Willie Gibson sits in the Daily News Café at Puke Ariki with a book opened before him. There's a particular photograph in Don Grady's Guards of the Sea he's interested in - the one snapped on the family farm on Manihi Roadd in Rahotū.
Circa 1969, there are four males in the snapshot and the one on the left is Willie, aged 17. Beside him stands a farm worker, whose name has long since been forgotten. Next is Willie's brother, Bernard, and on the far right, their father Arthur. A ship's anchor looms large in the foreground.
A symbol of earlier, more dangerous times, it's the anchor from the barque Harriet that ran aground off the Okahu River in 1834. It was from the Harriet that Betty Guard and her two young children were captured by Māori and held prisoners for six months.
Today, four generations of the Gibson family have farmed the Manihi Road land. The only way to get to the Okahu stream is through the Gibson farm, and it's a fair walk from the end of the road to the place where the Harriet floundered.
When Willie's father arrived from Yorkshire as a boy in 1910, he explored the area well, often roaming the sand dunes where he hoped to find things. And he did. Arthur Gibson found the Harriet's anchor twice. “Dad first saw this anchor when he was boy” says Willie, pointing to the photograph. “But all efforts to dislodge it with a chain and three stout horses failed. The river sands kept it hidden for fifty years. He kept it in mind but it got covered up by sand. The sand kept shifting. But he noticed it again, years later, and he went and grabbed it.”
A tractor pulled the anchor home on a sledge, where a fire was lit beneath it to burn off 135 years of rust. From there it was trucked to New Plymouth to be sand blasted clean. “It was painted and put on the corner where the old hotel used to be.”
And that's where it sits today, next to the Rahotū Tavern, mounted on a concrete block beside Surf Highway 45, and Willie Gibson remembers his father every time he drives by.
Grady, D. (1978). Guards of the Sea. Christchurch: Whitcoulls.
Marshall, W.B. (1836). A personal narrative of two visits to New Zealand, in His Majesty's ship Alligator, A.D. 1834. London, J. Nisbet.
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