Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
‘Heart of the Molesworth’ reopens
‘‘If you knew the house before, and looked at it you wouldn’t see it any different.’’
The legacy of a historic South Island homestead will live on, as the ‘‘heart of the Molesworth’’ reopened this week.
Farm manager Jim Ward had lived in the Molesworth homestead, south of Blenheim, with his wife Tracey for 15 years when the earthquake struck in November 2016.
‘‘We’re in open country so we heard the thing coming,’’ he said.
‘‘We just took a door each and rode it out for a while. We knew there was significant damage but the beauty of it was that no one was hurt on the station.’’
‘‘All the bedroom end of the house, a lot of the cob fell out and all the floor bearers were on rocks, so a lot of the rocks shifted.’’
Even before the Wards arrived, the Molesworth Homestead had a long and colourful history, built more than 140 years ago.
‘‘It was built by Ned James in the 1870s and he was a renowned cob builder back then,’’ Ward said.
‘‘But as we said today, the words square and even and straight and level were not words that we’d use to describe the house after the earthquake, everything was topsy turvy.’’
The homestead went to ‘‘cattle-only’’ after the sheep losses due to snowfall of 1941.
The Molesworth entity as it stands today is 182,000 hectares, New Zealand’s largest farm, after encompassing three stations in the 1940s.
The area that comprises Molesworth has been managed by the Department of Conservation since 2005, and is farmed
other by Landcorp Farming, now known as Pamu.
Ward said one of the options was to pull down the original homestead after the earthquake, which would have been cheaper.
‘‘We really thought, on the historic side of things, we’ve really got to show respect for what’s gone on in the past. The decision was made to rebuild.
‘‘It was more expensive, but I think the outcome will last another 100 years at least.’’
The first plans for the rebuild were put together in late 2017, and they began gutting the house in early 2018.
They decided to keep the original structure of the building, and build a ‘‘house within a house.’’
‘‘The cob walls are two foot thick and then there’s an 100ml gap and then they’ve built a house inside there,’’ Ward said.
‘‘The physical footprint outside is not too different to what it was.
‘‘ So if you knew the house before, and looked at it you wouldn’t see it any different.’’
But the house is now warmer, and much safer in an earthquake.
The homestead was officially reopened on Tuesday by Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage, and a member of Nga¯ti Kuri performed a blessing.
‘‘That sort of sealed it for us, it was the icing on the cake,’’ Ward said.
‘‘We just all got together and celebrated as a group – it was cool to be part of it. It’s going to be around for a long time now.’’