(By Jean Irvine)
The oldest house in the Auckland area, the Mangungu Mission house from Hoki-
anga, built about 1838, and taken to Onehunga in 1855, has recently come back into
the possession of the Methodist Church, and there is some question as to its future.
Enthusiasts in Hokianga want it back on its original site near Horeke.
once more on one of the most historic spots in the North, the nucleus of a complex of religious memorial
and museum, a place of study and meditation, pilgrimage and retreat, it could become a west coast
parallel to Waitangi.
They see that, erected
The Treaty House marks the original political commitment to being ‘one people’, as Hobson said.
Mangungu could mark the spiritual and cultural realisation of that old vision.
MOTHER CHURCH
The Mangungu Methodist
mission station was the real
mother church of Methodism
in N.Z., but all that remains
there is a memorial plinth, and
the old bell, and under the old
oak trees, the pioneer cemetery
with its headstones dating
back to 1829.
There are associations here
with the CMS missionaries
who came by in 1819 and es-
pecially with Marsden, who
landed here on his last visit to
N.Z. in 1837.
A few miles up harbour is
a memorial stone to the first
recorded Roman Catholic
mass in N.Z., in January
1838, and a few miles down
harbour an old oak tree marks
the site of the first Marist
mission, Our Lady of Papa‘
kawau. A mile or so down the
Narrows from Mangungu lived
N.Z’s first Quaker. And be-
William Trusted, thought to be
yond that on the Rawene pen-
insula bought by the first
NIZA Co. in 1827, is the Wahi
Tapu, or sanctuary area of the
Maori prophet Papahurihia,
leader of the first and perhaps
the most significant of the
postmissionary Maori cults,
sometimes called Kotahitanga
or Unity.
The Bay of Islands is for-
tunate in that so many of its
historic buildings have been
preserved, but Hokianga, al-
though equally rich in historic
interest, has very few or its
old houses remaining-
The Horeke house, built for
the shipbuilding enterprise of
1826, and later McDonnell's
residency, which was painted
by Heaphy in 1840, was burnt
down in the fifties. The Man-
gungu church was pulled
down and used for mill cotr
tages in the eighties. The Mar-
ist chapel was moved all over
the countryside, its remaining
timbers ending up as a stage
in a school hall. The oldest
structures associated with ear-
ly pakeha settlement are the
old stonc_bridge at Kohukohu
and part of the old Wharf
Hotel at Rawene both probably
dating from the fifties. But
that is nearly forty years after
the beginnings of inter-culture
contact in Hokianga, whose
first records begin with the
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