Charmian Smith talks to Ann Barsby, of the Southern Heritage Trust, about saving and telling the stories of our heritage.
That attitude is changing due to a growing awareness among Pakeha New Zealanders of the country's history and heritage.
One of the people behind that change in Dunedin is Ann Barsby.
"To me it's an intriguing history. It's different and fascinating," she says.
As instigator and driver of the Southern Heritage Trust, she is the catalyst behind many heritage projects, from putting information panels at the Hindon Railway Station on the Taieri Gorge line and instigating brochures for walking and driving trails, to arranging afternoon teas at the Savoy and developing the Dunedin Gasworks Museum.
Her vision is to see Dunedin recognised as the heritage capital of New Zealand and to raise public awareness about the city's European history and heritage.
She wants to tell the many stories of places in the South and the people who have lived and worked here.
In this she is not alone.
But Mrs Barsby says that although there are many heritage organisations dedicated to various projects or aspects of heritage, they tend to work in isolation.
More could be achieved by working collaboratively and complementing each other's aims, she says.
"At the moment it's a very fragmented approach to heritage, including within the city council, but there's so much happening now, it's bearing fruit.
A thematic study, a DCC initiative, is under way.
It has come out of the heritage strategy (a 2007 initiative) and is a more cohesive approach to the city's heritage, which will strengthen the district plan and hopefully the policy on the way we look after it."
"Ann loves the word `collaboration'.
She's a bit of a gadfly," chips in John Barsby with a laugh.
Emeritus professor of classics, he is secretary and treasurer of the trust.
Since he retired from the University of Otago in 2002, he's been writing a history of the classics department in between answering the phone for Ann.
She has the vision and the energy but does not like attending to the details, he explains.
The couple came to New Zealand in 1971 because Prof Barsby was taking up a lectureship at the university.
The move has given both of them opportunities they would not have had in the UK, Mrs Barsby says.
Originally from Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, she taught home economics in London before they moved here.
While her three children were young, she started to teach at Otago Polytechnic.
Over the years she has seen the potential in good ideas and worked to make them happen, whether it was establishing new courses at the polytechnic or saving various aspects of local heritage.
Examples of the latter include the 118-year old Burns Club, which was about to wind up, and the site of a Chinese camp and Gay Tan's cottage, which were to be buried under a rock pile at Macraes gold mine.
In 2000 she retired as head of the polytechnic's tourism department, but was by no means ready to take up gardening and housekeeping.
Seeing the potential in Dunedin's - and indeed Otago and Southland's heritage - she set up the Southern Heritage Trust, which has seven trustees, to give her a platform from which to work.
Heritage is more than historic sites and buildings - the Historic Places Trust looks after that.
The Southern Heritage trust's theme, "Past Present Future" summarises its aim - celebrating the past, linking it with the present and handing it on to the future.
The urgent thing is to preserve what existed 20, 50, 100 years ago, stimulating public awareness and trying to protect it by whatever means we can, Mrs Barsby says.
The trust has a base at the DCC's sexton's cottage in the Northern Cemetery and in return provides a service to visitors searching for family graves and other information.
Grants provide for a Task Force Green worker for 30 hours a week, six months a year, which enables the trust to staff the information centre at the cottage and do other research and work, such as producing trail brochures and cards, or updating websites.
Providing the service for the remaining six months is more problematic.
The trust also raises funds from a treasury of images of the city, many of them striking or quirky, produced by one of its workers, photographer Derek Smith.
They are deployed on posters and cards, calendars and bags sold from the sexton's cottage.
About five years ago polytechnic students built a website for the Northern Cemetery, which now receives inquiries from all over the world.
Unlike most cemetery websites, it can receive contributed biographies about people buried there, although they have to be checked before they are uploaded, Mrs Barsby says.
It is the best-preserved Victorian garden cemetery in New Zealand and many heritage roses have survived when only a handful have elsewhere, she says.
In fact the most popular of the trust's many brochures for the cemetery is the memorial rose trail put together with the help of the Otago Heritage Roses group, which identified the roses and propagates them.
The latest cemetery brochure is the "Anzacs at Gallipoli" trail, a guide to memorials for local soldiers who died during the Gallipoli campaign.
On Anzac Day the trust led a guided tour of the trail.
Its most recent general brochure is "The Port Side", which explores the history of the communities from Dunedin to Aramoana.
It is the first of two Otago Harbour heritage trails - the other will explore the peninsula side.
One of Mrs Barsby's major ongoing projects is the gasworks museum.
In 2006 she noticed it had been crossed off the DCC annual plan budget.
"It seemed to be a rather short-sighted measure, and that's when I got involved," she says.
When the gasworks was closed in 1987, it was saved as a museum by former Otago Settlers Museum director, the late Elizabeth Hinds, and the late George Emerson.
It is one of only three known preserved gasworks museums in the world.
When the DCC took over the Settlers Museum in 1991, it was severed from the Settlers.
Stage one of the museum, the engine house, was opened by Sir Neil Cossons, chairman of English Heritage, in 2001, despite dwindling support from the council.
"The [gasworks] trust was small and kept going, but it was really a group of people who were interested in steam machinery and worked at restoring and maintaining it, but there wasn't any other activity to keep it in the public mind and the city had certainly not been proactive in looking after the buildings.
It was to turn that around that we established a development group - I'm often seen as meddling in the boys' stuff," she says with a laugh.
On open days at the gasworks museum Mrs Barsby can often be found making pikelets for afternoon tea on one of the old gas stoves, and has become known as "the pikelet lady".
"It's a surprise, something different, and it's always a good talking point for any woman who comes in.
The children are usually fascinated and enjoy eating a pikelet.
I'm keen to extend the interest of the gasworks to a much broader mix of people.
We need families to come and to attract the youngsters," she says.
The second stage of the museum, the fitting shop, is to be strengthened and restored later this year.
Mrs Barsby likes to work behind the scenes.
Much of her time is spent in making submissions on heritage to the DCC, making applications for grants, and talking to people.
"Ann's very good at talking to people and getting them on side.
It's a real skill," says Prof Barsby.
For all that, the trust struggles, as do most voluntary organisations, to attract funding.
"That's a limiting factor on what you can achieve. If we had the funding we could pay people for their skills and for particular projects, and we'd achieve things more quickly too, but we are always limited by funding," she says.
Financial constraints mean many projects are simmering on the back burner, waiting for volunteers to finish them or for funding for printing the brochures, which they have to sell rather than give away.
Among the projects waiting in the wings are the brochures for a self-guided tour of the Dunedin courthouse, a historic trail in Milton, one on Dunedin places with literary associations to complement its recent web podcasts of local writers, and several more exploring the stories of those buried in the Northern Cemetery.
"Making heritage pay is a big problem here. I haven't got that sussed at all. That is also a problem in terms of promoting it from a tourism perspective. We are paving the way to create tourism products."
There are no signs that at age 68 Mrs Barsby's enthusiastic championing of heritage is waning.
There are still plenty of stories to be told and things of all descriptions to protect.
She has her eye on a heritage trail telling stories in South Dunedin.
The gasworks museum, which should be the key industrial heritage site in the city, she says, would be the hub, linking to other nearby heritage sites.
"The potential's there. It's just a matter of making it work," she says.
•The next Afternoon Tea at the Savoy is on September 30, with highlights from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeoman of the Gaurd. Another will be held on November 25, with a Scottish Week celebration.
•The Southern Heritage Trust invites anyone with an interest in any aspect of heritage to join. Membership forms are available on the website, www.southernheritage.org.nz or by phoning (03) 479-0169.
