Northland the cradle of NZ’s nationhood

• Author: Sandy Myhre
• Published date: 06 January 2021

Stories are plentiful and there is so much to see. The new interactive museum in Opononi that traces the footprints of the master mariner and settler Kupe, has been open for just a month. The oldest store and house in Kerikeri — Kemp House and the Stone Store — have been open for years.

The Russell (Kororāreka) museum has a large model of Cook’s Endeavour and a model of Dumont d’Urville’s ship, originally called La Coquille and later Astrolabe. Along the foreshore there are whaling bits and pieces and Pompallier House. Then there’s the steam train Gabriel at the Bay of Islands Vintage Railway at Kawakawa.

That’s just for starters and you don’t have to go far to find other intrinsic and intriguing sites and tales. Sincere thanks to Bill Edwards and John O’Hare of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga for invaluable expertise and knowledge.

New Zealand’s first duelThe beach in Russell wasn’t always a picture of tranquillity. Like the town itself it has a history, and it was here that New Zealand’s first duel was fought.

The protagonists were Kororāreka businessmen Joel Polack and Ben Turner. Both had a mutual disdain for the other that was bordering on loathing, according to Pompallier Mission property lead Scott Eliffe.

The first duel took place in 1837. Turner was wounded but not fatally, and as boneheaded as it may sound, the pair met again to duel in 1842. This time Polack, who admitted to owning a “rascally bad temper” was shot in the elbow as Turner received a bullet in the cheek.

It was a criminal offence to challenge or provoke another person to fight a duel, with the possibility of the survivor being found guilty of murder. As it turned out, both were lousy shots and both walked away, albeit not entirely unharmed.

Three years after that second duel, during the battle of Kororāreka in 1845, the magazine at Polack’s Stockade in the centre of town exploded. It was caused by a careless pipe smoker according to some reports and Polack’s house, which the stockade encircled, went up in smoke as the resulting fire destroyed much of the rest of Kororāreka.

The duels on the beach have been re-enacted every year since 2011 in street theatre performances depicting Russell/Kororāreka’s past as the “Hellhole of the Pacific”, and are always the most popular segment of all the performances.

George Clarke — a man

with a missionOne of the earliest missionaries to arrive in the Bay of Islands was George Clarke, known as a man with a mission who did not hold back.

When...