"The Auckland Star " July 2 1963

In 1963 we danced in the street in three days of joyous celebration, the like of which we wondered if the village of Puhoi would ever see again. The little north Rodney settlement founded exclusively by Catholic immigrants from Bohemia, in the Austrian Empire, was turning 100 and the organisers had turned on the 'full works' - dinner, dance, church service, cemetery procession with Rosary.

Photos of the event show the riverbank below the hall covered with the crowd awaiting the landing re-enactment.

Around the corner they came, in little motor boats like parish curate Father Theodore Van Lieshout's, 'Saint Peter and Paul', with my young Schischka cousins, Mary and Alan, in a loose approximation of pioneering garments.I was on the riverbank waiting, along with my training college class, using the occasion for a field trip.

At the age of 17, I was overawed and overcome with love and reverence for its organisers, the village elders, including my uncle, deputy chairman Vince Schischka. Almost 50 years on I have become one of those elders, charged with the duty of helping celebrate the addition of another half century of history to the village of my ancestors. When I was 11, and a pupil at Ellerslie Convent, Sister Vincent announced the inspectors would be visiting the school the following Monday. "Judith Williams, will you please prepare the morning talk for that day," she commanded. Our family had a copy of Father D.V. Silk's 'A History of Puhoi', written at the time of the village's 60th anniversary.

So I prepared to recite the whole history of the arrival of the first party of 83 German dialect-speaking Europeans to struggle ashore, wet, cold and apprehensive, ferried up the gloomy river by Maori whose unfamiliar faces would have added to their fear. "It was the middle of the night and the middle of winter…" I droned on in front of the inspector, until Sister, seeing I was digging in for at least another half hour said, "thank you, Judith, you can stop there." Shut up at that moment, I have nevertheless been retelling the story of the foundations of the village, and my home of 35 years, ever since. My ancestors, Johann and Elisabeth Pittner and their two young daughters, had joined the first of several waves of Bohemian immigrants, but the parents were elderly -we believe they falsified their ages to gain immigration -and were unable to farm their 64 hectare-land grant, where Good Brothers now have their forest. After the death of the Herdl or grandfather, Wawa, grannie, Pittner left for Auckland. I am the first of my family to return. Meanwhile, the younger pioneers struggled on to clear bush on terrain which seemed to them to have scarcely a single flat acre.

Germanic immigrants had the reputation of making hard-working settlers and the Puhoi pioneers had cleared hundreds of acres in the six years after their arrival. The community centre they eventually established down on the river had a church, a succession of schools, presbyteries, halls and hotels, wharf, shop, post office and steamer service to Auckland. Community life was rich with church, village and family celebrations, concerts, anniversaries, weddings and funerals accompanied by music and dances brought from the homeland. And, until recent decades, the dialect, a variant of north Bavarian, was spoken. As a child coming back to Puhoi for Easter Week ceremonies in the church, I was entranced by the older men, with their big beards, curved foreheads, noses and chins and strong accents.


...1913 - Descendants on the steps of the Schischka Boarding House.

Gus Titford, product of an English and Bohemian marriage, would 'wamp' on the piano and fiddle on the 'wiolin', while Auntie Molly Schollum once described for me 'the tisles and tunder in the Buwai Walley'. And I am told an early English-learner, when her girl was praised, replied: "she is so good what a Moidl should."

Until around the time of our centenary, Puhoi was almost exclusively Bohemian, and the Schischkas, Schollums, Strakas and Schedewys, Rauners, Turnwalds, Bayers, Wechs, Wenzlicks and Tolhopfs were still creating pronunciation and spelling problems for their English neighbours, and filling the church on Sundays.

The turning tide began with a little influx of people escaping the city in the search for a more alternative, rural lifestyle in the 1960s and 70s, and regarded as hippies by their conservative neighbours. 'Bohemian' was a strictly geographical designation in Puhoi's case, referring to the pioneers' origins in the towns and villages to the west of the city of Pilsen in Bohemia, an ancient kingdom in central Europe, today a region of the Czech Republic. It had nothing to do with the loose living arrangements and student lifestyles of Puccini's Parisians. But it was 'the hippies on the hill' who rescued and incorporated into their restored villas, or creatively-designed timber homes, the kauri staircases discarded by the grandchildren of the pioneers when they replaced them with their Keith Hay houses.

'Old time' dances such as the Maxina, Barn Dance and Veleta were still in vogue but the genuinely old time, that is, brought to New Zealand from Bohemia, by the pioneers - dances such as the Um -a -dum, the Haamickl, Prince of Wales Schottische and Finger Polka, were fast disappearing and it needed the creation of a Puhoi Bohemian Dance Group to haul them back. Their revival was aided by the discovery, in the 1980s, by the Egerlaender people, of the existence of a group of distant kinsfolk in faraway New Zealand. A subgroup of the German-speaking Sudetendeutsch, the Egerlaenders lived in the Czechoslovakian district north of that from which the Puhoi people had emigrated decades earlier. Driven out of their homeland on the fall of Hitler, many of the exiles had been taken up by the southern German states. Puhoi was taken under the wing of these people, who, with their political and cultural leaders, visited the settlement, starting off many years of warm friendships and mutual visiting.

It was they who taught us about the missing years of our European history, interrupted by emigration, distance, language differences and the tragedy of two world wars. It was a hugely enriching time for me. After having graduated with a degree in German Languages and Literature, I had taught in northern Germany for three years, before returning to New Zealand to buy land in my ancestral village. The visitors and I fell into each other's arms and they helped me teach myself the dialect. Sadly, today, most of my Bohemian neighbours of my generation are uninterested in its revival. The elderly Bohemians, who had created such a heart-warming 100th anniversary celebration for a star-struck seventeen-year-old, were passing away and the population was being replaced by newcomers who, although recognising Puhoi's uniqueness, did not really know the details of their new home's history.

Apart from the historical society, whose mandate today is still to collect, record and preserve local history, continuity with the past has been maintained by those two institutions once most at the heart of the old Bohemian settlement -the church and the hotel. While the influence of the former has waned the latter has grown

And this leads me to the development of the Puhoi of the present.

In winter, 2013, we will celebrate 150 years since the foundation of our settlement and in the life of our community. In the two generations since the 1963 centenary Puhoi has seen a population reversal from a community almost exclusively Bohemian-descended to one where around three-quarters of our people are newcomers, from city, other rural districts or from England, Holland, Japan, South Africa, Ireland, Scandinavia, Kiribati and Germany.

Our Community gathering in the Puhoi Hall 2008

There may no longer be dancing in the street when we gather in the weekend surrounding June 29 2013, the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul, after which our church is named, and on which my ancestors landed on that cold and inhospitable Puhoi river bank. But the core programme will most certainly contain the same elements - the band and its Dudelsack -Bohemian bagpipes - music, the dinners, the dances, church services and landing re-enactment. Plus the significant addition of bus and garden tours, ethnic showcasing, family reunions, A & P shows and community picnics, in the lead-up months to the core celebrations.

These months will provide the opportunity for a celebration of all the talents and achievements with which the so-called 'newcomers' have enriched the community life of the Puhoi of recent decades. "They kept the faith and they helped one another" - these core pioneer values have been recited ad infinitum. Although the newcomers may not realise it, their contribution, in the explosion of community activities and organisations of recent years, have ensured the continuation of those values.

Our playschool, our library, our historical society and Bohemian Dance Group, our sports club, hall and hotel, our women's dinners, our fire force, zumba, yoga and pilates classes, our badminton, soccer and hockey, our farmers market and informal exchanges of produce, our concerts and art exhibitions, our community forum, wharf and walkway projects, our structure planning, motorway and other public meetings, our shop and garage, our Landcare planting days and street parties, and most importantly, our loving and harmonious community, are all true to the spirit of the Bohemians who first settled our valley.

Judith Williams