St Faith's, Ohinemutu, Rotorua. 2007 Ajr This is the very beautiful St Faith’s Anglican Church, built in 1910 in an elaborate Tudor style and embellished with ornate Maori carvings. It sits beside Lake Rotorua in the little Maori village of Ohinemutu, once the main Maori settlement of the area and where Rotorua was born as a tourist town in the 19th century. I love this place with its hissing steaming vents, little puffs of geothermal steam gushing out of the ground, the pavements, the gutters – just wherever it bursts free. Maori in fact, still use geothermal pools in the area for cooking, washing and bathing. But back to
St Faith’s – inside there’s an amazing sand-blasted window that depicts a Maori Christ, who appears to walk on the waters of Lake Rotorua seen through the window.
The village is also home to the spectacularly carved Tamatekapua meeting house, which I featured here in February. (Just put Ohinemutu into the blog search box top left, or click on
Ohinemutu in the label line below).
Ohinemutu Maori Village on Rotorua's steaming lakefront, is one of my favourite places. I love wandering about the skinny streets, watching natural geothermal steaqm hissing up through gardens and gutters, the mud bubbling in nearby pools, the marae and the magnificent St Faith's Church. In among it all is this cute-as-a-button carved whare (house). I've always assumed it was part of one of the marae but on a recent visit, talking with one of the locals, they told me it is a private house that has been lovingly restored with a carved front and that someone does in fact live in it. It's such a lovely visual surprise, snuggled there among all the modern Western-stye housing. Wouldn't it be nice if more modern Maori considered doing this? How much more interesting our modern streets would look.
