Editorial: The 'last living link' has gone

Peter Jackson, editor, Northland Age.

'History is (was) bunk,' according to Henry Ford.

That's a view that some in Kaitaia believe is shared by the St Saviour's Anglican Church, after it attacked a venerable hoop pine outside the vicarage with a chainsaw, then ring-barked the trunk with the obvious intention of getting rid of it altogether.

To be fair, the tree stands accused of causing longstanding stormwater problems, to the point where the vestry says it is now jeopardising the vicarage itself.

And while the tree has enormous historic value, it would hardly be reasonable to expect it to remain at the cost of a significant asset that earns the church much-needed income.

There may be some dispute regarding whether the stormwater issue could have been resolved without removing the tree, but that is probably irrelevant now.

Depending on how effective the ring-barking proves to be it could perhaps still be saved, although that can hardly be done without the vestry's co-operation.

It does stand on church land after all, and whatever its sentimental value it does belong to St Saviour's, which wants it gone.

It has been noted that those who are most upset by what has been done don't currently play much of a role, if any, in the daily life of the church, but that's hardly the point.

This tree was planted in 1846 by William Gilbert Puckey, who worked alongside Rev Joseph Matthews to establish the Kaitaia mission in 1834.

It is just a few years younger than the Treaty of Waitangi (which was witnessed by Puckey a short distance away), and has been described as the last living link with the mission on the mission site.

It is believed to be the oldest tree of its kind, and one of the oldest exotic trees, in New Zealand.

Its historic value, at least for Kaitaia, is beyond question, and it will be a very sad day when it succumbs to its wound, as it seems likely to do.

William Gilbert Puckey was a remarkable man, a jack of all trades and master of many of them. His contribution to Kaitaia's story is immense, and while some physical signs of his life's work remain they are not thick on the ground.

This tree holds a special place among them.

In terms of the tree and its significance, it hardly matters that some of his multitude of descendants no longer worship in the church he helped build.

They have a right to cherish the history he helped create, and it is hardly surprising that some are deeply aggrieved by what they perceive as a cavalier decision to destroy a tree that he planted with his own hands so many years ago.

Heritage NZ's Bill Edwards put it nicely last week when he said that the hand prints of the ancestors of many people were on the tree, and an important connection with the past had been severed.

Our attitude towards history in this country seems strangely ambivalent at times.

Increasingly, Maori history is revered, as it deserves to be. Imagine the uproar if this tree was a native that had been planted not by Puckey but by his contemporary Panakareao, while what has been created since the arrival of Europeans is often discarded without compunction.

There are pockets of resistance - Dunedin is one community that cherishes its architectural heritage - but even at a time when many are becoming more appreciative of what they have inherited from their ancestors, what Bill Edwards rightly describes as important connections with the past can be in peril.

His advice is to give some thought now to what is important to us and to take steps to protect them via the Far North District Council's district plan.

That's good advice, although it might not always be enough.

At least one missionary descendant believes that Puckey's hoop pine was listed with the council at some point, but was removed at some point.

That scenario is far from unlikely. The creation of the Far North District Council from four counties and two boroughs in 1989 saw a remarkable loss of records, exacerbated by a fire some years later that destroyed archival material from the district's southern reaches.

Even in Kaitaia though, plans of some of the town's sewerage network cannot be found.

In any event, St Saviour's says it checked, and double-checked, that the tree was not listed before it began lopping off branches and ring-barked it.

That at least means the decision wasn't taken quite as lightly as some suspect, and raises the possibility that there might have been another option for dealing with the stormwater problem.

The fact that the tree was marked with a plaque, illegible as it might have been, should have indicated that it was no common or garden specimen though, and its probable destruction will rankle deeply with many people for a long time to come.

The church is to be commended, however, for its recognition of the significance of the Kaitaia mission site, and its endeavours to preserve as much of that history as it can.

It is incumbent upon the vestry though to communicate with the missionary families' historians, even if there will be differences of opinion from time to time.

Even the relatively innocuous act of shifting the lych gate some years ago wasn't universally welcomed, although there is reason to believe that its current position, just a few metres north of where it stood for many years, is where Puckey always wanted it.

The vestry should also allow for the fact that Matthews and Puckey's descendants don't need to be card-carrying members of the congregation to show an interest in what their antecedents did and left behind.

It might well be that the church is not well supported by those descendants, and the descendants of other early European families in Kaitaia, who helped build the church in the 19th and 20th centuries, but the history of the mission site goes far beyond the purview of the congregation.

This is the story of Kaitaia, a community that was founded by two remarkable men of courage, vision and goodwill, two men who were arguably far ahead of their time in terms of the English colonisation of New Zealand and the conversion of its native inhabitants not only to Christianity but broader Western civilisation, including medicine, education, the law and farming.

There might be many reasons why the Europeans were made more welcome in the Far North than was the case elsewhere, but it is arguable that much of the credit can go to those who paved the way. Not only Matthews and Puckey, but those who first settled in the Bay of Islands and at Waimate North.

We, Maori and Pakeha alike, have good cause to hold Matthews and Puckey, their wives and families, in high regard.

This is a young country and a young community, but our history grows more important and valuable with every passing day.

Within the writer's family alone Matthews and Puckey now have great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, who might not worship at the church they built but have the right to trust that the physical links that still exist with those earliest of European times will be preserved and nurtured.

The hoop pine outside the vicarage might be doomed, but it is not the last of those links, and those that remain deserve every protection they can be given.