Robertson H V Ross: Porirua City Council (Pauatahanui Burial Ground) Bill — First Reading 
Robertson H V Ross: Porirua City Council (Pauatahanui Burial Ground) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:640;Page:10285] 
H V ROSS ROBERTSON (Labour—Manukau East) 
: 
 Kia ora tatou no reira te Whare Whaea Hartley tena koe. It is with a great deal of honour and privilege that I stand here this evening because I have an interest in the Pauatahanui cemetery. I am very very pleased—[ 
Interruption 
] I am not going there colleagues. No no not yet; I am too young for that. But I certainly have an interest in the cemetery. I want to support the Porirua City Council in this bill because the bill vests ownership management and control in the council. 
The Pauatahanui cemetery is of significant interest to the Robertsons because one of our forebears was buried there in 1884. The family came out to New Zealand in the good ship  
Gairloch 
 in 1881. My great-great-grandfather whose name was Walter and who was married to Agnes had three young children: Thomas aged 6 Agnes aged 4 and Elizabeth who was less than 1 year old and ailing at the time. They decided they would leave Glasgow. They left the Broomielaw Wharf in 1881 and 6 months later after rounding South America and travelling down through the Strait of Magellan in the barque 
 Gairloch 
 they finally arrived in New Zealand. Walter and Agnes settled at Pauatahanui and for 18 months they must have had some exciting times putting their roots down in New Zealand soil. But the problem was that fate tossed my great-great-grandmother a blow when in 1884 her husband Walter was tragically killed while on his horse and dray in the Ngauranga Gorge between Wellington and Johnsonville. So my forebear Walter Robertson is now buried in that cemetery. 
When I knew this bill was coming before the House I approached my esteemed colleague the Hon Luamanuvao Winnie Laban and said that I would like to speak to it because of the special interest the cemetery has for my family. She was only too happy to oblige and I want to thank her publicly for the opportunity to put this on the record. 
I visited the cemetery several years ago and tried to search for our patriarch because he is buried there. His wife Agnes is buried in the Porirua Cemetery. But we could not find the grave site because the cemetery was all overgrown. When I looked into the history of this bill I found a paper that was drafted by Sharon Evans who is a genealogist and amateur historian. She has a section in her paper headed: “Who’s buried in the Pauatahanui Burial Ground?”. One of the points is: “There are more than a dozen mystery graves. All show signs of a burial long ago but most have no headstone. Some early headstones would have been made of wood and when they eventually decayed were not replaced.” That was the case with regard to my forebear Walter Robertson because my uncle Gordon Massey Robertson remembers visiting the grave site with his father during the Second World War when his two brothers were overseas doing service for New Zealand. He said to me that it was overgrown that one could tell there were wooden plaques but that they had all fallen over and had rotted away. So my great-great-grandfather is one of those in the mystery graves. 
Interestingly we found when we were digging all this sort of thing up that the records of the grave sites were destroyed back in the 1950s. Rumour had it at the time that the wife of the person looking after the cemetery was very unhappy about her husband’s extramarital affair shall we say and that as a result she burnt all the records that belonged to the parish. So those records are lost for eternity. 
I just want again to put on the record my thanks to both Winnie Laban and the Porirua City Council because they have enabled me to talk a little about my ancestry. I am sure the story is not very different from that of many other people who came out from Scotland as long ago as that. I say thank you again for having been given that opportunity. Tihei mauri ora! Tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa.