Pauatahanui’s past captured
Stories from Pauatahanui’s glittering heyday have been preserved in a glossy history book being launched this week.
Pauatahanui: A local history is the product of eight years’ hard work by a group of history- minded residents wanting to capture the area’s past before it was lost forever.
‘‘We wanted to gather the history while the people who know the real history were still here, so it wasn’t just folklore that’s been carried down by families,’’ Gael McRoberts said.
‘‘For people who living in 2013, it’ll give them the idea of how things were 150 years ago.’’
The book covers the history of Pauatahanui from early Maori occupation and battles with Pakeha to the village’s boom years in the mid-1800s, Whitby’s development in the 1960s and up to the present day.
Author Helen Reilly said the 300-page coffee-table book was a better finished product than she could have imagined, with almost every page having a photo or drawing accompanying it.
‘‘It’s such a beautiful production,’’ Mrs Reilly said. ‘‘I can’t praise the group highly enough for the hard work they’ve put in.’’
The book will correct common mistakes, such as calling a shoreside boatshed ‘‘ Brady hut’’, when in fact it belonged to the Brandon family, Mrs Reilly said.
One of Mrs Reilly’s favourite stories involves settler John Harvey, who fell in love with one of the Stace daughters living across the inlet.
The girl would signal him to come courting, Mrs Reilly said.
‘‘She would hang a white sheet and he knew he could come and pay a visit.’’
A failed attempt to set up an oyster farm in the inlet is another of Mrs Reilly’s picks from the book.
The aquaculture venture gained backing from Wellington investors, but the tides were never ideal and the oysters got sand in them, Mrs Reilly said.
The most memorable part of the book for Wally Brown is a photo of an old wreck of a shed that housed four men during the Depression in the 1930s.
Mr Brown said he remembered the shed had just one bed, made of netting and sackcloth, on which all the men would sleep.
‘‘It reminded me of the struggle people had during the Depression,’’ he said.
Christine Stanley is a fan of Downton Abbey and historical novels and used to take schoolchildren on historical tours of Pauatahanui, urging them to imagine the streets covered in horse poo and a blacksmith’s shop halfway up the school’s driveway.
Some children would later bring Ms Stanley cannonballs from the musket wars from their families’ mantelpieces.
‘‘They were little family treasures,’’ she said.
‘‘I would have liked to see the village when it was a very busy place. It’s never been the same since.
‘‘We think we’re so sophisticated now. It’s nothing to what it was.’’
With Transmission Gully coming in the next decade, the village could again enjoy boom times, Ms Stanley said.
‘‘Give us another 50 years and there will be huge pressure on Pauatahanui again.’’
Pauatahanui: A local history