Farewell Spit cottage gets new lease of life as conservation base
Thursday, 4 February 2021
Everyone who has visited the base of Farewell Spit will know it. The house locally known as Freeman’s cottage which adjoins the carpark is demarcated off by a picket fence. It takes its name from the original builder and farm owner, Stephen Freeman, who constructed it back in the 1930s.
Thanks to HealthPost Nature Trust and a heap of volunteers who gave it a serious facelift over the summer, this cottage has found new life as the trust’s new field station. It will be used by those conducting biodiversity research along with trust volunteers and workers as the Cape Farewell-Wharariki Eco-sanctuary picks up speed.
The house will also be available to DOC personnel, iwi and educational groups, and it’s great to see yet another refiguring of community assets.
Key members of the trust including Peter Butler, Craig Potton and Kim Hill updated guests on the trust’s work at the opening ceremony on January 17. Blessing the house and welcoming everyone in was Manawhenua ki Mohua, who gifted the cottage a new name, Te Whare Whakatā, meaning ‘the place of rest’, marked now with a rustic sign routered by Karen Cooper of Weka Arts.
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It’s great the house has a new name, given that Triangle Flat harboured a sizeable Maori settlement in pre-European times. The cottage will always be ‘Freemans’ to me though, simply because Freeman built it in living memory and that’s what everyone has always called it.
Stephen Freeman was the son of ‘Ernie’ Freeman of Dovedale who later moved to Bainham and farmed there, where the Haldanes are now.
Stephen purchased the block at the base of the spit around 1930 from the Riley family after marrying their daughter, Gertrude Riley. With the help of builder Charlie Hickmott, they built the cottage adjacent to where the carpark is today.
The only access to the farm used to be either around the headland at low tide, or across a footbridge situated where the big road culvert connects over to the promontory today, still marked as ‘Freemans Access Bridge’.
Since its original building, Freeman’s cottage got substantially altered and extended. The main entrance used to come into the room by the still-pokey kitchen, and the extensive veranda (added later) got covered in.
Before the big box culvert that runs out front got put in here, the highest tides would intrude up the big hollow beside the house, where the entrance to the carpark is now.
Neighbours to the Freeman farm were the Cottons, described as an “elderly couple”, whose fireplace base can still be seen at their house site amongst the big trees half way along the track from Fossil Point which takes people back through the farm to the carpark.
Stephen Freeman’s uncle Rex took over the farm after him to become the last private owner. An early move to get the spit and adjacent farm blocks into Crown ownership saw Lands and Survey acquire them as they became estates, the overall ownership eventually passing to DOC.
Lone Star farms leases the pastoral grazing here today, while Freeman’s descendants still farm in Golden Bay, at Onahau Plains, Puramahoi.
Current residents of the house for the entire summer are Victoria University Masters students Aiden Reason and Eliza Burt-Priddy. They took up the opportunity to study the Asian paper wasp invasion around the spit after their presence was identified by entomologist Richard Toft during the trust’s bio blitz in the area last October.
Asian paper wasps are native to East Asia, notably China and Japan, but an invasive subspecies, Polistes chinensis antennalis, made its way to New Zealand in 1979, most probably in a shipping container.
Although they cause less trouble than their German wasp cousins, paper wasps, easily identified as being skinnier and with dangly legs, cause havoc amongst native insects, particularly caterpillars which are their preferred food.
Nelson gardeners may have noticed their effect in the garden by reducing pests, but also severely reducing the monarch butterfly population.
But it’s in our scrublands where these wasps proliferate that they threaten all endemic insects – cicadas, damselflies, thrips, moths, butterflies, the lot.
The researchers three months here this summer and another three months next summer will enable them to study these paper wasps in their ideal scrubby lowland habitat of the spit.
Explains Aiden: “The aim is definitely to establish possible control methods or at least set a baseline for long term population monitoring, but we really can't promise anything on the control front. We're currently looking into an insect pathogen already present on the spit as a potential for developing a fungal bio-control agent.”
So far the pair have recorded and plotted on GPS over 300 paper wasp nest locations along the spit. Farewell Spit Eco Tours afford them some transport when it works, but most days they can clock up upwards of 15km on foot as they push their way through the scrub looking for nests.
These are usually small affairs typically anywhere between 30 and 200 cells. Another pest they’ve seen plenty of out there are possums.
The researchers are aware that another species of paper wasp, Polistes dominula or European paper wasp is already well established in Golden Bay east of Collingwood. To help them with their distribution mapping, they would like to know from anyone who has seen them in western Golden Bay. These paper wasps differ from the Asian ones by having defining spots on their face and abdomen.
When completed, their report on the ecology of paper wasps on Farewell Spit will add to our knowledge of this outstanding environment, and keep it a haven for our endemic critters, no matter how big.