50 YEARS of SAINTS CYRIL AND METHODIUS Catholic Church

The Maori mostly welcomed the newcomers who were predominantly families from the Dalmatia area of Yugoslavia. They had come to New Zealand often with nothing but their strong catholic faith, the clothes they wore, and a burning desire to make a better life for themselves and their families by sheer hard work. To begin with they often lived in jute-sack huts, with cabbage tree trunks as a backing to the fireplace. The cabbage tree is a lily not a tree, so did not burn easily. The jute sacking would swell when it got wet and so made a snug, shower-proof dwelling. And years later when the shanties were left to disintegrate, some of those cabbage tree trunks started to grow again even though they were partly burnt through. On some farm land even now over a hundred years later, you can still find flower plants like freesias that the miners or their wives planted around their huts. The men dug the gum from the buried ancient kauri forests that had been felled by cataclysms tens of thousands of years ago. It was back breakingly hard work but they just slogged on in the summer heat and winter chills. The kauri gum was a very important export for New Zealand. It made high quality varnish and carbon paper and linoleum as well as nic-nacs and jewellery. But around the 1930’s the market for kauri gum slumped, and many of the gum diggers became owners of the land, and so then they had to fill in the holes they had dug. No tractors or machinery. Just the spade they had used to dig those holes they now had to fill in. They planted rye and clover grass seed on the peat land, and on the sand dune areas the new kikuyu grass from South Africa, Now that they owned the land and were a settled population, they wanted a village church just as they had back in Yugoslavia. The people of Waiharara and Kaimaumau and Waiharara School. The Auckland diocese, of which St Joseph’s parish in the north was a part, took that money they had raised penny by penny, shilling by shilling, and it was absorbed into the catholic schooling system for many years. But Father Maguire must have had some influence over those who held the purse strings, as in 1968 in August the foundations were laid and the church building began.