LOOKING BACK ...
As Hawke’s Bay Today celebrates its 20th birthday, senior reporter Doug Laing looks back over the newsmakers of the past two decades.
2000: NEW ERA, NEW MILLENNIUM
Just eight months after Hawke’s Bay Today was launched, New Zealand was the first country to wave goodbye to the 1900s and welcome in Y2K, the year 2000. Well over 20,000 crowded New Year celebrations on Napier’s Marine Parade, which would revive and set the scene for family-based public New Year’s Eve celebration to replace the alcohol-plagued disorder of the 1960s and 1970s. Huge numbers would try to catch the first sunrise of the new millennium. With cloud along much of the East Coast, parts of Hawke’s Bay were among the first in the world to catch the moment.
2001: HORSE OF THE YEAR SHOW
It had to have been one of the greatest coups in New Zealand sport when Hastings secured the Horse of the Year Show, first held at the Showgrounds in March.
It quickly became the biggest annual event in Hastings which is now established as the near permanent home, going into a 20th year in a row on March 10-15, 2020.
More than 1400 riders and 1800 horses competed this year in the dozens of events, which include premier attraction the Olympic Cup. New Zealand’s best equestrians of the last two decades and more have competed, including Olympic Games gold medallists Sir Mark Todd and Blyth Tait.
2002: THE MAYOR’S A LADY
This was the first full year of the first female Mayor in Napier or Hastings. Barbara Arnott was elected in the 2001 local body elections, beating sole opponent and male hope Tony Reid by 8347 of the 19,299 valid votes.
Alan Dick had decided not to stand again after 12 years in the chair. He remained in local government in 2019, on the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, and the only local body politician in Hawke’s Bay to serve throughout the first 20 years of Hawke’s Bay Today.
After a few months as acting mayor, Sandra Hazlehurst two years ago won a byelection to become Hastings’ first female mayor, succeeding long-time Mayor Lawrence Yule who had been elected a Member of Parliament.
2003: RIGHT ROYAL SHOW
The Hawke’s Bay A and P Show was the Royal Show, by its five-yearly rotation with other shows around the country. It was the last time by this method, the A and P Show each October remaining Hawke’s Bay’s biggest annual event. In 2013 it would mark its 150th anniversary and since 2015 Showgrounds Hawke’s Bay Tomoana in Hastings has been the home of the Royal Show.
In its heyday the show attracted more than 70,000 people each year, and its prominence in Hawke’s Bay culture is recognised by its last day being a public holiday.
2004: GOLDEN TWINS
This was the year that rowing twins Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell won the first of their two Olympic Games double sculls gold medals, on their way to becoming among Hawke’s Bay’s most successful international sports stars. Unbeaten in the double sculls at world championships and other events in the previous three years, they won on August 21 at the Athens Olympics.
More than 10,000 people packed the centre of Hastings for a welcome home, they would also win three world championships, win again at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, be the only New Zealanders to receive their sport’s highest international honour, receive the ONZM, and have named in their honour the Evers-Swindell Reserve, alongside the Clive River where they trained.
2005: TRAGEDY ON THE ROADS
While fortunately well away from the highs of the 1970s, tragedies on the roads have been a common feature, mainly on highways and rural roads.
The three worst crashes in Hawke’s Bay in the past 20 years each killed four males, adults or teens. The worst urban crash in Hawke’s Bay was on July 29, 2005, when four male teenagers died when a car hit a tree at high speed in Windsor Ave, Hastings.
It was part of the highest annual road toll in Hawke’s Bay in the past 20 years — 37 killed. The lowest was six in 2013. The other two were between Napier and Wairoa just over five months apart. Each killed four men in 2012.
2006: ROCKET BOOST
Mahia Peninsula as a site for rocketlaunching might have seemed lightyears away, as Aucklander Peter Beck formed ambitious company Rocket Lab, and almost immediately moved the company to the US.
Even as recently as mid-2015 the notion of rockets pitching over the Pacific from the coastline of Northern Hawke’s Bay seemed a bit pie-in-the-sky.
But the dream was realised on May 25, 2017, when the first rocket was launched. There’ve now been four launches, a fifth is imminent, less than two months since the last, and the site is licensed to launch a rocket from Mahia every 72 hours for the next 30 years.
2007: RACING BIG-TIME
Hawke’s Bay Racing’s Kelt Capital Stakes became New Zealand’s first $2 million horse race.
Held on October 7, the last day of a threeday spring racing carnival in Hastings, it was a four-way finish, with South Island horse Princess Coup getting the nod, as it did again a year later when the stakes again totalled $2m.
Now known as the Livamol Classic, it last year became the first New Zealand race to be named one of the top 100 weightfor-age races in the world, although the stakes were just $250,000. Formerly known as the Hawke’s Bay Challenge Stakes it was rebranded in 1991 and has been won by three Hawke’s Baytrained horses — Moss Downs in 1997, Jimmy Choux in 2011 and Wait A Sec in 2017.
2008: A CHANGING WORK FORCE
The Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme had been through its first year, bringing hundreds then thousands into New Zealand to plug the workforce gaps in the horticulture and viticulture industries, with workers recruited from mainly Pacific nations to help pick our apples at the peak of the harvest.
It was initially capped at 5000 nationwide but is now capped at 12,850, coming from such places as Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu and creating a new culture in Hawke’s Bay.
2009: NAPIER SIEGE
On May 7, three long-serving Napier police officers were shot on a mid-morning drugs raid at the home of cannabis grower Jan Molenaar in Chaucer Rd, Hospital Hill. Arriving home to find the officers talking with partner Delwyn Keefe and friend Lenny Holmwood, Molenaar took a gun from his room, ordered the officers out and opened fire as they retreated. Senior Constable Len Snee died, and colleagues Bruce Miller and Grant Diver and civilian Holmwood were seriously wounded. Napier’s biggest ever armed police operation ended two days later when Molenaar was found dead in the house from a self-inflicted gunshot.
2010: NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR
On May 11, Hawke’s Bay Today was named Newspaper of the Year for publications with circulations up to 30,000 daily. The acclaim came at the Qantas Media Awards in Auckland and largely recognised the coverage of the Napier siege 12 months earlier.
It was eight years later that Hawke’s Bay Today won the best front page at the rebranded Voyager Awards, for an effort that focused on the 2016 Havelock North water crisis at the time of the inquiry in 2017.
2011: RUGBY WORLD CUP
Hawke’s Bay’s part in the Rugby World Cup, the biggest sports competition ever held in New Zealand and attracting more than 130,000 people from overseas, and won by the All Blacks, was played out in two games at McLean Park, Napier. On September 18 France beat Canada 46-19 and nine days later Canada and Japan drew 23-all, the only draw in the 48-match, six-week tournament.
2012: MISSION CONCERT
On February 25, Rod Stewart became the first and still the only two-time star billing at Napier’s big concert held at the Mission Estate winery and vineyards annually since 1993.
He was even more popular than first time around in 2005 and attracted a record Mission crowd reported to be about 27,000, possibly also a record for any paid entertainment or sports event in New Zealand outside the main centres.
2013: RANFURLY SHIELD REIGN
Hawke’s Bay’s prospects of Ranfurly Shield rugby heaven in Hawke’s Bay had never been far from the thought of fans in the 44 years since a great era ended when the mighty Magpies of the 1960s lost the shield at Canterbury in 1969. The euphoria arrived early on the Sunday evening of September 1 with a 20-19 win over holders Otago in the indoor arena of Forsyth Barr Stadium