Mac Harwood: Upper Takaka historian and rock-hound
Family genealogies and local histories, Mac Harwood can't get enough of them.
The latest project for history buff Mac Harwood of Upper Takaka has been collating the history of roads in his area, handwriting screeds of remembered information on just how each of them got made, starting right back with the old Maori pathway out to Riwaka.
He explains: “Up to around 1895 to 1900 here everyone basically just got around on wide carriageways cut through the bush which could often become nothing more than big mud bogs. By 1910 the government was giving out grants in Golden Bay to bring its roads up to all-weather standards.”
Mac’s research has been meticulous, detailing many of the early farming families along the way who were often contracted to supply horses, hand-dig water-tables and put in wooden culverts along their stretch of the ‘highway’.
Side roads like Aarons Creek and the track off to the Asbestos Quarry are all described, even the Kill Devil Track which apparently many locals considered a good bet to escape over if the Japanese invaded during WW2.
Roadside institutions are detailed also, like the Upper Takaka Public Hall and the flea-ridden and condemned Forresters Inn that made way for the Rat Trap.
Mac’s interest in local history goes back a way. Not only has he written up all his younger day recollections, but in 1989 he self- published a small book about great grandfather Octavius Harwood who stepped ashore in New Zealand from London 150 years before, settling first at Otakau on the Otago Peninsula.
It was his son, James Septimus Harwood, who got a job in 1887 as assistant keeper at Farewell Spit. His duties there were to milk the cow and ride by horse to Puponga once a fortnight and collect the supplies - oil for the lamps and chaff for the horse. He also helped attend the light at night. Despite parental objections about marrying into the Harwood family, Robina Winton accepted his proposal to come up from the Otago Peninsula and marry him. He resigned from the lighthouse service in 1894 and they settled at Pakawau before moving to Upper Takaka and building the original Accommodation House there in 1903. Although family holdings have grown somewhat since, it’s still under the name of A D Harwood, Mac’s Dad.
“We recently cleared through the old farm accounts, some going back to 1925. I found it interesting the way all the government departments insisted on calling my father Arthur Richard Harwood in their correspondence even though his middle name was actually just Dick. Times were much more formal back then. You couldn’t deviate from the line like you can today.”
Mac has now collected almost 14,000 names (many with family trees) that are connected to his family and other local settlers. A small treatise about the original Sparrow family farm at Dry Creek near Hailes Knob (titled Eric and Lucy Sparrow and Section 1) that he finished in June 2008 was reprinted in the Nelson Historical Society Journal.
Mac, who is 75, keeps his hand in the farming operation, doing sheep-work and helping out with the wool. His interests have widened considerably since his early farming days and the 25 years he spent milling and treating timber on the family farm at Upper Takaka.
“I remember being intrigued reading once in a 1900 publication that there were 19 different types of limestone and marble known in the Takaka region. Now we know there’s at least 23.” Mac has documented them all in his meticulous fashion and he has prospected out so many samples of them all that they now have to reside in a separate house, which he calls ‘the museum’, on the farm.
An eye-opener for him came ten years ago when Auckland War Memorial Museum paleontologist Mike Eagles visited and told him about all the fossils that could be found in the surrounding rocks. “The most interesting for me at Upper Takaka are the ‘Dancing Crinoids’ which lived in the Ordovician period around 435 million years ago. These filter-feeders, about six inches [150mm] high, attached themselves to the sea floor and waved around in the current. Upper Takaka is the only place of that old uplifted seabed where you can find them so identifiable.”
It was Harold Wellman, a geologist doing some work on the Cobb Dam foundations, who first discovered the remains of these creatures in Graphitic Arthur marble around Dry Creek during the 1960s while staying with Ralph and Nora Hope up Waitui Road. The samples he found were internationally significant as it was the first time these creatures were known to exist in New Zealand. Mac likes to show off a large worn chunk of marble on which he points out 400 million-year-old-plus worn casts now set in stone.
“The most interesting thing about Upper Takaka are these fossils, because they tell the real story of how this valley developed.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
