Tawa Historical Society Incorporated

The Tawa Historian

Newsletter #33 – December 2013

The dates for our meetings in 2014 will be 3 March, 5 May, 7 July, 27 August, 6 October, and 1 December. All these dates are Mondays except Wednesday 27 August, on which date we will hold our Annual General Meeting. Please note it in your diary.
Congratulations to our member Richard Herbert, recently elected to the Tawa Community Board, and to Tawa resident and good friend of our Society, Malcolm Sparrow, on his election to the Wellington City Council. We also congratulate Northern Ward councillor Justin Lester on his appointment as Deputy Mayor.
Our most recent stock indicates that the following of our publications are now out of stock: The Streets of Tawa, An Historical Atlas of Tawa, and Rails through the Valley. There is only 1 copy of Best of Tawa Vol 2 remaining, 8 copies of The Takapu Valley Ammunition Bunker, and 14 copies of Brian Mexted’s Memories of Tawa.
We have given some thought to the printing and publicity necessary for the publication of our next major project, A History of Tawa. It will be a book of some 220 pages, liberally illustrated with photos, tables, and maps. It is likely to become the standard reference book for information about Tawa’s past.

We have established an ad hoc committee to deal with the process of advertising and promoting this publication. For example, we are seriously considering publishing this book in both soft and hard covered editions. If there is to be a hard-covered version, we will need to gain pre-publication orders, and to do that we need to be able to inform members of the cost of a hard-covered version, to collect orders, and perhaps to arrange a special printed version as Arthur Carman did for the first edition of Tawa Flat and the Old Porirua Road. Clearly there is much to consider and to be done.

The text of the book is almost complete. Design and layout is the next task, and we have been granted $1000 from the Mana Community Grants Foundation to assist with this work. Once that is done an index can be prepared, and then the book will be ready for printing, hopefully in October 2014.
Further books or booklets in preparation will chronicle the history of the Tawa Town Hall, the old Mexted Homestead (now in Rewa Terrace), and the Ranui Golf Club of the 1920s.
We are working with the Wellington City Council to place an information board in Willowbank Park to cover some of the history associated with the southern end of Tawa.
For some years now, as a service to the community, we have had printed and made available through the Tawa Library two maps of two heritage trails which can be walked through Tawa. One covers the northern end of the valley, and the other the south. The development of Te Ara Tawa, the pathway/cycle way being concluded at the moment, ought to be included on our maps, and we are considering getting new maps, more professionally produced, for use by those who want to be informed about Tawa’s past as they walk or cycle the trails.
We are going to discuss, firstly with the Tawa Community Board, and also with other relevant groups, the possibility of resurrecting an idea we promoted some years ago of erecting a Tawa Memorial honouring those people from Tawa Flat who died in the service of their country in three wars (South African War 1899-1902, WW1 1914-18, and WW2 1939-45). Our original attempt produced a superb architecturally designed Memorial, to be placed at the northern end of Oxford Street. Sadly, its cost was prohibitive. What we are now proposing is a smaller, less costly memorial, with flagpole(s), where Anzac Day commemorations can be focussed, wreaths laid, and community attention can be continually drawn to those who gave their lives for New Zealand. We are hopeful that such a memorial could be dedicated on Anzac Day 2015, 100 years after the landings at Gallipoli, during which Corporal William Edward Earp of Tawa Flat was killed in action, aged 22. New Zealand will be commemorating this centenary event in numerous ways, and we believe that we in Tawa should play our part in these historic events.
Our Treasurer will be sending out our annual subscription notices in the New Year. The 2013 AGM approved a subscription of $25, which is the same as it has been for the past few years.
We have decided that the Tawa History Week, which we ran in the Library for several years, should be replaced by a Tawa History Day. We will be in discussion with the Library about this.
Our website has been “off air” because the sponsor of the service we use withdrew support (ie the cash necessary to run community websites). However a new sponsor has been found, and our webmaster, Richard Herbert, informs us the the website should be up and running shortly.
Material about Tawa:

We are developing a record of books, documents, written material, leaflets and the like which are significantly about Tawa. We are interested to know if you, our members, have any copies of published books, documents, leaflets or material that cover some aspect of the Tawa (Flat) community. These may be about history, or sporting, cultural, religious, or educational matters. They may cover industry, community groups, or family histories. They could include ‘traditional’ commercially published books, or privately published works, or university theses, school magazines, or programmes of Tawa events.

Please contact David Parsons of our Executive on ph: 232 6339, or email tawaparsons (at) xtra.co.nz if you have something you think might be of interest. We would like to record that these items exist. If you have something rare or obscure, we could arrange to have it copied so that it would be available for research. But if you would prefer privacy we will respect that wish.

In advance, thank you for your interest and assistance.