The day a shadow fell

IT'S a wintry Auckland day, but the Mediterranean sun of nearly 70 years ago illuminates Jack Middleton's room at the Ranfurly Veterans Home.

The old soldier is at work on one of his tapestries, a hobby he began to while away the wet winter evenings when farming on the Hauraki Plains after his "overseas trip".

The tapestries are very good but, colourful as they are, his needlework can't compete with his war stories.

For the next hour the former carpenter, soldier and farmer is no longer 91 and plagued by angina and a gammy knee.

He's a 21-year-old back in a leaking eight-man army tent in Ngaruawahia in 1939; then on board the Orion a few months later as the converted passenger liner pulls away from the dock, taking the First Echelon to the Middle East.

That first day in Egypt monuments, mates and mischief. Good times.

Then Greece. Rumbling, oncoming tanks, hundreds of them. Crete, and parachutists, thousands of them. Bad times.

Back to Cairo. So many faces missing.

The colonel who saw him as officer material (no thanks).

Libya, and fixing bayonets for a night charge on Belhamid.

El Alamein, and shrapnel in the knee.

Coming home, and opening an unexpected letter from the War Department. It said he didn't have to go back to the war.

And the day he and his fellow carpenters on an Auckland state housing construction site put down their saws and hammers and went into town for a drink. World War II was over.

Jack's war started as it ended - on a building site.

He remembers the announcement on the radio but didn't stop hammering nails just because a world war had broken out. No one was hysterical about it, he said, and there was a job to be done for the Lands and Survey Department at Kerepehi, south of Ngatea on the Hauraki Plains.

A couple of days later Jack rode his pushbike 12 miles to Paeroa to sign on - the first in the town to do so when enlistment opened. There was another job to be done.

Besides, he adds: "I wasn't going to get a trip overseas otherwise."

Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage prophetically warned that it would be a long, bitter conflict. Even so, who would have predicted war between then-allies Germany and Russia, and World War I allies America and Japan?

The impact on New Zealand was enormous, perhaps more than Savage could have envisaged, had he lived to see it. In September 1939, the New Zealand Army numbered 2500. Three years later, one in eight Kiwis was in uniform, when the Home Guard is taken into account, and by then the war accounted for half the nation's economic activity. Twelve thousand New Zealanders died, one in 130.
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But Jack recalls that the mood on board the Orion was optimistic when she sailed on January 5, 1940. And why not? He had left school in the midst of the Great Depression, yet here they were, at the start of an experience they had never had before. Travelling in style, too; they had two-berth cabins, luxury compared to the army training camp at Ngaruawahia.There was even a full orchestra. And stewards.

"We still had to drill and march around the decks."

And when the First Echelon landed in Egypt, the overseas experience was everything it promised. On their first day at Maadi Camp their colonel marched them into Cairo for a look around, and they "saw everything there was to see", Jack says, with a twinkle in his eye. That's a reference to the Wagh el Birket, the infamous red-light district.

They visited the museums, the zoo, the brewery (where the Kiwis were not invited back). And the English tea gardens, until someone was rude to one of their hostesses, who turned out to be Lady Astor. The Kiwis were not invited back.

His mate, Bruce, would "drink like a fish, he wouldn't go to sleep until he'd kissed everyone good night".

The New Zealanders were seeing the world, but the bill was about to arrive. For all their training, Jack recalls, they had "no idea what was coming".

Of the 700 men in 18 Battalion who left Egypt for Athens at the start of March 1941, fewer than half assembled back at Maadi Camp after the disasters of Greece and Crete. "We had 420 reinforcements, that was how many we lost, killed or prisoner."

Their first night in Athens was spent in a cemetery after their arrival on the Ajax, and they were sent by train to Salonika.

"We had no equipment, just rifles, no tanks, or air support, they had everything."

He remembers the Germans pushing unwilling Italians in front, forcing them to fight.

"We were pushed back..." A slight pause. "Never mind."

Bitterly, the New Zealanders noted Winston Churchill's public claims that the Allies did have air support in Greece. "One bloke said, if the air force is in Greece then where the hell are we?"

At least Churchill showed up in Egypt later, Jack says. "He came tearing along in a jeep, he said 'hello, kiss my arse' and was gone again."

It's no surprise to hear that Jack was a PBP Poor Bloody Private from start to finish, even though battalion commander Colonel Jan Peart offered him officer training after Crete.

Jack was mentioned in dispatches after El Alamein, and nominated for a military medal, but in the end the only metalwork he collected was the shrapnel in his knee in the battle. The wound was "nothing" he says (Peart, the former headmaster of King's College, Auckland, died of wounds on September 4, 1942).

Jack wasn't to know it, but the Allied victories in North Africa meant his war was coming to an end.

"Strafed in the desert and bombed out in Crete

With sore dark eyes and hardened by the heat"

James K Baxter, "Returned Soldier"

In July 1943, after three years away, the first furlough draft of 2NZEF returned to New Zealand. To their disgust, they found they had been fighting a very different war from those at home who had found ways to gain exemption from active service.

"We all decided we wouldn't go back, there were so many jokers walking around in civvy clothes."

Public opinion swung behind the soldiers, and Jack says that those who did go back were mostly given tasks away from the front, such as driving. In his own case his mother was ill his father died in 1929 and Jack was given six months' compassionate leave, albeit without pay. Then in June 1944, to his complete surprise, the letter from the War Department arrived to say he was discharged.

The quiet life followed building, farming, working for Hellaby's in the bacon factory, and raising two children.

It's nearly spring now, meaning it's time to see the daffodils in bloom on his son's farm at Pukekawa. The Ranfurly has its own outings and activities they look after him well, Jack says, and he keeps himself busy with tapestries, surrounded by people who can identify with his war experiences.

But they've never been that far away. Years after the war, on an evening when he took his wife out for dinner at the Thames RSA, a familiar voice boomed across the room: "I kissed you good night over there and I'm going to kiss you good night again now!"

Keen Auckland sailor Con Thode went to work as usual on September 3, 1939, despite the morning news.

After all, he and his yachting friends had seen the war clouds gathering for months and had taken steps towards gaining the qualifications they would need to serve in the navy.

But although his first rank was "Acting probationary temporary sub-lieutenant", he never expected to see the war through a periscope.

The living room of the 98-year-old's home at Okura, north of Auckland, is testament to four years of service with distinction in submarines. In one corner is the ship's bell from the Scythian, which he commanded. On one wall is an artist's impression, published in the Illustrated London News, of a head-on collision between his first submarine, the Proteus, and an Italian destroyer off the Greek coast.

At 98, Con retains an alertness that belies his years, and, although some of the memories are a bit hazy now, he clearly remembers how he nearly didn't make it to sea at all.

In 1939 the New Zealand division of the Royal Navy wasn't recruiting, and would-be officers thinking of joining the Royal Navy in Singapore were advised that "private means" were a prerequisite.

Disgusted at the elitism, Con enlisted in the infantry, only to learn from a fellow crew member on the yacht Iorangi that an Auckland yachtmaster's ticket would open doors in London. Sailing community contacts helped him "un-enlist" and he left New Zealand for the first time, working his way to England on the Port Darwin, and arriving to a London of sandbags and gasmasks.

Training in Brighton and convoy escort duty on corvettes followed, where the only sign of the other side was a Focke-Wulf Condor circling out of range.

But Con's war changed course in 1941 when the Luftwaffe dropped a parachute mine on the Liverpool Adelphi Hotel, killing some of his fellow diners. "It just got to the stage when it all seemed so hopeless," he says.

It turned out to be a case of mood matching opportunity, because the next day, after he had picked his way through glass and rubble to report for duty, he learned that the Royal Navy was looking for submarine volunteers.

Over the next four years Con was twice mentioned in dispatches after patrols that sank troopships in the Aegean and protected the Allies' Arctic convoys.

And there was an enormous party for his crew and everyone else in Trincomalee harbour, Sri Lanka, on the day it was all over.

"There was supposedly a great shortage of booze, it was amazing how much appeared that night. Rockets and flares... it was a big night."

It was over, except it wasn't. Back in New Zealand, he married and returned to his old job of working for chemicals giant ICI, but could not fit back into civilian life. He cleared his head by going farming at Matakana, near where he now lives.

He has a fantastic view of the sea, and given those days and nights of dim lighting and stale air, he surely appreciates the sunshine and salt air more than most.

"Near miss", says the caption in neat capital letters. Understatement isn't the word, given that the image it accompanies is of a German bomb landing close to HMS Leander in the Mediterranean.

Leander veteran Des Price, 89, enlarges: "A near miss could be worse than a direct hit, a near miss alongside a ship could open her up."

This photo album is surreal, the result of some entrepreneurial spirit by a camera-toting crew member who would pin prints to a board and sell copies to willing buyers. Another picture shows a half dozen of the cruiser's crew grinning on a sunny day. It could be anyone's holiday snaps if not for the steel helmets and the neat handwriting noting that they have just helped fight off an air attack.

"That was taken on my 17th birthday," says Des's Leander shipmate Bill Morland, 85, pointing to a picture of himself and two other sailors. Shortly after the shutter clicked, the crew were at action stations to repel aircraft.

If you were an historian trying to capture the spirit of the New Zealand experience of World War II, you could give up on the words and just run these pictures a sepia world of Sydney swimsuit beauties and exotic ports of call Bombay, Colombo, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean. And the Solomons, when there was no "near miss". They were lucky to survive; 33 of their crewmates didn't.

Bill Morland clearly remembers September 3, 1939. He was on leave in his home town, Dunedin, and had already been in the navy since the age of 15-and-a-half "I used to see all the ships coming in with all the pomp and ceremony and thought it would be a good life."

No sooner had the radio announced the news when his brother appeared in the Octagon with a telegram ordering him to report back to HMS Philomel, the naval base in Auckland. The declaration of war came as a shock, he recalls. "When you're young you don't really think about world events."

Des, originally from Levin but now living in Auckland, heard the announcement on the Leander's tannoy, on the way back from the cruiser's first mission. New Zealand had not waited for the outbreak, given what happened at Fanning Island (now Kiribati) in World War I, when the German raider Nurnberg shelled the cable station and disrupted communications across the Pacific. The small garrison Leander was carrying 1 platoon A company, special Service Force became known as "The men who beat the gun", Des recalls.

The two veterans admit they had no idea what was in store; Des thought the war would last maybe a year while Bill hoped they would be "cruising the islands in winter and New Zealand and Australia in summer".

Des, whose father had been wounded and shell-shocked in World War I, expected at least to be safer at sea, although he had been keen on the navy since primary school.

"In the navy it's 99% boredom and 1%... well..." His meticulous "summary of places of call and events" records everything from "boredom" to "well..."

On February 21, 1941, the Leander sank Ramb I, an Italian armed raider. (Almost all the crew were rescued.) The previous day: Leander's ship's cat Minnie was unfortunately lost overboard. March 16, another disaster: the ship "ran out of rum".

He knows all this because, against regulations, he also kept a diary. There's a gap, but he's glad it was only the pages he lost.

They were both on board when the Japanese torpedo struck on the night of July 11, 1943, when Leander formed part of a Pacific task force.

Des, in particular, had a lucky escape. He was working in the boiler room as part of an electrical repair party when he was called away to the other end of the cruiser. "At midnight they wanted a job done in the after engine room and took me away. A chap from Devonport took my place. One hour later there wasn't anyone left."

They were lucky to get back, says Bill. The photos show a huge hole in Leander's port side, and the cruiser would have been an easy target as she limped to safety.

You'd think that by now Des might have been rethinking the relative safety of the navy but he only got in deeper, literally. A former motor mechanic before joining the navy, his fascination with submarines was prompted by a visit aboard a seized Italian sub in Aden in 1943. He was one of four friends who volunteered.

"We used to see them going out and coming back, somehow it just got us."

He served on the Otway, Tribune and Totem, and the eventual fate of the latter is a chilling reminder of the risks he faced. Sold to Israel after the war, the submarine disappeared en route and the wreckage was found only four years ago in the Mediterranean.

"These things happen," says Des.

At Submariners' corner in the Devonport RSA there is a list of Allied submarines lost in the war, and it's a long one.

Bill ended the war on HMS Norfolk (Leander was "paid off" in 1944), and saw the Norwegians' reaction when the cruiser brought King Haakon and his family to Oslo in June 1945 after five years in exile. It was a "quite interesting" occasion, notes Bill. He was in Malta when Japan surrendered "That was a bit of a relief. We were refitting on the way to the Pacific."

He remembers arriving back in Wellington on Christmas Day 1945 "That was great. We came back on a converted aircraft carrier, all the North Islanders got off at Wellington on Christmas Eve, we sailed for Lyttleton. We had leave 'til March."

Everyone else was being demobbed but Bill and Des, being regular navy, had to report back after their leave.

And for Bill, it started all over again in Korea. After that he joined the army and served 14 years as an instructor. But when offered a tour of duty in Vietnam, he declined: "I said I wouldn't trust my luck that far."

Des concurs: "I suppose we were lucky in many ways."

Near misses, and all that.

When Esther Cochran reads an Agatha Christie thriller, the page numbers take her on a voyage around the Pacific of 70 years ago.

It's one of the odd ways the memories of her war service return, says the former Waaf (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) weather specialist.

Page 115 is Auckland; page 172 is Hamilton. The numbers are weather codes memorised as part of her years of work for the air force weather department in Suva, when Fiji was the crossroads of the Allied war effort in the Pacific.

But the 94-year-old Aucklander wishes she could remember more and regrets not recording her experiences from 1939-45. Something as mundane as a cloud formation can set off a flashback she had to know her nimbostratus from her cumulus.

"I'm very angry at myself that I didn't write things down. When you're young and things happen, you don't really register that they'll be very important, you think it doesn't matter but it does."

The former shorthand typist does recall that when the conflict broke out the War Department visited the company she worked for.

"They wanted volunteers to join His Majesty's Armed Forces. I was no more an armed force than a pussycat but I put my hand up."

Esther considered herself patriotic and saw it as her duty, but learned very quickly that doing her part would involve personal sacrifice.

The occasion was an encounter with her former manager in Queen St.

"I had quite a thing about that boss. I had a bit of a crush on him. He pumped my hand and said I was looking as lovely as ever."

But there was a war on and the regulations demanded secrecy. She couldn't tell him where she was going or what she was doing.

She volunteered for overseas service and was posted to Suva, where she plotted maps for the air force forecasters around the clock.

Esther was one of 10,000 New Zealand servicemen and women in Fiji. The official history of New Zealand notes that they were overcrowded, under-resourced and endured boredom and tropical diseases while their contribution to the war effort went largely unnoticed.

Esther was lucky to have work she considered enjoyable, but she missed her Devonport home with its magnificent oaks and pohutukawa, blackberries in the back yard, cosy fireplaces and poetry library, including her own verses and short stories. She missed the concerts her family would attend at the Auckland Town Hall.

But she did make good friends in the Waafs and, after all these years, one of them still comes to her birthday parties at the Ascot retirement home in Devonport.

It's not far from the house Esther returned to after four years in Fiji, and where she lived from the age of three months to 88 years a home of happy family memories, except for the grief that World War I visited on her family.

Despite her sense of patriotism, Esther has never had any illusions about war.

"I feel very angry when I think about the war and any wars. They are diabolical, they just are. It ruined my sister's life."

Her sister Dorothy's husband was given six weeks' leave after their marriage. He knew he had a daughter, but never lived to see her. She was six weeks old when he was killed in the Battle of the Somme.

Her brother Hector was wounded but survived and won the Military Medal.

"Wars are just dreadful. That was my sister's life ruined. They were so in love. It's just unbelievably awful. There should always be another way of settling your arguments without having a war."

Tom Shaw never spoke much about the war.

His son John, a Devonport painter, says he and his siblings would ask about it but their mother would intervene "Don't upset your father".

The Wairarapa farmer took his memories and stories to the grave, but he did leave behind a suitcase full of clues.

Showing a sense of posterity and occasion and a disregard for army regulations Gunner Shaw used his Kodak Box Brownie to record scenes ranging from the Maori Battalion on parade to his artillery unit in action.

We can guess why he singled out certain graves in the El Alamein cemetery. But we won't know the circumstances and other consequences of the air raid that resulted in the Chevrolet 4x4 (used to tow the 6th Field Regiment's 25-pounder guns) catching fire, leaving the crew to frantically shovel sand on to the blaze.

In another picture of a Chevy, there's someone else's ammunition inside. It's a dud shell that landed right next to the steering wheel.

The memorabilia Tom Shaw was perhaps proudest of was his "one-way ticket" to Europe the berthing card issued on his departure from New Zealand. He kept it for the rest of his life in a precious leather wallet which also contains small head and shoulders photos with brief captions: "Gunner V.B. Silbery. Killed in action." "Gunner R. Townhill. Killed in action."

Intriguingly, one photograph (above) shows German paratroops landing only about 100m away. On the back, a single word: "Crete".

It could be an extraordinary snapshot taken in the heat of battle, but exactly when, where and by whom is unknown. The source best-placed to comment died in August 2006, aged 87.

Tom Shaw's family can only speculate that he might have been more forthcoming to someone outside the family. But today, Google says only: "Your search `6th field regiment' `Tom Shaw' did not match any documents".

By ARTHUR WHELAN - Sunday Star Times 30 -8 -9

The Pohutukawa Tree

IT'S one of our most famous plays, written by our most famous playwright, but it has never been professionally staged in our biggest city.

Now, nearly half a century after Bruce Mason penned The Pohutukawa Tree, Auckland Theatre Company will find out whether audiences are ready for a work that contains the line: "Where are our Maoris? Our lovely Maoris!"

The play was the country's first to deal with race relations issues. It has been studied by countless School Certificate English students and was dropped only last November from the national high school drama curriculum.

The lead role, Aroha Mataira, has been described as a "female King Lear". It was big enough to entice Rena Owen, Once Were Warriors film star, home from Los Angeles.

"This play is a slice of New Zealand theatrical history," says Owen. "But it's also a slice of who we are."

Didn't Owen's hackles rise when she heard the "lovely Maoris" line?

"That's the way it was in the 1950s," says Owen. "Maori were still very subservient, second-class citizens, trying to be very good little Maoris. A lot of people in the older generation say `what happened everybody used to get on fine'. And yes, they did. Because Maori never said boo."

The Pohutukawa Tree is the story of Aroha's ties to the land her ancestors battled for; her children who are trying to break free from her strict Christian ways; and her orchard-owning Pakeha neighbours who struggle to understand this proud and spiritual matriarch.

The Sunday Star-Times assembled director Colin McColl and the play's three Maori actors Owen, Tiare Tawera and Maria Walker to discuss the relevance of the work today.

"The unfortunate thing is that it was written in the late 1950s," says McColl. "And then we had the whole Maori renaissance, the land marches, Bastion Point, all those things, and it made the play unfashionable, because the last thing that Maori activists wanted was a play by a Pakeha that, in a way, denigrated Maori.

"Now, with the benefit of distance, we can look back and see it as a work of its time. We're trying to present it so people can say `wow, look how times have changed'. Or maybe they haven't."

Tiare Tawera plays Johnny, Aroha's wayward son. His character can't speak te reo Maori. In real life, Tawera has just voiced Spongebob Squarepants for a Maori Language Week version of the American cartoon.
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Some of the play's dialogue, says Tawera, "is definitely something to laugh about but it does bring back how it was for people back then".

Maria Walker plays his sister Queenie. "I've read that in 1951, 57% of Maori were 20 years old or younger. There was that whole thing of being colonised by the music and dance and all this wonderful stuff, that if you were a rural Maori you wanted to go to the city to experience..."

Today: "When I was 17, I could Google stuff! Back then, that naivety isolated everything."

In the play, Johnny gets drunk, Queenie gets pregnant and Aroha loses a cast-iron Christian grip on her kids. There is plenty, say this trio of actors, that is pertinent today.

"It's the lesson that happens to every generation," says Owen. "You cannot control other people."

Bruce Mason, who also wrote The End of the Golden Weather, Blood of the Lamb and Awatea, died in 1982. In a 2002 interview, his wife, Diana, said The Pohutukawa Tree was born of direct experience. Her parents ran an orchard, and the play's Pakeha protagonists were loosely based on them. It was the work, she said, that prompted Mason's realisation "that what he wanted to do with his life was write".

By 1957, he had a play. But no audience. The director of the New Zealand Players agreed to a workshop performance. Richard Campion (father of The Piano filmmaker Jane) believed the script was too risky for a full production.

"Audiences wouldn't have stomached this," confirms McColl. "Things were very, very conservative in New Zealand in the late 50s . . . the only risk today is people might think it's a dusty old piece."

It was produced by BBC TV in 1959, and McColl says a 1984 reprisal by Campion was, "a very fine production, except for the role of Aroha there were no Maori actresses of that age around. The other thing that makes it right to do now is we've just got this wealth of talent to draw from".

Rena Owen has a Maori father and a Pakeha mother. In the play, her pregnant daughter is spurned by her European lover, Roy. "My mother had been disowned by her family for marrying my father," says Owen. "When Roy rejects Queenie because he can't have brown babies, that's exactly the attitude my mother faced."

As an actor returning from London in the 1980s, Owen says she became caught between cultures. "Because back then, you had to be a `typical Maori'. Dark-as skin, bushy hair and I didn't fit that mould."

She got the part of Beth Heke in Warriors, and then watched while it took another decade for Maori film roles to emerge. "Which was in Whale Rider. Ten years. What are you supposed to do in the meantime?"

McColl: "Play Mexicans?"

And maybe it's a further sign of the times that the actors, huddled together under a blanket for warmth, burst out laughing.

A NZ Book Council essay on Mason records that, in the early 1960s, as editor of Maori news magazine Te Ao Hou, he challenged readers to ask themselves: "Since I am Maori, what part do I want it to play in my life?"

Ask that question today, and the thing is, says Owen, "being Maori ... it's not a coat that you take off and hang in the wardrobe. It's a part of your essence".

Walker says her Maori father was strapped at home and school for speaking Maori. Her world is so far removed from his, she was shocked when she discovered that in the 1950s, some establishments erected "No Maoris" signs. Now, "we've got so much to offer as young Maori and there's so much on offer for us ... so many doors open for us".

Tawera says the play is an opportunity to show how things have changed. So do the actors believe Mason's depiction of 1950s' New Zealand rings true?

"Writers are the only recorders of history," says Owen.

"If you ever want to find out what's going on in a civilisation, don't listen to the politicians. Read the writers, listen to the lyrics, go and see the stage plays. You will get more truth about your society through your artists than your politicians."

McColl says Mason simply wrote what he saw. "He was extremely sensitive to Maoris' place in New Zealand society. He wasn't the sort of man who said `let's write a provocative play that will shock everyone'. I think he was just saying... "

Owen finishes his sentence: "...this is us."

The Pohutukawa Tree, by Bruce Mason, Maidment Theatre, Auckland, September 3-26.
The way we were By KIM KNIGHT - Sunday Star Times 30 08 2009

Whangapoua: Harbour of the Shellfish

The past is another country (or town)

THERE'S A lot of local history about. Over the past couple of decades New Zealand communities have shown a growing interest in recording and publishing their backstories. Most of our small towns have colourful histories, being entwined with such dramatic events as pioneer farming, bush clearances, gold mining, coal mining, the coming of the automobile and the impact of the world wars.

And there is now an awareness that if these stories are not written down, they could be lost forever. There is also a substantial readership for local histories, probably because our ageing population has a developing curiosity about the places where they grew up or spent family holidays. While they were young they were too preoccupied with the present to bother looking back. Now, they want to.

Local histories are usually initiated from within the community. Sometimes it's the local historical society, sometimes the town librarian, or the ratepayers' association, or a group of well-read citizens, or an interested individual. For example, Janet Riddle of the Mercury Bay Museum in Whitianga wrote and published Salt Spray and Sawdust, the history of her local area, in 1996. Its first print run of 1000 sold out, necessitating a reprint. Print runs for such books are usually short, but they sell steadily. Over on the peninsula's western coast, the Coromandel Town History Research Group collectively wrote and published In Search of the Rainbow The Coromandel Story in 2002, then followed it up with two sub-regional books, True Tales of Northern Coromandel (2002) and More True Tales of Northern Coromandel (2005). As Colleen Carmichael of the Coromandel Library points out: "Such books sell because they're written by local people whose extended families and friends all buy one." Jeanette Grant, project treasurer of The History of Epsom (2006), which had 50 contributors under the overall editorship of historian Graham Bush, reports that their book, too, was reprinted and has to date sold 1700 copies, at $65 each.

Commercial publishers generally shy away from local histories because they don't consider them a viable proposition. Penguin NZ publishing director Geoff Walker says local histories "have a local readership, and nothing wrong with that. But it depends how local and narrowly focused the book is. A history of Canterbury or the West Coast or the Coromandel, for example, would almost certainly have a wider market. And sometimes with a little editorial tinkering a book's readership can be broadened."

Local publishing of such histories places the entire production process in the hands of the people who inaugurate the project. This saves money, because the book is produced largely by a voluntary labour of love. But a crucial question still has to be answered: just who is to write it? That's a decision for the organising committee.
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My involvement with a local history project began with a phone call, in May 2008. An author was needed, to write the history of Whangapoua, on the eastern Coromandel coast. Local resident Judy Drok, one of the project's management team, showed me over Whangapoua and neighbouring New Chums beach. On the walk there we passed a long homestead, surrounded by native trees and a stone wall.

"That's the house that Alberta McLean built," Judy told me. I didn't know who Alberta was, although I was soon to find out. We walked along a track to New Chums, which I hadn't seen before. Native bush overlooked an arc of white sand. It was even more beautiful than Whangapoua beach. I decided to accept the offer.

The project was instigated by the beachside settlement's ratepayers' association, who had accorded the writing of Whangapoua's history top of a priority list of its long-term aims, the rest being environmental protection concerns. I was not a trained historian, but I have a keen interest in New Zealand history, and as I was already the author of several books of non-fiction as well as historical fiction, I was deemed suitable.

Judy Drok had been accumulating material for some time, from people who had lived or holidayed at Whangapoua, and she handed me over several file boxes of notes.

I started with Whangapoua's Maori history. The district's tangata whenua is the Mangakahia family, their tribe the Ngati Huarere, who had suffered grievously in pre-European times from incursions by Tainui and Ngapuhi war parties. In the early 1960s the family had been obliged, for financial reasons, to subdivide and sell their remaining foreshore land. In the 1990s the Mangakahia family had lodged a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal for compensation for land alienation after a succession of allegedly unjust deals with timber merchants and the Crown during the 19th century.

The published testimonies of Mangakahia family representatives mentioned their charismatic forebear, Hamiora Mangakahia (1838-1918), who had campaigned unsuccessfully for compensation from the Crown in Victorian times. I contacted the family's legal counsel, Charl Hirschfeld. In 2006 the tribunal had found in favour of the Mangakahia claim, Charl told me, but a counter-claim meant that no compensation had yet been paid.

Timber milling played a huge part in Whangapoua's past. All over the district there had been stands of kauri trees. From the 1860s onwards Pakeha timber merchants sought to fell the trees and sell them, but disputes arose over cutting rights. Some Maori sold the rights when they weren't entitled to do so; some payments were manifestly inadequate. In the 1870s the disputes spilled over into what became known as the "Log Wars". In spite of this the forests were annihilated.

As early as 1868 the land in Whangapoua's hinterland had been found to be auriferous, or gold-bearing. But it was quartz gold, meaning that substantial capital was needed to crush the rock and process it, to extract the bullion. A company was formed, the Kauri Freehold Gold Estates, and a share issue floated in 1896. In the Opitonui valley a boom town sprang up, including hotels, stores and a school. But the rock-to-bullion ratio proved uneconomic, a bust followed, and Opitonui became a ghost town, then vanished altogether.

All these events had been fully reported in the newspapers of the day, such as The Daily Southern Cross. The website http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz proved a tremendous help. There were also illuminating photographs in the Auckland Weekly News.

In the Kiwi way, the news that a book on Whangapoua was being written soon spread. People rang to tell me their stories, called in to talk, emailed or sent photos.

Chapter headings for the book now suggested themselves: pre-European tribal life, kauri deforestation and milling, the mining boom and bust, pioneer farming, "rehab" farming, reafforestation, coastal subdivision. Writing a local history, I came to realise, is like working on a very large jigsaw puzzle. Key pieces were missing but had to be found to complete the picture.

Several people had recollections of Whangapoua's most extraordinary resident, Alberta McLean (1886-1964). She was the daughter of an upper-class English couple, Henrietta and Charles Ridley, who had been the controller of the English royal household. Alberta drove an ambulance in World War I, married and divorced twice, and in 1929 emigrated to Whangapoua. There she bought land, built a 13-bedroom homestead, farmed sheep and bred Siamese cats and polo ponies. Childless, she left her estate to various charities, including the SPCA.

A founding family of Whangapoua were the Denizes, whose story runs right through the district's narrative. "Punga" Denize was a pioneer farmer and it was pastoralist Bert Denize who allowed people to camp on his land by the Te Punga stream from the 1950s through to the 1980s.

Bert's son Rob and his wife Wendy, who taught at the local school at Te Rerenga for longer than anyone else, today live in the homestead that Alberta McLean had built. It's virtually the same as it was in the 1930s with its frontage deck, grand dining room and stone wall surround. And in the hall, along with Denize family photos, is a portrait of the formidable Alberta, still looking as if she owns the place.

Whangapoua: Harbour of the Shellfish by Graeme Lay, is published by the Whangapoua History Project Group (256pp, $70) By GRAEME LAY - Sunday Star Times
Last updated 05:00 30/08/2009

Are you local?: When it came to stories, Whangapoua turned out to be a figurative and literal gold mine.
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An Obituary- London Times

oday we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years.
No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies
(adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place.
Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school
for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do
in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to
administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and
wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment
than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own
home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot.
She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death,
by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on.
If not, join the majority and do nothing

Locals band together to save church

By Simon Wong ⋅ May 22, 2009 ⋅
It is truly a community affair as local groups in Mt Eden join forces to upgrade a local icon.

The Mt Eden Village Society Centre, the Methodist Church and the Eden-Albert Community Board are working together to restore the historic Mt Eden Rd church and hall into a community facility.

The hall was destined to be redesigned as a commercial site for shops and had resource consent, but strong local opposition stopped the plan going ahead.

Community board member Virginia Chong says the hall is the only community facility from Sandringham Rd to Gillies Ave in Epsom.

“We were not prepared to sit and let it disappear.”

Village society centre member Penny Hansen says the change of plan is a win for both the community and the church.

“It was a victory in finding a way to work together. All the problems are in the past now.”

The annex that joined the church with the hall, which was used as a Sunday school, was destroyed by a fire several years ago.

The project will reconnect the church with the hall and will provide a new kitchen and toilet facilities. The exterior will also be repainted and the interior refurbished.

It is projected to cost around $1.5 million.

Some funding has been guaranteed, but the three parties, which have formed a trust, are still seeking additional funding.

Dr Bill Peddie, who looks after the Mt Eden church, says the partnership between the three parties is unique.

“Usually churches do their own thing and offer their place for hire. The trust will lease the premises from the church which has ownership of the land and the building.”

Dr Peddie says the church, which was established in 1899, has lost some of its character by doing things “on the cheap”.

“Its historic value will be increased by tidying up the premises.”

Chong says she is keen to get the project done before the proposed super city structure takes effect.

“We’ve waited a long time for this. It’s been about six years in the making.”

During the construction period, which is hoped to begin next January and finish in August 2010, Dr Peddie says the church will “either find some way of keeping the hall open, or shift to another church”.

Dr Peddie says the community has been extremely supportive of the project.

“There is enough goodwill in the community to ensure we won’t lose sight of what we’re aiming to do.”

Hansen says the hall is already used by several local groups, but hopes the new development will encourage more people to use the facility.

“The motto for Mt Eden is ‘The place where people meet’ and the church will be the heart of the place.”