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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 4 (August 1, 1928)

A Mission Church of Bishop Selwyn

A Mission Church of Bishop Selwyn.

Te Awamutu Town (the name signifies the head of canoe navigation) is, like Hamilton, a mile away from the Main Trunk line. The traveller who has the time might well stop over here and see something of this little metropolis of the Waipa district, and of the beautiful farming lands around it, the garden country of the Waikato. It is quite a model town for its size, well proportioned to the needs of the good agricultural region of which it is the business centre. The pride of the place is the pretty English church, in its old-fashioned burying-ground by the side of the willow-walled Manga-o-Hoi Stream It is an histori building, one of the first of Bishop Selwyn's Maori mission churches, dating back to 1854, when the Rev. John Morgan was the missionary of the Waipa country. Maoris worshipped here before the war and the conquest, when Te Awamutu was an oasis of civilisation in these parts. At the old mission station, in its great groves across the road, Sir John Gorst had his headquarters in the early “sixties,” when he was Government Commissioner in the Waikato, until the Kingites summarily suppressed his little pro-Government newspaper, the Pihoihoi Mokemoke, and evicted him from the Maori country. Rewi Maniapoto and his fellow-chiefs had a short way with propaganda they considered objectionable. A current story was that they used the lead type to mould into bullets, which they fired at the troops. The fact is, however, that they took scrupulous care to return the printing press and type to the Government; it was packed up and sent down the Waipa and Waikato by canoe.