We had a taxi booked at 10am to take us to Paihia where we took the passenger ferry to Russell. It is a very quaint old seaside town on an island with a lot of history. The weather was very variable, so the first thing we did was to rush to the museum to get out of the rain. It was an interesting little museum, loads of stuff from the whaling era, huge whale bones and various ghastly looking harpoons.
‘Russell is a historic town, dating from the early 19th century and known by its original Maori name Kororāreka until the early 1840s. In the 1830s it was a lawless trading centre where whalers, seafarers and merchants mixed with early settlers, adventurers, deserters and escaped convicts from Australia. From 1833 there were attempts to impose British law, culminating in the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. It was a rough seaport, popular with Pacific whalers, with the nickname ‘The Hellhole of the Pacific’. After the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson purchased land to establish the colony’s first capital. It was named Russell after the leader of the British House of Commons. A year later the capital was moved south to Auckland in 1841.’
We moved onto the next historical site, the Pompallier House, a Catholic mission printery, the oldest surviving industrial building in New Zealand. We had a very good half Maori guide take us around the house, amazingly we did not have to pay a cent as we are National trust members. The only others in our group were an English couple who were also NT members, a lean day for the museum. In 1839 Bishop Jean Baptiste François Pompallier got his Marist priests to build a two-storeyed printery, using a rammed earth shuttering technique as timber was too expensive. There was a thriving trade in NZ selling timber to Europe, because Europe was running out of timber. Some of the walls have had the plaster removed and you can see the layers of sea sand and shells in the walls. On display were preserved rats that they had found in the walls, all with little trinkets and cloth that the rats had taken into their burrows. They had the original printer in one of the rooms, it had printed the first catholic church books translated into Maori, quite an undertaking as the Moari had no written language. The building was used as a grand private home from the late 1870s, the house was bought by the government in 1943 and in the 1990s it was restored as a printery under Heritage New Zealand. The gardens were lovely with an ancient orchard, which are from when it was a grand house. Amazingly the tanning pits at the back of the house were discovered when a kitchen was remodelled in the 1970s. The renovation has restored the pits and filled them with black wattle bark, which is how they originally do it. The run printing and leather courses currently using the old methods. It really was quite fascinating, we really enjoyed our tour.
Afterwards we wondered along the seafront road looking for lunch, a lot of places were closed so we landed up going to an Italian restaurant called the Gables, and had a very friendly Sicilian waiter. We had an excellent fish lunch, it way exceeded our expectations, all washed down with a bottle of Bay of Island Albarino wine. We staggered home afterwards …. we will have to come and visit the couple of wineries next time.
Blue dot is us in the marina, and further north the ferry crossing from Paihia to Russell
The Paihia dock, a lot of traditional looking architecture
The passenger ferry to Russell
All blue in the ferry!
Huge crayfish in the museum, I had to stand next to it to give it scale
Pompallier House
The original printer
The gardens going up to the water’s edge
The pebble beach at Russell
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