On 18 January 1934, Lord and Lady Bledisloe arrived at Picton for a presentation connected with the new national gathering at Waitangi.
The official visitors were named. The mayors were named. The speakers were named. The master carver was named.
But the record also kept four names that could easily have disappeared.
Mrs Hariata Huntley, née Kere.
Mrs Puhi Huntley.
Mrs Ngaia Arthur, née Kepa.
Mrs Tini Hemi, née Kere.
They were the four Waikawa women who worked the tukutuku panels on the back of a carved presentation chair.
The chair itself was carved by Thomas Heberley of Te Ātiawa, formerly of Queen Charlotte Sound. It was presented to Lord Bledisloe in his role as donor of the Waitangi Estate and chairman of the Waitangi Trust Board, with the intention that it would be placed in Waitangi House.
The Waikawa League and local supporters had raised almost all the money for it.
On the lawn before the Picton War Memorial, a space was used as the marae. A Waikawa culture party welcomed the visitors. The Mission House Choir sang. The chair was blessed. A whole bullock, a sheep and two large sacks of potatoes went into the hāngī.
This was not a small decorative contribution to somebody else's ceremony. Waikawa had organised, paid, carved, woven, welcomed, fed and sung.
Hariata Huntley was our great-grandmother.
We first knew her as a name on a family chart. Then an iwi pānui placed her hands inside a national event.
That is the part of history I keep coming back to.
A chair survives as an object. A newspaper records the important visitors. But unless somebody keeps looking, the women whose hands made part of it can become a line beneath the photograph.
The four names appear in E Tītia, Issue 22, April 2019, published by Te Ātiawa o Te Waka-a-Māui. The account was compiled by historian Mike Taylor from Marlborough Express reports of 18 and 19 January 1934.
Does anyone hold another photograph of the presentation, know more about these four women, or know the chair's history after it left Picton?
The object matters.
So do the hands behind it.
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