LINKS WITH TE AUTE

Te Ao Hou, Summer 1953, Page 54

LINKS WITH TE AUTE Hukarere is an old-established institution in the city of Napier, and the school has always had some very good friends there, right from the beginning. The school began seventy-seven years ago, soon after Te Aute College was established. It has many links with Te Aute still, and is maintained by the Te Aute Trust Board. But the strongest link of all is with the founder of both schools, Bishop William Williams, who bought a property for a girls' school on Hukarere Hill, right opposite his own home. In 1875 Hukarere opened in a very small and informal way, with a staff of two, and the assistance of Miss Maria Williams, who kept the accounts, and her sisters, Kate and Mary Ann, who gave some lessons. Twice in seventy years Hukarere has been violently uprooted and twice rebuilt—first from the ashes of a disastrous fire in 1910, and again from the rubble of the 1931 earthquake. After the fire the Trustees moved the school to where it now stands. The alterations after the earthquake, the additional dormitories, and the new laboratory and classrooms, which have just been built, have changed the face of Hukarere. But none of this created quite the same excitement among the girls, or quite the same interest outside the school as the building and decoration of the new Chapel.