Happy birthday , Eltham

Eltham begins celebrating its 125th birthday today. Rob Maetzig, who grew up there, takes a lighthearted look at the town.
Taranaki Daily News

Last updated 10:37 07/12/2009

ROBERT CHARLES
Taking time out: Long-time Eltham residents Beulah and Max Hucker enjoy a moment under art deco artwork in the town's Stark Park.

There are quite a few Elthams around the world, but none quite compares with ours.

Consider the Eltham in the London borough of Greenwich, for instance. Famous people born there might include comedian Bob Hope and musician Boy George, but the New Zealand Eltham produced cut-the-hedge- with-a-lawnmower All Black Jazz Muller.

Eltham in Victoria, Australia, might be where the paralucia pyrodiscus lucida - the Eltham Copper Butterfly to us - was discovered, but our Eltham had this country's first fully tarsealed main street.

The Eltham in New Kent County, Virginia, might be where the New Kent-Charles City Chronicle is published, but our town has got the Eltham Argus.

But wait, there's more. Our Eltham had New Zealand's first commercial butter factory, which made the first-ever classic pound of butter. And it's got the first commercial building ever to have a suspended concrete floor. And Eltham even hosted the first-ever world axemen's carnival.

No comparison, really. But that's Eltham.

The town actually likes to describe itself as a town of firsts, because it is true that many years ago, it did pioneer everything from tarsealed streets to pounds of butter - which in some ways is ironic, because Eltham was the last place in Taranaki to be settled between Patea and New Plymouth.

Historians say this was because Central Taranaki was difficult country. If in the mid- 19th century it took several days for a bullock dray to travel the 21 kilometres between Inglewood and Stratford, it must have taken even longer to negotiate that valley where Eltham now is.

The town is nestled between the Waingongoro River on one side and the Ngaere Swamp on the other, and the whole area is crisscrossed with numerous smaller streams and creeks, so in those early days, it must have been a very muddy place when it was wet.

No wonder a few years later it became the first town in New Zealand to tarseal its main street.

Actually - and maybe this was because of the difficulty of the country - it almost seems that in the very early days, no one even wanted to claim the Eltham district.

In 1876, when the Patea County Council was formed, Eltham was lumped into its area of jurisdiction. Then, five years later, when the Hawera County Council was created, it was given the fledgling township.

It took another three years for Eltham to be declared a town district. Mind you, at that stage, it only had a population of 25 settlers.
Ad Feedback

But the town quickly grew, thanks first to the timber industry and then the development of dairy farms. This meant that by the beginning of the 20th century, the district was sufficiently populated to allow the urban area to be declared a borough and the country surrounding it a county.

One of the things I enjoy about Eltham is that its first mayor was the powerfully named and United States-born George Washington Tayler, and that among the borough council's first decisions were to ban driving stock through the main street, outlaw spitting on pavements and curtail cycling on footpaths.

Obviously, this would all have been part of a big move to bring respectability to a town that, by then, would have been getting quite prosperous. The beautiful Victorian and Edwardian buildings that are there today are proof of that - everything from the Coronation Hotel (it opened in 1902, the year of King Edward VII's coronation), to the Post Office Building opened in 1904, to the Eltham Courthouse opened in 1908.

And what about the Pease Building down on the corner of Bridge and Stanners streets? Built in 1909, it was the first such commercial building outside of Europe to have a fully suspended floor. That's flash. So was the fact that during World War II, it was officially designated an air raid shelter.

Mind you, when I was a child, we didn't know that building as the Pease Building. It was Carmen's, because that's where one of those traditional old booksellers-cum-giftshops was located.

Locals do that sort of thing, you see. That's why the Coronation Hotel is known simply as the Corrie, why the little stream running through the centre of town isn't known as the Mangawharawhara but the Town Creek, and why the Waingongoro River on Eltham's western boundary is simply called the Wong - just like the sound of a stone plopping into one of its deep pools, wrote the late Douglas Stewart, famous ex- Eltham author and poet.

And how about this? Down by the golf course there's a green area officially known as Soldiers Memorial Park, but which everyone calls the Gully. And the golf course has a hole called not Suicide but Sewerside, because it runs alongside what used to be a sewage outfall into the Town Creek.

Instead of sorting out the pollution at the time, Eltham named a golf hole after it. Now that's local.

But let's get back to history. These days, Eltham is most famous for the magnificent selection of cheeses it produces and that history goes right back to the late 1880s, when Chinese entrepreneur Chew Chong built a dairy factory on the banks of the Waingongoro River.

He exported his butter under the Jubilee Butter brand, because the factory was opened on the date of Queen Victoria's jubilee. Maybe these days it might have been called Chong Wong Butter.

Anyway, the story goes that within a few years, Chong's suppliers didn't like it when he told them he could not pay more than tuppence per gallon for their milk - and that the payout would probably be half that the following year - so the farmers formed their own Eltham Co- operative Dairy Company.

Cheese was the first product to be manufactured, as it was considered a safer export commodity, and Eltham's cheese industry took off from there. These days, a massive selection of cheeses, ranging from traditional cheddar to French- style and processed, roll out of two big plants in the town.

But there is one particular cheese that Eltham is most famous for: blue vein - that product that smells like foot odour but tastes divine.

This tangy, salty cheese has been made in Eltham since 1952. Today the town might also make a variety of cheese on the blue- vein theme, but nothing beats the grunty original version that is quite addictive.

Over on the other side of the railway tracks, there's the Riverlands meatworks, which produces damn good steaks. In fact, a couple of years ago, its porterhouse took out New Zealand's prestigious Steak of Origin title.

Besides the cheese and meat industries, there's not a lot left in Eltham these days. A few decades ago, its main throughfares of High Street and Bridge Street were alive with shops. Most of these retail premises are empty now, although retro and second- hand shops have opened up and are popular.

The reasons are obvious. It used to be quite a journey to the big city lights of New Plymouth. Today, it's just a half-hour scoot up the road in the average family car. That means many people choose to live somewhere else and commute to Eltham to work, and that in turn has hurt the financial viability of retail businesses.

But if Eltham's business area is looking a bit bony these days, the town's soul is still very much there. In fact, it's turning back to its past as the means towards its future. Take Time Out is the mantra now being promoted by the Eltham Business and Professional Association as it encourages visitors to spend time in the village and sample both its history and its wares.

And that includes popping into the little cheese bar on Bridge Street, where there's usually a big selection of Eltham-made cheeses, often at ridiculously low prices. Just why this cheese bar isn't out on the main street, I'll never know. Then again, its almost-hidden location makes it a neat sort of Taranaki secret that's quite appealing, because you have to take time out to find it.

That's the thing about Eltham - you have to take time out there to begin to appreciate it. So how about this: pop into the town and pick up a brochure outlining the histories of all the beautiful old buildings in the central area. Head off on a walking tour of these buildings and, along the way, pop into the cheese bar for some blue vein and the Corrie for a few beers.

Then head down to the Wong for a picnic. And if you're really hungry, set up a barbie and cook a Riverlands steak. That'd be the true spirit of taking time out.