Delivering the post office

A couple of years ago the Kaeo Post Office building on the little town's main street was spruced up. After all, the old girl was turning 100 and getting tarted up comes with a significant occasion like that. Out of those celebrations has come a book written by local author Fiona Craig.

Fiona and her partner are the two-person team running Weaving The Stands Publishing - Fiona is the writer and Tony Kay is the designer. It's a business that's kept them going for 13 years now, five of those from Raglan and the rest from a bush-covered hideaway house that overlooks the tranquil lower reaches of the beautiful Whangaroa Harbour.

In that time they've written and produced six books from regions outside of Northland (mostly personal biographies that are commissioned works) and six books from in and around Northland including this latest book In Praise Of Our Post Office. As the book's strap line so aptly says, it's a celebration of what were once the nerve centres of Kaeo and Whangaroa.

"There used to be 14 different post offices in and around the Whangaroa, sometimes sited in native schools or even in people's homes because there were no roads and people were so isolated," says Fiona.

She was commissioned to write the book after a reading at the Kaeo Post Office during the centennial celebrations. She was given a grant from Internal Affairs because of the historical nature of the book's topic even as the process to acquire a grant is almost as exhausting as writing the book itself.

She was given a list of around seven people to interview and took full advantage of a tome by Donald Robertson, a former secretary of the Post & Telegraph Department who wrote the Early History of the New Zealand Post Office. She scoured the Whangaroa Museum and Archive Society for documents and files, dived into detective work on the internet and made 'a few suppositions' to get the book written.

To get the book printed they relied on the Gibbs Family - one of New Zealand's most affluent. Kaeo's first post master Mr William Spickman (1857) is in fact a relative of Alan Gibbs. The book's cover was from a painting by local artist Erin Pickard.

In Praise Of Our Post Office isn't going to sell in large quantities but that's not the point of it being produced. Those who physically worked in a post office are getting older and chances are that if it had not been commissioned, a considerable amount of the information contained within the pages would have been lost to the region and to the country. It's an important historical document detailing a by-gone era, a story of the arrival of post and telegraph to what was a very isolated region of the country and so traces the district's often tentative development over the past 150 years.

It's clear when talking to Fiona Craig that she values history and respects the personal stories from those who ask her to pen their biographies. Each book takes about a year to complete.

"There is a certain element of midwifery about writing a book and there is a sense of delivering something of value to the world."

She and Tony don't actively seek publicity to generate business, it's a word-of-mouth operation for a good reason. The ocean beckons and when they're not working they're sailing and with a wide tentacle of the Whangaroa Harbour a mere pied shag's spit from their front door, the priorities are clear.