Tarahua Road sign (2022). Mike Gooch. Word on the street image collection.
Tarahua Road sign (2022). Mike Gooch. Word on the street image collection.
Tarahua Road in Vogeltown loops in a horseshoe-like fashion from the Brooklands Road/Carrington Street roundabout to the intersection with Upjohn Street and Coronation Avenue.
Records are vague as to when the street was formed and named, but it begins to be mentioned in local newspapers as far back as 1914. However, it wasn’t until 1934 that the road appeared in the local Wises Street Directory and only two residents were listed, farmer Ernest Ashwell and labourer John Paulger. These first properties were at the Brooklands/Carrington end of the road.
Early maps indicate that at this time the road ended at the intersection with Junction Road and became part of Coronation Avenue – or Avenue Road as it was known before the change in name to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. In 1995 the New Plymouth District Council formerly passed a resolution to change the name of this small stretch of Coronation Avenue to Tarahua Road.
A clue to the choice of Tarahua for the road comes from an unusual source, a golf club. In 1909 the Carrington Road Golf Club was formed and commenced play on a nine-hole course in Vogeltown, just outside what was then the town boundary.
On 28 April 1911 the Taranaki Daily News reported that the Carrington Road Golf Club was changing its name to Tarahua, said to be the “Māori name for the locality in which the links are situated”. Noted ethnographer Stephenson Percy Smith was quoted a couple of weeks later in the same newspaper suggesting that the word meant “plentiful barbs” and that the local area had once provided Māori with easy access to heart rimu for making ‘spear barbs’.
The final annual general meeting of the short-lived golf club was held in April 1916 – perhaps the demands of the First World War proved too much for their dwindling number of members.
Over the years ongoing residential development has added an eclectic mix of residential housing to the road as well as an electrical substation on the Carrington Road corner and a long-established building recyclers shop.
This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.
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