Patea

The Aotea Memorial Waka graces the main street. It was built in 1933 to commemorate the settlement of the area by Turi and his hapu. Next to the Waka is the Library and Plunket building, a 1930s design by Gummer and Ford.

Patea (population 1100) was badly hit by the closing of its freezing works in 1982. Several projects including Aotea Utanganui the Museum of South Taranaki have endeavoured to offset this. The beach at Mana Bay is nearby and it is amazing, as well as being wild and west, it is home to the relics of remains of the wharf.

The Pátea Maori Club is famous in New Zealand. Over the years, the Máori Club has performed for royalty and celebrities in New Zealand and abroad. In 2005 the group was selected by the New Zealand Government to perform in Seoul, South Korea, and to represent New Zealand at the World Expo in Aichi, Japan.

TVNZ's heartland visited Patea in 1994 and made this documentary.

The protein industry’s graveyard

Unlikely as it may seem now, Patea once provided over half of the Port of Wellington’s dairy exports through transhipments. At first called Carlyle, the little South Taranaki township supported troops during the wars of the 1860s. The shallow, twisting river was a serious impediment to development, however, and the Patea Harbour Board (formed in 1877) soon had its work cut out. International expert Sir John Coode recommended building breakwaters and river training walls to concentrate the scour and to provide a safe shipping channel up to the township.

The harbour board completed the eastern breakwater in 1880, but the western one had to wait two decades. The board lived hand-to-mouth but made gradual if erratic progress. It completed the Town Wharf on the west bank of the river in 1881. Two years later the Railway Wharf opened on the other side of the river. There was work for both and for the Grading Wharf (opened in 1901). The harbour board often struggled to maintain the entrance, but the little steamers threaded their way up and down the river, carrying refrigerated produce down to Wellington.

They actually loaded a big ‘Home boat’ in the roadstead off the coast in 1900, but it was risky and expensive and the shipping lines preferred to subsidise the coasters to ship butter and cheese down to the capital. Nevertheless, the port flourished between the wars. In 1921, contractors finished lengthening and raising the breakwaters and a decade later a new freezing works was built and the Grading Wharf was extended again. There was even congestion in the port.

Patea’s end came when the Conference Lines cut the shipping subsidies. The South Taranaki Shipping Company ceased trading in 1959. The wharves had their decking removed during the 1970s and the freezing works closed in 1982, kneecapping the town economy and triggering a population decline from about 2000 to 1300 by 2001. The cheese factory went, too. The district heritage inventory largely ignores it, but where else in New Zealand can you find such a varied industrial graveyard? Within sight of each other are derelict wharves, shipping company offices, freezing works, cheese stores and a railway station.

© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: Ian Church, Little Ships of Patea, Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1977; Margaret de Jardine, The Little Ports of Taranaki, author, New Plymouth, 1992.