A tiny Kiwi settlement where everyone wants
At the small settlement of Scotts Ferry, southwest of Bulls, almost everyone is part of the ‘‘inn’’ crowd.
That is, they have a sign on their house or at their gate with the words ‘‘inn’’ and a play of their own name or their favourite activity.
For example, the Nixon family has a sign saying Nicks Inn.
Up and down Parewanui Rd, which runs through Scotts Ferry, there are plenty of signs like that. There’s N2relax Inn, Breeze Inn, Retyre Inn, Back Inn, Tune Inn, Live Inn, Shoot Inn, Hev Inn, and the triple whammy of Rowed Inn, Rode Inn, Road Inn.
Resident Bill Gray said the quirky naming started after the 2004 floods that swept through the settlement, when amanawatu¯ River stopbank collapsed and deposited sludge up to two metres deep in most houses along the road.
Gray chaired the community committee at the time and is still known as the ‘‘mayor’’ locally, although he’s now 83 and has no official title.
‘‘My wife and I took control of things, trying to find out where people were.
‘‘Some had been evacuated, some had not. Some had gone and returned.
‘‘No-one really knew what was going on,’’ Gray said.
‘‘We decided that if you were back you could show that [with] a sign out the front of the property, and that’s how the ‘inn’ thing was born.
‘‘We thought it would be a fun thing for a couple of months, but it’s stuck and is still going 16 years later.
‘‘It cost nobody anything, really. We had some spare paint and people used that,’’ Gray said.
The signs are ‘‘just something you do around here’’, a young lad who lives at who’s Inn tells me.
Almost everyone has an ‘‘inn’’ sign.
But there’s more to Scotts Ferry than just the ‘‘inn’’ crowd.
The settlement now known as Scotts Ferry is 16km down the road from Bulls, heading south-west to the coast.
Heading down that road puts the Rangitı¯kei River on your left, the south side of the road.
On the other side of the river and heading into the settlement of Tangimoana, where the spy satellite station is located, is Scotts Ferry Rd.
It takes its current name from the man who ran the ferry across the river then.
Today, the settlement has a camping ground, a windswept beach, and a row of houses almost all with ‘‘inn’’ in their names.