Read Online Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: David Cohen
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European settlers and the Maori during the 1860s as they put their respective ideas of what constituted a home to the military test.
As disenchanting as this must have been, the record suggests Epuni never entirely lost the belief that things could have been different, enjoining his people, in the words that were read out at his mist-shrouded funeral, to remain ‘kind to my European brothers and sisters, be patient, be tolerant’.
Generous sentiments. Whatever the confidence the European settlers had in their own strength, they were at the time seriously outflanked by Maori. Epuni’s intercession, spurred by his belief in the inherent benevolence of the settlers, clearly saved a great many lives and influenced things for the better, not only inTaranaki but also back in Wellington, where uncommitted Maori were still doing a brisk business in violently settling scores with the newcomers. The city’s Evening Post was sufficiently moved to respond in kind at the time of his death, admitting that, while it was ‘not often that we say much on behalf of the Maoris, in this instance it would be unjust not to allude to the services of the venerable chief who passed away’.
Over time the white establishment would kindle a variety of incense around his memory, including the naming of a far-flung native horticultural reserve, located to the north of Wellington and prized for its fertile earth and comfortable microclimate, after the memory of the man who, the Evening Post also wrote, ‘when the spirit of trouble brooded over the Hutt Valley, helped to keep harm from the Europeans’.
Despite the Maori desire to stay on and cultivate that same hamlet, the colonial imprint quickly deepened. Among the first of the owners to snatch a significant parcel of farmland — the same stretch of land where portions of modern Epuni now sit, including the site for what would become Epuni Boys’ Home — was Baron C. Alzdorf. The Baron later died during the city’s big earthquake in 1855, apparently felled by a giant mirror in his own Wellington Hotel, but not before he had welcomed scores of other colonialists to help cultivate his fields with their 20 varieties of vegetables, in what would become the new country’s second borough and soon enough one of its fastest-growing urban centres.
Alzdorf’s offsiders cultivated their airs too. Or as much as circumstances allowed. Unlike the surrounding suburbs, many of which had been identified for what would later become the largest state-housing project in New Zealand’s history — an urban ribbon eventually stretching down from what became Stokes Valley to the Petone foreshore — the pioneering residents of Epuni were different, better.
They were the custodians of nothing less than a gentrified holdout against the great Fabian housing experiment going on around their enclave. Not for them the petty brutalities and bad manners of nearby Naenae, the city’s fastest-growing neighbourhood, or persistently ugly Taita. And their conceit, partly nurtured by the fact of the area’s chronic drainage problems, which rendered parts of Epuni unsuitable for the kind of state-house forests that had grown in these suburbs to the immediate north, remained long after it was absorbed into wider Lower Hutt in 1941.
Walking along some of the suburb’s main arteries in 2010, including those abutting what became the neighbourhood’s most infamous correctional facility, one is struck by the larger properties and more ample vegetation that is to be found there in comparison with the immediately surrounding suburbs.
As one resident of the time later put it to Ben Schrader, the author of a recently published history of state housing in New Zealand, it was as if the people of Epuni in the 1940s and 1950s somehow ‘saw themselves as more refined than those of Naenae and Taita. I think it was to some extent due to the fact that it was an earlier development than those further north in the valley and … in
As disenchanting as this must have been, the record suggests Epuni never entirely lost the belief that things could have been different, enjoining his people, in the words that were read out at his mist-shrouded funeral, to remain ‘kind to my European brothers and sisters, be patient, be tolerant’.
Generous sentiments. Whatever the confidence the European settlers had in their own strength, they were at the time seriously outflanked by Maori. Epuni’s intercession, spurred by his belief in the inherent benevolence of the settlers, clearly saved a great many lives and influenced things for the better, not only inTaranaki but also back in Wellington, where uncommitted Maori were still doing a brisk business in violently settling scores with the newcomers. The city’s Evening Post was sufficiently moved to respond in kind at the time of his death, admitting that, while it was ‘not often that we say much on behalf of the Maoris, in this instance it would be unjust not to allude to the services of the venerable chief who passed away’.
Over time the white establishment would kindle a variety of incense around his memory, including the naming of a far-flung native horticultural reserve, located to the north of Wellington and prized for its fertile earth and comfortable microclimate, after the memory of the man who, the Evening Post also wrote, ‘when the spirit of trouble brooded over the Hutt Valley, helped to keep harm from the Europeans’.
Despite the Maori desire to stay on and cultivate that same hamlet, the colonial imprint quickly deepened. Among the first of the owners to snatch a significant parcel of farmland — the same stretch of land where portions of modern Epuni now sit, including the site for what would become Epuni Boys’ Home — was Baron C. Alzdorf. The Baron later died during the city’s big earthquake in 1855, apparently felled by a giant mirror in his own Wellington Hotel, but not before he had welcomed scores of other colonialists to help cultivate his fields with their 20 varieties of vegetables, in what would become the new country’s second borough and soon enough one of its fastest-growing urban centres.
Alzdorf’s offsiders cultivated their airs too. Or as much as circumstances allowed. Unlike the surrounding suburbs, many of which had been identified for what would later become the largest state-housing project in New Zealand’s history — an urban ribbon eventually stretching down from what became Stokes Valley to the Petone foreshore — the pioneering residents of Epuni were different, better.
They were the custodians of nothing less than a gentrified holdout against the great Fabian housing experiment going on around their enclave. Not for them the petty brutalities and bad manners of nearby Naenae, the city’s fastest-growing neighbourhood, or persistently ugly Taita. And their conceit, partly nurtured by the fact of the area’s chronic drainage problems, which rendered parts of Epuni unsuitable for the kind of state-house forests that had grown in these suburbs to the immediate north, remained long after it was absorbed into wider Lower Hutt in 1941.
Walking along some of the suburb’s main arteries in 2010, including those abutting what became the neighbourhood’s most infamous correctional facility, one is struck by the larger properties and more ample vegetation that is to be found there in comparison with the immediately surrounding suburbs.
As one resident of the time later put it to Ben Schrader, the author of a recently published history of state housing in New Zealand, it was as if the people of Epuni in the 1940s and 1950s somehow ‘saw themselves as more refined than those of Naenae and Taita. I think it was to some extent due to the fact that it was an earlier development than those further north in the valley and … in
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