Giveaways
I have published several posts about Whanganui and its wild hinterland, so far. They are, in no particular order,
Tales of the Whanganui: Rediscovering the ‘Rhine of New Zealand’
The Remarkable Dry River at Ātene
A map from the last of these posts shows where Whanganui is:
But in all these posts, I haven’t really done a walk-around of the city, which is surprisingly urbane in spite of its small size, remote location and the fact that it is known for being the site of a conflict in colonial days, between settlers and down-river Māori on one side against Māori from the forested wilds further up the river on the other.
So, here’s a walkabout post. It is not exhaustive by any means. I will have to come back when they have finished restoring the amazing Sarjeant art gallery and explore some other parts.
But in the meantime, here are some photos that my editor Chris took when he visited Whanganui in June of this year, the first month of winter in New Zealand.
For starters, here’s the classic Whanganui view, of Mount Ruapehu behind the Sarjeant Gallery, currently undergoing restoration. I definitely plan to come back and shoot this in the winter of 2022 once the barriers and scaffolding are out of the way.
The photo with the mountain behind was taken from a site called Cooks Gardens, a park and athletic arena on a downtown hill, where a world record for the mile was once set.
Cooks Gardens also have an old wooden bell-tower originally erected for fire-watching purposes at the top of the hill, and a South African War memorial in the form of an obelisk.
As I’ve mentioned in one of the other posts, Whanganui has been described as the world’s capital of war memorials, and this is but one of many.
There are some excellent murals in the street that leads up to the entrance of Cooks Gardens. In fact, murals are everywhere in Whanganui today.
The downtown is the most charming part of Whanganui, with façades of businesses that were obviously founded very early on by New Zealand standards.
TThe next three photographs are of is a fountain erected in 1881 at the intersection of Victoria and Ridgway Streets, in the city centre, to commemorate the creation of a reliable supply of fresh water from a nearby lake. Though it is closer, the Whanganui River is often a bit soupy by the time it gets to the town.
The river is sacred to Māori: but as with the Ganges, the waiora or living waters of the mountainous upper reaches have traditionally been regarded as the best and most spiritual parts of such a river as opposed to the muddy and sluggish waimate or dead water downstream. The town’s engineers took a similar view of the best and worst places to obtain water, even if it was not quite so poetically expressed.
The fountain also appears in the 1885 photograph that follows. Next to it is the Rutland Hotel, which dates back to an even earlier, wooden era and is also mostly still there to this day.
Victoria Street is the ‘main drag’, and has a real variety of old buildings and storefronts, many of which are at their best at dusk. Like a lot of provincial towns and cities in New Zealand, Whanganui did not grow very fast in the second half of the twentieth century and thus has a ‘heritage’ quality that is absent in many parts of larger cities such as Auckland.
About thirty years ago, Victoria Street and Ridgway Street, the city’s second most important street, both got massive upgrades of their footpaths to replace the old asphalt ones with patterned tiles.
There are some pretty impressive buildings in Ridgway Street too, including the former post office, which dates back to 1939 and shows an interesting blend of British official architecture of the era and Māori designs.
As I say, there are murals just about everywhere in Whanganui. Here is one in a side street of the downtown, with the town’s most elevated war memorial tower, visible atop Durie Hill on the south bank of the Whanganui River in the background. It stands next to the top house of the Durie Hill Tunnel and Elevator, coloured orange.
The Durie Hill War Memorial Tower yields especially impressive views and I am determined to go up it the next time I am there!
Here is a video about the Durie Hill Tunnel and Elevator, which is reached by going past some traditionally carved Maori faces on poles, some of them rather whimsical.
Sign boards provide orientation for visitors to the downtown area, which isn’t very large in any case.
The town’s murals really are abundant. Here is a modernistic one on Taupō Quay, close to the inter-city bus station.
And another of a Māori woman with a traditional tattoo like that of Nanaia Mahuta, the current Foreign Minister of New Zealand.
On Taupō Quay you can see the old paddle-steamer Waimarie, the ‘tunnel boat’ Wairua — a sort of early jet-boat, for the river’s upper reaches — and a succession of wharves, including one where the town’s first European settlers disembarked in 1841 after a four-day voyage up the wild west coast from Wellington. Incidentally, the Waimarie and the Wairua are still in the excursion business.
It is at about this spot that you arrive at the famous or notorious Moutoa Gardens or Pākaitore, the site of a 1994 land occupation that saw the destruction of a statue of the nineteenth-century New Zealand Premier John Ballance, a local resident who actually wasn’t too bad as nineteenth-century premiers went, but who had said some inflammatory things about the Māori in his youth.
The gardens are named after the battle of Moutoa, a Thermopylae-like engagement some way up the river in which local Māori prevented upriver Māori from advancing any further on the town, and thus ensured that everyone would continue to be ruled by the British.
Grateful colonists erected a statue to the fallen Māori defenders of the town plus a Catholic lay brother, Euloge, who may have sought to get between the warring factions. Dedicated in 1865, this statue of a weeping angel is the oldest war memorial in New Zealand and indeed one of the oldest anywhere, as the whole idea of war memorials was only just then starting to catch on as an aspect of what is now called ‘Victorian sentimentality’.
The inscription on the front is perhaps not all that PC these days, but the fact that it was erected in honour of people of colour as far back as 1865 should lead us not to quibble over words.
Here is 2021 photo of the statue of Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui or Major Kemp, from the same angle as the 1912 one that I have reproduced in ‘Union Jacks and Grumpy Cats’.
Not all the surviving statues in Moutoa Gardens/Pākaitore are war memorials, fortunately. Here is one called Protection in Adversity by Joan Morrell, of which the original was also destroyed during the mid-1990s occupation. This photograph shows a re-casting in bronze which was installed in 2003.
For the last word in over-the-topness, you have to visit the Veterans’ Steps, which lead up to the Sarjeant Gallery.
Lastly, here are a couple of other things that caught Chris’s eye. Even the gates of many schools often have something of a war-memorial aspect in New Zealand.
And lastly, among the many architectural quirks of this well-preserved town, a hospital that obviously dates back to before the creation of the New Zealand equivalent of Britain’s National Health Service.
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