Grave of Hori Tamati Pipi

I pass your marble headstone, Hori Tamati Pipi, on my way to the city you would not recognize. Maybe you walked down Courtenay Place, muddy track, but not to the Paramount for an afternoon at the flicks.

Your home had lines drawn around it on a map. Your pa got lot numbers. Courtenay Place had a name put on it after you died, probably.

And here you are not under your headstone moved for the rushing motorway, like a waterfall on its way to a traffic jam.

The lead was leaked into your name, into your reo. It is as God would have wanted it for his people, Hori Tamati Pipi.

**As in every cemetery, every headstone tells a story. Here is one story.
**Walking down the steep path from Anderson Park, crossing the motorway pedestrian over bridge you find, at the turn, the headstone of Hori Tamati Pipi. Here's what his headstone has inscribed on it in Te Reo with a translation by historian Jeanette King.

He whakamaharatanga tenei mo
This is a memorial for our friend Hori Tamati Pipi
i mate ia i Te Aro Pa i Ponekewho died at Te Aro Pa in Wellington (Port Nicholson)
i te 12 o nga ra o Akuhata 1877on the 12th day of August 1877
Na ana hoa tenei kowhatu i whakatu i koneiHis friends have erected this headstone here
hei whakamaharatanga mona, mo Wiremu Tamati Te Wera
in remembrance of him.

King notes that it is confusing that there is a word that looks like mo, so it reads "of Wiremu Tamati Te Wera" (i.e. a memorial for Wiremu as well as Hori, above) but I think this likely is an error and that Wiremu Te Wera was one of those who erected the memorial'.

More is to be found about Hori Pipi from the fourth volume of Nga Tupuna 0 Te Whanganui-a-Tara (2007) published by the Wellington City Council and the Wellington Tenths Trust and written by Sandra Clarke and Neville Gilmore. He belonged to the Taranaki iwi and had land interest there. He was also a resident of the Te Aro Pa in what is now central Wellington between Courtenay Place and the harbour.
Pipi had no children so when he died he left his land interests in Wellington to his friend Tamati Wirimu Te Wera, with whom he had signed various leases in the past, 'on the condition that Tamati Te Wera provide for his sister's son'. Tamati Te Wera died in 1903, aged 79. His headstone is to be found in the Karori Cemetery. A picture of Tamati Te Wera pictured with his wife, (Ana?), outside their Ohiro Bay Road home is owned by the National Library. There is so much more of the story that isn't recorded. That Pipi has a headstone in the Bolton Street Cemetery means that he was most likely a convert to Christianity, and most likely Anglican, since the Catholic cemetery is in Mount Street. He may have spoken English. He was likely literate in that he signed various documents? When did he or his tupuna come to Wellington? Why did they come?
The Bolton Street Cemetery headstones show that, alongside the Maori community, there was a Jewish community including Alexander Dimant from Tiel in the Netherlands who has a headstone with a Hebrew inscription, settlers from the UK and small Chinese gravestones of people who it is believed died in Wellington after falling ill at sea while crew on a ship. The Bolton Street Cemetery demonstrates what a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual community early New Zealand was. Every headstone tells a story but not all of the story.
For more on some of the headstones in the Bolton Street Cemetery you can download a two page map and notes on some of the other headstones.

Text, Poem and Images by Koenraad Kuiper