Brian Rudman: Gifting of Kaipara farm recalls city's great benefactors

For those who fuss about foreigners buying up our land, there can be a happy ending. Such as the wonderfully generous gifting of their 843 ha, Kaipara Harbour-fronting farm to the people of New Zealand by Pierre and Jackie Chatelanat.

Young Swiss traveller Pierre Chatelanat arrived by ship via Canada during the 1951 waterfront strike and headed north on a moped. He got to Wellsford, said he was looking for land to buy and was directed westward. He found a scrub and bush-covered peninsula opposite the harbour entrance and bought it.

The majority of the land he sold on to the Crown, retaining 843 ha that he spent the next decade breaking in.

Then he headed to Rome to join the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. He visited the farm regularly over the years, overseeing its blossoming into a model estate and finally retiring there in 1998 with his English-born wife, Jackie.

Now they're giving the property - including stock and fixtures - to you and me.

From next July, it will become a farm park, administered by the Auckland Regional Council.

ARC chairman Mike Lee says you have to go back to Sir John Logan Campbell's gift of Cornwall Park in 1901 to find something on a similar scale, and he could be right, as far as land is concerned anyway. But where generosity of this sort is involved, comparisons and rankings seem rather odious.

Let's just give thanks that there are at least two landowners on the fringes of Auckland not seduced by the lust for the profits urban sprawl promises to deliver.

Instead, the Chatelanats want to ensure future generations in their adopted land enjoy the glorious landscapes they have nurtured and developed over the past half-century.

When you watch property owners in the foothills of the Waitakeres and on the outskirts of Long Bay battling to squeeze every last speculative penny out of their land, you can't help wishing a few more of them were tarred with the generosity of spirit and community-mindedness that the Chatelanats have brought from foreign parts.

Their gift gives us the chance to reflect on how much poorer Auckland would have been but for the selfless generosity of many over the years. The New Gallery, about to celebrate its 10th birthday, springs to mind. It was a derelict telephone exchange until art patrons Alan and Jenny Gibbs came up with the millions to buy and rebuild the place into the country's premier modern art gallery.

As far as land is concerned, you can't go past brewer Sir Ernest Davis, who in 1956 presented 60ha of Browns Island at the mouth of Tamaki River to the city. Another brewer, Douglas Myers, more recently funded the renovation of the old broadcasting buildings in Shortland St into Auckland University's school of performing arts. Now whatever happened to that institution?

Leaping back in time, Governor Sir George Grey's fabulous library became the foundation for the Auckland public library, and 1860s land and gold speculator James Mackelvie's amazing collection of paintings, sculpture, furniture and other applied arts formed the mainstay of the early collections of the Auckland Museum and Auckland public art gallery.

Newspaper men were also generous, with the Auckland Star's Thomas Leys paying half the cost of building and furnishing the Leys Institute, Ponsonby, and his colleague Henry Brett, in 1911, funding the grand organ for Auckland's new town hall. After his death, his grand home on the shores of Lake Pupuke was gifted as a boys orphanage.

Let's not forget the girls. One of the city's most generous givers was, and still is, Marianne Smith, self-made founder of department store Smith and Caughey. Long involved in mission work, she and her husband, William, in 1907, funded a home for convalescent women and children and later orphanages for girls and boys. They also gifted Quinton Park, North Shore and Craigavon Park, Green Bay.

On her death in 1938, she left a huge estate, including nearly half the shares in the department store company, to a trust that now administers the Caughey-Preston Rest Homes.

Of course I'm just scratching the surface with the small list above. But it is nice that Pierre and Jackie Chatelanat's generosity has provided the chance to recall our past benefactors. And to signal that the spirit of private giving is still alive and kicking.