PO Box 56076, Tawa Wellington 5249; Secretary ph 232 5901
Website: tawahistory.org.nz
The Tawa Historian
Newsletter #58 – October 2022
Here is a brief update on a couple of forthcoming activities that we are involved with.
Spring into Tawa – 29 October 2022
The Tawa Historical Society will again have a presence at the forthcoming ‘Spring into Tawa’ event on Saturday 29 October.
We will have copies of all our in-print books for sale, some at a discount price. We will also have a few copies of ‘out-of-print’ books available for sale if you missed out on obtaining a copy at the time they were published.
Please come and say hello at our stand on the day.
Wellington Heritage Week (24 October to 6 November) – so good that it’s running for a fortnight!
The Tawa Historical Society will be participating in the forthcoming Wellington Heritage Week. The whole event is so full of interesting activities and places to visit around the region that it is actually scheduled to run for a fortnight.
The Tawa portion of the event, which is a partnership between Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga and the Tawa Historical Society, will take place on Saturday 5 November.
It will start with a talk about the history of the area at the Tawa Community Centre on Cambridge Street at 2pm and will be followed by a walking tour.
The walking tour portion will start from the Tawa War Memorial at the southern entrance to Grasslees Reserve and conclude at the Bucket Tree Lodge by Takapu Road Station. It will take participants along part of the Old Porirua Road, which is marked by several cast iron roundels in the footpath, with the opportunity to view several sites of historical interest along the way.
The talk is free, and participation in the walking tour is by koha. Bookings are required through the Wellington Heritage Week website. More information about the whole fortnight of activities can be found on the Wellington Heritage Week website.
The title of the Tawa history presentation is ‘Home in 15 minutes: the history and heritage places of Tawa’. The advertising blurb about our participation states the following:
For this first time this year, Wellington Heritage Week (24 October to 6 November) will include an event in Wellington’s northern-most suburb – Tawa, arguably made famous in the 1980s by Ginette McDonald’s fictitious character ‘Lynn of Tawa’!
Tawa was established in the mid-nineteenth century when colonial settlers acquired 100-acre blocks along the Old Porirua Road between Wellington and Porirua which had developed from Maori trails connecting Te Whanganui-a-Tara and Te Awarua-o-Porirua Harbour.
The suburb experienced rapid growth from the mid-20th century due to an improved road and rail network which meant it only took 15 minutes to reach Tawa from Wellington city, a substantial improvement on the hours it took along the Old Porirua Road in the early days of the settlement.
Tawa Historical Society Annual General Meeting
The society’s AGM was held on Monday 29 August.
All members of the committee who were standing for re-election were duly confirmed in their roles.
In the medium term the society is still looking for someone with the necessary skills to be our Treasurer from about mid-2023, when the current Treasurer retires from the role. We are also still seeking someone keen to be our archivist. Please contact the Chair of the Tawa Historical Society if you are interested in either role.
After the formal business of the AGM, Rowan Carroll, Director, N.Z. Police Museum at Papakowhai, spoke to those present about the museum itself and some specific items of interest held there. If you haven’t visited this locally-based museum yet it is well worth taking a couple of hours to view it.
David Parsons
Chairperson,
Tawa Historical Society Inc