From Heritage New Zealand, Summer 2009

by Prue Dashfield

History comes alive for children when school projects involve hands on research in their own communities

"Every child ought to be made to understand not only something of the world in which he lives, but something of the inheritance from the past to which he is born… the historic sense, if once born in him, is a permanent enlargement of his life, kindling imagination, enriching experience, inspiring character.”

Quaker historian William Charles Braithwaite’s words of 100 years ago could be the mission statement for two NZHPT groups which have  convinced local schoolchildren that their heritage is unique, relevant, worth preserving – and loads of fun to boot. Hats off to the NZHPT’s Manawatu Branch Committee; take a bow, artist Barry Thomas and the Thames School of Mines.

Quaker historian William Charles Braithwaite’s words of 100 years ago could be the mission statement for two NZHPT groups which have  convinced local schoolchildren that their heritage is unique, relevant, worth preserving – and loads of fun to boot. Hats off to the NZHPT’s Manawatu Branch Committee; take a bow, artist Barry Thomas and the Thames School of Mines.

In a 2007 project conceived and co-ordinated by Manawatu branch member and former teacher Pamela Benson, pupils from six Palmerston North schools studied old buildings they liked. In this year’s follow-up, Our Places: Our Future. Retail, five schools focused on commercial premises and the structural, social and functional changes they’ve undergone.

On both occasions, Pamela and colleagues provided resource kits and advice and secured the co-operation of the Palmerston North City Archives and the local museum, Te Manawa. Pupils and teachers chose their subjects and approaches; a term’s archive and internet research, visits to and from experts, detective work and creativity climaxed with an exhibition at the Palmerston North City Library which was received with gratifying warmth.

This year, groups from Central Normal and Parkland Schools looked at the lives and times of nearby shops. At Our Lady of Lourdes, 10 and 11-year-olds studied the 1940s’ façade of Square Edge, the former city council chambers converted to an arts co-op and art-and-craft-materials recycling centre. Their cardboard-carton-and-coloured-paper facsimile barely squeezed through the classroom door for display in the school hall and a UCOL (Universal College of Learning, a local polytechnic institute) art advisor helped them make paintings in the style of Ralph Hotere’s striped Godwit/Kuaka. “The project made them look at architecture in a new way,” says teacher Jody Hayes.

For Suzanne Smith’s talented pupils, the project was “a real adventure and it had a real outcome. They weren’t passively taking knowledge in”. Children  at her Russell Street School compared contemporary photographic techniques and equipment with those of 19th-century Palmerston North photographer GW Shailer, whose five-roomed studio/house is now the site of an office building just off The Square. They took pin-hole pictures with tin-can cameras and discussed the need to record memories and at what point a manipulated photograph ceases to be one. GW’s greatgranddaughter happened upon their display at the Library and was so impressed by it she visited the school to talk to them.

Suzanne’s Whakarongo School group tracked the old PDC department store’s evolution into their familiar Plaza shopping complex. They canvassed its future with its development team, looked at changes in shopping habits, consumer goods, window displays and advertising and modelled the PDC with details down to a lift lady and tiny cakes on a stand. Callum Mayston, nine, says, “All the olden-day stuff was really cool” –especially the tools, men’s ties, ladies’ jewels and china cups, plates and little sandwiches in the dining room. “Old buildings shouldn’t be demolished,” he says. “They’ve got memories of the times in them.” Thames South School pupil Katie Grant- Mackie, eight, is equally emphatic that she would be “very, very sad” should anything happen to the subject of the picture she made at one of the paint-making workshops that Wellington film-maker and artist Barry Thomas has been conducting at the Thames School of Mines for the past four years.

This year’s theme was The Maori, the Mariner and the Miner. What did they see? For Katie, it was the cross on the old Maori church as seen from her house; for Stephanie Rouse, 12, it was the hilltop war memorial; pohutukawa flowers for nine-year-old Lucy Manly-Williams; and for Isla Anderson, seven, the old school chapel. The children brought charcoal, clay and crushable rocks collected from their fireplaces, back yards, local creeks, cuttings and roadsides – lovely dirty stuff they’d had no idea could make a painting. They wet it with water and child-friendly PVA (you’dadd egg for tempera paint and linseed oil for enamel) and hand-ground it between a rock and a hard place – a granite slab. They transfered their prepared drawings of local scenes to raw pulp paper card, painted them in the browns, yellows and mustard colours of the local earth, signed and dated them and were proudly, filthily and collectively photographed with their artworks, the latest recently displayed, to rapturous reviews, at a Thames café and the local shopping mall.

“Kids love making things,” says Barry Thomas. “Here’s an activity that’s utterly benign environmentally, safe to handle and easy and less than cheap to make. Plus, and most importantly, they’re making something they’re in charge of, not sitting in front of some danged computer or telly.”

“We’ve had very good feedback,” says John Isdale, curator at the School of Mines, “and not only from the teachers but from students. We’ve run the programme three times in the past four years; some students have come to all three sessions and you can see their artistic progress.

Thames South’s enthusiastic deputy principal Jeannie Apthorp says the workshops “give them soul food, plus the value of learning and working in and around their own history and heritage”. The School of Mines is part of that. At the same old desks at which 19th-century gold-miners learned how to crush quartz to extract gold, 21st-century children are learning how to crush clay into paint. “There are all sorts of vibes in there that evoke memories of what went on there.” And the children feel it. “It gives them an understanding of the importance of keeping their heritage alive and honouring it.”

Pigments to Paint

A poem by Holly Wishart

Grinding, crunching, softening different
pigments, making paints with earthy
tones, mixing ground up clay, rust, moss
and rock, making our perfect colours,
adding different tones of browns, reds
and yellows, Showing how we see our
home Thames, paintings of buildings,
mines and trees, once the day full of
paint complete, we admire what we
have done, pictures full of colours and
history, that we can say is ours.