Auckland,
Tamaki makau rau, has been inhabited since around 1100 AD and many of its
volcanic cones were once fortified. The capital from 1840-65, Auckland is the
largest city in New Zealand with over 1 million inhabitants. It is also the largest
Polynesian city in the world. Now a bustling modern centre with excellent shops,
restaurants, galleries, museums and gardens, it still has many fine 19th and early
20th century buildings.
Alberton (1863)
100 Mount Albert Road, Mount
Albert, Auckland
This romantic timber mansion began as a farmhouse in
1863 and was later expanded to 18 rooms, with fairy-tale decorative verandahs
and towers. It was owned by the Kerr Taylors, a leading family in Mount Albert,
until it was left to the Trust in 1972. Allan Kerr Taylor was a landowner, investor
and provincial and local body politician. His wife Sophia was an outspoken advocate
of the vote for women, as well as a singer, gardener and mother of 10. She ran
the estate for 40 years after her husband’s death, with her three unmarried
daughters running it for a further 40 years.
Alberton was famous in the
19th century for its balls, hunts, garden parties and music. It contains a wealth
of original family furniture and other possessions, and several rooms retain their
nineteenth century wallpapers.
To visit Ewelme Cottage is to step back into the 1880s.
Built of kauri wood in 1863-4 for the Rev Vicesimus Lush and his wife Blanche,
Ewelme was extended in the 1880s and has remained largely unchanged since this
time. The home was lived in by the family until 1968 and is filled with interesting
family furniture and possessions, including an important collection of over 800
books.
One of New Zealand’s finest timber Gothic houses,
Highwic was begun in 1862 by Alfred Buckland, one of Auckland’s most substantial
land owners, and his wife Eliza. It was extended in 1873 in the style of the original,
which had been copied from American A.J Downings patternbook ‘The Architecture
of Country Houses’.
Highwic was home to Buckland’s 21 children
and remained in the family until sold in 1978. Furnished with antiques, it is
a popular functions centre and the hectare of lawns and fine gardens provide a
haven from the hustle and bustle of nearby Newmarket.
The Melanesian Mission House was opened in 1859 to coincide
with the arrival of 38 Melanesians on board the Mission vessel, Southern Cross.
Its life as a training facility was shortlived however when 14 of the students
died from an epidemic of dysentery in 1863/64. Shortly after this it was decided
to move the headquarters of the Mission to Norfolk Island.
By 1915 only
the stone dining hall block remained, the rest of the buildings having been removed
or used in the repair or erection of farm houses and outbuildings on the Melanesian
Estate. It then operated for a time as a museum, before being handed over to the
Historic Places Trust.
One
of the main reasons for preserving old buildings is that they enable people who
view or visit them to understand in a vivid, immediate way, how people lived their
lives. Both old and young can learn at these properties – as was demonstrated
charmingly by a fax that the curator of Alberton received from four school children.
