Historic Hanmer morgue on the move
For decades one of the oldest morgues in the country has been tucked away in a secluded spot, shaded beneath a stand of fir trees.
Now the historic halfway house of the dead – the stop before the final stop – is to be moved to preserve the building in the Canterbury town of Hanmer Springs.
The Hurunui District Council has long had an agreement with the Ministry of Health for the weatherboard mortuary, built in 1903, to be shifted from the southern section of the former Queen Mary Hospital site.
The process has accelerated after the ministry deemed the land surplus to requirements, leading the Crown to begin the disposal process this year.
The council is now working on a plan to move the morgue back to its original location – it was shifted sometime in the 1950s – in the northern section of the hospital site, which was vested to the council as a historic reserve in 2010.
Hanmer Springs Community Board member Rosemary Ensor, who has largely driven the bid for preservation, said it was important to keep local history alive.
‘‘Once a building goes like that goes, you never get that bit of history back again. I really want to see it preserved.’’
The morgue was commissioned in 1902 as part of a Government Sanatorium complex, comprised of baths and accommodation, built in the late 19th century due to the supposed healing properties of the town’s thermal waters.
‘‘The sanatorium was a place for elderly and infirm people who were taking the waters or breathing the mountain air and enjoying the scenery,’’ Ensor said. And with sickness comes death. The weatherboard morgue, described as an example of late Victorian gothic architecture, is a little larger than a single garage. Inside there is a marble plinth, or slab, with room for one body at a time.
The sanatorium building itself burned down in 1914, and the site eventually became repurposed as the Queen Mary Hospital for rehabilitating soldiers, which then became a site foralcohol and drug rehabilitation. The morgue, which Heritage New Zealand (HNZ) said continued to be used until at least 1986, was moved to its isolated spot as the hospital grew.
‘‘The morgue is historically significant as the earliest intact building on the former hospital site and for its association with the government sanatorium,’’ HNZ spokeswoman Robyn Burgess said.
But it it falls short of clinching the title of the country’s oldest morgue.
Burgess said the Hanmer morgue was ‘‘potentially’’ one of New Zealand’s oldest, but HNZ was aware of older, including one at the former Seacliff Lunatic Asylum north of Dunedin, which was thought to be constructed in the 1880s or 1890s.
Council regulatory services manager Judith Batchelor said she hoped the morgue would be moved within the ‘‘next few months’’. If you’ve been hung up on by a mystery international number, don’t call back.
New Zealand is ‘‘flavour of the month’’ for robo-dialling scam calls, which may try to draw premium calling fees out of unsuspecting punters. Telco companies are divided on the type of scam being employed, but are advising anyone who has returned a dropped call to check their phone bill.
2degrees spokesman Paul Brislen said a robo-calling piece of software was churning through New Zealand phone books.
‘‘Suddenly NZ is the flavour of the month, because somebody has got to +64.’’
Brislen said many were premium call scams, called the ‘‘wangiri scam’’ by the industry. Such scams aim to have a person return the hung-up call, routing them through the equivalent of a
0900 number and charging them an exorbitant fee. ‘‘You call them back and nothing happens and you’re on the line for about 30 seconds and then you get a bill.’’
Brislen did not know how much people were being charged for the calls, but with 0900 calls ‘‘it could be anywhere from $1 a minute to $50 a minute’’. The calls – from countries such as Bangladesh, Morocco, Canada and Cuba – might not be from the location indicated by the calling code, as often internet-based phones are used to mask the true location.
‘‘You could be calling from Madagascar and calling from a NZ number. It’s hard to track the numbers as we can’t tell where they’re coming from, you can’t block them and you can’t tell how much people can get charged until it’s too late.’’
People who had returned such calls should check their bill, and contact their phone company to contest the charge.
Spark confirmed a surge in scam calls in recent months, but had not received reports on the wangiri scam specifically.
The hang-up calls were likely scammers using auto-dialling software to ring en masse; the silence due to either the dialler failing to pick up ‘‘human activity’’ or the caller not reaching the connection in time, Spark spokeswoman Cassie Arauzo said.
Often these callers purported to call from a recognisable company or have investment opportunities and return calls accrued international calling charges.