A bottle a day...

Press, 18 June 1976, Page 13

A bottle a day...

The man digging for bottles in Kearneys Road knows a lot about empties. He should do—he has 15.000 of them. ROBIN SMITH and COLIN SIMPSON (photographer) report in story’ and pictures:

His grandmother was reputed to be New Zealand's greatest cannibal. It was said that her descendants were blood relatives of every tribe in New Zealand because she had feasted on members of all of them at one time or another.

Seiwyn Te Moananui Hovell, aged 87, is an archaeologist and a bottle collector. He has a tiny, cluttered house in VVoolston and he spends most of his time excavating a field in Kearneys Road, Linwood, looking for old bottles. His collection exceeds 15.000 different bottles, pots, and other containers.

His grandmother lived to be 115, and Seiwyn has every intention of surpassing her age. His life has covered archaeological excavations in the Coromandel Peninsula, to the opening up of the Redcliffs cave, and to the teaching of the Maori language at Avonside Girls’ High School.

He talks with enthusiasm about his ancestry. His cannibal grandmother ate a few white men but gave them up because they were too salty. Her daughter married the son of a doctor who tended the wounded on both sides during the Maori wars. The chief of the Ngati Porou tribe offered his daughter in gratitude for the doctor’s kindness. Selwyn’s interest in archaeology began on the family’s 72.000 acres in the Coromandel. There had been several Maori pas or the land and as a child he had picked up artefacts. This led to him working for the Auckland Museum and. when he moved to Christchurch 21 y ears ago, for the Canterbury Museum. It was then that he worked in the cave at Redcliffs where the only

other excavation had been dene by Sir Julius von Haast in the nineteenth century. The second dig uncovered a total of 337 artefacts.

Mr Hovell took up bottle collecting about six years ago. He secured the sole rights to excavate the field in Kearneys Road, the site of an old rubbish dump. From there, and from old Chinese workings on the West Coast, he has built his enormous collection of old bottles, many of which are extremely rare.

His sitting room in Ferry Road is full of artefacts. A iaige cabinet on the wall holds family heirlooms of large tikis and a pendant in greenstone. Also in the cabinet are dozens of fishhook barbs carved from bone that he ■found in the Coromandel.

Every inch of space is covered with artefacts of one descr.ption or another; clay pipes, scent bottles, bones, pieces of greenstone, a bottle labelled “Warner’s safe cure,” and another labelled "Dr Soule Hop B’tiers 1872.”

On the wall are paintings and two autographed photographs, of Sir Walter Nash and Sir Keith Holyoake. “Both personal friends of mein,” Mr Hovell says.

The bottles are displayed, in a crude but orderly way, in a shed at the back of the house. Shelf upon shelf of bottles and pots, inkwells and candleholders. There are blue embossed castor oil bottles, clear glass salad oil bottles, green medicine bottles, stone crock ink bottles, and two bulbous soda syphons. The prized collections, he says, are two spittoons in china, and a selection of china toothpaste pots.