On New Year’s Eve day my cousin Mary and husband Kelvyn decided to take me through to Omahu where my mother, Ruth and her father, Fred, lived as children. Mary thinks our Grandfather had worked at a saw mill, possibly in Tairua and possibly later in farming. We had to turn off to the right from the Paeroa to Thames road and head up a narrow road towards the Coramandel Range. The original house at Omahu has been replaced with another, but the one there now is still a pretty old house.
I have a photo of myself as a very young child paddling in the creek and I was very keen to try to locate the place in the photo. The property doesn’t belong to our family any more so I had to content myself with taking what photos I could. The creek apparently opens out into a pool below the house.
Kelvyn drove us a bit deeper into the Coromandel Range and it was easy to picture how dense the bush must have been there once. The original house had been leased to our ancestors because at some point in time, possibly my Great Grandfather had worked in the mines, so it had been a miner’s cottage.
My mother often used to describe how she and Fred would ride to school at Puriri on horse back, so our next point for exploration was the Puriri School.
Mary and I wandered around the grounds and spoke to some young men who were letting their children ride a go kart around the school playing field. They had both attended the school and were fascinated to hear about our parents going there. The school buildings have been modernised, but the young men were telling us that the school role had dropped from 100 pupils in their day to 14 children currently. Like a number of country schools it might be a struggle to keep it going, which would be a shame for a school, which is 150 years old and built to accommodate the children of Gold Miners, Saw Millers and Farmers.
Behind the school is a magnificent old Puriri Tree and I couldn’t help wondering if this was how the name for the school and the small hamlet had been created.
After this quite emotional trip we returned to Waihi to get ready for a little New Year’s Eve party at the house of some friends of Mary and Kelvyn. The wife, Frouwke, is from The Netherlands and had prepared a Dutch treat, Oliebollen, which is a type of Doughnut they only prepare on New Year’s Eve. It was a nice lead up to the New Year.
