Heritage Trails – Megan Williams

Note: This talk by the Chair of the Hastings District Heritage Trails Committee was given at Duart House in 2010; however, the introduction and opening remarks are missing.

Megan Williams: … so that’s up on our Kaweka Heritage Trail, looking over at Mount Ruapehu. So I just want to give you a little bit of an example of the wonderful, wonderful things that you see on these trails.

[Shows slides] That’s up in Puketitiri, which to me is just the gem of Hawke’s Bay, and the heated pool. Now I remember before DOC [Department of Conservation] put that there it was just a hole in the ground. [Murmuring in background] That’s somewhere I used to take the children when they were young, ‘cause we always thought it was really special. And you know, at night there’s glow worms going down to the … And I’ve noticed that when my son comes home from varsity, if he’s got a girlfriend or a friend he’ll often say, “Let’s go to Puketitiri for a dip.” So you know, it is a special, special place.

Comment: I can see why you don’t have trouble getting committee members. [Laughter]

Megan: Well that was Millie; and do you remember Deborah Turner that [who] was on our committee from council, who we lost? And then also the person in the pool was Simon Robson, who was the Traffic engineer. He’s not Traffic engineer now, is he? They’ve changed the title. And he has been amazingly supportive from council, so we’re so lucky to get those relationships. It was just ‘bout ten years later, after the – the reason why the foundation became defunct, as I said, was because you paid this initial fee, and unless you’re going to pay subs [subscriptions] further down the track, well obviously, it’s going to run out.

Now, we’re on to the next one [slide] about how it’s developed. When a trail’s being developed the committee will identify an area where they believe there is a significant cluster of interesting sights. For instance, when we decided to do the Hastings Urban Trail, we went around and we got together in the committee and went through places that we thought were special. And of course ,with all our heads together … and you know, if you ever think of things that should be on a trail, just give us a yell; come to our committee meetings; you’re more than welcome. And so it’s a matter of getting all those things and then working out a route. So that’s how we start – we think, ‘Right, there’s a whole lot of really good things in such and such an area’, and we put them down on a bit of paper and then we work out a route. So we cluster them together; the sites will develop a route; join these sites together into a route that would take about four or five hours to complete by car. Now that’s if we’re doing a big trail, but obviously, as I said before, the walkways aren’t like, four or five hours’ drive.

And the Architectural Drive – as you can imagine each trail, the length of time to do it depends on how many stops you want to have, and you know, whether you want to have lunch, or you know, all that sort of thing. Some of them are obviously longer than others. Our Ahuriri one which was really too long, we’ve now just recently divided it into two.

This is the bit that I love, and the [chuckle] guys are always teasing me ‘cause I always make the cheese scones. And then we usually get the council van and off we toddle, and we actually do the trails, that’s right. And of course when you do that you’re identifying all sorts of things on the way – what the best route is, and things that we might’ve missed that were of significance; understanding the people that we need to contact, that, you know … ’cause it’s really important that we discuss that there’s going to be a Trail with people that are on it; if there’s special gardens or … for instance, Kereru Station’s got a sign up outside it. Well if you lived at Kereru Station in the farmhouse, you might not want people stopping, and you know, looking at Kereru Station. And ‘specially the architectural drive around Havelock North – quite a few people when we contacted them, they said, “No, we don’t want anybody stopping and looking at our house.” And golly, that’s fair enough.

Yeah, we’ve sort of got a bit set in our ways, but we’re always looking for new members. But I don’t know why – we’re very nice people – I don’t know why we don’t seem to get them, ’cause we have fun; that’s the whole … I mean, if it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t’ve kept going all these years.

Yeah, once it’s been identified then the sites are listed, and the committee go into research mode where each committee member has a number of sites that they go away and research. And we’re very lucky, because we’ve got people like Ivan [Hughes] and Maurice [Bartlett], they will do that research. I mean I can only do what I have the time to do, because I work …

Maurice Bartlett: That’s the difficult part, because you end up getting so much about one site that you actually have to edit it down to maybe three or four lines. So you do get a lot more information; but now we’re passing that information on to the historical part of the council for their records.

Megan: Yeah. Because when Roy [Peacock] died … Roy had done a lot of research and he’d done most of the trails; he had virtually books, you know, on them. He’d contacted all sorts of people; had wonderful photographs. And when he passed away, we didn’t know where the information was. We contacted Jackie, his wife; and she was upset obviously … grieving; and she really wasn’t interested in us going onto getting that stuff, so we lost a lot of stuff in that manner. So that was fine; we learned from that. We now make sure that all the information … we have a system and it all goes in, it’s documented; we’ve got our own archives, and we make sure that the information goes via council. All the trails are all on disk now, and so I guess we’ve learned.

But the research is really important, because, as Judy [Siers] will tell you, research is something that … there’s such a lot of work goes into it to get it accurate. And so we have to consult with a lot of people, and we have to make sure we do our homework; and as historians you’ll all know how important that is, to get your facts right. And we had one brochure [chuckle] which we did – it was the Architectural Drive – and a person’s name was wrong, wasn’t it? Yeah.

Maurice: Megan, I actually brought a stack of them that we could hand out as they go out, because I thought, ‘That’s not cool if Megan hasn’t brought any brochures’, or whatever.

Megan: Well I’ve got examples of all the brochures.

Maurice: Yeah. We’ll hand out the Architectural Drive brochures.

Megan: That’s examples of all the different ones that we’ve got here in the district, but you’re welcome to take that Hawke’s Bay one away with you.

So what we had to do … we got a little sticker and we had to go through … how many thousand? Fifteen thousand … we had to stick over that word. But we couldn’t not do it, and I mean you’ve got to respect that; you just simply can’t have something going out that’s … And that’s what, you know, as you know all being historians, you’ll know how important it is. Now the research involves looking at the history, obtaining old photographs, and taking new photographs. Ivan is our photographer and he takes wonderful photographs for us. I’ve just got a selection of photos here, just to make it a bit more interesting; and that’s the old Hastings Post Office after the earthquake – you’ll see the bell here. I love the old photographs, I think they’re fabulous.

Question: What did the bell come off?

Megan: The Post Office Tower.

Question: Would you know why there’s a bell?

Megan: Do you know why it had a bell?

Unknown speaker: The bell? The bell is in the present clock tower.

Megan: Oh, is it?

Question: Why was it in the Post Office [??]

Megan: Must’ve been in the clock tower in the old days, then, wasn’t it?

Question: Was there a clock on the front of it?

Megan: Yeah. Now the research may involve talking to people about the families who lived in particular homes. And often, you know, I mean, a home – that is dependent on the original families that were there often; it would be the architect or family that was there; that’s what the history’s all about. So it’ll be often talking to the families. Part of our research process is to write to the different sites we’re proposing to have on the trail, and invite the owners to meet so that they can have their input into the trail, and also give them an opportunity to say that they do want to be mentioned, of for some reason they don’t want that exposure. So it’s very important that we’re not intrusive on people; that we respect them. But it is nice to have them included.

And Jim [Watt] was part of our committee when we were doing the Havelock trail and the walkway, weren’t you? So we find sometimes people come to our committee for a period of time and then move on, because they’re particularly interested in the trail that we’re developing at that time, which is fantastic! Absolutely great, you know.

So this is what … quickly going through … identify points of interest; we contact the local people on the route; we draft a copy of the brochure, and then input’s sought from iwi. Always have to get input from iwi, as you can imagine, especially when an area has a lot of Maori culture. For instance, Dan Panapa was very involved on our committee when we were doing the original River Trail down the Tukituki [River], which was a huge area of Maori settlement way back at the turn of the last century. And then in 1913 when the flu epidemic came through … although if you go down there now there’s not a lot of Maori [?], not like there used to be [??] But Dan was very involved with our research in that area, and came to our committee meetings for about three or four years, and that input was fantastic.

[New slide] That’s just a photograph I put … and that was the old … well it’s still going … the sale this morning; Monday, Wednesday, the stockyards, yep?

Question: So Megan, eventually all the material that you’ve researched will be deposited up at Stoneycroft, will it?

Megan: Well, I presume so; but the brochures carry everything. But there is other history that we have and a lot of that’s just in our files and things. But we’re very conscious of giving it to … Nanette Roberts is our secretary, and so if we doing things we always make sure we’re giving Nanette, you know, copies of things.

Maurice: But the council themselves requested that we pass on any of our research material to their archive, or whatever.

Megan: Right. Well then that’ll go up …

Yeah, the next step is the positioning of the signs; and of course the signage and brochures cost money, and this has to be attained by either fundraising, or from our local authorities or community organisations. And so, as I said before, we’ve been particularly lucky because we’ve had the support of council; we’ve had the support of the regional council. Originally the regional council had a person employed part-time to support Heritage Trails; that now no longer occurs, but they do sometimes put funding aside and we’ll get a cheque. So we’re always very conscious of of making sure that we’re not spending more than we’ve got, and also making sure that if we’re going to be spending some money – as you can imagine brochures cost a lot of money – that we’re getting the money from somewhere, so we’re very careful how we budget. And we are an incorporated society … charitable trust … I mean, we’re accountable.

Yeah, once everything’s done the trail is opened, and the brochures are placed in travel agents, visitor information centres and other tourism information locations. We have had some amazing openings. The last one we had was a couple of months ago, and we took a bus trip – I don’t know if you remember it; the mayor opened it down at Lucknow Lodge. And it was a Sunday morning, and forty of us hopped in the bus and we actually did the new trail, which is the eastern side of the Awarua Trail, and goes down the Tukituki. We were able to go through Lucknow Lodge, which was really nice; Terry Longley took us right through there. And then we all went out to Birdwood [Gallery]; and then we had lunch at the Patangata pub, [Tavern] and then we went through the … it was before it was opened, but the regional council opened the gates to the Pekapeka Swamp redevelopment. And that particular trail takes us up and up, over then back down Burma Road. This is just unbelievable … wind up [at] Lake Poukawa.

One of our [?] agendas is that this tremendous work developing trails throughout New Zealand’s been accomplished almost exclusively [through] voluntary efforts. So everything we’ve done, we don’t have to sort of go out and get sponsors as such, but everything we’ve done has been absolutely voluntary. It’s different to other brochures that you get, which are often full of advertisements, and are full of business sites. We do have business sites on, because often business sites are of historical and cultural value. If they are, then they should be there. But because we’re not a business venture, we don’t have a lot of the … just going from business to business to business; that’s just not the way we work.

Now here we’ve got … any of you done the Waimarama Trail? That was our first one we did, and then we [did] the Kaweka, which goes up to Puketitiri, which is my special [?], that one. Then we did the Awarua, which is huge – we’ve now divided it into two, which is like, the Tukituki which we developed, and then we’re now in the process of revamping the one at Ngaruroro which goes up to Kereru/Big Hill, up there. Now the Hastings/Taihape which was called the Inland Patea Trail, we’ve done that twice; we’ve done it once and then revamped it. But years and years ago we joined with Taihape; and there was a committee in Taihape and that was really, really good. And we split the difference cost-wise, and it went on one side of the brochure it went up to Kuripapango, and then we flipped it the other side and it went the other way, so we sort of met in the middle. And that was really good to have that team effort; I mean, that took us right through to the middle of the North Island. And then we re-did it, and they again got on board with us.

The openings are really good; we had a really nice opening up at Ngamatea.  Oh, some of our openings! We’ve been opened by the Prime Minister; we had a second opening, the Kaweka one – a whole lot of cyclists from Australia came and cycled down the trail, and then as they rode into Hastings, that was the opening. What other openings have we had? We had …

Comment: The cheese scone opening. [Chuckles]

Megan: We had another time we did it, on the Blossom Parade; that was the launch of one of our … We always actually make a bit of a fuss about our openings, because the thing is – no point in doing all this stuff if nobody knows about it. [Chuckles] And I mean when you’re getting fifteen thousand brochures printed, you know, you better do it …

Maurice: The thing is we don’t have money for publicity to put ads in the paper and such, so it’s mostly word of mouth.

Megan: The Architectural Drive, which probably a lot have done, which is really special. And then we decided that we would join with SCHNEG’s [Saint Columba’s Havelock North Environment Group], which is when Jim became involved, and the Karamu Walkway – we decided to make that into a Heritage Trail, so that’s why when you see the walkway down there, you’ll see the green and gold signs. We all started to work as a team there to get it in. The Tainui Walk – that one was sort of an off-spring from our original Waimarama one, because we went round past Tainui Reserve on the historic walk.

Probably about fifteen years ago we were actually recognised by the Smithsonian Institute, and the Heritage Trails of New Zealand won the Green Globe Award … environmental award. Yeah. So as I sort of said before, from time to time the committee must audit the trails and they must re-write the trail brochures to keep them current and accurate, ‘cause as you can imagine, things close down you know, or we get new sites. ‘Cause it’s not necessarily historic, it’s also scenic and cultural, so other sites develop. And so you’ve got to make sure that your brochures … when they run out we don’t just go and click a button and get them re-printed; we go right through the whole process all over again. And thank heavens I’ve got Ivan and Maurice down there who will pop in the car and off they’ll toddle, and they’ll redo … We go through every single word of the brochure, I mean they’re edited and edited and edited, to get them …

Maurice: And there’re still errors. [Chuckles]

Megan: Oh no! But the reprinting, as you can see, does cost money. Yeah, the most recent trail has been the revamp of Awarua Trail, which we have just divided into two trails – the eastern side, which is the Tukituki River trail, called the Middle Road/Poukawa Trail; and the western side which goes up to Kereru/Big Hill.

Yeah, that was another opening we had – when the Cinema Gold Theatre was opened we launched our Havelock North Walk, and we made that event a fundraiser for us. That event paid for the publicity of the actual brochure, so that was a real win-win for [sneeze] everybody. [New slide] So there was our committee at that; Maurice, you weren’t there – you hadn’t joined the Hastings committee at that point, had you? Where were you, Jim, that night?

Jim Watt: I don’t recognise everybody there, no.

Megan: And Nanette Roberts, her partner, Ian Burson, is our treasurer. So we’re really lucky to have those two on board. But there’s Lily and Cherie Baker, and Stephanie and Ivan [Hughes] and Don [Trask]. And unfortunately we’ve lost two of those people. Golly, you won’t be wanting to join my committee. [Chuckles]

Maurice: And they’re all experts, I see. [Laughter]

Megan: I thought, you know, you know these people, and when you actually know people it makes it a bit different, doesn’t it? Yeah.

The advantages of the Heritage Trails in the community as a whole: so its historic, cultural, scenic significance[s] are identified, with the result that they’re looked after and protected; tourist attractions are created by customary [custom] sites; tourism packages are created for the district; visitors stay in the area longer and spend money; locals are able to enjoy their heritage; council does not have to pay for an office, equipment and staff, ‘cause work is done on a volunteer basis. So, you know, you find with a lot of these things you’ve got to … you’ll think of something in a region, and then you’ve got to get your office, your office person, your computer, your da dada … don’t have to do that with Heritage Trails, we just do it all ourselves. Clear, attractive, comprehensive signage is developed; accurate, current research brochures about the district are created and kept updated and current.

[New slides] That was when we got the Green Globe Award from the Smithsonian Institute. There’s Te Mata Peak from one of our sites. And that’s the last one, but that was when we were on one of the Blossom Parades we have from time to time. In fact we won one one year; did a float in the Blossom Parade. So we do have a bit of fun, it’s not just the [?]; we just make it fun.

Are there any questions about Heritage Trails? It’s not rocket science, but it’s just a system that we religiously … that’s the secret, I guess, ’cause we religiously keep to the process, and don’t move on to the next until we tick the boxes of the one before; and we’ve done it over and over again, and it works. The sad thing is that, you know, if the committee’s no longer there those signs will become obsolete, and then nobody will remember what Heritage Trails was all about. My real goal – when I was in England, I don’t know if I’ve still got it at home, there was a book called ‘The AA Guide to Britain’. Has anybody ever seen that book?

Audience, altogether: Yes.

Megan: Right. Well that was my goal when I came back from England, ‘cause whenever Ernie and I’d go out on a Saturday or Sunday, I had that; he’d be driving and I had that on my knee. So no matter where you went you had the little map, so you didn’t miss any of the wonderful little sites. And that was my goal originally, was to be able just … I mean, if you had that throughout New Zealand … and you could do that by literally joining all the Heritage Trail brochures. You know Hastings has virtually got it all covered.

Comment: That was the ultimate aim when we started; was to be able to start at the top and go through Heritage Trails right down to the bottom of New Zealand, but I guess that’s never happened.

Megan: Yeah, and because it’s called Trails, people sometimes get it confused with like, walkways or you know, like, a ‘trail’ trail. But it is quite different. It incorporates those sorts of trails, but it isn’t.

Comment: If John Key’s got tourism, isn’t he the person to go and [?] …

Megan: Perhaps he should’ve come today. Yeah. [Laughter] [??]

Maurice: See, well unfortunately, the government’s sort of going a little bit anti on all these things, like – the Foundation has disappeared. And now many will understand what’s happening to the Historic Places Trust; a similar thing. There’s a few other organisations that are these sort of ad hoc things that the government are not wanting to fund too much into them.

Megan: Yeah, but I mean this doesn’t cost them anything.

Maurice: No, exactly.

Megan: I mean – but I guess you’ve got to have passionate people there; and I mean, with the Foundation too. And it’s like anything, you see it all the time, some people got on it that had their own agenda anyway. But we’ve just kept our feet firmly on the ground, and just stuck to the recipe.

Question: First [?] one was Puketitiri Museum – that’s coming from Bay View, is it? Do you know anything about that?

Megan: Don’t know. It is on our trail, the Puketitiri; it’s one of our sites. And that’s the sort of thing that when we revamped, we’d have to research, because, you know, if you’ve got it up there at Puketitiri and it’s not there any more …

Maurice: Haven’t they got a site in … the road comes off the Taupo Road, coming back inland there; I think they’ve already got a site …

Megan: Have they? Oh, they’ve purchased a site to relocate the Museum?

Maurice: But I don’t know when it’s to happen, but in time it will be moved. Yeah.

Question: My other question was, do you still have any connection with [??] Walkways? You know what I mean?

Megan: Some of the walkways in Napier are trails …

Questioner: … [???] along the beach, and that sort of thing?

Megan: No, not really. You can probably answer that better, Maurice.

Maurice: They’re done by the Rotary Club. These are different [??] …

Megan: The Awatoto Walkway … does that incorporate any of the walkways?

Maurice: No. But you might be able to construe that some of them in Ahuriri, you know – there’s a walkway that goes along the beach, an actual, physical walkway which is part of the walkways; but our trail you walk around is very close to it, on the same footpath.

Unknown speaker: They may coincide [???] is placed …

Megan: Yes, exactly, that’s right.

Unknown speaker: … and are not incorporated as such. Then again, they’re a walkway that in time was to cover the whole of New Zealand from top to bottom, and join up with each other. And that was mooted years and years ago.

Megan: Yeah. I mean, that’s a different philosophy, that’s for sort of biking and walking; whereas this philosophy of the Heritage Trails is those three things: historic, cultural and scenic [?].

Comment: They’re more fitness things, I’d say, walking and biking. Although on Ahuriri’s frontage, if you go along there, beside their walkway they’ve got some plaques about the historical things that are there, that happen to be at the same point.

Megan: I mean, the thing is, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, either – I mean you know, if people are doing that, that’s cool.

Jim: Megan, I’d just like to congratulate your committee on your tenacity in keeping going, because most of the Historic Trail committees around the country have closed, or lost interest, or moved on to other things. But the Hastings one and the Napier one just keeps going.

Ivan Hughes: And remember, Jim, you were a stalwart part of it. [Laughter]

Jim: Ivan Hughes is the second point of my comment [chuckles] because in terms of making historic information available to the public, your brochures are a classic way of doing that. And if you make a collection up and down the country, you end up with a history of New Zealand in a sense.

Megan: Oh, I’d love to see that in a book, because that was my [??] too. Everywhere in the country.

Jim: Yeah, I’d like though, to acknowledge Ivan and his …

Ivan: No way. [Chuckles]

Jim: … lovely Stephanie. When they were up in Gisborne, they went about this kind of work in their own capacity and produced pamphlets at their own cost, or from plucking the cloud somehow. [Chuckle] But there are a series of Historic Places brochures, or pamphlets maybe, from Gisborne that those two are solely responsible for. And I’m lucky enough to have a set of those, and they’re just classic in taking people up to Gisborne; you’ve got this wonderful resource at your fingertips.

When I first came here I was looking for the author of a history of the port of Awanui, up on the East Coast; and I wrote to these people in Gisborne, and the letter came back in the dead letter post, saying that they’d moved on. It was Ivan and Stephanie, and they’d written this wonderful little book about the history of Awanui, or the old port that was there. And that’s a little classic work, too. Ivan, I would like to say publicly, the community is indebted to yours and Stephanie’s work, and thank you for doing it.

Ivan: Thank you, Jim. I’d like to pay compliment to the work that you’ve done [laughter] in the Stewart Island/Foveaux Strait area too, which should be published.

Megan: So, you know, that’s the wonderful part about it, isn’t it? You’ve got these gems of people .. I mean Stephanie used to work tirelessly, didn’t she? And poor old Roy, he did too; but you know, as I said, he used to ruffle feathers up, but it wasn’t a problem on our committee ‘cause we just smoothed them all out again. [Chuckles] Any other questions?

Question: In terms of accessing the information, you were saying the brochure is actually a summary of the research that’s been done. Would it be possible to … you’ve got these already on the website … to put hot links to further information?

Megan: Yeah, it will be a matter of getting somebody to do that. We do have the support of Council; like, you know, we managed to sort of get them do the process of how to make a Heritage Trail; they typed all that out, ‘cause I mean it was quite a thick document. And then we got someone the other day to re-type in … ‘cause originally of course, things were on the old computers. Roy had really funny language in his computer, that you couldn’t … like, these days you just zap it on something, email it to someone; it’s easy. But things had to be re-typed, you know – brochures had to be re-typed out and things like that. So we have had that support from people to do that; but what you’re saying, it would need to be sorted, and there’s no reason why that … You could probably talk more about that, Maurice?

Maurice: Well you see, just taking a good example – I’ve got a whole set of the Havelock North Architectural Drive. Now, you see, you write the brochure, but each one of the houses that are in there could have a book written about it, you know? So that’s what you’re up against.

Megan: Judy can certainly tell you about that. She’s written the book.

Maurice: Yeah, so you have to … you’re only really touching the surface on a lot of these sites.

Comment: But you could do a suggestion of further information as a good [?] – you don’t necessarily need to enter it all, but you could put your references; like, if you’re talking to Whare Ra, then you can reference …  There’s one example; you don’t put it all on, but you lead the … [speaking together, inaudible] … where they can go and find more information. It’s like a bibliography almost.

Maurice: And most people have put something, probably at the back of the brochure, where [a] lot of the information’s come from anyway, that you want; Buchanan’s from Hawke’s Bay, or whatever …

Megan: And often a trail will kind of cross another trail, and so we’ll often say you know, see the trail [???]

Question: Megan, can I ask you about availability, because I heard something – I think it was from you, Maurice – that you had to buy these in Napier? Is that true?

Maurice: Yes.

Comment: And the availability seems to me to be one of the sticking points of …

Ivan: No. Hastings one’s are free; the Napier one you do have to purchase, because the Napier committee does not have quite the availability of finances that the Hastings one has. But we won’t go into that … [many people speaking together, indecipherable]

Maurice: We put a one or two dollar charge on it. What we found was a lot of people took them, looked at them, virtually threw them away. We said if we charge, two things: it’ll stop them throwing away brochures people don’t want maybe; and the funding will help us get more funds, because the Napier Council are not very generous on their side, where Hastings are more generous.

Comment: That means that Napier has to be obtained from some place where there was an ability to accept money.

Megan: That’s right. And that really complicates it; and that’s what we felt was complicating it – the availability. Like, to put at your homestay, you know, we’d love to have brochures at your homestay, whereas if you have to take the money, we have to bring them out, you’ve got to collect the money, you probably want a commission … da de da de da, you know? And we just decided, whilst we have the funds available and we can do it … Mind you, what we do is, we know how much … say we might get a quote for $5,000 to do this particular printing or whatever, depending on how many we think … ‘cause some of the trails aren’t as popular as others, so therefore we don’t need as many to be printed. And so what we’ll often do then is go out and make a consolidated effort;  like, we might apply to the pub charities, or the Eastern and Central, or we might … might do a presentation to council to try and get more funding perhaps put in the budget, or, you know, something like … We might have a fundraiser-type thing like we did with the Cinema Gold. So we do always try to keep a bit ahead of ourselves so that we don’t have to do that. Because … it’s just a different philosophy; we have chosen, rightly or wrongly in the Hastings District, that whilst we’ve got the funding, to have them free.

Comment: And now their availability is what? Your i-Site, and Havelock Community Centre? Probably that’s the two main ones, would it be, Megan?

Ivan: Google; HDC, which will put you on to the Hastings District Council website; type in ‘Heritage Trails’, push the button. And the majority of the Napier ones are also in there, so availability is as far away as …

Megan: [Speaking together] So we’ve been very lucky with those link-ins. Because Maurice and I are involved with the Napier ones, well we’ve been able to put them on the Hastings District website. So you know, those are the sorts of link-ins that we’ve … because as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter where the trail’s from or whatever, you know – it’s all just about helping the public identify what our philosophy is, you know.

Maurice: But generally the Hastings trails are kept within their i-Site?

Megan: Oh, yes. Napier has them all.

Comment: Yeah, Napier’s at the i-Site, and the Art Deco Trust who we’ve got a friendship with, which is great too, really.

Megan: Yeah. And of course why Robert McGregor has had a cost is because they were running it from the Art Deco Trust, and they could see that was a way they could get a bit of money from selling them, basically.  But, yeah, it’s just an issue that we’ve just been a bit lucky with. And I think originally, it was because that original, historic way they were set up;  and I suppose it was me being the squeaky wheel at council, that each year I’d sort of go to David Fraser and say, “Right David – you’ve got our Heritage Trails in the budget, haven’t you?” You know, and now it’s sort of gone in there; because the Hastings District doesn’t want a whole lot of tatty signs either, so they make sure they’ve got enough money in there to … [inaudible] And at the end of the day it’s a system that’s worked on a voluntary basis, so why not, you know, support it? Okay, we’re done. Enjoy.

Jim: I’m going to invite Paddy to propose a vote of thanks.

Paddy: First of all, thank you, Megan, from my heart. Now some of you will have heard me burble on before, and I hope you will not be too bored, because I am the most inadequate person to ask to propose a vote of thanks. It’s wonderful to find this tradition here, that people are trying to bring home to people the necessity of creating that wonderful web that really makes our lives of interest. I was fortunate enough to be drawn into the Duart House Society about twenty-five years ago by two characters who were cast in the same mould. To them I owe and the community owes an enormous debt of influence – an enormous debt which can never really be repaid. I’ve been asked to hand this to Megan;  I hand it with all my heart.

Megan: Thank you. [Applause]