From Heritage New Zealand, Spring 2005

French Footprints

By Jessie Munro

At Russell, France and New Zealand are looking through their shared past to a promising future together.

Lyon-based book historian Dr Dominique Varry at Pompallier Mission. Photo: Kate Matin

Politics, print and prayer were intertwined in all mission experience in the Bay of Islands at the crossover era of TeTiriti o Waitangi. These three elements of history are pulling researchers increasingly to the Trust's Pompallier Mission in Russell. Why? Because it is an authentic and ideally situated survivor of that crucial era in our history, and is also dynamically engaged in the ongoing story. That is how, one serene April evening in 2004, I found myself with other pilgrims, traders and storytellers of history on board the Bay's tall ship R.Tucker Thompson. The Tucker happens to be the exact replica of the schooner that Bishop Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier bought in 1840 to be the French Catholic mission ship, the Santa Maria. Just right to give an 1840s feel at the start of three days at the "French Place", "te urunga mai o te iwi wiwi". (Yes,"wiwi" is how Maori named the French, from the "oui, oui" they kept hearing.)

The Pompallier Symposium of 2004, as Auckland University's Dr Manuka Henare said, was a festival of history, fulfilling "something of a dream, which was to bring history into small communities in North Auckland". There will be another at Kerikeri in November.

Russell Primary School children act as guides at Pompallier Mission. Photo: Kate Matin

What about Maori political, spiritual and economic agency in relation to the French, for instance? Religion, trade and politics were integrally bound.What about the visits of French whaling and naval vessels, increasing dramatically in number in the late 1830s? You can count hundreds of French whalers and marines among the roistering sailors, on record for the usual range of drunken "vices" of Kororareka's branded past. How did Maori deal with the French Catholic missionaries setting out to counter the hard-sought gains of English Protestants? How did hapu and iwi seek to gain leverage from these French secular and Catholic factors?

What was the pattern of Maori and French exchange around the Kororareka headquarters of the French mission during a highly charged period? Dame Anne Salmond spoke during the symposium of Marion du Fresne's tragic visit to the Bay in 1772, and her sensitive and meticulous account pointed out "the dangers of ignorance in human relationships".

"It takes mutual knowledge as well as goodwill to transact our relationships with each other successfully," she said, and "patience and a great deal of effort on occasion ... to find common purpose together."

Thanks to a New Zealand Teacher Fellowship in 2003 - a Ministry of Research, Science and Technology scheme administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand - I had the chance to be part of this search for common purpose. Pompallier Mission was my host organisation in a project to let more of the voices and stories from early French Marist documents be heard.

I was interested in the people living and working in the Catholic mission centred on the Kororareka site, and their interrelationship with Maori.

Kate Martin and other local experts had me sailing the waters, climbing hills, crossing mudflats, floundering through bogs, bouncing on the back of a ute, following the tracks of these men in the Hokianga, Whangaroa, Kaipara and the Bay of Islands. To gauge the context in which these French Catholics found themselves, I was also shown allimportant Maori sites and the corresponding "English places" of the opposition "heretics".

The controversial religious dynamic around the time of the Treaty continues to be accessed mainly through English Protestant documents, since many Marist priests'records are still in their original French. But other men, Marist brothers, were part of the French mission too, and their letters, translated by Br Edward Clisby, allow English speakers to learn more of their experiences and emotions. These were the men who worked on and at the pisé building that is Pompallier.

Michel, Claude-Marie, Pierre-Marie, Emery, Basile, Luc, Elie- Régis, Euloge, Florentin and others quarried the rock, shoveled the clay, burnt the shells for lime, rammed the mix, rowed materials across the bay, built the walls slowly, made the joinery for the printery and other much simpler pisé buildings nearby, now long gone. Although most of them originally intended to be teaching brothers, the circumstances in New Zealand made them gardeners, wine-growers, boatmen, cooks, butchers, tanners, printers, bookbinders. Some of them were often cooped up for long days inside the building to meet the huge demand for books in Maori. Occasionally, they could be the teachers and catechists to Maori that they had hoped always to be.Over the year, I drew close to them, along with their priest companions.

These priests and brothers obviously weren't in the roistering lot. They were spiritual, zealous, overall enthusiastic and definitely stoic. Often lonely, too, and bewildered with elements of two new cultures. They veered from the pressures of isolation at the outstations to those of overcrowding at the small Kororareka headquarters. This overcrowding became an issue in one despondent 1842 letter to France. Father Jean André Tripe had fretted about oil spilt twice all over his trunk, and about a sacred altar stone being broken by a fellow priest's careless handling. (The broken stone turned up in the Pompallier archaeological excavations of the early 1990s.) He felt he was being told off too much by his bishop and cited one instance. "While I was happily playing my guitar during recreation time, I was told: 'What are you doing with that instrument of yours?! You'd be better off studying.' That put paid to instruments for me, so I left them behind when I came to Akaroa."

Hawke's Bay Mission wines date back to grapes grown by these men in the Hokianga, Whangaroa and Kaipara, and on the slopes of Kororareka/Russell. "I'm busy just now preparing to plant vines," wrote Brother Elie- Régis in 1840 from Whangaroa, "I will then have the prettiest vineyard in New Zealand, God willing. It will be a côte rôtie wine [characteristic of his Rhône wines back home] because of the position and the quality of the soil." In another letter, Pierre- Marie reported back to France on the 1844 Kororareka vintage: "Our little vineyard has given us more than 120 bottles of white wine this year." Father Garin's Mangakahia journal records him pruning his own and neighbours' vines in the northern Kaipara.

Centre a compass on Lyon in the Rhône Valley and draw a circle reaching about 75 kilometres out into the countryside, and you cover almost everywhere these Marists came from. (The same circumference also nets in most of the first women in the Pacific Catholic missions, including New Zealand's Suzanne Aubert.) With the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I travelled around several of these villages in May and June of that hot, hot French summer in 2003. I wanted to track the men's home communities, and look at 19th-century houses and barns built in the commonplace and money-saving pisé technique of these gravelly landscapes. Out in New Zealand, they were building Pompallier in the same way and at the same time their own relatives were building their beautifully plain farm buildings back home.

There is a strong renewal of interest in France, on both historical and ecological grounds, in restoring, adapting and constructing rammed earth buildings. Kate Martin spent time inFrance in September 2004, learning more of this process from experts and enthusiasts in Grenoble, Lyon and outlying areas such as l'Arbresle, where a pisé farmhouse and its outbuildings stand intact and unchanged. It is now a museum.An informed dialogue with these experts is essential for the Trust to be able to preserve Pompallier. Special challenges confront this unique building on its beachfront site in our wind-driven, rainy climate. Pisé, once wet, can collapse into a heap!

A strengthening kinship is also growing between the little Pompallier print museum and its world-famous counterpart in Lyon, le Musée de l'Imprimerie. Dr Dominique Varry, again with the support of the French Embassy in Wellington, was able to come out to Russell for the symposium. From the prestigious French university for information and library sciences based in Lyon, he shared his expert knowledge of French print history and the French publishers who had handled some Pacific mission production. He now has graduate students doing further research in Pacific printing history.

Like others, he has been struck by the sheer volume of printing coming off the Kororareka press between 1842 and 1849:well over 30,000 books, including 6000 of the major 648-page Ko te Ako.... Much of this achievement was due to the quickly acquired skills, intelligent planning and hard work of the lay printer Jean Yvert. His fascinating letters about his crammed training and the decisions over the purchase of the press before he left France, and his equally intensive printing experience here, are now being translated.

Politics, print ... and prayer. Even though Pompallier as a national historic place is officially secular, spirituality/wairua is part and parcel of its shared Maori, Pakeha and French heritage. Lyon again is a key. It is often called the cradle of Western European Christianity; the cardinal archbishop of Lyon is "the Primate of the Gauls", not his fellow cardinal in Paris.

New Zealand's strong spiritual ties with the Lyon region are being drawn closer once again. Maori are bringing back to Fourvière, the famous shrine dedicated to Mary that overlooks the river Saône, their bicultural expression of Catholic spirituality. Not far from Lyon is the shrine of Notre Dame de la Roche, where you'll find the grave of Louis Perret, the architect whose short stay in Kororareka gave us such a distinctive building in our national landscape.The local Amis de Notre Dame de la Roche are extending their friendship to New Zealanders.

Pompallier the place honoured Pompallier the man during the poignant, celebratory hikoi of 2002, when Maori Catholics from Northland fulfilled their long-held vision of bringing back the bishop's remains from France. Before being laid to rest at Motuti in the Hokianga, these were taken to the places of his lifetime travels. The garden of the Pompallier mission was one of these places. The spiritual nature of this event held meaning for everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic, Maori and Pakeha; from there, you look straight across the bay to Waitangi, where the bishop was mainly responsible in February 1840 for the inclusion of the Treaty's "Fourth Article", allowing us all the right to religious and customary tolerance.

Very significant in the spiritual history of the Pompallier site is the story of a young Maori woman baptised Peata (from Latin Beata or "Blessed") no more than three weeks before the Treaty of Waitangi. In essence, she became the first religious sister in New Zealand. In 1845, shortly after the destruction of Kororareka, a party of canoes approached the still-standing Catholic mission, seemingly intent on attack. Br Emery was there to observe what then happened and recorded in a letter how he saw Peata stride to the water's edge and karanga to the incoming chief and his party.

According to the tradition, this courageous act led to a cloak of protection being placed by the chief over Pompallier. Peata's travels and influence in the Maori and Catholic worlds continue to have far-reaching effect. Acknowledging her role at the outset and her later mentoring in the 1860s of people such as Suzanne Aubert is a goal shared by many in the North.

Pompallier, with its shore, garden, pisé building and steep hill behind, is redolent of accumulated, entwined stories. Air and land and water and people meet at this "French place". During the symposium, ecologist Dr Geoff Park pointed out that "whenua was not just land but was a connector between people and place - the two are in relationship". This is what is continuing to keep Maori, French and Pakeha connected to their Bay of Islands place, to "te urunga mai o te iwi wiwi".

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