Rangihoua Heritage Park

Today was the day the Rangihoua Heritage Park was being opened and the ceremony began at 10:00 am. The new park comprises Oihi Bay and the hill above it. It has a track and very beautifully conceived and executed series of signs, spaced around the park, telling the story of the first missionary settlement in New Zealand.

We gathered in the foyer of the Copthorne at 8:00 am to pool cars, then set off in convoy 15 minutes later for Oihi Bay. It was longer than I remembered it to be, but after about 50 minutes driving on narrow roads, sometimes sealed and sometimes not, we found a paddock on a hillside to park and a bus to take us the last kilometre up to the new interpretive centre.

There were already a couple of hundred people there, and I realised how badly prepared I was. They had camp chairs and bottles of water and umbrellas. I had a pilgrim's staff, though I had remembered to bring a sunhat. The new interpretive centre, basically a great sweeping roof with three walls set on a hillside and with a wide opening looking down to the valley below it, is called Rore Kahu - Soaring Eagle. Over the next hour or so more people arrived, until, by the time the Governor General and official party were called on just after the official starting time, somewhere around two thousand had gathered.

Clemency, Catherine and I found seats amongst the manuhere. There were a dozen or so speakers all told, none of whom were brief. The sky was slightly overcast and the air heavy and hot. I was glad to be under the marquee. A Pentecostal pastor began the korero, and he set a good tone. Maggie Barrie, minister of conservation and heritage spoke wittily and cleverly and managed a 15 minute talk commemorating the arrival of the first missionaries without once mentioning the church. Quite an achievement. Chris Finlayson, Attorney General and a convinced Catholic gave the best speech of the day by far. He spoke of the various important world events that had occurred in 1814, setting the events of Christmas Day in their global context. He spoke of the positive role of the church in the development of New Zealand's culture and challenged us to be more confident, more assured in what we proclaim. The archbishops (three of ours and one Australian) lead a brief liturgy of blessing, then The Governor General cut the ribbon and we all filed through the interpretive centre, tramping the house in true Maori style.

Then we walked the kilometre or so of track down to the bay. There were a dozen of so yachts moored under the shadow of the pa. A speaker system had been set up and there was a varied program of entertainment: a young kapa haka group, and a young woman with extraordinary guitar skills. I walked up the hillside and stood again on the places where those three little houses had once stood. The sun was by now relentless and the way back up the hill steep. We walked back to the top of the hill, caught the bus to our car, then drove to an excellent lunch at a cafe called The Rusty Tractor in Kerikeri.

So now Oihi Bay is a heritage park, perhaps it will stop being the most important unknown site in our brief history as a nation and take the place it deserves in our national consciousness. It is a truly holy place; a fitting destination for pilgrimage.

Comments

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...

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 incomp...

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 Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

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...

Available Light

Search This Blog