From Heritage New Zealand, Autumn 2008

by Rachel Macdonald

At the end of last year, excavations at Auckland's Carlaw Park turned up a rare link to the North Island's 19th century Chinese immigrant community

Auckland’s Carlaw Park, tucked into a gully between the northern slopes of the Domain and the south side of Parnell, has been through many metamorphoses. In the 1840s, it was the site of one of the city’s first flour mills, followed by a tannery and then a Chinese market garden. In 1916, the first grandstands and terraces went up as it was turned into rugby league grounds and leased to the Auckland Rugby League Club. And, by 1921, the club had made the park its home; an arrangement that continued until it was retired for use as a university carpark in the 1990s.

Then, early in 2007, it seemed there might be a possibility of the stadium’s sporting heritage being resurrected, when it was mooted as a possible alternative location for then Auckland mayor Dick Hubbard’s Waterfront Stadium New Zealand. The concept designs presented to the city council by lobbyists calling themselves the Domain Stadium Promotion Group were prepared by the same team that delivered the refurbished Jade Stadium to Christchurch, and did attract a modicum of support.

That plan failed to fly, however, and today Carlaw Park’s Number Two ground is in the process of being transformed into a sizeable mixed-use development at the hands of McDougall Reidy & Co. Designed by architects Warren and Mahoney, and being built by Haydn and Rollett, this will comprise commercial space, a serviced hotel, residential apartments and hospitality outlets, all within a quick walk of Parnell and the Domain. The Number One ground has remained in the hands of the Auckland Rugby League Club. It plans to build a rest home on the land as an income-earner.

However, under the Historic Places Act 1993, any location where there is evidence of human occupation before 1900 is defined as an archaeological site. This means it requires an authority from the New Zealand Historic Places Trust before works that will modify, damage or destroy the site can begin. In this case, of particular interest were Carlaw Park’s 19th century uses.

So, before the diggers lifted the last of the asphalt last October, time was allowed to get a team of archaeologists in to investigate what lay underneath. Led by Dr Hans Bader of Geometria, an to make sure no precious fragments of the park’s rich and varied past were about to be lost.

Visiting the site on the day before it closed, I quickly realised that ensuring the remains of one of Auckland’s earliest Chinese settlement were retrieved, recorded and interpreted to provide new insights into this part of Auckland’s heritage, was a seriously messy job.

Mud-caked archaeologists were bucketing the ground-water out of an old cesspit (all over Bader’s car) – the pump had found the dirt too much and given up. In the site tent, trays of dirt-caked artefacts were painstakingly being cleaned, classified and bagged by other, equally grimy hands.

Despite the mess, though, there was nothing random about this dig. Geometria’s first task, embarked upon well prior to picking up the trowels, was a research stint, looking back into the documented history of Carlaw Park to work out what its team would be looking for, and where.

“We ranged through the council archives and old maps, and undertook geophysical surveys to get an idea of where the built structures had stood,” explains Bader. “We could then go to the developer and discuss access to the best place to dig, which was at the bottom left of the park, if you’re looking up the valley from Stanley St.”

The location and layout of the Low and Motion Flour Mill was pinpointed, as was the set-up of the tannery with its pelt pits. And Geometria also turned up a mortgage over the land dating from 1882, in the name of Mr Chan Ah Chee.

“This last find, in particular, strongly reinforced our thinking that the site had high potential for yielding artefacts related to Chinese market garden activities, and could reveal more about Auckland’s early commercial industries, as the area was one of Auckland’s earliest industrial centres,” says Bev Parslow, regional archaeologist for the New Zealand Historic Places Trust.

And such a layering of history provided the Geometria team with the challenge of distinguishing which period of the park’s past they were looking at as they dug. The oldest structure Bader expected to find was the water race for the flour mill. “When the mill was built, the valley was a swamp ... which is probably why it was so fertile as market gardens later on,” explains Bader. “The stream that ran across the flats was redirected along the shoulder of the hill, where it fed the millpond, sluicing down from there into the millrace.”

However, given the mill’s short tenure, Bader speculates it can’t have been a particularly successful venture. The same can’t be said of the tannery, if the discovery of a nearly complete hide in one of the pits, more than 100 years after it was put there, is any indicator.

“We had a sketch plan of the tannery to go by, but no map,” says Bader. “There were a number of large pits, some clay-lined, all connected to a central barrel that would have fed them. We’ve managed to salvage most of the workings, but have yet to understand exactly how it operated.”

Then, in 1882, ownership of the land passed to Mr Chan, the brick foundations of whose house were unearthed only a couple of days into the project, lying intact just under the surface of the tarmac of the old carpark. It’s this Chinese connection that makes the site particularly valuable, say Parslow and Bader.

“The finds to date have huge heritage significance,” says Parslow, “as they show visible evidence of the settlement and occupation of the Chinese community in early colonial Auckland. Interestingly, we can also see that the community was prospering – even though Auckland was in the grip of a major economic depression at the time. In fact, we know Mr Chan later went on to own six commercial properties on Queen Street, along with three other market gardens elsewhere in Auckland, and a banana plantation in Fiji.”

And the Chinese community has taken enormous interest in the site, as it gives a voice to a group of people who were almost invisible in Auckland’s early historic records, adds Bader.

“While a Chinese presence in the Otago goldrush days has been well examined and documented, the Carlaw Park dig was the first archaeological excavation of an early Chinese site in the North Island,” he says. “Given the racism of the time, the Chinese community was essentially a silent one. History is very quiet on the activities and daily round of life of these people, so that’s what we were there to unearth.”

Bader suspects that when the Chan family took over the land, the dam from the old mill was still intact. Given there is evidence of a stream running down the valley to irrigate the market gardens that filled it, one of the advantages of the property was probably the availability of such a ready water source once the dam had been cut.

Around the house site, just beyond the neat little courtyard and its path to what must have been – given the size of its roots – an enormous tree, wood-lined drains kept the water at bay. However, the stream had to be crossed by way of a boxed structure filled with stones to get to the kitchen garden. It was also bridged near here by a wide timber trough, where the picked vegetables were washed for market. “We don’t know exactly where the timber came from,” says Bader. “And we’ve taken this opportunity to salvage samples to be examined using new technology, called dendro-chronology, which may be able to tell us a lot regarding age and tree species.”

The house itself was built on a combination of timber and stone piles, and underwent several extensions in the course of its life. The chimney also had to be replaced at some time, with the original fireplace being laid atop one of the old tanning pits and slowly falling into it over the years.

A number of the significant artefacts unearthed from in and around the home were showcased to the public at an open day last year. Among the discoveries were imported Chinese domestic and commercial ceramics and 30 to 40 rice wine bottles, still intact, but with their richly coloured glaze starting to become delaminated after being buried so long.

“Most of the artefacts came from the site of the old mill, alongside the house, which has been used as kind of a dumping ground,” says Bader. “Others had just been tossed under the house – some behaviours don’t really change over time!”

There were also several 17th century Chinese coins, many-sided and with a hole in the middle. “The most likely explanation for this is that a member of the family brought it over from China as a keepsake; a memento of home,” says Bader.

The open day and a ceremony on the day the dig was closed also offered opportunities for descendents of the Chan family to visit the site. “We had one very elderly lady who was fascinated to see where the stream had run,” says Bader. “She had recollections of her mother telling her, when she was small, how eels could be flipped out of the water by hand, to be cooked for the dinner plate.”

Such memories, along with the small amount of information that can be unearthed from the archives, are as essential to the process of archaeology as the excavation itself.

“Archaeology doesn’t take place in a vacuum,” says Bader. “Finding what’s hidden in the earth is one thing, but it’s meaningless unless it can be placed into a context. Part of the excitement is teasing out the details that come together to make the whole story.”

Much of this life of the Chans is to be preserved in a book on Chinese growers in New Zealand, the production of which coincided with the dig. And there’s also a more site-relevant plan under discussion, designed not to let the busy workings of Carlaw Park in the past slip back into obscurity.

“Once the new developments are built, we’re working on having a small space set aside above what was once the millrace, where people can sit and look down on the site, and read about its history from a description board,” says Bader. “It would be nice to leave both a gesture to, and a memento of, the past here.”