A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Like the millennium and Gisborne’s opportunity as first city in the world to see the sun, the Tuia 250 commemoration of first formal meetings here between Maori and Europeans, in October this year, has focused minds on the legacy potential of a significant event.
Back in 1999 the city centre
was upgraded . . . it is in need of another, more extensive, reimagining — but that hasn’t got on the radar for Tuia 250.
Instead much of the focus has been on the Tairawhiti Navigations programme of developments around the harbour and Turanganui rivermouth, where this history that was so formative for modern New Zealand took place in 1769 with the arrival here of the Endeavour, and where the first waka, Horouta, Te Ikaroa a Rauru and Takitimu, arrived about 450 years earlier.
Interwoven with this has been a focus on our dual heritage, and in particular celebrating tangata whenua heritage — which until very recent times has, in the public sphere, been subsumed within a European heritage construct. A key Navigations/Tuia legacy will be a more clearly bicultural setting for ourselves and our visitors.
The Navigations programme is not delivering what was envisaged along the way — not by this October, anyway. But that will not matter, years from now, if other high-quality projects still proceed.
