175 years and still hard case

Southland Times Editorial 11th Jan 2011:



When Riverton marked its 150th anniversary – the squishy sounding sesquicentennial celebrations – it coincided with an Invercargill visit by Billy Connolly, who made merry about the fact that they chose to mark it by erecting toilets.

Perhaps this struck him as rather dour and joyless, in which case he was sorely misled. That's not Riverton. Never was, never will be.

After all, John Howell knew how to throw a party.

The patriarch who founded Riverton was, by all accounts, a joyous man; so much so that this newspaper has occasionally argued that New Zealand would have been an altogether happier place if his approach "to Maori, to community, actually to life in general" had been more reliably the nationwide norm.

He married a Maori princess and settled down to preside over a little society of raw-boned hardworking harmony, first as a whaling station boss and then as a pioneer farmer. The many who enjoyed his hospitality would tell of nights of music and laughter; his daughters playing a piano duet while he took up his fiddle and regaled all around him with songs in Gaelic English and Maori, or with his seafaring tales.

Surveyor John Turnbull Thomson, bestirring himself one following morning, noted that Howell then rose early to cook breakfast, hunt and cook dinner and conduct religious activities for his village.

Top stuff, and it set a template from which Riverton has never veered too far. Any community, large or small, will have its vexations and occasional conniptions, but this town still seems to have weathered the passing time without losing the lip-smackingly salty flavour of the community Howell established.

Generations grew up associating Riverton with mighty fine recreation, not only from its beaches, but also the carnival which for decades ran from Boxing Day until the end of the first week in January.

People are perhaps more mobile nowadays, and the event has nothing like the scale of bygone years, but if the Taramea Bay soundshell no longer has the gravitational pull it once exerted, the core attractions of the resort remain strong, and widely enjoyed.

There's still plenty of work that gets done but it is also a haven for artisans and surfers, as the recent ructions over Wayne Hill's driftwood sculptures attest.

A good cafe-restaurant scene exists, as do a bunch of examples of how this community finds new ways to celebrate its enviable longevity; from the Te Hikoi museum opened in 2007 to the gathering momentum of its heritage food festival.

And now Riverton has reached the big 175, so time for a year's worth of merry-making to be collectively described, we are assured, as demi-semi-sept centennial celebrations.

These started last weekend with a street parade conducted with, to judge from today's letters column, a slightly dodgy sense of direction.

Nobody seems to have minded that the parade didn't exactly follow the arguably tedious dynamic of everyone heading in the same direction.

Among the events still on the calendar for later this year are the traditional Easter races.

Call us bluff traditionalists, but without wanting to squelch any sense of Rivertonian creativity, we might suggest that this event is still best conducted with the participants being clear beforehand where the race starts, where it stops, and the direction to be taken to get from the former to the latter.