Sketchbook

Around and About

Again last Tuesday morning I climbed Marsland Hill in the centre of town and sketched this view looking due east. The high ground in the right of the picture is where one of the defensive forts stood during the early 1860s in the intensive stage of the Land Wars here. Marsland Hill was the army Headquarters, with barracks and command post, and the hills to east and west had forts to provide the outer defences of the town.

 

This one, now at the top of the hill behind the terraces overlooking the Pukekura Park cricket ground (you can see the terraces in  my sketch), was the first eastern one, then came Fort Cameron on the next spur, and then Fort Niger, behind our house here, which is just out of the sketch on the skyline to the left, although you can see the outline of one of the Boys High School buildings higher on the same spur.

 

Another day I had a hospital appointment so I sat in the car outside the hospital gate and sketched the scene looking down the street towards the coast. This is David Street, and the house my mother lived in as a little girl was just a couple of hundred metres behind us until a year or two ago, when they shifted it to make room for an extension to the Taranaki Hospice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This last weekend we travelled to Palmerston North to take part in a family celebration.

 

My cousins, Don and Fran Bird, were celebrating their Diamond Wedding. When they married in January of 1955, I had the privilege of being their Best Man.

 

Amazingly all their wedding party are still alive, and the minister died only a few days ago.

 

We stopped on the trip down to have a picnic lunch at the Settlers Memorial at Mt Stewart just before Arahuri (near Feilding), and I sketched this clump of trees near a farmhouse just over the side road.

 

 

On the way home we picnicked at Patea Beach, and here is the sketch of that scene.

 

If you are interested in industrial archaeology this is a great site. At one stage over a century ago this was the third busiest port in the country, and much of the harbour construction is still in place. I presume the difficulty of keeping the river mouth open, and the increasing size of ships, were the factors that led to the death of the port.

 

While we were there the twice-daily train went through on the rail line across the river. It is the milk tanker train, which travels from Dannevirke to Hawera and back mornings and afternoons to take the day's milk from the farms in the Hawkes Bay, Wairarapa and Manawatu to the Whareroa Factory of Fonterra for processing. The train also had several trucks of containers, presumably full of dairy products, on their way to Wellington for loading onto ships.