring for this special place. How to do that? I think we have to go beyond contemporary environmental concerns and engage with the area’s Māori history, heritage and custodial relationship with the land expressed through concepts like kaitiakitanga. In the Sounds, these things have been invisible for too long. New Zealanders, to me, need to know about and understand them so that, as historian and author Dr Rachel Buchanan says, we can all “feel the history of the places [we] call home”.

An historian and former children’s book author, Helen Beaglehole has written histories of New Zealand’s coastal lighthouse system and rural firefighting in New Zealand. Her latest book, One Hundred Havens: The Settlement of the Marlborough Sounds looks at the history of Pākehā settlement in the Sounds. It was published by Massey University Press last year.

kaitiakitanga: guardianship and protection

pou whenua: post markers of ownership

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When was the last time you had a good yarn by an open fire? Hot choccy in an old-fashioned tea room? Or powered up a hill to explore an abandoned mine? Don’t hibernate this winter.