Tourist industry in New Zealand encourages us to explore our own back yard

The memorial to Maurice Wilkins in Pongaroa. Photo / Christopher Cape

By Christopher Cape

My father, in his 1962 diary, made the observation that the English tend to live on top of each other. In the tradition of Upstairs Downstairs and Coronation Street, I can see his point. If one looks to the Continent, to Persia, Italy, or the Middle East, the chances of you walking the streets and frequenting architecture built on and over layers of foundations from preceding civilisations dating back thousands of years are pretty high. New Zealand is too young for that. Nonetheless, historical narratives do exist, as I frequently discover, often hiding in plain sight. I have made it a mission over the past few weeks to explore the eastern regions of the Manawatu/Wanganui/Tararua landscape in pursuit of buildings of historical interest and to actually visit places I have not visited. As usual, when I do that sort of thing the unexpected happens.

Pongaroa is southeast of Dannevirke, through winding, sometimes narrow atrociously beaten up roads, pulverised by logging traffic. It has a hotel, a dairy/general store, a street corner green reserve containing a clutter of memorabilia, and an early 1900s Telegraph and Post Office, which was about the only thing I was really interested in photographing. Last time I was anywhere near Pongaroa it was 1980 and I was part of an ITOS team from Faith Bible College in Tauranga. We got lost heading back to Tauranga from Masterton. Pongaroa looked like a short cut. We ended up in the gathering dusk on an alarmingly narrowing road among a large flock of wild turkeys. We eventually arrived at Faith about midnight, five hours after everyone else. They called it ITOS - the Initiative Training Outreach Scheme.

So Pongaroa, a small rural East Coast settlement with a clutter of memorabilia, which one could easily pass by without a second glance, has hidden secrets. There was, for instance, a white stone column resembling a stack of balls of wool, or someone's eccentric attempt at modernist sculpture. It was more than that. The inscription on its plaque read:
"Maurice Hugh Fredrick Wilkins. Maurice was born in Pongaroa in 1916, son of our local doctor Edgar Wilkins and his wife Eveline. In 1940 he received his physics doctorate from the University of Birmingham. During World War 2 he worked on radar and the atom bomb but afterwards became a strong campaigner against nuclear warfare and switched to the new science of biophysics. At Kings College University in London, he and colleague Rosalind Franklin studied the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) using X-ray diffraction techniques. Their discovery of what appeared to be a double helix enabled Francis Crick and James Watson to deduce a structure for the molecule. Wilkins, Crick and Watson were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for this work ……"

The salient point is perhaps that without the knowledge of DNA there would be no understanding of RNA and that would imply a lack of knowledge of mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) which is the crucial component in the construction of the current Moderna and Pfizer- BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines. It started in Pongaroa. Mind you, nuclear fusion started with Sir Ernest Rutherford in Christchurch, so New Zealand has a lot to answer for.

While I was photographing those balls of wool I fell into conversation with a couple visiting from Auckland. They were travelling to Castlecliff and had spent several hours at the Pongaroa cemetery clearing up a gravesite that hadn't been tended for 80 years. They were relatives of the family buried there. The narrative is colourful and dates from January 29, 1909. The story made the papers - the Evening Post and the Dominion. Headlined "Murder and Suicide – A Sad Tragedy In The Country" the story, as told to me by the wife, was that in Waiowaka, a 37-year-old settler named Henry Thomas shot his 18-year-old son dead while he was lighting the family fire then pursued his wife and daughter for a mile or so across country with the intention of shooting them too. They escaped. He returned to the family home and committed suicide with a shotgun blast. Henry, well known in the community, had a longstanding head injury and at times became deranged.

The story is genuine. I checked it in Papers Past at the National Library archives. Healthcare and mental wellbeing were as questionable then as they are now though there have been some modern improvements. In the Evening Post on January 30, 1909 the District Health Board reported only one case of scarlet fever in the city, with five cases of diphtheria and two cases of tuberculosis. A decade, a World War and the Spanish Flu were on the horizon and those events would change this world forever.

History can, apparently, be intriguing and a colourful can of worms.