Church has tales to tell
One of the things I find most interesting about the built environment is how much variety can be discerned within a standardised typology such as a house, church or government building.
On the one hand, there are so many Gothic Revival style churches around Aotearoa it can sometimes feel like if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
Look closer, however, and there is often a distinguishing feature or features that individualises the building and underscores its own, singular history.
So it is with St Paul’s Anglican Church at Tokaanu.
At first glance it may appear to be no different from all the other nineteenth and early twentieth centuries timber churches that dot the map from one end of the country to the other.
The church was built as a memorial to the Rev Thomas Grace and his wife Agnes (nee Fearon) who established a Church Mission Society station at Pukawa, north of Tokaanu, in 1855.
Agnes (1825-91) and Thomas (1815-79) had immigrated to New Zealand with the eldest two of their eleven children in 1850.
The mission station was built on the whenua of Ngati Tuwharetoa paramount chief Te Heu Heu Tū kino IV and was the home of the Grace family until 1863 when the Waikato War broke out.
Three of the Grace’s children became Anglican priests, whilst another (Lawrence Marshall Grace, 1854-1934) married Te Kahu Henerieta Te Heu Heu, a daughter of Te Heu Heu Tū kino IV, and served as the Member of Parliament for Tauranga in the mid-1880s.
Lawrence and Te Kahui’s daughter Bessie Te Wenerau Grace (1889-1944) was the first Mā ori woman to graduate with a degree from a New Zealand university; in later life she joined the Community of the Sisters of the Church, an Anglican religious order.
Meanwhile, the church at Tokaanu opened free of debt in January 1908.
Archdeacon Thomas Grace travelled from Blenheim to oversee the proceedings, which drew over 500 Mā ori attendees from all over the North Island.
Accounts of the church opening included mention of the £200 raised at the event to support the next church to be built in the district as well as the three fine mats, valued at £30, made and gifted by an unnamed elderly Mā ori woman who had no money to give.
The Rev Frederick Bennett, Mā ori missioner of Rotorua Lakes, also preached, in te reo Mā ori, at the consecration service.
As for the church itself, the weatherboard and corrugated iron building economically communicates its ecclesiastical purpose in the separation of the gabled porch, nave and sanctuary, in its cross-shaped finials and the small belfry atop the principal gable end.
Forgoing the greater complexity of lancet arched windows, the church is lit by multi-pane rectangular windows that are separated by buttresses along the nave.
Admittedly the Grace family history cannot be ‘read’ in the built form of St Paul’s but nevertheless the church embodies the life stories of all of those involved in its genesis and subsequent use.
Not only that, but after an hour or so reading about the Grace whanau those sky-jump style buttresses start to look like they are a springboard into a colonial past wherein church missionaries and mana whenua created enduring bonds of faith and family.
The sky-jump style buttresses start to look like they are a springboard into a colonial past wherein church missionaries and mana whenua created enduring bonds of faith and family.