Memory box
As much as the Department of Conservation is known for its environmental management services, DOC is also responsible for numerous historic buildings and structures around the country.
The department shares the history of places, both Maori and non-Maori, through signage and interpretation panels and is also charged with safeguarding some of the important ‘stuff’ that people have left in the bush, on the beach and up the mountain.
As a case in point, visitors to the Okere Falls Reserve, which is close to where Lake Rotoiti meets Lake Rotorua, get to enjoy attractive natural scenery and also encounter remnants of an early 20th century power station.
The Engineering New Zealand website tells the story of the station, which was commissioned in May 1901 to provide power to Rotorua, which was already a major tourist destination by that time. This was the country’s first central government hydroelectric power scheme; note the qualifiers in that sentence given that hydro-electric power generation had commenced in the 1880s.
Thanks to the completion of the Okere Falls station, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (later King George V and Queen Mary) were able to enjoy electrical lighting in Rotorua when they visited the town for two days in mid-June 1901. Only Reefton, Wellington and Stratford also had public power supplies at that time.
After a period of everincreasing demand the Falls station’s output was supplanted in the later 1920s by supply provided by the stations at Horahora and Arapuni. The Okere Falls station was finally closed by the electrical branch of the Tourist Department on September 30, 1939 and the plant was dismantled during the war years that followed.
The turbine mounted beside the visitor track was installed in 1995 by DOC. The signage beside the turbine is looking a little dated, and it says nothing of the ruling in 1909 that the government acquisition of the land beside the falls from its Maori owners was invalid, but the turbine itself looks to be enjoying its retirement.
A search on the digitalnz.org website will reward the searcher with 306 images of the falls, including several of the rafters who get a closer view of the surviving structures of the power station than those of us who like to enjoy their scenery in dry clothes.