Good weather at last

Waitangi Weekend

provided great weather, with fine, clear days, and very little breeze. We had a family get-together, with relatives from Auckland joining us.

Saturday we went to the fair at the Tupare Gardens. This reserve is excellently maintained by the Taranaki Regional Council.

Morning Tea stop was at the tennis court, where several stalls had been erected.

Further down the hill, a Swiss Band was entertaining the visitors with Swiss and Bavarian music: two guitars and two accordions, helped along by tuba, trombone, and for one item an alpenhorn.

Sunday we all gathered at the Seaside Market at Ngamotu Beach and I managed to catch a few of the individuals enjoying the sunshine or watching the kids playing on the playground equipment or driving the dodgem vehicles.

    

Our Western Neighbours

Our suburb of Welbourn stretches south along the eastern side of State Highway 3 from the Boys High School, and includes localities on the western side as well to the site of Highlands Intermediate School.

On the west of the highway for most of its length is the New Plymouth Racecourse and Pukekura Park.

Further west again is the suburb of Brooklands, named after the farm in the area which was owned by the King family in the nineteenth century. The homestead area of the farm is now Brooklands Park. The house was burnt down many years ago and only the chimney survives.

Here is my sketch of the site drawn from a park bench at about the spot where forty years ago Margaret and I were married, on a beautiful May morning. Behind the chimney one could almost see the Brooklands Bowl over the brow of the hill.

Both the King boys grew up in this house. Newton founded the stock and station agency which bore his name, and Truby was the founder of the Plunket Society.

In Coronation Avenue just south of here is this impressively maintained house where one of our friends was brought up.

One day last week, grandson Spencer asked me to teach him to sketch by drawing the house across the street. Here is the result:

Neighbourhood next door

When you move

south along the main highway at the end of our street, you come to a district where the streets are named for historic ships.

The first is Timandra Street, which takes its name from one of the first six ships to bring settlers from Britain in the 1840s. It was on this ship that Margaret's Barriball ancestors came here; her great-great-grandparents arriving 175 years ago next month. We are planning to celebrate this event with other families from the ship, and the Maori hapu who shared their urupa so a newly born infant from the family could be buried when he died suddenly soon after their arrival.

Off Timandra Street is Tokomaru Street, with its satellite Turi Street, both reminiscent of Maori voyaging canoes of the "Great Fleet".

After a shopping block, we come to Oriental Street, named for another early immigrant ship, which is also commemorated in Oriental Bay in Wellington.

Side-streets to Oriental are Tainui, Aotea and Arawa, more of the first group of waka.

This week I stopped in Timandra Street in light rain to sketch a house we have been studying for its new landscaping.

On another day I was driving through Fitzroy near what was in the 1840s the farm of Margaret's Timandra family. At a high vantage point I stopped to catch the view of the Waiwhakaiho River and the three parallel bridges across it.

The clouds were gathering around the mountain and the rain eventually arrived. We will be relieved when Summer really reaches us!

More of Rogan Street

Halfway along Rogan Street, at the corner of Ridge Lane, is a massive coral tree. It was planted in the 1870s; during the Taranaki War of the 1860s, this corner was the site of a fort, Fort Cameron, which was one of a line of forts which formed the outer defences of New Plymouth. The next in line to the east was Fort Niger, which is still a reserve up behind our former house in Lemon Street; to the west the line of forts ran to Pukekura Park's highest point, and then to the military HQ on Marsland Hill behind St Mary's Church.

Here is the tree with the houses on each corner next to it:

Next comes a house built on to a stone wall along the street frontage, with windows set into the wall:

You can still see the roof with its two chimneys in this next view, with the next two houses as well:

And finally the last three houses in Rogan Street right opposite the Boys High School.

John Rogan was one of the gang, or crew, of surveyors who assisted Frederic Carrington in laying out the streets and town sections and allocating names in 1841 and 1842 for the infant town of New Plymouth. Others in the crew were Frederic's younger brothers, Wellington and Octavius (cf Octavius Place) and Harcourt Aubrey (Aubrey Street), whose life-story is entwined with that of Margaret's great-great grandmother, Harriet Foreman. One of their descendants until recently lived in the house behind the tree in my first sketch above.

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By way of foretaste of the next sketching blog, here is the first of some views of more houses, this time in Pendarves Street, which runs parallel to Lemon Street one block further away from the CBD. The two-storeyed house on the left is a very early one for this part of town: note the wide weatherboards and the wall without windows.

Our part of town

Several people gave me sketching materials for Christmas, so I've been indulging my hobby this week.

This is the view just past the Boys High School in Coronation Avenue. The house on the left is on the corner of Wakefield Street (yes, named after Edward Gibbon). Then comes BK's Motel, run by two of our friends, Ross and Sheryl Domney, with their three flags flying at the gate.

I spent yesterday afternoon turning it into a watercolour version:

There are some interesting older houses, and some newer ones, around the corner in Rogan Street, where they have a view of the mountain across the racecourse to the south, and the sea beyond the CBD to the north.

Here are the first few:

The house on the right is seen from the other side in this next view:

Sketching in Christmas Week

A photo was posted recently on Facebook of Mt Taranaki by moonlight. Here is my version of the photo, using white gel pen, white pencil and silver pencil on black paper.

Today we decorated my mobility scooter for Christmas; here is a photo to show you what it looks like, with granddaughter Carys trying it out:.

Although I am walking as much as possible along the street and back, I need to ride the scooter to reach some slightly more distant sites for sketching.

One is the Polytech just around the corner:

And in the other direction the corner of Tokomaru and Turi Streets.

And here is Margie's 2016 version of our Christmas tree:

The Bell Tolls

It was a handbell, just like the ones the schools used to use to ring lunchtime or at the end of the schoolday. This one was smaller, lighter, but just as well made and rang with a good tone.

It sat on my windowsill by my big armchair, where I was recovering from surgery on the third floor of the new hospital building. I could see a view of Mt Taranaki from the chair, but I couldn't reach the electric bell, so the nurses had found the handbell somewhere and brought it instead. I had insisted I wanted to see the view, rather than be closer to the bell button.

On the bell itself was a label which read: Property of TDHB Ward 4. The handle was well worn. I soon recognised it as one that had stood on the desk of the Charge Nurse of the old Ward 4 (Orthopaedic) in the eighties, when Patricia Woods was in charge. If my memory is correct it had been donated by a grateful patient.

So I told the nurses all this, and they looked at me slightly bemused; "why would a ward need a ward bell?"

My mind wandered back to those days. In 1988 the then Minister of Health, Helen Clark, had asked everyone to think about replacing Hospital Boards and some Health Department services by what were to be called "Area Health Boards". The aim was to make the health service more aware of preventive and community measures, rather than focussing solely on hospitals.

So the Hospital Boards set up Community Advisory Committees to consider the possible future shape of the new structures. I was asked, as a community worker at Social Welfare, to be a member of the Taranaki Hospital Board's committee, along with about 20 others, including several members of the Hospital Board, one of whom was Patricia Woods.

The committee was chaired by Dan Holmes, the THB chair, and advised by the Board's three top staff members, John Eady, Peter Matthews and Janice Wenn. Other community members included Simon Shera from Hawera. We duly thought about the questions the ministry had set us. A year or so later the Area Health Boards were set up.

A week after I left my picture window and the old handbell behind, the penny dropped. Every ward on those days needed a bell to ring the end of visiting time. Visiting was from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, say, and at 4 pm one of the nurses would ring the handbell to tell the visitors politely it was time to say Good bye.

No wonder the handle looked worn; it had been used every day for years.