Naenae
Naenae is a suburb of Lower Hutt, New Zealand. It lies on the eastern edge of the floodplain of the Hutt River, four kilometres from the Lower Hutt central business district. A small tributary of the Hutt, the Waiwhetū Stream, flows through the suburb. Naenae lies 19.7 km from Wellington Central.
Toponymy
Early newspapers refer to the area as Naenae, Nainai, Te Naenae, the Naenae and so on. Naenae or nae-nae is a Māori word meaning "mosquito" or "sandfly", and is widely believed to recall a time prior to the draining of the area, when the mosquito population predominated. The New Zealand Geographic Board authorised Naenae as the correct spelling in 1929.However, the name of the suburb 'Naenae' is an incorrect recording by settler populations of the traditional Māori name Te Ngaengae, which means ‘to cause effect through rupture’. The story of Naenae begins with Māui raising the fish Hāhā-te-Whenua, and his brothers cutting the fish and creating mountains, lakes and rivers. There was said to be a freshwater lake where Taita Cemetery is now. Two man-eating taniwha dwelled there, and people were banned from going into the water because they would disappear. One day a child slipped in and the two taniwha raced towards the child and tore each other apart. Thus two rivers were created: Waiwhetū and Te Awamutu. Taniwha are unexplained phenomena, not necessarily the large monsters they are often represented as. Te Ngaengae could be ‘volcanic activity underwater’. Maui’s fish was called Hāhā-te-Whenua – a reference to plates shifting under the water.
Setting
Naenae occupies a basin and the lower slopes of the Eastern Hills in the upper reaches of the Waiwhetū Stream catchment area. The basin is divided into northern and southern areas by a spur of the Eastern Hills. At Naenae, a Holocene-era swamp deposit of loose silt, sand and gravel with beds of peat lies between two alluvial fans. A drillhole bored at Naenae found up to 30 m of silt and inter-bedded peat. The swampy area may be prone to liquefaction, although this was not reported after the 1855 or 1942 Wairarapa earthquakes.Waiwhetū Stream
The stream has its headwaters in the Eastern Hutt hills, above the suburbs of Wingate and Naenae in Lower Hutt. It has a catchment area of around. The stream is around in length and passes through the eastern suburbs of Fairfield, Waterloo, and Waiwhetū, and the industrial areas of Seaview and Gracefield before entering the estuary of the Hutt River Te Awa Kairangi as it reaches Wellington Harbour. A 2.3 km section of the stream at Naenae has been formed into a concrete channel, known in the 1940s and 1950s as Waddington Canal. This was created in an attempt to improve drainage and run-off from the hills. From 2015 to 2017, volunteers planted plants along the concrete berms of the channel and in some areas placed rocks in the channel itself to slow down the water flow, which enabled īnanga to travel upstream.History
Early development
From the early days of European settlement, land in the area around Naenae and Taitā was used for market gardens and supplied vegetables for the Wellington region.In 1905, the government bought 143 acres of land at the south of Naenae, and in 1906, 46 sections at the newly laid out "Town of Nainai" further north were sold to the public. The land was suitable "for poultry farming, and other purposes" and an advertisement promised "the wonderful character of the soil for horticultural purposes". The land was lavishly described as "carefully selected for its picturesque beauty, for its productive power, for its unrivalled sunny aspect, for its healthy character, and for its accessibility to all the main roads".
The 1911 census of New Zealand recorded only 136 people living at Naenae, and by 1916 this had risen to 316.
Waddington
When 143 acres of land at the south of present-day Naenae was sold to the government in June 1905, there were allegations that the government had paid too much and the land was too swampy to build on. A committee investigated the deal in 1910. The land was divided into 376 sections and became known as the Waddington Estate. The government had intended to build homes for workers, but there was little demand from potential settlers because the area was too far away from business centres where working-class people might seek work.Farmers and gardeners at Waddington struggled due to the boggy ground and flooding caused by run-off from watercourses coming off the hills surrounding the basin. Drainage work was undertaken in 1918 to make the area more suitable for market gardening: small streams were diverted into concrete channels which fed into the Waiwhetū Stream, and the upper part of the Waiwhetū Stream was deepened and straightened into a canal bordered by wide public reserves. The large swamp at the centre of Waddington disappeared, and between 1918 and 1937 the land was used mainly for grazing, poultry and market gardens. In 1922, 20 acres was opened up for settlement by returned soldiers.
The government began planning a huge state housing project at Waddington in 1937. At the same time, railways and roads were being built in the Hutt Valley and there was a massive demand for manpower. In the early 1940s a workingmen's camp was established at Waddington to house up to 500 men working on public projects. By the mid-1940s the state houses were built and occupied and the population of Waddington was growing rapidly. In May 1946 the government announced that it would shift the workers to Petone and use the camp buildings for a new temporary primary school. Waddington School opened in October 1946 in 12 classrooms in the former camp buildings, catering for 350 children in the Naenae-Waddington area who had previously attended Hutt Central School. The school closed around 1950 when a new purpose-built school was opened at Naenae.
In 1947 and 1948 there were calls to change the name of Waddington, since there was a locality in the South Island with the same name. Lower Hutt City Council advised the New Zealand Geographic Board that it did not recognise Waddington as an official name, and the name fell out of use after this period. Waddington Drive in Naenae exists as a reminder of the former name of the area.
State housing
When the government raised the idea of a state housing development at Naenae in 1937, there were protests that it was a waste of an area with good soil for market gardens. Undersecretary for Housing John A Lee said that it was better to transport vegetables longer distances than force people to travel further to work. In 1944, 1000 state houses were constructed at the south of Naenae around Seddon Street, in an area then known as the Waddington Estate. Many of these homes were built quickly using prefabrication, a new technique at the time. Sections of the houses were made in a factory in Miramar and trucked to Naenae, where the whole exterior shell of a house could be erected in a day or two. A small community co-operative shopping area was built at the intersection of Seddon Street and Waddington Drive to service the new housing area. Another housing area was created north of Naenae Road. In the late 1950s a block of Star Flats, apartment-style state housing, was built at Naenae Road. As of 2019, about 47% of Naenae's homes were part of the state housing sector. New state houses were built at Naenae in 2020.Post-war boom
As Lower Hutt expanded during the 1940s, the Labour Party government under Peter Fraser selected Naenae as an ideal site to become a "designer community", a model suburb of sorts, where a substantial shopping centre would complement a suburban state-housing estate. This community centre would serve as a social hub for the greater area. Ernst Plischke, an Austrian architect, designed plans for the new community centre between 1942 and 1943. However, government architect Gordon Wilson later drastically changed the design. The planners hoped to encourage nuclear-family life in such a scheme, but due to the increasing urbanization of New Zealand, demand for housing outstripped the need for such centres, leaving the scheme only partially realised.The population of Naenae increased from 548 in 1926 to 22,000 by 1958 as a result of the large state housing programme. Naenae Railway Station opened in 1946 on the Hutt Valley section of the Wairarapa Line. The railway provided direct access to Wellington for the rapidly-increasing suburb.
A light industry zone was established next to the railway line and by 1958 businesses in operation included a bakery supplying most of the Hutt Valley with bread, an engineering works, a printing ink company and a timber treatment plant. Philips, a Dutch company which produced televisions and radios, built a large factory at Naenae in 1956 in anticipation of the arrival of television in New Zealand. Television production at Naenae ended in 1988 after reduced import tariffs made it uneconomical to manufacture televisions locally. The last television set produced in this factory was made on 11 June 1988. Resene Paints occupied the buildings. Rembrandt Suits established a factory in Naenae in the 1950s and was still operating from the site in 2012.
A shopping centre opened in the 1950s at Hillary Court and Everest Avenue had 42 shops and two banks, and Wellington's first post-war picture theatre, the 700-seat Regent, opened in June 1958.
Naenae's post-modern Post Office building pays homage to the Art Deco era main Post Office in Lower Hutt town centre.
By the late 1960s, Naenae's population had started to decrease as children in families who had moved to the area in the 1940s and 1950s had grown up and left home.