The Wairoa River Bridge

Wairoa Bridge (Tauranga), circa 1905-1907. Postcard A.G. Series No. 105 C
Collection of Justine Neal

The precursor to the modern Wairoa section of State Highway 2, was a simple bridle track cut under the direction of Captain Turner, County Engineer and the Civil Commissioner in 1870. In April 1871 the track was enlarged by the local constabulary to ten feet wide and declared a government road in 1872, running from Tauranga to Waihi. The road finished down at the Wairoa River beside a landing reserve. From the landing reserve travellers used a ferry service operated by Ngati Kahu. By 1874, with travel over the Wairoa increasing, the Crown built a kauri timber bridge to replace the ferry crossing.

Wairoa Bridge, Tauranga, circa 1910-1912. Postcard attributed to Mary Humphreys
Collection of Justine Neal

The Bay of Plenty Times January 12th 1886 stated:

"The bridge over the Wairoa River on the Tauranga-Cambridge road was last week completed by our local contractor, Mr. J Brain. The bridge is 172 feet long, of three spans. The end spans being 52 feet each and the centre 66 feet. It is truss girded, built into the solid rock bed of the river. The bridge opens up the rich district of Kaimai, a large extent of very fertile soil, famed in days gone by as a wheat growing centre and will no doubt prove a great boon to the settlers and travelling public."

Wairoa Bridge, 24 Nov 1962. Colour positive slide by Robert Gale
Image courtesy of Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0005/20/1199

By 1912 the kauri bridge was in a state of advanced decay. The Public Works Department replaced the bridge in 1913 with a single lane concrete bridge built a few yards up river. Originally the replacement bridge was intended to be built in timber but with the steep rise in the price of timber it was decided that concrete was more prudent. The new bridge was built in a deeper but narrower part of the river. The road was also widened to accommodate the increasing amount of vehicle traffic and two balcony-shaped pedestrian refuges were built into the bridge as a safety consideration for the increasing foot traffic across the river.

The concrete bridge was opened for traffic in July 1916, the county council tore down the old bridge and sold it for farming material throughout the district. The new bridge was an impressive structure for its day but the harsh environmental conditions of the Wairoa River would, over the next fifty years, take its toll on the bridge. As early as 1918 severe scouring around the foundations, worsened by high annual flooding saw the new bridge slump in one section.

Repairs to Wairoa Bridge, 16 May 1963. Colour positive slide by Robert Gale
Image courtesy of Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0005/20/20

By the 1960s it was obvious that the bridge had served its time. It was never designed or constructed with modern traffic in mind and was also becoming increasingly dangerous for local pedestrians, particularly children on the bridge as well as people fishing from it. Despite increasing lobbying from local interest groups as well Tauranga’s Mayor and local councils the Ministry of Works and National Road Board were slow to act so the river took matters into its own hands.

A severe flood in 1962 caused serious damage to the bridge with the western portion slumping considerably in April/ May of 1963. One pier was reported to have moved two inches in one day making the bridge unsafe for traffic, particularly heavy vehicles. This resulted in weight and speed restrictions being placed on the bridge in order to avoid a serious accident. Heavy vehicles and buses could no longer cross the bridge, effectively cutting the region in half. A local news item reported on how New Zealand rail buses could no longer cross the bridge on the Tauranga to Auckland route. Instead passengers on these buses are conveyed to one end of the bridge and then are required to walk across it to board a bus at the other end.

The new and the old Wairoa Bridges, 30 Dec 1967. Colour positive slide by Robert Gale
Image courtesy of Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0005/20/1203

In May 1963 the Ministry of Works began extensive temporary repairs on the bridge to restore the main northern road link between Tauranga and Auckland. By early 1964 the Ministry of Works announced that a new bridge was to be constructed with a new site under investigation but it was not until May 1967 that the first pile of the bridge was driven into the riverbed. To the delight of the region’s motorists the new bridge was finally opened in February 1968. The bridge’s opening signalled the end of the old bridge, which in April 1968 was progressively carved up into blocks for removal. A report from the NZ Herald in March 1968 stated:

“The old single laned bridge across the Wairoa Stream which for many years has been a source of frustration for motorists entering or leaving Tauranga by the Waihi road, is to be demolished. It has been replaced by a two-way structure which has been in use for a few weeks. The single laned bridge, one of the oldest concrete bridges in Tauranga county, was built more than fifty years ago. There were often queues of people waiting to cross."

Wairoa Bridge, 11 Aug 1968. Colour positive slide by Robert Gale
Image courtesy of Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0005/20/1202

References
Wairoa Hapu and The Realignment of State Highway 2. Section 2.
Papers Past. Bay of Plenty Times 10 January 1936.
Tauranga 1882-1982. Edited by J. Bellamy.

SO 424 of 1865

Left of centre, near the bottom of this beautiful, poignant old map, in letters too small to be seen in the image, is the word, MILL. The map was made in 1865 and endorsed by an eminent surveyor, Theophilus Heal: “I certify that all the inland lines coloured red on this map have been properly cut, all corners marked with circles properly pegged and lockspitted, and all the map accurately represents all the work done.”

A half-size colour copy of the original document is in the Tauranga Library. The map itself is in the public domain, obtainable from Land Information New Zealand if you care to penetrate its arcane and frustrating file systems (I used a professional search agency). SO 424 is the first map of Te Puna, Peterehema (modern Bethlehem) and Otumoetai to be made after the raupatu that followed the battles of Gate Pa and Te Ranga. It is the landscape we know, drawn after a war. Elsewhere, in similarly tiny letters, are place names we also know, and still use: Epeha, Waikaraka, Oikimoke.  There are more, and they are all Maori. Perhaps influenced by Crown Commissioner H T Clarke, surveyors did not invent names for an already well-populated geography.

Names of landowning families appear. Roha Borel survived the sack of Rangiaowhia and married Emile, who twice [1]  persuaded the Crown to make a grant of land to her. The “Nicholls children” are perhaps the Nicholas family whose marae is Tawhitinui. The one pākeha name, R C Fraser, requires further research into some tantalising leads.

Beside those already noted, ‘MILL’ is the only other pākeha word. How did such modern technology - a water-wheel, alongside a substantial building housing the shafts, chutes and stones that ground wheat into flour – come to be alongside a riverbank in the valley of the Wairoa? Who built it, and when? How long was it used?

The Wairoa River near Tauranga, circa 1918
Photograph by Frederick George Radcliffe
Courtesy of the F G Radcliffe Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library (G-6933-1/2)

This much later image of the riverbank offers no clues. A horse drinks from the river alongside a reed-thatched hut. Something that looks like a cooking pot sits alongside something that looks like a cookstand. There is nothing to indicate what might be cooked.

Nevertheless, in the mid-1860s, there was a flour mill at Pukekonui. And mills were very much the thing for entrepreneurs: Te Ara tells us [2] that “between 1846 and 1860, 37 flour mills were built for Maori owners in the Auckland province alone.” Ours stood almost exactly where the boat ramp is now, just upstream from the road bridge, south-west across the river from Potariwhi on the Bethlehem bank. (Colonists mangled the name into “Point Relief”.)  Maori and pākeha alike moored their river scows there. 

Ngati Kahu owned the mill. The New Zealander newspaper of 31 May 1864 described it, admittedly as a site recently abandoned to the oncoming Colonial Defence Corps, as “an extensive corn mill worked by water… the whole neighbourhood is covered with plantations of potatoes, corn [ie, wheat], pumpkins and melons… [the natives’] retreat must have been a hurried one, to have sacrificed so much food.”

The loss of such abundantly fertile land after 1865 must have been especially grievous. But the mill survived in Maori ownership, possibly because the status of the river and its bed were, until the passage of the Coal Mines Act 1903, debatable; at a less abstract level, post-confiscation native reserves were mainly in the vicinity of the river mouth. [3] Theophilus Heal’s 1865 field book notes the hapu of Matehaere residing at the Mill, Wairoa. [4] It was too valuable an investment to be abandoned for long.

And its value was well-understood. In 1872 Commisioner Clarke was reported in the Waikato Times as hearing an “important native case [that] has lasted two days. It was concerning the ownership of the mill at Wairoa. The litigants are leading chiefs of the district. The decision of the Court may lead to bloodshed.”

Bloodshed was fortunately avoided, and by 1888 [5] our old friend Mr Lundon was involved in some kind of partnership deal between one Mr Blundell and the native owners:

The parochial hopes of the editor of the Bay of Plenty Times were not to be borne out. David Borell blamed the sparrows. [6]  Perhaps an imported shipment of Australian seed, or just a prevalence of strong north-westerly winds [7], meant that local wheat crops succumbed to rust. Or maybe it was simple economics: the wide dry plains of Canterbury were much better suited to producing flour for even North Island bakers. Mr Blundell turned his attention to a new project, the flour mill at Waimapu, and the Wairoa mill’s grindstones were taken there in 1893. [8]

And the mill building? During the early 1880s it may have been, briefly, repurposed.  Longtime Wairoa Road farmer Doug Harrison provides this reminiscence: “… there was a Flour Mill built near the end of the Wairoa River Bridge.  This had a very checkered career, standing idle for most of its life, eventually being used as a school for a few years. When the Bethlehem school opened about 1900 the pupils from the Mill transferred to the Bethlehem school.”

This sits tantalisingly alongside Antoine Coffin’s remark that “some schools were initially set up on temporary sites, for example the Paeroa Native School [the original name for Bethlehem School] started out in an old mill and moved several years later once attendances had been confirmed.” [9] Paeroa Native School officially opened in 1884, but before that had been operating “as a half-time school along with that at Huria.” [10] It is just possible that, before Mr Blundell got the grindstones moving again, the mill had been a makeshift classroom.

References

[1] The first allocation, around today’s Snodgrass Road/Wallace Road area, met with resistance from settler neighbours and was replaced with a grant on the other side of the Waikaraka estuary, where Borells still live.
[2] https://teara.govt.nz/en/agricultural-processing-industries/page-5
[3] https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_93499720/Wai%20215%2C%20A033.pdf , p.28
[4] https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_93406645/Wai%20215%2C%20A076.pdf, Appendix 6
[5] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT18880406.2.6
[6] https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_93406645/Wai%20215%2C%20A076.pdf, p.35
[7] For a mid-twentieth century account of rust infections in wheat, see  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00288233.1966.10431548
[8] https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_93406645/Wai%20215%2C%20A076.pdf, citing Bellamy, A.C. 1982. Tauranga 1882-1982. Flour Mills, ed A.C. Bellamy. Tauranga County Council. pp204-207
[9] https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_93406645/Wai%20215%2C%20A076.pdf, citing Nightingale, Tony.March 1996.History of the Economic and Social Conditions Affecting Tauranga Maori.Crown Forestry Rental Trust. p81
[10] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/parliamentary/AJHR1885-I.2.2.3.6