A sense of history is a valuable perspective to hold and an increasingly rare one at that.
In an age of online saturation and omnipresent social media, few of us take the time to look back. The past, it seems, is very much the past.
So it is refreshing to see that some
still value history, are eager to acknowledge it and even learn from it right here in Hawke's Bay.
Tonight sees the induction of three new Port of Napier Business Hall of Fame members, all of them part of the historic fabric of Hawke's Bay and all of them with legacies we can learn from.
In its third year, the Hall of Fame inductees are New Zealand Aerial Mapping founder Henry Piet Drury van Asch (CBE), New Zealand Tobacco Company founder J. Gerhard Husheer, and pioneering Church Road winemaker Thomas Bayne McDonald.
They will be inducted at a special event at Black Barn Winery.
Mr van Asch founded Hastings-based New Zealand Aerial Mapping in May 1936 and was responsible for transforming New Zealand's cadastral maps into accurate topographical maps.
Mr Husheer was a German-born businessman and philanthropist who formed the New Zealand Tobacco Company in 1913. His legacy includes the art deco National Tobacco Company Building in Ahuriri.
Mr McDonald was 14 when he started making wine and by the 1960s was regarded as the father of red wine in New Zealand. Church Road was his original winery.
At a time when the business community, led by the Chamber of Commerce (a backer of the Hall of Fame), is searching for ways to stimulate commerce in the Bay, it is appropriate to get a reminder that successful enterprise has sprung up right here through ingenuity and hard work.
The businesses built by Messrs van Asch, Husheer and McDonald were not easy to establish. They all identified needs of the time and worked to fill those needs. They were lessons in working smarter from the Bay.
