Sir John McKenzie - the forgotten memorial

On top of a hill not far from Palmerston can be found the remains of a memorial erected to the memory of the late Sir John Mckenzie.

Remains?  you might say - I thought that had been restored.  And you would be correct.  The Mckenzie memorial that is visible from  Palmerston was restored a few years ago.  But I'm talking about the previous one.

John McKenzie, while Minister of Lands, was responsible for breaking up the huge squatter estates which had been established in the early years of colonial New Zealand.  He put men on the land - an estimated seven thousand farming families - laying one of the foundations for New Zealand's frozen meat trade.  

He had grown up in Scotland and one of his earliest memories was seeing the inhabitants of Glen Calvie, huddled around small fires on a rainy Saturday, in the grounds of Croick Church but too proud to enter the building itself which would be disrespectful.  These were victims of the Highland Clearances, some of the last to be dispossessed of lands they did not own by a Chieftan they trusted to lead and care for them.  The messages that some of them scratched in the diamond-shaped panes of the church's windows can still be seen.  He never forgot the sight and strove to make New Zealand a place where a working man could own his own land.  Some of the large landholdings he had broken up, however, were portions of Maori tribal land, and he has been criticised for doing to the Maori what the Clearances had done to the Scots.  All that can be said in his defence is that the tribe of capitalists called "land sharks" were much more rapacious and less trustworthy.

Sir John McKenzie, in younger years. Hocken Library photo.

He was knighted by the Governor General shortly before his death from stomach cancer in 1901.  Immediately after his funeral, which was a remarkable performance of Scottish tradition - real or imagined - there was talk of errecting an impressive memorial to him, on top of Puketapu Hill, where McKenzie had first shepherded sheep for Johnny Jones and where the current memorial stands.  The Memorial Committee eventually decided on a different location - Pukehiwitahi, a hill named for one of the crewmen of the ancestral waka, Arai te uru.  It also overlooked McKenzies house where lived, was knighted, and died.

So it was upon that hill, atop the conical peak immediately to your left when you drive over the low rise just south of Shag Point, that the Premier, Richard Seddon, and a crowd of the great and the not so great, gathered in November of 1902.  The speechifying commenced and the politicians of those days did like to speechify.  I will attempt to convey the sentiment without imitating the length of those speeches.

Richard Seddon, Premier of New Zealand, arrives at the top of the hill.  I have a feeling he took the horsedrawn option for the 200m or so climb.  Hocken Library photo.

Richard Seddon unveils the memorial's inscription tablet.  Hocken Library photo.

The Sir John McKenzie Cairn in all its pre-1917 glory.  Hocken Library photo. 

Grave of Sir John McKenzie

Alfred Lee Smith, Member of the Legislative Council and president of the gathering began the speaking, the end of which was greeted with great applause:

"What an example does his life present to the youthful political aspirant. Step by step he won his way. His determination, his exhaustless energy, and an incomparable zeal for the cause he had espoused carried him rapidly to the goal he had in view. Difficulties were swept aside, opposition was quelled by the irresistlble force of success. Withal, notwithstanding his forceful action in public life, how gentle, forbearing, and sympathetic a man he was in private. Those who had the privilege of intimacy in his home must have noticed how much he conduced, to the completeness of hie domestic felicity. Our thoughts and sympathy will go out to that widowed lady and her fatherless family who shared with him the anxieties of his strenuous life, for there has gone from them a kind and loving husband, an affectionate parent, and a wise counsellor. May they find some consolation in the reflection that he had served his country with his best powers, And there are others who, though unconnected with him by ties of kinship, have good reason to remember and esteem the name of John M'Kenzie. The homesteads of the settlers planted on the soil by his efforts will ever be monuments to the wisdom and forethought of our great land reformer. Let history, in impartial tone, do him and his policy justice, and then there shall be no need for the indulgent criticisms of posterity. Long may this massive pile of rough-hewn stone—typical of the sturdy and vigorous-minded man to whose memory it is erected—survive the storms and stress of time, and be a shrine at which the youth of generations to come may learn the lesson of a nobly industrious life, and for centuries be a beacon to signalise that here was the home of a man who bestowed upon New Zealand's public life the priceless gifts of unsullied honour, true patriotism, and transcendent ability."

The Chairman of the Memorial Committee, the Honourable J Rigg then recounted to those assembled the details of the steps which had culminated in the gathering at the top of the hill.

The Premier, Richard Seddon followed with a half hour speech which recounted the life and career of his late friend, before unveiling the tablet on the cairn which detailed the life of the late Sir John and is a copy of those details on his gravestone in Palmerston Cemetery.  The McKenzie family were then presented with a handsomely bound copy of the Committee report and a minute's silence was observed by all present before the assembly dispersed.

Sad to say, the "massive pile of rough-hewn stone" collapsed one night, fifteen years later.  It was little reported, possibly due to more important happenings in Europe in that year of 1917.  Some locals say the memorial was undermined by rabbits.

The current memorial, seen from near the old one

Remains of the Cairn - south side

Remains of the Cairn - north side