From Heritage New Zealand Summer 2006

by Paul Little

Kawerau's heritage buildings are unique in their youth and ubiquity. The town is on their case

Anyone who knows Kawerau well would have had their attention piqued by a headline in the Whakatane Beacon of 9 June. “No heritage in Kawerau says council”. What? Nothing? Even the Kawerau Community website describes the town as one “steeped in history and tradition”. What sort of council disdains the worth of its own assets to such a degree? Not Kawerau’s as it turned out.

Reading the story revealed that, in the process of meeting its obligations under the Building Act, the council had noted that none of its buildings carried a heritage classification. Simply, Kawerau’s youth meant no one had got around to recording its heritage, but the wheels were well in motion.

It is one of our youngest towns, yet, from a heritage point of view, also among our most significant, because it exists today largely as it was when it first came into being in the 1950s. The 19th century saw many towns spring up “overnight” – Kumara, Cromarty and Arrowtown among them. But, in those cases, gold was the impetus. The gold that brought Kawerau into being literally grew on trees: timber from the Kaingaroa and other nearby forests. To process this, a mill had to be built, and to man the mill a town was needed. Thus, Kawerau.

Previously, the area had supported a substantial Maori population, and there are numerous remains of pa and earthworks sites. Kawerau was a chief in the area, descended from Toi teHuatahi. The name means “carrier of leaves” and refers to the fact that Kawerau was born while his mother was harvesting kiekie. The Maori heritage of the area is substantial and deserving of consideration in its own right, a very different one from that of the town that came into being in 1954.

Although there were other candidates at the time, the choice of location seems obvious now. It is flat, in a plain of the Tarawera Valley, but nestles at the foot of Putauaki, Mt Edgecumbe. It is a short distance from Whakatane and Rotorua, slightly further to Tauranga. A river runs by it. The weather is excellent. And there is geothermal activity that is harnessed by both the mill and “the last free public heated swimming pool in New Zealand”, as any resident will tell you proudly.

The geothermal activity is said to be greater than Rotorua’s. It continues to make its presence felt, with mixed results. On the plus side, notes district councillor Alistair Holmes, there are benefits to come if an application from Mighty River Power to build a station to supply the national grid – and provide security of supply for local industry – is successful. On the other hand, “You have that terrible smell. And you also get a lot of corrosion. There’s been lots of damage to buildings and roads. A whole wall of the Recreation Centre was replaced last year because it had just corroded away. If you built that building now, you wouldn’t build it there.”

The Rec Centre came relatively late in Kawerau’s brief history. Its very first structure is no more. That was a toilet erected to meet the needs of those who began work building the town in 1953.

Following the toilet, town and mill rapidly began to take shape together. Within short order, the mill itself, serviceable houses for the workers, more substantial residences for management, parks, schools and shops appeared. “It was an impressive site because of the sheer size of it,” the late Kenneth Moore, resident and town historian, told The New Zealand Herald in 2004, in a story to mark Kawerau’s 50th anniversary.

“New Zealand wasn’t used to that sort of thing. There were 1800 men up there building that mill, and a similar number down at the town building all the houses and facilities for the influx of workers.” At one point, two houses were being completed per day. The town was commissioned on 1 April 1954. Many were the rueful comments on the appropriateness of the date, especially from local bureaucrats attempting to bring some order to this rapidly growing entity.

June Ter Ellen, resident and one of the curators of the Sir James Fletcher Kawerau Historical Museum, no doubt echoing the feelings of many other early residents, notes: “We were very lucky because everything was put in place for us. We didn’t have to do a lot of the stuff other towns had to do. You need parks – we had heaps of parks. You need a town hall – we got a town hall. It’s all here.”

Topographic class distinctions are also here. “The Hill is still the best address,” says Ter Ellen. “It was always considered ‘Nob Hill’ because that’s where the superintendents upwards lived. The workers were down here.”

The people reflected the town. “Everybody was young. There was no one for years much over 40. Everyone was keen, and there was everything you could imagine or want to do, from sports teams to cultural things to bridge clubs. Everything.”

The makers of Kawerau had obviously served their instant population well. The town was designed by anonymous Ministry of Works architects whose skill can be measured not just by the fact that there was a sense of community among this polyglot population from the start, but also that the town’s layout and services have survived to this day. It was obviously well thought through.

“The way it has been set out has created a good separation of classes of activity,” says Chris Jensen, council regulatory and planning manager. “We don’t have a lot of the conflicts you might see in other towns between industry and residential amenities in terms of noise and traffic movements.”

A mill As big as Kawerau’s could indeed oppress its town – just ask Blake or Dickens. But, “the town angles around a corner away from where the main residential activity is,” notes Jensen. Another way of looking at it is to say that everyone knows the mill is there but, once you’ve left work and gone home, it’s easy to pretend it’s not.

The town’s roads and streets tend to curve. There are only two crossroads, the rest are just T-junctions, and only one set of traffic lights – near the mill. The layout took some getting used to in the early days. “When I first came, I was teaching at Central School and lived by the fire station,” says Ter Ellen.“I could always look for the station tower and go: ‘That street’s heading in that direction,’ but, no, you’d head off and end up somewhere else.”

The town planners also included numerous reserves, made good use of the river and planned streets that were wide and are planted with trees that continue to de-emphasise the industrial aspect today.

One of the most significant elements of Kawerau’s identity is the multinational flavour it had from the start. “A lot came from Australia and went back, and England and went back,” says Ter Ellen. “Germans were here. Finns were brought in.”

The Finns had their own paper-making industry and brought much needed expertise. While many did return to their home countries, many others stayed. Headstones in the town’s cemetery bear a roll call of non-Anglo Saxon or Maori names. Ter Ellen herself has been here nearly as long as the town. She came for a year in 1958 as a teacher and met and married her Dutch husband.

This international flavour is reflected in the town’s most indigenous – and probably single most important – building, the wharenui at Rautahi marae, itself not on the outskirts but right in the centre of town, reflecting its function as a community focus.

“There are other multicultural marae around the country,” says Pakeha trustee Bernie Joyes, “but this one is the only one I know of where the carvings on the three centre poles represent 42 different nationalities: Ireland, Wales, England, Scotland, America, you name it.”

Not only do these carvings recognise all the nationalities that helped bring the town into being, but the wharenui’s wall carvings are done in the individual styles of major tribes from all around New Zealand. “Not only is it multicultural,” says Jones, “but it’s inter-tribal.”

As well as the traditional community uses, “Norske Skog and Carter Holt use it if they want to impress overseas customers. It embraces within itself the whole town and it represents the history of the whole town.”

Other multinational sites are not of quite such aesthetic value but they are relevant to Kawerau’s heritage nonetheless. Such would include the homes built for the American families who came in the early days. Unimpressed by the accommodation on offer, they insisted, successfully, on ranch-style homes being built.

And one of the few buildings Kawerau has lost was distinctly incongruous in a New Zealand setting. “They pulled down a Finnish sauna,” says Ter Ellen. “The old ones [Finns] were gone and the young ones didn’t use it and it was getting a bit knocked around. That was a shame because it was unique.”

But much else remains. The library and concert chambers building near the town shopping centre was originally the cafeteria to which workers came with their meal tickets – and the cutlery and cups that they had to supply themselves – for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It would not be hard to come up with a list of buildings of interest in the town. In fact, Ter Ellen presented this writer with just such a list. Many sites are obvious – the shopping centre, which was built on the ever-so-modern “shopping court” model of the time (single level with a pedestrian only court through its centre), not to mention the mill itself, which welcomes visitors to the town with a pillar of smoke by day.

But other notable buildings are quite inconspicuous. If you didn’t have someone to point it out to you, you wouldn’t be able to pick out the first three houses built, the first manager’s house, the house that used to be the bank, complete with walk-in safe, and the one that was the first maternity hospital.

Former mill worker Holmes nominates “areas in the mill that are quite unique. In the timber area, there’s a massive shed, the dry shed, which I think was one of the biggest open spaces built. It had a 120-foot (36-metre) wide crane used to pick up loads of timber and move them around the shed. The council building itself would be a heritage building. It’s been here from the beginning.”

Not everything was laid on for residents. The distinctive dome shaped recreation centre, it of the corroded wall, was a community initiative, with fundraising along the lines of a rolling pin sweeping race and mother and daughter contest. “They tell you something about the town, these places,” says Holmes.

One of the reasons for Kawerau’s state of preservation has been a lack of growth. The population was 9000 at its height and is around 7000 today. While many, especially younger, residents might have been happy to see buildings torn down to make way for a big red shed or a set of golden arches, the town’s economy hasn’t made such enterprises viable. Holmes notes the paradox: “Our identity has been preserved even though we’d have liked the prosperity.”

Kawerau’s residents have always been proud of their home; the community spirit is almost palpable. But many are only beginning to realise its heritage significance. Although it is now just more than 50 years old, when that amount of time has elapsed again, it will have reached a century, and, if the right measures are put in place now, a perfect slice of mid-20th-century town planning and small-town architecture will have been preserved, almost intact.

“The approach I’m taking,” says Chris Jensen, “is that it’s important for us to now look at what is important to the community, so that in another 50 years we’re not looking back and saying ‘What if … ?’ and, ‘I wish ... ’ ” Jensen says the 50th anniversary “reminded the community that it has some presence and some place. So, there are a number of persons and organisations who are now sensing the importance of doing it.”

Ter Ellen agrees. She says more and younger people are coming into the tiny museum at the back of the library – really just a collection of fascinating historical photographs. “People didn’t realise there was all this. They’re just starting to realise we should be looking after the buildings and that the town is unique.”

Familiarity breeds apathy. “When people live here, they don’t  realise what they’ve got. We’re trying to preserve what could get thrown out.” She also points out the national significance of Kawerau, not just in the size and success of the enterprise, but also in the economic impact of the industry it enabled.

So, Chris Jensen has a big job on his hands. “From my perspective, with a review of the district plan coming up over the next two to three years, it’s timely to have a good look at the heritage provisions, and particularly built heritage.” He will carry out a built-heritage assessment and make sure that the next district plan fully takes account of what the community needs. “I’m confident that the community will see the need to take steps for heritage protection.”