Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Memorial to the battle of Tūtūrau

This post is for the two wonderful women I met at the Otautau Museum last Thursday afternoon.

It was bitterly cold. I was trying to find the local sheep yards to take a photo. As I drove around the sleepy mid Southland town, I noticed the door of the local museum - once the court house - was ajar. I went in to ask where the yards were. Two women were just taking down an exhibition with some powerful photos of Otautau men going off to the Great War (the First World War). They were putting up an exhibition of lace and women’s work. They told me, to my embarrassment, that the yards had closed in the 1960s and there was not a trace to be seen. And one of the women, with a North American accent, who had been in Otautau for five years, said she knew about Te Ara - even read our blog. That made my day.

So this is a tribute to those Otautau women, and others like them, who have done such a great job in preserving history in Southland.

Everywhere I went I found that stories I had read in Te Ara were also being told in heritage trail plaques, murals, or stone monuments. They include, for example:

• Memorials to the battles between Māori. The last great battle between Ngāti Māmoe and Ngāi Tahu in the early 18th century is marked by a big stone boulder in the Five Rivers area. To recall the defeat of invaders from the north by Ngāi Tahu in 1836 there is a huge obelisk at Tūtūrau that records, as if it were an interisland football match, that this was ‘the last fight between North and South Island Maoris in which the Southerners were victorious’!
• Memorials to whalers, especially at Riverton where John Howell gets pride of place beside the Aparima River.
• A wonderful tribute to the large number of Scots settlers of Southland at Glencoe where a memorial recalls the Massacre of Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands in 1692.
• A sad memorial in a deserted field to the 131 people who drowned in the wreck of the Tararua on Waipapa Point in 1881.
• A tribute to coal-mining history at Ōhai, where Solid Energy have set up a display of mining equipment beside the main road.
• And, of course, the province is thick with war memorials – some slightly heroic, like the handsome Boer War trooper on the main corner of Invercargill; others with long lines of the dead from the Great War such as the hugely impressive memorial at Otautau itself, which is surrounded by captured Turkish and German field guns. Unusually, many of the war memorials in Southland also record those who served as well as those who died.

Southlanders, it seemed, have long memories and are intent on ensuring that we shall not forget. We are in your debt.