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The history of Houghton Bay and Valley has become a focus for present-day community-building as a result of PhD research work by a local artist and teacher.
For his PhD Grant Corbishley of Houghton Valley is using an approach called ‘dialogical aesthetics’ . The formal title for his PhD work is: Stewardship: an ethical aesthetic response to an uncertain and unsustainable future in local communities.
This sounds like something completely impractical, but Grant says the approach is simple and based on listening to people’s stories.
He sees his work as providing a catalyst for community development – with the history of the community and community interest in its history as the key element.
Grant started his project at the beginning of 2010 and was passed from one person to another, listening for hours about lives in Houghton Valley until he had formally spoken with about 80 people. As well as stories, people shared photos. These were collected in an album to be passed from house to house, sparking interest and discussion and creating knowledge about local history and the community. With his collaborator Norman Smith, Grant has observed the creation of more than 20 projects and groups stimulated at least in part by people coming together to talk about their community and its history.
These include the Houghton Valley Community Garden Project, which now has 45 to 50 plots that feed several households, acts as a learning environment for the kids from the school and play centre next door, and is a gathering point for locals to forge connections; the Naming the Tracks Project, to name and signpost local park pathways; an email newsletter; a civil defence group; work to redesign the intersection on Queens Drive; and re-vegetation projects.
Houghton Valley community, he says, was built in part on the Sheltland Island immigrants who formed part of the local fishing community. Families such as the Sinclairs and Laurensens were prominent landowners and active supporters of local development. There was extensive intermarriage among the Shetlanders, and this strengthened the sense of community. Farming continued in the Valley until the middle of last century. In one memorable conversation local Ron Simpson told Grant how he remembers driving the last dairy cows along Hornsey Road on their way to the meatworks at Ngauranga.
Pamphlets promoting the archeological dig and commuity activities.What's going on in Houghton Valley and how to get involved
In the late 1920s the locals built the still-standing community hall, digging out the bank, and raising 100 pounds. Initially the community centred on three or four farms, but gradually the city reached out to Houghton Valley, with bus routes, and people commuting to work elsewhere. None-the-less, a strong sense of what Grant calls community stewardship continued. There was the hall, two parish churches – the Baptist church at 8 View Road, now a joiners, and Anglican St Chads, which is still in use - the bowling club and three shops: on Beach, View, and Buckley Roads.
The community was seriously affected by use of the valley as a tip (See Southern Bays no. 6 2011/2012); something some locals especially through the Progressive Association saw as a positive long-term benefit, as it created the flat parkland now so much a feature of Houghton Valley. But while the tips were in use, the valley faced noise, dust and other pollution, and the loss of a sense of coastal serenity.
But Grant says the older people do not blame the tip for the drop off in community activity apparent in the latter decades of last century: they attribute it to TV, and car ownership. He sees the 1980s as a low ebb in social cohesion, but says the community was there all along, His project, he believes, along with the activity of some others such as Norman Smith provided a catalyst to reawaken the still-living community spirit and activity.
And it was history which provided the biggest focus for community activity in recent times.
An archeologist living locally, Mary O’Keefe, supported Grant and others in a project for a community-based archeological dig at the site of the old Restieaux farm.
Sid Restieaux bought his farm on the western side of the Valley and his cows provided much of the milk for Island, Owhiro and Houghton Bays. The farmhouse itself survived into the 1960s, when it was finally torn down.
With the support of the City Council, the Historic Places trust, the Tenths Trust and Restieaux descendants, Grant and Mary organised a community archeological dig in February 2012; possibly the first ever in New Zealand.
It was far bigger that Grant’s expectations: ‘I believed it would be me, Mary and a couple of dogs but word got out word got out and Norman [Smith] got hold of it and organised a big team of locals to make it happen. It became a massive event.’
The day of the dig attracted hundreds of people, from as far away as Napier, including members of the Restieaux family, and was covered nationally on TV news. The antiques expert Peter Wedde ran a mini ‘Antiques Roadshow’ and closed-circuit TV brought images of the dig itself into the big marquees which provided a base for the processing and display of artifacts found, and protection from the weather.
The dig was particularly interesting because many of the items found – mainly bottles, and pieces of old ceramics – were originally deposited in the living memory of some of the older people there. And many remembered the depositors themselves, including Mr Sid Restieaux himself, famous for his call-out to alert people to bring their containers out to be filled with milk from his cans. In one particularly amusing incident, an elderly observer with a keen eye and a good memory expressed certainty that she had known the owner of a half a pair of false teeth which turned up in the dig.
No jars of gold sovereigns were found, and little of any commercial value. This was not a grand estate - it was the remains of a hard-working family which had weathered the depression in a tough part of Wellington. Apart from the obvious conclusions (Grant was reported in the Dominion Post as saying the family ‘drank a lot of beer and used a lot of tomato sauce’), there were fascinating objects found that provided a basis for speculation on the Restieaux’s lives. Most of the broken crockery was cheap, and locally available. But one or two pieces were old, and must have been imported – one dating back to the 1700s. Another was an early piece of Clarice Cliff work. Clearly, in the hardscrabble existence on the hillside, things of beauty played a part, and had perhaps been kept from the time of the family’s immigration. A bakelite crystal set must have been used for listening to wartime broadcasts when the Home Guard had a base nearby, and the south coast was seen as a potential invasion point. The remains of toys spoke of the childhoods typical of those of perhaps hundreds of the children who called Houghton Valley home.
There is more to discover under the ground on the site of the farm, and more to discover in the memories of residents and the records and photos others have left.
Grant Corbishley’s project is remarkable for finding not only evidence of past communities, but uncovering and activating the still-living community network which was there all the time, and waiting for its own history to bring it to life again.
Pamphlets promoting the archeological dig and commuity activities
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