Feet Up; Time to Think

Twenty minutes walk away from home in the Motueka Cemetery is the grave of my 3x great grandfather, Ben Lovell. As I walk along Thorp Street, up Old Wharf Road and down Motueka Quay, I often wonder what Ben would think of the town he helped build. A lot has changed since his arrival here in 1842, over 175 years ago. The "bones" of Motueka are still the same. The major roads across the plain remain laid out in the grid pattern from the 1842 survey by Samuel Stephens. The roads themselves would have been paid for, then built by labourers like Ben and his sons, Ben and Alfred. His son, Thomas, born here in 1845, definitely helped as he is recorded as a contractor for the Motueka Roads Board in the 1870s. Most of the native forest, sadly, is gone and Ben would have been part of that. As a sawyer, he would have cut down those rimu, matai and totara for export, firewood, fencing and building materials. The fertile land, where Maori had grown tons of potatoes in clearings under th...

This morning I walked through the living room of my 3x great grandmother, Hester. Well, if I'm honest, it may not have been her living room, it may just have been her garden. Around me the stall holders of the Motueka Sunday Market, held on Deck's Reserve, were selling everything from blueberries to second hand hoes. It wasn't until I found Hester's will and newspaper advertisements related to her estate, that I realised the connection. Hester passed away in Motueka in 1898 aged 85 and after her death, the property she and her husband Ben had cleared of forest and where they had run a store, was auctioned. It was bought by Dr. Deck, one of the witnesses to her will "signed" with a very shaky cross the previous year. In the 1950s, these three acres were gifted by Dr. Deck's daughters to the people of Motueka and are now the Deck's Reserve. Half of the area is a carpark during the week but a market on Sundays, and half is parkland where the local histo...