Otago Sculpture Trust

In Site Library - Greater Dunedin: McKenzie Cairn (Palmerston) (1931 rebuilt)

Insite

Sir John McKenzie Memorial Cairn..... Puketapu Hill above Palmerston .... H.S. Bingham, Monumental Mason

It was King Dick himself, the Prime Minister Richard Seddon, who unveiled the memorial cairn to his Parliamentary colleague Sir John McKenzie on a cold but fine day in November 1902. Around 400 people turned out to remember the life of the former MP for the Waihemo district.

The cairn is faced with local stone with cornerstones from the River of Leith, and was originally sited not in its present location but on a nearby hill, Pukeuiti which overlooks the Heathfield Estate at Shag Point, where Sir John died in August 1901.

The idea of a cairn was initially proposed by the Gaelic Society and taken up by a former parliamentary colleague of McKenzie's, Lee Smith. The preferred site was on Puketapu but the then owner of the land was uncooperative. The cairn collapsed in 1917 and for a time it seemed as though it would languish as a ruin on Pukeuiti. However, old loyalties were strong and when Sir Joseph Ward, who was present at the unveiling in 1902, was made Prime Minister in the late 1920s, he was approached by the Gaelic Society who extracted from him a promise to help restore the memorial to his old friend. In 1929 the Philip family gifted land to the Government for the memorial cairn and access, and the rebuilt cairn was opened where it now stands, on Puketapu, in 1931.

The three politicians, Seddon, Ward and McKenzie, had been the principal architects of an agricultural policy which broke up the huge land holdings of the original and made the land available to farmers and homesteaders and so, as the memorial stone in Palmerston notes, founding farming as it is known today.

The eventual site of the cairn was significant. It is said it looks over the land he worked as a shepherd after he came to Otago in 1861.  Sir John McKenzie was born in Ross‑shire, Scotland, in 1839. In later life he told the story of how on the first day of his arrival in Palmerston he climbed to the top of Puketapu to view the surrounding country. From that height he saw only two huts, and, in a reference to the notorious land clearances in Scotland, the thought occurred to him that here was a land for the people who were being driven out from the homes in which they had been born. On that mountain he vowed that if ever he had the opportunity he would not allow the evil laws of the old land to prevail here.

The memorial was in the news in 2001 when the Department of Conservation declared that the internal stairway was unsafe. It estimated that repairs would cost $16000. A controversy arose around responsibility for the maintenance of the cairn with the local council insisting on the importance of the monument but declaring its care to be a Government responsibility. Eventually a compromise was reached. The Department of Conservation offered the $5000 it had budgeted for the removal of the stairs while $6000 came from the Oamaru Licensing Trust and the Waihemo Lodge Hotel in Palmerston, and $2500 from the Waitaki Heritage Trust (a committee of the Waitaki district council). The Royal New Zealand Air Force helped out by offering to have an Iroquois helicopter airlift the new internal staircases to the memorial cairn. The stairs and the new railing for the viewing area on top of the cairn were built by a Palmerston engineering firm and the cairn was officially reopened, for the second time, in March 2002 following a church service in the Murray Hall at the East Otago High School. Among those present was Sir John McKenzie's great-granddaughter.

The monument is visited in October each year by athletes who compete in the annual Kelly's Canter from the Palmerston railway station to the summit of Puketapu. It is 333 metres to the top (the cairn is a further 13 metres high) and the fastest runners can usually make the return trip in about 25 minutes. The run commemorates the policeman Bert Kelly who ran up Puketapu three times a week during World War II to look out for enemy ships.

Richard Dingwall

Text Copyright Richard Dingwall