Hawke's Bay meatworks history lives on in Napier MTG exhibition

MTG curators Te Hira Henderson (left) and Gail Pope get ready for Saturday's Hawke's Bay freezing works exhibition opening. Photo / Warren Buckland

Former TV producer and director Te Hira Henderson has again proven just the man for the job as Hawke's Bay museum MTG on Saturday opens an exhibition commemorating the life, times and people of five Hawke's Bay meatworks.

Before he embarked on a television career of 42 years he worked at one of them.

Preparing the exhibition - which opens with a pōwhiri at 8am Saturday in Herschell St, outside the beachfront site museum in Napier - he says working at Whakatu or Tomoana in school holidays and/or as soon as school was out was a central part of wider education for generations of many Hawke's Bay families, over as much as a century.

He studied at St John's College, and the meatworks at Whakatu, and says: "I left school at 15, I did three seasons, my last season was in 1977-1978."

Then he left and started to establish a profession, just like the thousands of others for whom "the works" were a stepping stone to the careers of adult life.

Lawyers, teachers, priests, police officers, businessmen, bankers, entertainers, politicians, iwi leaders ... to name a few, some using the summer season to bankroll their way through university to those careers, some with careers launched by the dramatic closure of the works – Whakatu, in 1986, and Tomoana in 1994.

"Some even went back to school," says Henderson, who played his own role in education, at the cutting edge of setting up the Television New Zealand Māori language unit and working on other shows such as children's weekend programme "What Now."

Sadly, he says, there were those who didn't make it, lives and family structures going downhill in the grief that followed the closures.

It was about two years ago that Henderson returned to Hawke's Bay to take up the role of MTG curator taonga Māori. In this latest project he picks up on the dream of MTG director Laura Vodanovich and social history curator Gail Pope to recognise the part the meatworks of Hawke's Bay have played in the history and lifestyles of the region.

As part of the exhibition, he's interviewed seven or eight of those involved in the latter days of the works, and museum visitors will get a walk-through of images of slaughterboards, cooling floors, landmark buildings and the people, along with examples of tools of the trade.

There have been commemorations and events elsewhere in the past, most recently in Hastings last year marking 25 years since the chains shut down at Tomoana, and director Vodanovich says she expects the new-season version at the MTG will be particularly popular.

Because of that, it was chosen for what is a symbolic summer season. On show for several weeks, it runs parallel with the traditional summer seasons when so many Hawke's Bay teenagers started out in the workforce, in an era more than a generation past but still remembered by many as if it were yesterday.