In the market for a quarrel
The year was 1978, and a Saturday market was being held in Nelson for the first time.
The planners behind the market were members of Women’s Emergency Centre (WEC), a precursor to Women’s Refuge. They asked to hold a market to raise funds for not just the WEC but other local charities by way of the Central Relief Committee, a nowdisbanded citizens’ charity funding committee.
The Nelson City Council of the time granted the WEC permission to run a ‘‘Trash ’n’ Treasure’’ second-hand market, which it held about four times a year. However, two years later a new market was established by Nita Knight, and the charitable market came to an end.
That’s what Annie Kolless, the spokeswoman of the WEC in those days, says, and she has never let go of what she sees as the charity organisation being muscled out by the Nelson Market.
‘‘We requested, we trialled, and were successful . . . It was going well, all the money was going to the Central Relief Committee,’’ she said. ‘‘It was a fund that people could apply to without feeling like they were begging.’’
Kolless said WEC received no notification about the new market. ‘‘We just suddenly were told that [it] had taken over.’’
When the WEC members complained, they were dismissed by councillors, she said.
‘‘We were told that young women with children should be at home. One councillor said someone should ‘spank their bottoms and send them back to their husbands’.’’
Rubbing salt in the wound for Kolless is the fact that Knight has been identified as starting the WEC markets in 1978, rather than the Saturday Market which started in 1980.
She is also concerned that over time, funding from the market for charities has decreased.
Kolless says she and some of the other Trash ’n’ Treasure founders planned to go to the Nelson Market tomorrow to tell what she said was the real history of Nelson’s market.
However, Knight said there was nothing untoward at all.
‘‘I’m really sorry that they feel that way . . . but it’s not true.’’
She said she had no idea about the charitable market when she proposed her own.
‘‘I came from Auckland and I just loved Nelson, and I wondered what I could do for the place.’’
Knight said the councillors she went to at the time, thenmayor Rob McLennan and councillor Pat Tindell, were enthused with the idea of a weekly market. She was given permission to run it in the Miller’s Acre car park for a few months as a trial, and Nelson never looked back.
‘‘I don’t want to be immodest, but the market has done a lot for people. They can live in Nelson and have that lifestyle, run a small business, do their crafts.’’
She said it was her understanding that at first, the rent she paid went to the same charitable fund the original Trash ’n’ Treasure funds went into, and over time this may have changed.
Kolless acknowledged this, but said that if the non-commercial market had continued, it could have kept up the good work.
‘‘If it had not been turned into a commercial enterprise, it could have been funding quite a bit of charity.’’