Looking now to previous owners

Like many Heritage properties in Northland, Te Waimate Mission was a private home until relatively recent times. Photo / Sarah Ivey

The early history of the country's most significant Heritage buildings is well known, but Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga is now looking at the more recent past recent history of some of Northland's most cherished properties, to increase its understanding of how they functioned when they were privately owned.

"Many of these properties in Northland were in private hands until relatively recently," Heritage New Zealand's property lead Hokianga properties Alex Bell said. They included (Rāwene's) Clendon House, which was purchased by the NZ Historic Places Trust in 1972.

"Clendon House, Te Waimate Mission, and even Kemp House were all private residences at some point within the past 65 years, so there are people still alive who lived in these houses, knew people who lived in them, or visited them when they were still in private hands," he said.

"Their memories about these places are potentially very useful, as they recall an aspect of the more recent history of these buildings that we don't always know that much about."

Heritage New Zealand was encouraging people who had personal memories of those historic buildings to get in touch.

"We'd love to hear from people who may have stories, anecdotes, information, photos – anything that might help us fill in gaps in our knowledge," Bell added.

"We already have access to a lot of information held in public collections, like the Alexander Turnbull Library for example. It's the personal material that we're really interested in; the sort of stuff we can't find on Google.

"The other thing to add is that we don't need the originals. We can easily digitise materials and return photos and documents promptly. It's the information that we need, not the object itself."

New information would be added to Heritage New Zealand's existing knowledge base, informing the approach taken to conservation, and potentially broadening interpretation of the properties.

Anyone who would like to share their connections with historic places in Northland was encouraged to write them down and send them to Alex Bell, Te Waimate Mission, 344 Te Ahuahu Road, Waimate North 0472.