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

Nearby Castlepoint was the main port for Wairarapa

Anzac Day once again saw tiny Tinui swell with people attending the service in the small Wairarapa town. However, it looks like like the air force’s recent proposal to turn Tinui into a place of pilgrimage may have hit a snag.

Tinui was the site of the first Anzac Day service in 1916, just one year after the Australian and New Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli. The service was held in the village church, and afterwards the villagers processed up Tinui Taipo (a rock outcrop also known as Mt Maunsell) and erected a cross – the first permanent Anzac memorial. The original cross was replaced with an aluminium cross in 1965.

So the air force’s idea has some justification, but it seems this plan wasn’t discussed with the owners of the Tinui station, on whose land the memorial stands. Tinui station is a working farm and, while the owners have allowed people access to the memorial on Anzac Day and by prior arrangement, they’re understandably reluctant to have people tramping across their fields willy nilly. Pilgrims could instead gather at the memorial in the town, but what a pilgrimage would be complete without a climb up a hill?

Tinui is a small town steeped in history. I experienced this first hand while staying in a holiday cottage at homestead of the very same Tinui station. The cottage itself was about 130 years old, and the station even older.

The village has a wee museum behind a craft shop, from which I learned that Tinui had once been a thriving village, servicing the enormous sheep stations of the region. At this stage nearby Castlepoint was Wairarapa’s main port, and it was much easier to transport goods by sea than by land – especially on the narrow windy roads around that area.

Photos of Tinui’s main street from the late 19th century showed it lined with shops, but in the 2000s most of the shops are gone, replaced by grassy fields. When I visited a few years ago, the Tinui hotel was still there, but apparently it has been moved to Greytown now. And I’m told that a church from Tinui has been moved out to Riversdale. It’s sad that the town should have to sell its historic family jewels, but, I guess – with a much-depleted population, and with wool prices not what they once were – what’s a small town to do.

My grandfather Toivo as a young man (click for full image)

Toivo Pärssinen (1911–2007), my Finnish grandfather, fought in two little-known wars (in New Zealand at least) within the Second World War – the Winter War (1939–1940) and the Continuation War (1941–1944). I am named after Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, who led the Finnish forces (he had a great moustache). Russia was the ’sleeping bear’ and whoever was Russia’s enemy was Finland’s ally. This proved to be Germany, once Hitler broke the non-agression pact with Russia in 1941.

During the wars Toivo (which means ‘hope’ in Finnish) was a cornet and later cavalry captain. In the summer of 1945, at the end of the fighting, my grandmother Saima was pregnant and had two children under six. The army flipped a coin. He lost, so he was sent to clear mines in Lapland – departing SS troops had razed the town of Rovaniemi and laid mines. Toivo’s eyebrows got burnt when his best friend stood on a mine. They picked his remains out of the trees.

Toivo's cavalry funeral in 2007 (click for full image)

Toivo did not talk much about the war, but he had a small map on his bedside wall of a horseshoe-shaped lake where he grew up in Karelia. At the end of the war Russia took a large chunk of eastern Finland as war reparations. The Finnish army burnt the Karelian farmhouses as they withdrew. By war’s end Toivo was something of a pacifist but, as he said, ‘if you don’t shoot them they’ll shoot you’. He was pensioned in 1959 and enjoyed a long retirement. If the Finns hadn’t resisted the Soviet invasion they would have ended up like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – behind the Iron Curtain. Finland’s war experience is chronicled in the novel The unknown soldier by Vaino Linna, which has been translated into English. The book is anti-war.

My New Zealand grandfather, Frank Walrond, ran a stamp shop in Auckland’s Queen Street. During the Second World War he trained soldiers before they went overseas, so he saw no active service. Technically, Frank and Toivo were enemies at times and allies at others. The war was messy and complicated – there were all sorts of dirty little wars, land grabs and attempts to settle old scores. Toivo’s friend died from a German landmine and many of his brothers-in-arms, and his brother in-law, died by Russian fire.

A vodka bottle carved by my great uncle in the trenches (click for full image)

So, on New Zealand and Australia’s day of remembrance, ANZAC Day, I thought of Toivo and my great-uncles who were wounded, and I remembered Saima’s only brother, who died fighting for German forces against the Russians in ‘White Russia’ (Belarus). His last word was ‘aiti’ (mother). A small corner of a Belarusian field is forever Finnish.

New Zealand as a young British lion

On Saturday thousands of New Zealanders will get up in the autumn cold to attend dawn services and hear speakers describe Gallipoli as the birth of New Zealand nationhood. It is worth asking whether this was actually the case.

On the surface it seems an incredible claim:

• Most countries looking for the origins of a nation would choose a glorious victory; Gallipoli was an ignominious defeat.
• Gallipoli was not a battle at home, or even close to home, but in a part of the world that New Zealanders knew, and still know, little about.
• In the context of the First World War, Gallipoli was a minor sideshow to the major action on the Western Front. Only 8,566 New Zealanders served there – a small proportion of the 100,000 who went overseas. While 2,721 New Zealanders died on that rocky shore, that is less than a sixth of the 18,000 who died in the war, and small by comparison with the horrifying losses in France and Flanders.
• Even in the Gallipoli battle, the Anzac sector was not the major focus of the British effort – it was a diversion from the main effort at the foot of the peninsula.
• The New Zealanders went to Turkey under the orders of the mother country; they fought in a division which was predominantly Australian; and their commanding officer, Sir Alexander Godley, was a Pom
• The landing that is remembered at dawn on 25 April was very much an Australian affair. Most Kiwis did not reach shore until the afternoon.
• Knowledge of the Gallipoli campaign back here did not come from New Zealand reports, but through the congratulations of the British – such as the King, reporter Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, or poet John Masefield, who spoke of the Anzacs as ‘the flower of the world’s manhood’.
• In the long term, the effect of Gallipoli on New Zealand attitudes was to strengthen, not weaken, a sense of devotion to the British Empire. On about 500 First World War memorials, which I have examined, the word ‘New Zealand’ appears on just 3, the word ‘Empire’ on 31.

However, there are two ways in which Gallipoli can be said to be the birthplace of the New Zealand nation:

• In 1915 New Zealanders at home thought of themselves as irrevocably part of the British Empire. Their sense of nationhood was always as the ‘best of British’ – the most loyal, courageous and capable people in the empire. Gallipoli could then be seen as the birthplace of New Zealand as a fully fledged member of the imperial family.
• Among the soldiers themselves the experience of fighting alongside the British and the Australians led to a revolution in attitudes. When they landed in Egypt in December 1914, Kiwi soldiers were keen to present themselves as gentlemen like the British and quite unlike those rough colonial uncouth Aussies. But after months at Gallipoli they began to grumble about the class snobbery and sheer inefficiency of the British and to praise their brothers from across the Tasman. There was also a growing pride in the stickability and can-do attitude of their fellow countrymen. They developed a stronger sense of New Zealanders as a people very different from their imperial overlords.

However, when the New Zealand soldiers returned, this second sense of independent nationalism was submerged by the loud trumpetings of people at home, proud to identify New Zealand with the first, imperial, sense of New Zealand nationhood.

It will be fascinating to listen to the sentiments this Saturday and discover which view of New Zealand nationhood is most often expressed.

Welcome to Manaia

We went to Manaia in South Taranaki for Easter – an odd choice for a holiday, really. Even Murray, owner of the 103-year-old Waimate Hotel, where we stayed, looked dubious: ‘Do you have family here?’ he asked.

No; we’d driven down the coast road after WOMAD a few weeks earlier, and had our curiosity piqued by the signs that said ‘Soldiers’ cemetery’, and ‘Cape Egmont lighthouse‘, and ‘Parihaka Pa‘. Our Easter plan was to stay in Ōpunake, actually, but the Kneeboard Surfing World Championships were on and all the accommodation was full.

We were the only guests in the Waimate Hotel; not even the bar was open, because it was Good Friday. Murray told us that recently the place had been full, occupied by workers at the Kāpuni gas plant, but they’d all gone home for Easter.

Our room overlooked Manaia’s central Octagon, with its band rotunda and two granite obelisks, one commemorating the two world wars, and the other the men of the armed constabulary who died fighting the Ngāti Ruanui leader Tītokowaru in 1868.

Dairy tankers roared past, gleaming, on their way to the Fonterra factory at Whareroa, outside Hāwera. Yarrows bakery, opposite the hotel, was quiet, and the elegant 1911 post office was now home to a tattooist and an ‘alternative art gallery’. In the distance, Mt Taranaki, snow-topped after Thursday’s cold snap, was emerging from its thick cover of cloud.

Soldiers’ memorial, Te Ngutu-o-te-manu

On Saturday we went looking for Te Ngutu-o-te-manu, the pā where government forces made spectacularly unsuccessful attacks on Tītokowaru in August and September 1868. My atlas showed a historic place on an unnamed back road to the north; other than that, we had little to go on. We trawled up and down the narrow country roads, finally spotting a sign and driving into a bush-clad clearing where a tall white cross stood as memorial to the soldiers.

Ōhawe military cemetery – through the gate, over the fence, across the creek, up the hill

Almost as hard to find was the Ōhawe military cemetery, despite a large sign on the main road and an AA sign in the small beach settlement. We drove around and around, finally catching a glimpse of a monument in a hillside paddock behind a large hedge. We went through a gate, then picked our way through cowpats and thistles, climbed gingerly over an electric fence and jumped a creek to finally reach the small fenced area with its yellow-lichen-covered memorial to the Crown soldiers who died storming Ōtapawa pā and in other 1860s battles.

We gave up altogether on our search for Moturoa, another pā where Tītokowaru repelled government forces. An AA sign to the battle site points inland from Waverley, but once on the side road there’s no guidance at all. We were tired by then, and didn’t mind turning back – but it seems a shame that these remnants of South Taranaki history are so well-hidden.

If you’re out hunting for these sites, Te Ngutu-o-te-manu is on Ahipaipa Road, north of Ōkaiawa, and the Ōhawe cemetery is on farmland on Ōhawe Terrace. Let me know if you ever find Moturoa.

Super city from space

Recently, the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance released a report recommending merging the metropolis’s seven local authorities into one ‘super city’. It would make Auckland the biggest single municipal city in Australasia – just ahead of Brisbane – and end the ‘Auckland disease’ of fragmented and parochial local government. Well, perhaps.

Bickering has been a hallmark of Auckland governance since a welter of small councils were set up to govern the region following the end of provincial government in 1876. Rarely were these parts able to work as a whole. Projects benefiting the whole region – such as the harbour bridge – often got delayed or quashed by petty rivalries. In the 1950s geographer Kenneth Cumberland described Auckland’s local government as a ‘babel of disputing tongues … a comic opera of overlapping and ineffectual agencies we miscall “authorities”‘. In the 1960s these numbered 32; reforms in 1989 culled them to the present seven.

But it seems even seven is too many. Proponents argue a super-city council would stop infighting by working for the common interest. But in a metropolis that rightly prides itself on being New Zealand’s most cosmopolitan and diverse, agreeing on what these common interests are is going to be a challenge to say the least. New voices may well join Auckland’s babel of disputing tongues.

Meanwhile, the prospect of what the Otago Daily Times has called a ‘city state’ in Auckland raises the question as to whether we should embrace or fear the proposal. Will the proposal work? Might it mean Auckland dominates the country even more? Is that a good thing? Is there any alternative? And should other cities such as Wellington or Dunedin follow Auckland’s lead?