Onekaka childhood remembered
Visiting the Onekaka Hall was a trip down memory lane for Dawn Rose (nee Skelton), who attended school there from 1939 to 1945. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
Nelson resident Dawn Rose travelled over the Hill late last month to stay at Onekaka so that she could reminisce about her childhood spent in the once-thriving industrial community, including six years at Onekaka School, now the local hall.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and all the memories came flooding back,” said 82-year-old Dawn, who was accompanied on the trip by her husband, Alan Rose, and their daughter and son-in-law, Helen and Ron Wichman, of Blenheim.
Dawn was born in Ngahere on the West Coast, then lived at Roa near Blackball, where her fitter and turner father Thomas James Skelton worked at the coal mine. He became a supervisor under the Gold Prospecting Subsidy Scheme in the Great Depression and shifted with his family to Bainham, where he supervised miners in the Quartz Ranges. Dawn attended school in Bainham and was classmates with long-time storekeeper Lorna Langford. When the scheme finished, the family moved first to Parapara, where Dawn’s father sluiced for gold there and in the Tukurua catchment, then to Onekaka when he got a job at the ironworks.
Dawn particularly wanted to find the site of a small house that once stood in what is now the Washbourn Reserve. Her father bought it to remove and rebuild beside Onekaka Arts’ present site. “I spent a lot of time playing at that old house site as my father was pulling it all apart. It had a big rhododendron tree and a gully beside it that I used to play down in.” That massive tree with purple flowers can still be seen in the reserve, along with foundations of the house.
Dawn started at Onekaka School in 1939, when she was nine, and left, aged 14, in 1945. Her well-liked teacher was Mr RV Liddicoat. She recalls that she was one of 29 pupils.
“It was the most wonderful education, so comprehensive. Along with all the usual subjects we did amazing art projects like copper picture plaques where we would draw on copper sheet and beat and punch it out. There used to be a copper plaque on the gate saying ‘Onekaka School’.”
A trip around the community hall brings Dawn’s memories back. School would start every morning with a march around the tennis courts to the tune of Colonel Bogie.
“The grounds used to be so immaculate, like a formal garden, not a blade of grass out of place. The bank down to the swimming pool and changing sheds was a beautiful lawn all planted in azaleas. We used to sit down there and eat our lunch.”
She casts her eyes around the grounds. “There was a rounders patch over there [in the far corner], and the boys had their little vege patches over there [in the swings area], which the school inspector would always take a good look at when he came. Mrs Liddicoat, the teacher’s wife, taught us girls to knit and make scarves and other handicrafts. The toilets used to be behind where that stage is now. The flagpole is gone, and over there they put a little prefab for a while for the infants.”
A few tears are shed for the memories, even for the bellbirds singing all around along with the sound of the wind in the trees. A glass case of stuffed birds appears so much smaller to Dawn than it did in her school days, as does the single-room schoolhouse. Even the little porch has significance: “Me and Margaret Benvin used to giggle a lot, so we’d get sent out here. I think we spent quite a bit of time out here.”
A sophisticated herringbone of trenches down the bank in the big pine trees was dug out by Onekaka men as an air-raid shelter for the pupils. “We felt vulnerable during those war years. We thought we were going to be invaded for sure, and the radar station at Pillar Point reminded us of that.”
As part of the war effort, various communities in Golden Bay took turns entertaining the servicemen stationed out there on their weekend leave. “Every so often they’d be bussed to the ‘single men’s cookhouse’ up Ironworks Rd, which had evolved into a kind of community centre. Everyone would come and put on a big meal and entertainment for them. The Ward-Holmes boy would sing; he had such a lovely voice. It was always a great night.”
Every so often in summer too, for the war effort, the class would go out and pick ergot-infected seed from certain heads of grass. “We’d pull the heads apart to find it. There was something in it that stopped bleeding, we were told. Our teacher would put it all in a jar and send it off.”
Dawn recalls that the Onekaka School girls’ sports uniform was very trendy for the day: orange shorts with a white blouse and orange sash. Interschool sport competitions were always held at Collingwood, and one year Dawn came first in the girls’ high jump.
She also remembers exciting nights spent spearing flounder on the Onekaka mudflats, and the outings every Friday evening to Collingwood in Claude Wilkins’ bus to watch a movie, always the highlight of the week.
“We’d sing all the way there and back. I would always get really excited when we spotted what seemed to me the big bright harbour lights of Collingwood.” Dawn’s first trip out of the Bay was when she was 12, to visit her mum in hospital.
Despite her parents’ urgings that she stay on, Dawn Skelton left school at 14 because she just wanted to work. Her first job was housemaiding at the Telegraph Hotel before switching to the Post Office Hotel in Collingwood and finally the Junction. It was at this latter hotel that she first met her future husband, Alan Rose, visiting in a rugby team from Murchison. Dawn then did a stint travelling and working around New Zealand with her Takaka friend Lorna Bothwell. Years later she met Alan again in Hokitika, where she became a nurse at Westland Hospital (now closed). Alan operated the town’s Gold Band Taxi Service as well as the ambulance contract for Westland, and represented New Zealand as one of our top axemen for several years in Australasian wood-chopping champs. He and Dawn eventually retired in Nelson.
“I couldn’t have wished for a better childhood,” says Dawn. “It was loads of fun in a marvellous community. Looking around, it has changed, but it feels like the essential spirit of the place is still here.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
