Howie Tamati''s Proposal

The L-shaped Pa

New Plymouth District Councillor Howie Tamati has written a letter to the Taranaki Daily News suggesting a change to the Council's plans. It had been suggested that a small reserve in a locality known as Brixton should be sold. Howie wants it kept as a memorial. This seems pretty sound to me.

The Brixton reserve is where the first battle of the Taranaki War was fought in 1860. Each year a group of nearby Waitara people meet to remember the British soldiers who fought in the wars at the memorial in Waitara, and then move to Brixton to remember the Maori warriors in the same way. Howie wants a signboard erected to explain the significance of the site.

Brixton is important for more than just one battle. It was the site of what became known as "the L-shaped Pa". The Maori tacticians built it to this plan to protect the defending forces from the cannon that the British had brought up. And it was successful to the extent that the defenders were able to hold out against the attacks. This and other plans were developed by Maori for trench warfare long before they were used in the similar situations in Northern France during the Great War.

Anzac Day again reminds us that we make a major celebration about the courage, determination, and achievements of our forces in the World Wars and since, but never celebrate the earlier achievements of both sides in what was our provincial "civil war". And we are still, in 2016, sorting out the aftermath of that attempt to fix our problems by fighting, even longer after the events themselves! Not that we acknowledge all the consequences of the World Wars either, though some families live with them every day.

I think we need signage in many more places than just Brixton to remind us of our history. In the last few years several excellent boards have been put up giving the history of different sites and localities.

 Here are three examples.

This signboard is at the beginning of the Te Henui Walkway and gives a potted history of that locality in the centuries leading up to the arrival of British settlement.

Secondly, this is the view you get as you approach the signboard on top of the hill behind our house.

Originally the pa of Wharepapa, the top was flattened and a fort built by sailors from |HMS Niger in 1860. This was one of a ring of forts which formed the outer defences.

Inner defences consisted of a ditch around the little town. From here to the site of the nearest ditch was about 1 kilometre. There were two other forts in the outer ring between here and the ditch.

Getting closer, you realise there is a variety of information on the signboard, both words and pictures.  The top photo, which is dated about 1900, shows our part of the neighbourhood and it is possible to spot our house almost in the exact centre of the shot.

And here is another sign, this one on the edge of the old railway bed above the Huatoki River, explaining the history of this locality, including the two nearest pa sites.

But as well as battle and pa sites there are street names all over the district which have more than local significance.

Fitzroy Road marks the line drawn by Governor Fitzroy's advisers to show the border of the land bought by the New Zealand Company for its New Plymouth settlement, a much smaller acreage than the company had claimed. But Fitzroy was also the first real modern meteorologist: he invented isobars, weather maps and weather forecasts.

Hobson was not only our first governor and the initiator of the Treaty. He helped to clear the Caribbean of a new infestation of pirates long after Blackbeard had been defeated. And he surveyed and drew the charts of Port Philip Bay at the time of the founding of Melbourne in 1836.

Buller Street commemorates the MP Charles Buller, who was Lord Durham's secretary and drew up the report recommending self-government for Canada.

Hussey Vivian was a junior general under Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo and later a member of the UK Cabinet.

Eliot Street remembers the family of one of the first Parliamentary leaders in the struggle with Charles I that led to the Civil War in Britain.

Lemon Street is named after Charles Lemon, one of the first to suggest that statistics might help us sort out the origins of diseases and so develop the science of epidemiology.

All of these, and lots more, deserve signs to explain their importance.

It is entirely appropriate that we should remember the twentieth century wars, and have great exhibitions about them, if ever we are going to rid our world of the scourge of war. I watched "All Quiet on the Western Front" over the weekend. How anyone who had lived through that experience could contemplate another war twenty years later I cannot understand.

But the elephant in the room at Anzac Day is the similar barbarity of the nineteenth century conflicts on our own soil, with enemies who were then and are now even more linked by ties of friendship, family, business and neighbourliness. It feels like a psychotic blockage to even discussing the issues as a civilised and sane society.

Is it too much to hope that our District Council and its citizens will give Howie Tamati's suggestion more support than some other recent proposals?

This month's sketches

Around and About

Spencer (grandson, 5) and I have gone sketching together on a couple of occasions recently. The weather has been sunny and almost windless for several months this autumn, and sketching outside has been fun.

The other day we were sitting in the back yard with our pencils and paper, and here is my attempt at what Spencer called: "Those four balls", in fact he did the arrangement for me to draw. The smallest one needs some repainting!

Today I was down town for a meeting and before walking home I sat on a rubbishbin outside the Bus Terminal and sketched a couple of older buildings in Egmont Street. The wooden building on the right was for many years the home of the RSA here and since then has served as headquarters for the City Life Church.

The concrete building was originally the home of Hooker Bros, the transport company, but it is best known now for Frederic's Restaurant, named for Frederic Carrington, the original surveyor who chose the site of the European settlement here and drew up the plans for the central part of the city.

Our Sketching Group for U3A has recently been visiting the Te Rewarewa Bridge, where I chose on one occasion to concentrate on the harakeke which were then in flower.

Another day I sat at Macdonalds and sketched the building just across the street. It is known to everyone as the Perry Dines Building. For many years it was the home of Massey University for Taranaki, but a few years ago it was deemed an earthquake risk (it is the same construction as the PVC Building in Christchurch), so it has lain empty waiting for demolition.

On the first Sunday morning of the month we have a seaside market at Ngamotu Beach.

While Margaret was examining some of the stalls, I captured this quick impression of one of the streets.

A musician was entertaining us all in the first tent, and above us the sky showed one or two darker clouds.




Finally, a side-on shot of the Te Rewarewa Bridge, soft pencil and charcoal, This is a much easier angle to catch than the end-on view, because there are no straight lines in this bridge! Hundertwasser would have loved it!

Push or Pull

Why did they come?

My friend Tom is writing his family history and has sent us the first chapter to read. It is about the first couple in his family to make the journey from the United Kingdom to New Zealand.

This sort of project always raises the question: why did they make the decision to carry out this amazing change? Was it push? or was it pull?

Tom goes in to the details of why his ancestors left Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century; anyone who has heard of the Potato Famine will have an idea about it.

I have been fascinated by the questions for many years and have tried to give some of the background in my own family history (see earlier posts). But Tom's work has made me think again: did I give enough weight to the Pull factors.

Because in the Gaze family story, the Push factors were there. A young man with a growing family and working in a family business where he was a younger brother and therefore not likely ever to own much of the enterprise, looks for better prospects somewhere else.

Charles Gaze had already looked at the possibility of securing army contracts for his saddlery skills in the Crimean War Theatre. Both that and the Indian "Mutiny" were over by the late 1850s. Land Wars in New Zealand were top of the headlines, so that's where Charles set out for, arriving in Auckland the week the first shots were fired at Waitara.

He got a contract to make haversacks for the army at Otahuhu, so his plan was spot on! He was obviously prepared to look anywhere, so if we had not ended up in New Zealand, we might have grown up in Russia or Turkey or India!

On the other hand my great-great-grandfather, Joshua Robinson, came partly on Pull factors with a much more romantic flavour. He had grown up on the story of Robinson Crusoe and was dreaming of life on an idyllic spot like his hero. At the same time, like many in his era, he had been filled with the desire to help the less fortunate races who lived in less civilised places. 

But there was a more realistic factor too: he met a man in a cafe in London in 1841 who wanted to recruit him, an experienced builder, to set up a sawmill near Auckland. So he managed to overcome his wife's reluctance and they set out before the first organised settler groups for the new colony.

Another great-great, John Bigelow, could have made a living anywhere in the world: he was a shipbuilder in a small fishing village on the northern coast of Nova Scotia. Why he chose to come here out of the rest of the world I can't fathom. 

But his brother-in-law, who had the money, and owned the ship he had built for the voyage, wanted to come this way (perhaps because of gold-rush stories) so in 1860 to the Tasman coasts they came. The ship itself was wrecked a few hundred metres from here a few weeks later.

Robert Goodwin from Northamptonshire, whose daughter married my grandfather, came a generation later. He grew up in a community strongly independent in politics and religion, with a democratic tradition. The progress towards real effective democracy was taking too long for Robert. 

He worked as a slater, building and fixing roofs for the wealthy owners of manor houses. His grandfather had lived through the enclosures, where the wealthy landowners had turned their tenant farmers off the land, and fenced the land for sheep-farming. So there was plenty of Push Factor in his case.

But I have never heard anything about the reasons why he chose New Zealand, although I used to hear my grandmother talk about the voyage out when she was sixteen. He made a real mistake, because no slate rooves existed, except one, in Auckland. He managed OK as a plasterer making ornate ceilings.

So that is perhaps the next project for me.

Meanwhile, we'll wait expectantly for Tom's chapters as they arrive!