Skip to main content

Waikouaiti: Day 22

It rained on Saturday when we walked from the Blueskin Bay Library to Waikouaiti. I am very familiar with this territory but as always I was amazed at the shift in perspective that comes from changing the mode of transport from 4 wheels to 2 feet. We began at about 8:00 am with some of the Waitati locals walking the first couple of km and then as we crossed the Warrington Bridge, we were joined by a Catholic priest and two sisters from different Dunedin communities.

It bucketed down. My Goretex jacket kept most of it out and managed to breathe in the way it was designed to do, but no raincoat can keep you perfectly dry and by the time we reached St. Barnabas' church I was a little damp. St. Barnabas is one of my favourite places. It is a tiny wooden church set in a churchyard at the end of a long leafy path. It is beautifully maintained and the colours of the interior fittings are all well chosen. It has a golden woody glow offset by highlights of brass and the shifting colours of stained glass. It is architecturally spare: a small wooden box, essentially and it would be just another tiny, pretty, wooden country church apart from one thing; and that one thing is the rear wall.

In the 1920s an Anglican church in Brisbane ordered a new set of stained glass windows. When they were complete and almost ready to be installed the locals, still reacting from the animosities of the First World War, discovered that they had been manufactured in Germany and refused to take them. The supplier, wishing to save the cost of sending them back to the factory had them sent across the Tasman to contacts he had in New Zealand, and by a quite hazily documented process they were installed in St. Barnabas. St. Augustines, for which the windows were designed is a large Gothic church. St. Barnabas a very small wooden one, and the windows don't actually fit, but the result is glorious: one of the best mistakes you're ever going to see. The entire rear wall of the little church is pretty much made of stained glass. The windows are excellent: the colours rich and deep, the painting skillfully and subtly executed, the craftsmanship faultless. The coloured light fills the small space giving a golden quality to the light even when you are not looking directly at the windows. This uniquely beautiful little space is to me a lovely expression of redemption: of the animosities of the 1920s being resolved in something that is vastly better than if the windows had joined myriad others in their intended location. The church is always unlocked and stopping by is always well worth the effort.

St. Barnabas congregation are an innovative and, of course, law abiding lot. Behind the church is a utility building. Realising that the red tape for constructing a hall would be time consuming and expensive they erected instead a perfectly legal toolshed - which didn't require quite the same administrative permissions. It is carpeted, very tastefully painted and, so I am informed, does in fact contain a tool.  The shed is large enough for a couple of dozen people to sit warmly around  and have a cup of tea, and it was in here that we enjoyed hot soup and rolls before making our way slowly along the coast.

We were joined at Warrington by another couple of people, and we all arrived at the Puketeraki Marae around lunchtime. We were welcomed on and given yet another sumptuous meal. This is a small marae with the a single building being divided down the middle to form the  Wharenui and wharekai. It has some very imaginative carving in the forecourt and is decorated inside with many framed pictures of  recent tupuna. It is a welcoming a relaxed place and provided a good resting place to dry out a bit before the last leg of the day's walk.

We made it to Waikouaiti at about 3:00 pm. We called briefly at the historic church, and saw the meticulously planned preparations for the regional event the next day before we drove South to spend the night in Dunedin.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more