KERIKERI

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 14, 17 July 1944, Page 3

KERIKERI

NEW ZEALAND TO-DAY

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From Auckland to Kerikeri, on the east coast 170 miles north, is a full day’s journey by train and bus. You spend most of the day in the train it’s round half-past four when the 8.40 a.m. from Auckland pulls into Otiria Junction. And so, at this time of the year, you complete the last stage of the journey, the bus ride over the 20 or so miles from Otiria to Kerikeri, in darkness. You may be inclined to feel that the impression you gather of the country on this bus ride is an exaggerated one. The bus lights fall on roads which seem to be a strong red. They sweep over red banks at the sides of the roads. Above the banks they show you the green and gold of long lines of gorse in bloom. When there are no banks by the roads, all you see is the outline of masses of trees, most of which look like blue-gums and pines. Here and there the bus stops to set down a passenger, and you wonder why, for you can’t see any houses, or even a light from a window. Only trees, and gorse, and the red road ahead. It’s not until the bus is belting down the straight stretch of road that leads into Kerikeri Central that you do at last see a light. It comes from Kerikeri’s one street lamp, which hangs over a cluster of shops. This light and the half-dozen or so shops are practically all there is to tell you you have reached the end of your journey. Perhaps a handful of people meet the bus. But you’re still asking yourself where they and the rest of the people of Kerikeri live, for beyond the shops and round them all you can see is trees.

These treesand a walk round Kerikeri in daylight will confirm the impression that there are a great many of them — are not old. They are the mark of the new Kerikeri, the Kerikeri of to-day. A few years ago you could look for miles across undulating country to an unbroken horizon. Then pines and blue-gums were planted to shelter citrus-fruit farms. Fifteen years ago they grew round the homes and infant orchards of about thirty people. To-day they shelter 500 acres of fruit-trees and vines and the houses of 700-odd people. And with this expansion into one of the largest orange and lemon-growing districts in New Zealand it may be said that Kerikeri is emerging from its second pioneering period since the European settlement of New Zealand began. The Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain in the colony of New South Wales and superintendent of the Mission of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand, walked across this district on his first visit to this country in the year of Waterloo. He travelled from his ship, the “ Active,” lying in the Bay of Islands, in a Maori canoe, and stepped ashore at the head of the Kerikeri River in a potato-ground belonging to a brother of the great chief Hongi. The land was

treeless, fern-cover-ed. Marsden liked the look of it. ‘‘l considered this district the most promising for a new settlement of any I had met with in New Zealand,” he wrote, “ the soil being rich, the land pretty level, free from timber, easy to work with the plough, and bounded by a fine fresh-water river, the communication by water free and open to any part of the Bay of Islands, and safe anchorage for ships of any burden within about two leagues of the settlement.”

Accordingly, when Marsden came to New Zealand on his second visit in 1819, he bought from Hongi for forty-eight “ falling axes ” 13,000 acres of this land, and there, at Gloucester Vale, as the white men first called Kerikeri, he established the second mission station in New Zealand. (He had established the first at Rangihoua, about 12 miles from Kerikeri, on his first visit in 1814-15.) The first buildings were to consist of a public store, a house for James Kemp, an artisan missionary, and a blacksmith’s shop for Kemp to work in. But before any permanent buildings could be erected the missionaries had to build themselves a boat to carry the timber up the Kerikeri River. This vessel, the first, as Marsden says, “ ever built upon the northern island of New Zealand,” was a 20-ton flat-bottom punt. It was launched on September 13, 1819, and the next day took its first load to the site of the new settlement. The house then built for James Kemp stands to-day as the oldest wooden building in New Zealand. It is a pleasant two-storied English farm house looking across the broad reach of the river to tree-covered rising country on the other side. The land behind it rises,

too, and if you stand up there at this time of the year and look down on the house you wonder what kind of trees they can be over to the left that make such a splash of greens and yellows and reds. In the garden of the house, on either side of the gravel path to the front door, the flowers of three seasons re in bloom — chrysanth e m u m s, roses, and white spring flowers. Stones made for a flourmill that was never built pave the path from the

back door up the garden. This old house, built of heart puriri, matai, and totara, and nails made in the blacksmith’s shop on the site, is very much as it was originally. There is a little more of itsome additions were made to the back in later years—and an iron roof has now replaced the old roof of Australian ironwood shingles. But there is no electric light. And no radio. Miss Kemp, granddaughter of the original owner, who lives in the house to-day, has an oil-lamp and her books. “ And,” she will tell you, “ it’s often about midnight before I go to bed.” It’s an oil-lamp you see shining out toward the river if you chance to pass the house at night. An oil-lamp has shone there for a great many years. “ In Granny’s time,” Miss Kemp says, “ a light was kept burning to show the way to scows coming up the river. Mother said she wanted this kept up. It looks so homely. And many a captain has told us how the light has helped him in.” And so that light burns every night still, whether ships come up the river or not. Samuel Marsden himself stayed in this house when visiting Kerikeri, and in its rooms instructed Maoris in the Christian religion. Later, British soldiers, on their

first inland march against the Maoris, were billeted there. Across the inlet from the wharf, not far from the house, was one of the pas of the powerful chief Hongi Hika, who encouraged the missionaries to go to Kerikeri and sold them the land for their settlement. To the casual visitor there is no sign of the pa to-day, but in those early missionary days, when slaughter and cannibalism were common, it is said that the stream which so quietly slips past the house often ran red with human blood. As Miss Kemp takes you through her house you may notice a small table in the middle of one of the rooms. If you comment on it Miss Kemp may tell you that “ compared with that table the house is an infant.” You may also notice an old organ which stands in a comer. Apparently this organ was brought to New Zealand in the early “ eighties ” for the Kerikeri Church and landed at Russell to be sent to Kerikeri by boat. Unfortunately, however, a squall caught the schooner, which was carrying the organ from Russell, and turned it over, leaving the organ and the two men of the ship, bobbing up and down in the river. The organ was salvaged and taken to pieces to dry out, and that’s where the trouble really seems

to have begun. Nobody could put it together again. It was sent to Auckland for repair and Auckland sent it back again, with the advice that it would be cheaper to buy a new one. And so it found its way into a corner of the old house and stands there to-day. James Kemp’s home is not the only one of the early missionary buildings still to be seen in Kerikeri. It has a younger companion nearby, the Church Missionary Society store, built in 1833, the oldest stone building still standing in New Zealand. Most of the stone for the store was apparently taken out of the river—you can still see shells embedded in itbut Sydney sandstone was used round the doors and the iron-barred windows and this is the only stone that is showing much sign of its age. Some of it is beginning to crumble away. A general store, privately owned and complete with electric light and telephone, is still operated on the ground floor. Upstairs is the room which was used as a library by Bishop Selwyn, first (and only) Bishop of New Zealand. Bishop Selwyn lived at Waimate, where his house, the first Bishopscourt, still stands as the second oldest wooden building in New Zealand. It is said that Bishop Selwyn would often walk from Waimate to Kerikeri, a distance of 10 miles, for an evening’s reading. And on this story, Melville Harcourt, in his book The Day Before ester day , comments : —

“ The snowball of legend has travelled far since those days, and now people will

tell you that when he did it he would stroll there and back, others that' he would do so every evening, and those who take a real pride in their church, that he would do so every evening with his son on his back. A remarkable man.” The same writer says, however, that Bishop Selwyn must have been one of the greatest walkers who ever trod a step in New Zealand. On July 28, 1842, he left Waimate to inspect the North Island of his diocese. ’ He was away six months, and, in addition to travelling by boat and horse, he walked nearly one thousand miles. The library room to-day is a small and somewhat haphazard museum. The reddish dust of kauri-gum, which used to be sorted in the room next door, is thick on the floors and table. On the walls are copies of historic documents. Old account books used in the store are piled on a shelf, and round the floor are scattered odds and ends of early agricultural and other tools, cannon balls, muskets, Maori weapons. In the corner is a missionary bed, to-day almost unrecognizable as a bed. The more valuable documents and exhibits have, however, been removed, some to museums and some into the care of responsible persons.

Some of these early store day-books cast some interesting sidelights on early missionary life. You open one, dated 1822, for instance, and your eye lights on an entry recording the issue of a chisel for preventing a native from shooting the cows.” Six pairs of scissors, you discover, were

given to natives who assisted in “ seeking, killing, and bringing home a black bull,” and some one else got an adze for returning some medicine which had been stolen. Shoes, you note with envy, were 2s. nd. and 3s. 6d. a pair, shirting calico 7|d., and axes and sheeting calico is. 6d. You don’t have to remind yourself that those were the prices of more than one hundred years ago. As you climb the road up the hill from the store and

James Kemp’s old house you pass one more historic spot before you find yourself back again in the centre of the modern Kerikeri. This is a sloping field on your right, where, it is said, the plough first turned the soil of New Zealand. One of the Kerikeri missionaries, the Rev. J. G. Butler, has left an account of this event. “ On the morning of the 3rd of May, 1820,” he wrote, “ the agricultural plough was for the first time put into the land of New Zealand at the Kiddi Kiddi (Kerikeri), and I felt much pleasure in holding it, after a Team of six Bullocks, brought down by the Dromedary. I think that this auspicious day will be remembered with gratitude and its anniversary kept by ages yet unborn.” To-day this field is being turned into a citrus orchard. In a few years, no doubt, it will be hidden from sight, like so much of the rest of Kerikeri, by the trees of the citrus shelter-belts. When you leave these relics of the Kerikeri of missionary days and get back past the group of shops that form the township, you are very quickly reminded that there is a story of the modern Kerikeri that is vastly different from that of the old. You visit the modern post-office in Hobson Avenue, and opposite the post-office, the ultramodern theatre. The name on the theatre surprises you —Cathay. It seems out of tune with the spirit of a place, where even the names of the streets emphasize

its connection with our earliest national history. But it is less surprising when you know that some of the settlers have spent many years of their lives in the East and remember those years with pleasure and affection. They came to Kerikeri, which they heard of through a holiday visit by one of their number, to live in active retirement. Most of them will cheerfully tell you that the emphasis has been on the “ active ” part of the phrase rather than the retirement their work has kept them busy over long hours with, at first, only meagre returns. But, though there is often a nostalgic note in their conversation about the East, you leave them feeling that they have no real regrets about Kerikeri after all. People from many occupations and many places within and beyond New Zealand have joined the community in the last fifteen years. Some of them, like the missionaries, have built their own homes as well as converting the gorse-covered land to fruit-production, and the variety in size and design of their houses is one of the things you can’t help noticing in a walk round Kerikeri to-day. Some of their homes have cost up to £3,000 ; others have cost a few hundreds. When the citrus orchards were first planted the average holdings of land were about 23 acres, but the standard

holding to-day is approximately 15 acres, enough to grow 250 citrus trees and some mixed fruit and to keep a cow. In each of the last four years Kerikeri has produced an average of just over 10,000 cases of lemons. Last year it also grew about 5,000 cases of oranges and 2,000 cases of grapefruit. The grapefruit-production is increasing, as the trees have yet to reach maturity, but because of a labour shortage passion-fruit production is not as great as it used to be, the 3,000 half-cases sent last year to the markets and 15 tons to the processing firms being about half the quantity produced four years ago.

Passion-fruit growing is an occupation for a skilled man, and at present there are only about five skilled growers in Kerikeri. Other fruits, of which there are fairly extensive plantings, are Chinese gooseberries and tree tomatoes. Unlike the first pioneers, the Kerikeri fruitgrowers do not depend on the sea for their communications. Motor-lorries take their fruit to the railway. But the light which burns in Miss Kemp’s house may still guide scows to the jetty. Scows from Auckland come up the river regularly with petrol and supplies for Kerikeri’s general stores.