It’s popular right now for historians to emphasise the “story” aspect of history. Neat, straightforward, direct. Everyone has a story. Historians who are serious about their profession know, however, that every story has a story. This is one.
Title page of Keepers of the Faith
A somewhat battered copy of the book compiled to commemorate the centennial of St Joseph’s Church, Hatu Hohepa, in Te Puna, titled Keepers of the Faith, has come to the Te Puna Archive. [1] Its provenance is reasonably clear: it was initially acquired by the Te Puna Community Library, had apparently sustained water damage, in which state was withdrawn from the library’s holdings and came into the possession of the Gravits (Peter Gravit was for a time a member of the Community Library Committee).
Peter and Jen Rolleston authored the book. Peter died in 2007, [2] but Jen is still very much with us, and was very willing to talk about the way this very local history was brought together. As a direct consequence of the work she, Ellen Nicholas and Peter did to research the Pirirākau Claim: WAI 227, Peter Farrelly of the Parish Council approached them on behalf of the Church Centennial Committee for a publication to support the celebrations attendant on the little wooden church’s one hundredth anniversary. The first service there was held on 1 January 1900.
Compared to the work required to support WAI 227, this job seemed, and was, Jen says, relatively straightforward. It took between six and nine months to write; photographs were readily available, and the community it described were all people known to each other, or whose memory was still well alive among them. Most people came forward with their recollections of the church and its place in the Te Puna landscape.
Jen Rolleston
Compared to the gaps and contradictions that had to be resolved for the raupatu claim, Jen told me, getting material for the St Joseph’s book was far easier. “People had papers, photos and bits and pieces about the church in all sorts of places – for instance, [co-builder with Werahiko Borell] Hone Bidois’s papers were put together in a box held in the Tuhakaraina homestead.” Hone was the grand-uncle of Martin Tuhakaraina, Chairman of the Centennial Committee.
Despite these advantages, writing a local history is not always easy. Jen called it “interesting” when I asked her if it was fun to do. Peter, who, she said, “Put his heart and soul into the WAI 227 claim”, was a serious historian whose work entailed deep analysis and careful assessment of the evidence. “It’s hard for us to really understand how things were then,” Jen muses. “We think we know but we don’t really.” Nevertheless, the experience gained by the team from the raupatu claim – Peter doing the narrative, Jen and Ellen ferreting out the information needed to fill the gaps – has clearly shaped Keeping the Faith. It’s a book that, quite deliberately, has almost no conflict. But it does have a clear historical arc, situating the story of St Joseph’s into a wider context, and balancing the secular forces of history with a moving account of a miracle, set out in an (ahistorical) Appendix.
A careful reader of this local history can, however, detect the threads of tension through the stories. This is one of the great skills of good local historians: to let past voices speak so that people can, later, make their own minds up. This short book, citing primary sources, oral accounts and memoirs, is foundational for deeper, more scholarly explorations of the way spirituality and institutional religion contend with and complement each other. [3] It also offers very practical insights into the life and work of missionary fathers: the St Joseph’s complement were mostly from Holland, speaking te reo with a noticeable Duch accent, authoritative, hands-on and pragmatic. The Convent school, which ran from 1958 until 1980, was staffed by the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny in Ireland, [4] another missionary order. Furthermore, the function of evangelism itself is illustrated: once the Church determined that there were no new converts to be gained, the priests were withdrawn and the school was closed. The Little Sisters of Carmel, under the chaplaincy of the combative Father Jordan, lived in it as a retreat for the next decade, until “the effects of a Priest shortage had a direct and dramatic impact upon the Parish”.[5] The response to this crisis came directly from the devout within the Te Puna Catholic community. The book includes an account from the Guardian of the Sacred Sacrament, Rosina Borell.
I am happy to confirm that – quite aside from the rough dealings that resulted in the return of St Joseph’s bell to that church [6] - another conflict reported in Keeping the Faith [7] has also been resolved. Father Jordan’s cottage, controversially located, in 1982, “squarely in front of the Church, almost completely obscuring [it] from the road frontage”, was at some stage moved to another position, behind the church, and in the background of this photo.
St Joseph’s site, looking southeast
Although Jen cannot remember when, exactly, her book was thus rendered out-of-date, we agree that the cottage’s removal was probably tactfully managed by the Centennial Committee to make way for the welcoming waharoa that bears the plaque and blessings made in the new millennium, January 2000.
References
[1] Kindly deposited as part of the Gravit Collection, 7 March 2024.
[2] See Elisha Rolleston’s essay for Te Mahi Rangahau, https://temahirangahau.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/peter-rolleston/ also published on the Tauranga Historical Society blog, 7 June 2022, https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2022/06/peter-rolleston-1949-2007.html
[3] See, for instance, Cameron, G B: That you might stand here on the roof of the clouds.” The development of Pirirakau theology from encounter to the end of conflict, 1839-1881, Master of Theology thesis, University of Otago, 2015
[5] Rolleston, P and J: Keeping the Faith, p.55, quoting Rosina Borell
[6] Ibid, p.36
[7] Ibid, pp.48-49
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