Waitangi Golf Club professional Pieter Zwart showcases his trophies. Photo/ Golf NZ courtesy BMW media
Waitangi Golf Club professional Pieter Zwart won both the Wallace Development NZPGA Championship and the Cello NZ PGA Club Professional Championship at the Hastings Bridge Pa course two weeks ago.
He played his final four holes in five-under-par to leap ahead of the overnight leader Mason Lee, finishing the tournament at 15-under-par to win by a stroke. He said it went down to the wire.
“It was a strong field and my mindset was to play well and the by-product would be a win.
“When I finished I looked online and there were two players who had a one-shot lead, both had to birdie the last hole to force an extra holes playoff but that didn’t happen, both of them had their putts slide by.”
Zwart was in disbelief that he had just won the biggest title of his career. 1962 was the last time a golf professional won the New Zealand PGA tournament.
His finish was similar to his club championship victory in 2009, when he beat club stalwart and former New Zealand Seniors champion Stuart Duff. The win in Hastings puts him in the same league as golfing royalty, Sir Bob Charles, Frank Nobilo, Steven Alker and Michael Hendry all having won the title before.
He not only captured the trophy for beating 91 other professionals in the field but he claimed the trophy awarded to the leading club professional - winning the title by 10 strokes.
Zwart believed the Waitangi Golf Club could host a PGA championship round but that it was a question of having the resources. In other words, money.
“We are holding a ProAm tournament this week with prize money of $11,000. The NZ PGA tournament in Hastings had prize money of $100,000. All we need is a sponsor or two.”
The Te Tai Tokerau Water Trust hosted a barbecue two weeks ago for anyone wanting to hear about the work being undertaken at the Otawere reservoir in Waimate North.
Around 40 people attended including Far North District Council Deputy Mayor Kelly Stratford. She said the reservoir is expected to hold 4,000,000m3 of water and will be completed over two construction seasons.
Site establishment and enabling works have begun and work will soon start on the main 17m high dam embankment.
Trustees Dover Samuels and Kathryn de Bruin said the construction of the water storage reservoir will be a “great asset” to enable land use change to higher value and more sustainable horticulture use in the wider Waimate North and Ōhaeawai communities.
Nearby resident Graeme Price said neighbours in the immediate area to the dam were not invited to the barbecue and instead heard about it through a Facebook post.
He believed the project had gone ahead without public consultation or debate.
Stratford said community engagement was not one of the strong points of the project but that council were not the decisionmakers on where and how the project could progress.
“It is something I can raise with Te Tai Tokerau trust members,” she said.
The consent for the dam went through the Covid-19 Recovery (Fast Track consenting) Act 2000. The Matawai Water storage reservoir north-east of Kaikohe was the first project nationally to be granted consent under the same act.
Far North District Council has committed finance to buy shares in the project to ensure water for drinking supply.
Te Tai Tokerau Water Trust will make shares available for those wishing to subscribe to the reservoir and associated distribution. Contact the trust via info@taitokerauwater.com.
By Sue Fitzmaurice - Russell Lights editor and publisher of Real Magic Books
It is often a unique journey that Pākehā take towards an appreciation of, and passion for, things Māori.
It is even more unique when those Pākehā are French or German. Add to that the mysteries of synchronicity. I recently chatted with Auckland University Professor Alison Jones; Professor Bettina Fritzsche of the University of Education in Germany, and Dr Lisa Renard of France currently undertaking post-doctoral research at Auckland University.
Accompanying them were associate professor Te Kawehau Hoskins (Ngāti Hau) and Kororāreka Marae Society chairwoman Deb Rewiri.
Jones is familiar to Russellites from presentations of two of her books: Tuai: A Traveller in Two Worlds (Bridget Williams Books, 2017; winner of the Ockham Award for Illustrated non-fiction, 2018), and This Pākehā Life – An Unsettled Memoir (BWB, 2020; shortlisted Ockham non-fiction 2021).
She has a nearly 40-year career researching Māori in education. Along the way, she discovered one of her own ancestors had been present at the signing of Te Tiriti. Charles Robertson had speculated on land in Kororāreka; met Captain William Hobson, and rowed across the Bay to watch the signing of Te Tiriti.
He then left the Bay of Islands aboard the Samuel Winter, carrying Hobson’s official dispatches to NSW Governor Gipps. He wrote an account of the signing for the Sydney Herald.
Last year Jones, Hoskins and Rewiri journeyed to Europe to attend a conference on indigenous education hosted by Fritzsche, and to visit various taonga held by the British Museum, which under law is not permitted to return any items to their countries of origin.
They visited museums in France, and importantly, the Kororāreka chief Tane Kiwikiwi’s ornate burial waka held in a private collection in Cologne, Germany.
Renard, who has a Bachelor of Art History and two masters in both anthropology and museum studies, met Māori artist Tamahou Temara (Tūhoe) in the Netherlands. Her passion for toi Māori was cemented.
She had a two-month internship at Te Papa, later spent a month training with expert weavers in Rotorua, three months with the restoration of tukutuku panels at Auckland Museum, and completed her PhD three years ago on the art of the Māori weaving (raranga) relationship.
Her post-doctoral research involves tracking down taonga in French museums, researching their provenance, and connecting Māori in Aotearoa to their taonga.
Seeing the lost items, touching them, knowing they were made, held and utilised by their tupuna, the items themselves effectively become tupuna. Naturally, their repatriation is considered fundamental.
It is a relationship Renard cherishes and she has been involved in the return of kōiwi - human remains is the technical term although it hardly defines the substantiveness of these taonga - from France to Aotearoa.
The concept of ownership of taonga patently differs between Māori and the European institutions that hold them. There is a spectrum of understanding across many museums and among their curators. Younger curators generally have a deeper engagement with a cultural, and indeed, spiritual affinity that all indigenous peoples have with these historical items.
By way of example, the French ship Astrolabe explored New Zealand in 1827 under the captainship of Dumont D’Urville, sailing into Tasman Bay. D’Urville recorded that his crew had gone ashore and stolen many items and that he was appalled by this. He nonetheless kept everything.
With the rise and rise of mātauranga Māori, and the assistance of dedicated academics, lawyers, politicians and artists, we can anticipate further repatriations of our taonga.
A rāhui has been placed on Bland Bay and will be lifted at 12pm on Thursday.