Heritage must be celebrated

Mayor Annette Main leads the vintage car parade - which included Chester Borrows in the role of a Labour MP - as the opening of the Dublin Street bridge 100 years ago was marked on Sunday. PHOTO/LEWIS GARDNER

Last week I screamed around the place getting gear together which was in short supply.

The event was the commemoration of 100 years since the Dublin Street Bridge was opened.

The collective work by Rotary South and other clubs, Vintage Car Club, Wanganui District Council and myriad others meant that the place was buzzing and period costume was in short supply - but we got there in the end.

My day started with attendance at Wanganui Collegiate School prize-giving, which had followed evening events on Friday and Saturday celebrating arts and culture with exhibitions and literary awards in Opunake and Hawera and attended by hundreds of people. So it was only fitting that Sunday should involve a celebration of the third leg of the treble - heritage.

The school has been open since the mid-1850s and on the 100 years anniversary of troops leaving for the World War I battlegrounds on which so many Whanganui youths lost their lives, the ceremony was very poignant.

Being surrounded by young people who seem to be comfortable in their own skin yet blush so readily, made me think in admiration of those who so excitedly rushed off to war to return - if they returned at all - completely devoid of any wonder about the atrocities some men were prepared to inflict upon others. Life would never be the same.

The quick-change artist that I am, I then found myself in bowler hat, gold fob chain I inherited from my great-grandfather, and three-piece suit standing by the tram shed with Ed Boyd, Rob and Lyn Vinsen, Wanganui Mayor Annette Main and a growing crowd of others in period costume. We turned a few heads.

After a briefing as to who was who, saying what and in which order, we set off on an afternoon that remembered an event most of us never think of from one year to the next - the opening of infrastructure, in this case the Dublin Street Bridge.

And there were thousands of people there in the sunshine, cheering and waving, getting the jokes, and picking up innuendo.

The irony of history wasn't lost in that the suffragette protest for a woman's right to hold elected office was received by our female mayor in drag, acting as a man, and the National Party MP taking on the role of a newly-elected Labour MP who went on to form the New Zealand Labour Party.

But the winner on the day was heritage and the applauding of far-sighted ancestors who provided the means to unite a city.

The pageantry of the day was not lost on any of us - three river boats plying the river, the tram, the cars and the excitement. It seems to me that Whanganui is enjoying, or about to enjoy, a purple patch of pride in itself, its history and is in full buzz about its future.

We should be so grateful for those who have provided what our city is, and those prepared to work together to ensure we celebrate what that makes us today and will secure us for the future.

Cheers and thanks, Whanganui.