Mercer

WORDS: DENISE IRVINE • IMAGERY: MARTIN JONES, HERITAGE NEW ZEALAND POUHERE TAONGA

Built in 1936, the Mercer morgue is a rarity – one of only a handful of such structures known to have been built within cemeteries in New Zealand

When Kerryn Walker came to live in the north Waikato town of Mercer a few years back, she took her dog Lily for a stroll most days and became intrigued by a lonely concrete building with a rusty roof hidden among vines near the cemetery on Glass Road.

She asked local people about it: some said it had been a bus stop; others suggested it was a pumphouse. Kerryn joined the Mercer Community Committee and one of the members, Ray Katipa, told her that it had been the town’s morgue. It had probably last been used for this purpose in the early 1960s; it was something that Ray – and other long-time Mercer residents – had always known about, but its origins had become lost over time.

Kerryn was further intrigued. “Who finds a morgue while they’re walking the dog?” she says.

She delved into the morgue’s unique history, spent hours at her computer trawling old newspapers and records, and compiled a portfolio of information on the little building to which bodies that required examination for a coroner’s inquest had been taken.

The Mercer Community Committee subsequently applied to have the former morgue entered on the New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero, and in July 2021 it was listed as a Category 2 historic place.

“We are all so excited,” says Kerryn. “Now we want to tidy it up and celebrate its huge heritage.”

The Mercer morgue is a rarity – one of only a handful known to have been built within cemeteries in New Zealand. Most purposebuilt examples in the early and mid 20th century were attached to institutions such as hospitals and sanatoria.

Martin Jones, Senior Heritage Assessment Advisor for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, who produced the morgue listing report in consultation with Māori Heritage Advisor Tharron Bloomfield, says the Mercer building is an uncommon survivor. “It is still so well preserved so many decades after it was last used for its original purpose.”

The morgue’s story began in June 1936, when New Zealand Truth, a colourful and controversial tabloid newspaper, ran a story denouncing unsanitary rural town morgues that were typically located in hotels – the key community gathering places.

Truth illustrated its shockhorror story with a photograph of a morgue that was most likely in the yard of the Mercer Hotel, with a pigsty adjacent to the makeshift premises that held tūpāpaku ahead of a coronial inquiry.

Less than a month after the damning article, the Mercer Town Board commissioned and funded a purpose-built morgue for the community, to be located at Mercer Cemetery to the east of the township.

The cemetery site was part of an ancestral landscape known

traditionally to Māori as Te Paina and later renamed by colonial authorities as Point Russell and then Mercer. It is associated with the whakapapa, tūpuna, kaitiaki and oral traditions of WaikatoTainui and includes the hapū of Ngāti Amaru, Te Uri o Haupa, Ngāti Naho, Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Te Aho, Ngāti Haua, Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Pou, Ngāti Tamaoho, Te Ākitai Waiohua, Ngāti Te Ata, Ngāti Tipa, Ngāti Paoa, Ngā Muka Development Trust Marae and the descendants of those people of the Te Pūaha o Waikato and Kei o Te Waka rohe.

In the early 1860s the site lay immediately inside the aukati set by the Kiingitanga movement to preserve Māori sovereignty in an area that was invaded by Crown forces in 1863. Te Paina, on the Waikato River, became a supply depot for invading troops.

The Crown invasion was followed by raupatu, with lasting effects for iwi and hapū. Mercer was later developed as a colonial township and a strong Māori presence remained, notably in the early 20th century when Kiingitanga leader Te Puea Hērangi established a kāinga at nearby Mangatāwhiri.

The tiny Mercer morgue is one more element of the town’s rich history and it is regarded as tapu for its association with death and tūpāpaku. Martin Jones says that within a Māori context, structures such as morgues would have been foreign and uncomfortable. They were built at that time according to European concepts that did not accommodate tikanga rituals such as whānau being present with the tūpāpaku.

The morgue, used by police, medical personnel and the district coroner, incorporated the latest ideas in hygiene, privacy, ventilation and sturdy construction. It had one window, placed high on the rear wall, and there is evidence that it originally LOCATION

Mercer lies on the east bank of the Waikato River, 70km north of Hamilton and 58km south of Auckland.

had a shutter for maximum privacy. A distinctive diamondshaped ceiling vent (pictured left) led to cross-flow ventilation in the attic space, and the whitewashed concrete internal walls and the smooth cement floor would have been simple to clean.

Construction was by local builder Frank Hitchcock; his name and the date of the work (September 1936) are inscribed at the base of one wall. Says Martin: “It indicates the extent to which there was community pride in the building that the builder wanted to put his name and date of construction on it.”

The morgue served its diverse district for close to three decades. Mercer resident Willie McGrath remembers his late father, Bill McGrath, speaking about the death of a young farmhand in a bulldozer accident on a nearby property in the early 1960s.

Willie understands from his father’s story that the man’s body was taken to the morgue, and this may have been the last time it was used.

A member of the community committee, Willie is pleased by the morgue’s Category 2 listing.

“The building’s always been there. It’s good to preserve some of Mercer’s history.”

The Revd Joanna Lee Katipa, an Anglican minister and daughter of Ray Katipa, grew up in Mercer and remembers running fast past the morgue as a child on her way to school.

“It was a scary place, it was eerie. I went in there for a look as a kid, but you never went by yourself. We always went as a group.”

In March 2020, after the morgue site had been tidied up by cemetery administrator Waikato District Council, Revd Katipa, who is a great-great-niece of Te Puea Hērangi, blessed the building alongside the Revd Cruz Karauti-Fox.

“It was very special to do that, with the people of this community around us,” she says.

“The blessing cleared the way for everybody and everything. The building is nice and clear for the future.”

Kerryn Walker says the Mercer Community Committee is keen to raise funds for the refurbishment of the now-rundown morgue, which is showing its age and its lack of recent care, and is consulting Waikato District Council and Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga on how best to proceed.

“We’ve come this far; we want to finish the job. Give it back its pride and character,” she says.

Says Revd Katipa: “It’s been hiding in a corner, but it had a purpose. Now it is going to be known by everyone.”

aukati: boundary hapū: sub-tribe kāinga: village kaitiaki: guardians raupatu: land confiscation rohe: region, territory tapu: sacred tikanga: protocol, procedure tūpāpaku: bodies tūpuna: ancestors whakapapa: genealogy