Pompallier

**Printery for the Papists
**The Church Missionary Society (CMS) in New Zealand had no monopoly on folly. Their ‘Papist’ rival, Bishop John Baptiste François Pompallier, could match them. Catholic missionaries had landed in the Hokianga in 1838 and, six months before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, Pompallier established the headquarters for his grandly titled Vicariate of Western Oceania at Kororareka (Russell) in the Bay of Islands, directly opposite the rival Anglican mission at Paihia. The gullible Pompallier paid trader Benjamin Turner an exorbitant £370 for a cottage and a narrow beachfront section. On this cramped site, his Marists built a chapel, storehouse, outhouses and a printery. This distinctively French-looking building is a monument to poverty and passion. Lacking money but working under lay missionary architect Louis Perret, the priests used traditional Lyonnais methods, pisé de terre (rammed earth) for the lower storey and pan de bois (pisé panels/timber framework) for the upper one. Hone Heke spared the compound when he sacked Kororareka in 1845. After the Marists moved on it became a tannery (see the restored pits out the back), then it became a house for the Greenway and Stephenson families. With little sense of structural integrity and even less for spelling, they made ‘Pompalier’ into a grand Victorian house that gulled many into believing that it had been the bishop’s palace. The government bought the old building in 1943 and added much concrete and historical gloss to the ‘house that never was’. Truth seeped back slowly. Historian Ruth Ross exposed the bishop’s palace myth in the 1960s but ‘Pompallier House’remained a venerated fraud until structural instability caused by Hamlin Greenway’s chimney and the public works concrete ‘adobe’ forced its closure. Pompallier reopened in 1993, expensively conserved. Step inside. The grounds interpret its 19th-century secular history and a museum upstairs tells the story of the old place’s strange history. Downstairs the Virgin Mary watches over the old Gaveaux printing press.

Copyright 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.