Everlasting support for the places Gwenda loved.
On a calm, sunny day in the Orongorongo Valley in 2013, an 800-year rata fell to the earth with an unceremonious thud. Behind it, a bush hut stood proudly; ferns creeping up its concrete foundations and a hand-painted sign, ‘Taihoa 67’ hanging over the door.
Weeks before, a group of Onslow College alumni and their former teacher, Gwenda Martin had tramped an hour through dense bush, staying overnight to celebrate the hut's 50th birthday. Nursing cups of tea around the fire, they swapped stories of how Taihoa came to be. How it was built backwards, from the roof down; how its building materials were transported all the way from Seaview in a decommissioned WW2 army truck and how the concrete floor was poured over the May school holidays.
When the idea for the hut was first floated, Gwenda had snapped it up, quickly assigning roles to her students, finding the perfect site to break earth (‘by an old and important tree,’ she had specified), and paying the Wellington Water Board an annual license fee of £1 for the occupation of the site.
Philip Porritt, now an established architect, recalls the tongue-in-cheek suggestion of naming the hut, ‘Gwenda’s Inn.’ Sorely received by his teacher, she instead settled on the name Taihoa, which loosely translates as ‘no hurry’ or ‘don’t do today what you can comfortably put off until tomorrow', a gentle reminder to relax and enjoy the beauty of the valley.
In a letter Gwenda wrote after visiting Taihoa for the last time a year before her death, she wrote, “making things is a great pleasure for me. What better than to make a hut, especially when you don’t know how? Rules for building bush huts didn’t bother us much. We were free to work out how to do whatever job Philip [assigned the role of ‘chief builder’] had offered us. Good fun and look at the rewards we had!”
Taking the road less travelled
Gwenda was unconventional, taking every possible opportunity to take the road less travelled. Penny Porritt, Philip’s wife, recalls being invited to dinner at Gwenda’s Paekākāriki home, to be served dinner cross-legged on the floor. “Her mother always insisted on beautifully set tables,” says Penny. “Maybe it was Gwenda’s way of rebelling against her more conservative upbringing.”
Throughout her teaching career, first at Onslow then at Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu, the Correspondence School, Gwenda was known for this same unconventional approach. “She was the legend of my school,” said Onslow School alumna and former Green MP, Catherine Delahunty in Gwenda’s obituary, published on Stuff in 2017.
“There are many ways to be a teacher, many ways to ways to teach about nature,” said Catherine. “Her way was to march us through it, ask obscure questions and demonstrate the possibility of an authentic and unique world, whether we understood it or not.”
A passion for political activism
A long-time supporter of the Labour and Green parties she passionately campaigned for change when a cause was close to her heart. “She really had a conscience for people,” says friend, Jill Goodwin. In the 1970s, noting the discrepancy in superannuation for male and female teachers, she led a petition to close the gap on behalf of the Post Primary Teacher’s Assocation. A year on, with much public support but little progress made, Gwenda presented a ‘birthday’ cake to the Minister of Education, slyly outlining her disgust at the lack of action.
Her baking would return to the Beehive in the 80s when she raffled off a cake to raise money for the Labour Party. That small, red ticket raffle book now sits in the Labour Party Archives, signed by all members of the then Labour Government’s caucus, including David Lange himself.
A knack for creation
Scattered around the homes of old friends are countless mementos of Gwenda. The small jug and saucer she moulded from scratch, thumb imprints still visible; the teddy bear she spun and dyed wool for, old costumes from school productions, cotton reel toys she made for children of the original hut builder and the ice axe she gifted when she finally hung up her tramping boots.
She had a knack for craft and made everything and anything from hand. “Gwenda’s creative occupations were too vast for me to cover today,” said long-time friend, Margaret Cochran in her eulogy to a group of friends, former students, fellow Victoria University alumni, gardening groupers and second and third generation ‘Taihoans’, all nodding in knowing and bemused acknowledgement.
A final chapter of giving
Gwenda Martin will be remembered in many ways. By lamentations over the quirky objects she gifted, by the way her students always stop at junctions on the track to ensure that no one is left behind, by her outside-of-the-box ideas and by Taihoa; a living, breathing reminder of her passion for nature, her instinct to create and how she inspired new generations along the way.
In the last few years of Gwenda’s life, still in her self-built home in Paekākāriki, she thought about her will and leaving a gift to support things she was passionate about. Through a bequest in her will, the Gwenda Martin Fund has been established, dedicated to supporting initiatives and activities in the Paekākāriki area, the place she loved, and to fund conservation activities and initiatives in the Orongorongo Valley, including the preservation of Taihoa.
Sitting on the bench at Taihoa is a visitors’ book filled with 60-years of names, memories and stories. With help from Gwenda’s Fund, the experiences of future Taihoans will be collected, cups of tea will be nursed around the fire, and outside, a new Rata will grow.
