Pictures of the Week: Remembering the Marines – Kāpiti and Coast Independent

Recalling Kapiti history

Memorial Day Service 2017 (Photo by Cloe Willetts)

75 years ago, Marines arrived in Wellington and Auckland to help protect New Zealand in the event of Japanese attacks. They also came to train for the on-going war in the Pacific, and over the next 18 months, 15,000 lived in three camps north of Paekakariki.

Every year on America’s Memorial Day (the last Monday in May) there is a service held beside the US Marines Memorial in Queen Elizabeth Park.

This year the Monday service was especially poignant, as a restored Marines Hut was opened on the seaward side of the Memorial.

On the previous Sunday the Marines were remembered in a different way. Over 175 walkers and runners traced the course of an old route march which Marine Leon Uris described in his book Battle Cry.

The runners get underway “In the Footsteps of the Marines” (Photo by John Granville)

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STORY OF THE WEEK

Kāpiti Coast councillors have toured of one of Aotearoa's unique buildings, the heritage - listed Rotunda at the former Otaki Health Camp, the country’s first.

Jeremy Smith reports that the 105-year-old, eight-sided rotunda predates the Health Camp.

It wasn't actually built in Otaki, but was one of two built in Rotorua in 1915 as part of a military hospital, on the site of Rotorua’s present public hospital.

Later they were taken to Otaki for the opening of the health camp in 1931.

Full story in the main column (December 19).

100 Years Ago — and the Maori Long March begins

Māori politics was dominated by the influential MPs (and sometime Cabinet ministers) Māui Pōmare ( Waitara statue photo above) and Apirana Ngata.

The 1920's also saw the rise of Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana’s religious movement, and the emergence of Te Puea Hērangi in Waikato.

Ngata worked hard to foster Māori scholarship and education and preserve traditional arts and culture.

He convinced the government to establish a Board of Maori Ethnological Research (1923), a Maori Purposes Fund Control Board (1924) and a School of Maori Arts and Crafts in Rotorua (1927).

The Reform government also took the first, tentative steps towards settling longstanding Māori grievances.

Agreements with Te Arawa in 1922 and Ngāti Tūwharetoa in 1926 recognised their respective rights over the Rotorua lakes and Lake Taupō, and led to the establishment of trust boards with some government funding.

Commissions of inquiry which examined Ngāi Tahu grievances (1920–21) and the Waikato and Taranaki confiscations (1926–27) recommended that modest compensation be paid.