The northern South Island is known as Te Tau Ihu in Māori mythology: the prow of the waka from which the demigod Māui fished up Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island. People have lived in the Tasman region since the 1300s. In the Mohua /Golden Bay district alone, archaeologists have recorded around 300 places where Māori were building pā, gardens, fishing settlements, urupā and middens. Placenames such as Tākaka, Parapara and Motueka are a legacy of the peoples’ Pacific Island ancestry.
In 1642, when Dutch explorer Abel Tasman’s ships arrived in Mohua, Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri were dominant in the Mohua/Golden Bay area, having displaced earlier tribes. This first recorded encounter between Māori and Europeans, when 22 waka met Tasman’s two ships on the water, resulted in a violent clash and Tasman’s departure.
Around 1800, Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri were displaced by Ngāti Apa, Ngāti Kuia and Ngāi Tahu, with Ngāti Apa dominating the Mohua /Golden Bay district. Further changes occurred between 1828-1832, when an alliance of Tainui and Taranaki iwi war parties moved to Te Tau Ihu. A subsequent division of territory was determined, with Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Rārua settling in Mohua. Today eight iwi are recognised as tangata whenua of Te Tau Ihu: Ngāti Tama ki Te Tau Ihu (of Tokomaru waka descent), Te Ātiawa o Te Waka-a-Māui (of Aotea or Kurahaupo), Ngāti Rārua, Ngāti Koata and Ngāti Toa Rangatira (of Tainui), and Ngāti Kuia, Rangitāne o Wairau, and Ngāti Apa ki te Rā Tō (of Kurahaupo).
Onekaka, an inlet north of Tākaka, was the location of a papakāinga (village), under the gaze of the maunga Parapara which remains central to the lives and identities of Mohua hau kāinga Ngāti Tama ki Te Tau Ihu, Te Ātiawa o Te Waka-a-Māui, and Ngāti Rārua. Ngāti Kuia and Ngāti Apa also retain associations with Parapara and its coastal areas. Onekakā was also an important communication point from which Te Ātiawa o Te Waka-a-Māui sent smoke signals to Motueka, the Marlborough Sounds and across to Taranaki.
Wai (water) is of fundamental significance to mana whenua iwi. It is a living taonga with a mauri (life force) and wairua (spirit). Wai is the source of all life, essential for survival, and waterways represent the interconnectedness between all living things. The lifeblood of Papatūānuku and the tears of Ranginui flow as waterways through the land, sustaining the treasures that live within the realms of Tangaroa (spiritual guardian of water) and Tane Mahuta (spiritual guardian of forest, trees and birds living along the waterways and their catchments). The awa (rivers) that flow from Parapara maunga and the surrounding hills, and feed their catchments, such as the Onekaka and Ōtere Rivers, are of cultural, spiritual and physical importance to mana whenua iwi.
A mineral-rich region
The many mineral resources of Te Tau Ihu have been appreciated and extracted by people for centuries. Pakohe (argillite) was used by Māori for tools and weapons; pounamu and flints were also important. Kōkōwai /red ochre (iron-rich haematite clay) from the Parapara-Onekakā area was highly valued as a body paint and decorative pigment, with spiritual associations to the blood of Papatūānuku. The story of Kaiwhakaruaki – a deadly taniwha who lived in the Parapara inlet, just north of Onekaka, and who was eventually defeated with a stratagem involving kōkōwai – may have deterred outsiders from taking too close an interest in the local mineral resources.
New Zealand Company colonists, who established the Nelson settlement in 1842, were also keen to capitalise on the mineral richness of the region. Copper and chromite were discovered in 1852 but proved to be scarce; gold was more plentiful, inspiring Golden Bay’s name. Coal was mined between 1840 and 1913, but clay, limestone and marble were among the region’s more abundant minerals. The presence of iron ore in Golden Bay was also noted by European settlers, and in train with the Crown’s Waipounamu purchase, in 1852 Superintendent of Nelson Mathew Richmond moved quickly to secure this important mineral deposit for the Crown, before Māori could realise its financial value. Richmond admitted his focus on minerals when negotiating the Waipounamu and Pakawau land purchases.
The backbone of the world we have built around us
Iron was a key element in industrial development, described as ‘the backbone of the world we have built around us.’ Utilised by people for at least 6000 years, around 2000 years ago its value as a resource increased when smelting technology advanced and ironworkers discovered it is a crucial ingredient in creating a much harder alloy—steel. Everyday life was especially transformed in the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the widespread employment of iron and steel for construction, machinery, tools and implements.
Iron mainly occurs as mineral ores, particularly as different types of iron oxides. The bulk of New Zealand’s iron prospecting has focused on exploiting titanomagnetite iron ore, readily available in the black ironsand found along the North Island’s west coast beaches. European settlers first attempted to smelt the ironsand in 1848 at New Plymouth, however the technicalities posed by the small grains of sand and the amount of titanium in the ore proved challenging. Efforts to extract the iron by smelting the sand in a blast furnace were repeatedly unsuccessful, for decades. The ore at Onekakā, in the form of rock-based limonite accessible from the ground surface, seemed to be a more feasible way of starting an iron industry in New Zealand.
Exploiting the iron ore at Onekaka
The iron ore in Golden Bay lies in a belt between Onekaka and Parapara, parallel to the coast. It begins 1.2 kilometres inland of Parapara and stretches for 4.8 kilometres south into the hills behind Onekaka, 400 metres above sea level. The deposit consists mainly of limonite (limonitic iron ore, sometimes classed as ‘bog iron’), interspersed with patches of quartz and limestone. The ore deposits in the Onekaka-Parapara hills were used by enterprises such as the New Zealand Haematite Paint Company to produce red, yellow and orange pigments from the early 1870s. Their iron-oxide red paints became familiar throughout New Zealand from their use on all New Zealand Railways goods sheds and wagons, and many woolsheds and other buildings. Paint manufacturers continued to make use of the local oxide deposits until the early 1930s.
By 1874 the Nelson Provincial Council was promoting the potential benefits to the district’s population and income if the limonite deposits were developed into an iron smelting industry: the combination of limonite with limestone deposits, close to the coast, made this especially feasible. In the ensuing years various companies formed to exploit the mineral, however were generally unsuccessful due to lack of capital. Most of these companies planned to smelt the iron elsewhere. The quality of the ore was demonstrated in 1891, when the Onehunga Iron Smelting Company successfully smelted 300 tons of the Onekaka limonite at their Onehunga smelter, producing good quality pig iron bars. Hopes for a national industry rose even higher at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Onakaka Iron and Steel Company Limited
By 1920, however, New Zealand was still importing all of its pig iron (a crude state cast into bars directly from the blast furnace). That year, the Onakaka Iron and Steel Company Limited was incorporated. Bankrolled by wealthy Hawke’s Bay runholders including Mason and John Chambers, and Robert Donald Douglas McLean, the directors included the technical expertise of mining engineers. One, John Ambrose Heskett, had been central to ironsand smelting attempts in New Plymouth. After much perseverance, Heskett had some success developing the ‘Heskett Process’, which combined the sand with powdered coal to form lumps of ‘ferro-coke’ which could be smelted in a blast furnace, albeit on a small scale. Heskett would become manager of the Onekaka Ironworks throughout its tenure as a private enterprise.
The Onakaka Iron and Steel Company acquired the prospecting leases of previous companies and secured a 53-acre site for their main works west of the Takaka-Collingwood Highway, purchased from farmer Richard Scadden. A blast furnace was bought from the Taranaki Ironsand Company, via Heskett’s connections; this was part of over £42,000 expenditure on equipment. Construction of the ironworks began in early 1921, after more capital had been sought with a government loan.
Much excitement was reported in newspapers. Politicians and commentators supported the endeavour as being vital to national security, and one that would ‘give birth to a new industry for New Zealand… From an economic point of view the value of this industry can hardly be exaggerated.’
Smelting began on 27 April 1922 and was judged to be ‘of splendid quality’. This must have provided only limited relief, as by then the price of pig iron had dropped dramatically: by 50 percent in just two years. A serious fire early in 1923 then caused a slight delay in getting up to full production.
Infrastructure
The raw materials necessary for smelting–the limonite ore and limestone–were obtained from adjacent open-air pits 360 metres above the ironworks. Mining was done by hand, using explosives and air drills to loosen rock and sledgehammers to break it into smaller chunks. It was then loaded into hand-trucks which were pushed by the men along rails to the top of the aerial ropeway. Sheds were built to shelter the raw material from rain. Amanda Young notes that photographs show various other huts/sheds scattered around the quarries.
Workers lived in one of the four 4-6-room huts on site; each room (called a ‘camp’) had its own chimney and could house two men but one per ‘camp’ was preferred. The men cooked for themselves and walked the zigzag track down to the ironworks with relief at the end of their week-long shifts. The work was reportedly very tough and miserable, wages were limited, and living facilities were basic, but there was reportedly little argument or industrial action.
The raw material was carried 2.4 kilometres downhill to the ironworks on an aerial ropeway, with 67 buckets suspended from a ¾-inch thick plated steel cable. Each end of the ropeway was anchored on a heavy concrete block supporting a bullwheel. Buckets were shunted off the rope onto rails to enable efficient and safe loading and unloading. The weight of the descending buckets, which carried 2 cwt (100 kilograms) each and were spaced 180 feet (54 metres) apart, was sufficient to haul the empty buckets back up, once a motor had been used to start the system. The ropeway travelled at 4 miles (6.5 kilometres) an hour.
Buckets were emptied directly into a crusher at the smelter. A belt conveyor moved the crushed and washed material to a bank of storage bins built into the hillside; these held the limonite, limestone, and coke that had been produced onsite by up to 30 beehive ovens. Trucks then loaded the correct mix of these three ingredients onto an inclined skipway, which fed into a hopper at the top of a blast furnace. The blast furnace was powered by three gas-fired boilers, which created steam to drive the blowers to superheat the material. The molten iron was tapped from the furnace at least twice a day, and cast into bars of pig iron weighing 50kg each (and from 1928-29 when a pipe plant was built, into pipes. The brittleness of cast iron made it most suitable for casting into bulky items). Fine ore rejects were processed for sale for gas purification; other waste was washed over the hillside. The proximity of the limonite ore so near to the coast suggested sea transportation was most efficient for getting the coal and infrastructure material to the ironworks, and the company’s iron products to domestic and international markets. In 1923 the Onekaka Wharf was constructed, extending 1210 feet (368 metres) to deep water from the beach in front of long-time residents’ the Washbourns’ property. A tramline stretching from the wharf to the ironworks was built in 1924.
Archaeologist Amanda Young has described the Onekaka Ironworks as being ‘essentially a town’, with its own post office, shop, engineering workshop, laboratory, and tennis court. A school was built nearby. The number of employees rose from 40 to around 150-170 people, who were housed in an accommodation camp nearby. The cookhouse was operated by Ngara and Dave Mason. Workers participated in the social life of the district, and the ironworks itself was something of a visitor attraction, especially at night when the furnace was tapped or slag was run off down the hill. Draughtsman and surveyor Graham Bell, who worked there in the late 1920s, reported that a number of Māori were employed at the ironworks, particularly at the coking ovens: ‘The work was semi-skilled, and they were proud of it. They were treated the same way as others and there were no racial distinctions or friction. Owen and I were welcome in their houses and got on well with them.’ More than one generation of the prominent Ward-Holmes family was employed by the company.
Challenge, diversification and expansion: a hydro-electric power scheme
Although government subsidies were increased in 1925, a slump in iron price in 1926 hit the company hard. Smelting operations were temporarily suspended due to the New Zealand market being flooded by cheaply imported pig iron from India. Heskett sought new markets in Australia, and intense lobbying for increased state support resulted in tariffs being imposed on imported iron. In an attempt to remain afloat and diversify the company installed a pipe-making plant in 1928-29. This required upgrades to the aerial tramway, blast furnace, coking ovens and wharf; and construction of a hydro-electric power scheme.
The original mono-line aerial ropeway was replaced with a new British Ropeway system capable of carrying much heavier loads: 7 cwt (355 kilograms) loads were taken in bigger buckets now spaced 365 feet (111 metres) apart, on a thicker 1 ¾-inch cable. It was probably at this time that some, if not all, of the original timber ropeway towers were replaced with ones constructed from railway irons.
The ability to harness hydro-power was yet another advantage of the Onekaka site. The 10-metre high concrete arch dam, built in 1928-29, was located very near to the quarries, on the Onekaka River. The hydro-electric scheme was designed by Lloyd Mandeno (1888-1973), a pioneer electrical engineer and ‘passionate advocate for hydroelectricity’, whose life’s work included many innovations in the development and distribution of electricity in New Zealand. Mandeno designed nine hydro-stations in total and is celebrated as having made an enormous contribution to electric-power generation in New Zealand; he received an OBE in 1965 for his development of the SWER (single-wire earth-return) system of reticulation, now in use internationally.
Norman Livingston, Chief Engineer at the Onakaka Iron and Steel Co at the time, oversaw the construction. The base of the dam was 5 feet (1.5 metres) thick, tapering to 2 foot 3 inches (0.7 metres) at the top. The stone on site was deemed to be of doubtful strength, so sand and shingle from Onekaka beach was used (shells are still visible in the dam today). The materials had to be hauled up on the aerial ropeway, and from there to the dam construction site by a flying fox.
An iron penstock 15 inches (38 centimetres) in diameter took water from the dam 1.25 kilometres down to a powerhouse, near the confluence of the river and Ironstone Creek. A side race here diverted some water down to supply the ironworks. The powerhouse contained a Boving Pelton wheel coupled to a 350 K.V.A. A.G.E.C. generator. The alternating current, generated at 400 volts and stepped up by transformers to 6600 volts, was transmitted to the sub-station down at the ironworks where it was stepped down again to 400 volts. Heskett explained that an initial error in generator settings caused some of the welded joints of the penstock to fail; this was soon corrected. None of the pipes appear to have been manufactured by the company, instead having been acquired from various sources.
Historian Jeff Newport states that ‘although the second hand pipes which were used in the lead from the dam to the powerhouse sometimes developed leaks, and caused loss of power, the plant was eventually a very reliable generating station.’ Norman Livingston recalled that only a select few of the staff houses and the cookhouse were allowed to use the free electricity.
Although the Pupu Hydro Scheme (List No. 7519) was built in 1929 for public supply, it was not enough. The Golden Bay Electric Power Board first applied to use power from the Onakaka Iron Works scheme in 1935, to meet growing demand for reticulated power. By 1937 the arrangement was in place, continuing until the Cobb Hydro-scheme became operational.
Perseverance unrewarded: the Company collapses
In 1930 the company’s application to extract coal from nearby Mt Burnett was approved, however that project was never fully realised as the coal seam soon ran out. The ironworks ‘seemed to be booming’, with pipes being sold throughout the country for sewage and water, and the Government Railway Workshops a longstanding customer of the iron, along with most of the country’s foundries. However, exporting was vital as plant capacity was 10,000 tons of iron per year, and local demand was only 4,000 tons. Australia was a good customer of the company’s soft iron–useful for stove-making–but had imposed a duty of £3 per ton, which ate into profits.
The New Zealand market soon became saturated, and the Onakaka Ironworks couldn’t compete with cheaper iron produced overseas. The 1929 Depression also had a devastating effect. Soon after, the company was bankrupt, and went into liquidation in May 1931. Under the receivers, smelting continued sporadically but only until the end of May 1935, when the smelter was finally closed.
The State temporarily takes over
The Iron and Steel Industry Act 1937 authorised the government to establish a State steel industry. The Government was optimistic, still planning for an expanded iron and steel industry in Onekaka, even preparing to survey a surrounding town for a population of 2-3,000. The long-term plan was to smelt Taranaki ironsand at the ironworks, in addition to the limonite ore. The Onekaka Ironworks were duly acquired under the Public Works Act.
The ironworks assumed greater national significance with the outbreak of World War Two and were seen as a vital asset for self-sufficiency. In 1941 heavy machinery for the emergency reconditioning of the disused and deteriorated smelting equipment was shipped in. However, the war’s end saw the demand for pig iron drop, and re-surveying of the ore deposits suggested there was not enough to justify the expenditure. The government decided to dispose of the ironworks.
The end of an era
The government continued to spend money on the works until the early 1950s, by which time the smelter site was largely cleared. Before the smelter equipment was dismantled, however, the Onekaka ironworks featured one last time in the push to establish an efficient national steel industry. Exploitation of the West Coast’s titanomagnetite ironsand ore was back in focus, and international research now suggested the challenges of the titanium could be overcome with controlled slag composition and an electric arc furnace. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) successfully trialled these methods at the Onekaka Ironworks in 1949, bringing in ironsand. However, electricity costs were too high, and it would be another 20 years until the ironsand steel industry got underway at Waikato North Head and Glenbrook.
In 1954 the main ironworks site was officially alienated from the Crown estate, allowing its conversion into fee simple freehold properties. Subdivision ensued; by 2007 the change in use from industrial to residential was completed. The smelter buildings and equipment were either destroyed or dispersed around the district. The beehive coking ovens remained a feature of some pride for the locals, however the last of these reportedly disappeared in the 1980s. The quarries, which became part of the Kahurangi National Park in 1996, were reclaimed by bush and most of the aerial ropeway towers fell from rust damage. The turbine from the powerhouse was reportedly sent to be reused in the Solomon Islands.
A new chapter for the Onekaka Dam
Around 2002 Onekaka Energy Limited, led by Jim Baird and Brian Kidson, began preparing to resurrect the disused dam. The penstock was beyond repair but the dam could be modernised by an upgrade to the intake screen system, and excavation of the silted-up holding pond. A new penstock outlet and scour pipe were inserted through the dam, and a new surge chamber and power station were constructed, both near to their first-generation counterparts. The new penstock followed the route of the original. Heritage features were preserved in situ wherever possible. The Onekaka hydro-electricity scheme now supplies power to the national grid via the 33,000-volt Takaka-Collingwood transmission line.
