In spite of its 120-year lifetime the hall has no special status in the CODC district plan nor has it been registered or categorised with Heritage New Zealand, but its role as a community hub over five generations of Patearoa families is undisputed.
Before a hall was built functions were held at the schoolhouse which proved cramped, especially for dancing, and the first newspaper mention of a "Patearoa Hall" came in August 1900 when the "hall" was used as a magistrate’s court. When troopers were welcomed back from the South African War in August 1901 the hall was "artistically decorated with fern work and flags". It seems, though, that this "hall" was perhaps the school or the old school/church building.
By 1904 a Patearoa Public Hall Trust was formed and in 1905 it called tenders for sun-dried bricks and timber to be used in building a proper community hall. Waipiata builder Richard Thurlow’s family firm got the job and John Thurlow was soon at work in a paddock next to the proposed site. He turned out hundreds, maybe thousands, of bricks in just a few months and, until the bowling club used the site for its green in 1948, the paddock was always known as "the brick reserve".
Two hundred people turned up for the opening concert which featured the cream of Patearoa talent with Bob McSkimming in the chair. His name still resonates in the hall at the annual Crockery Bob Sale. A dance followed, the first of hundreds to be held there.
The hall was in constant use for community meetings and social activities including regular concerts in aid of local causes like the library fund and the cricket club.
A farce The Sleeping King was staged to raise funds for the school prize fund and the Patearoa Quadrille Assembly were regulars, while at election times the hall had its liveliest nights. In 1911 it was packed to hear Liberal candidate John Bennetts, a Roxburgh fruit grower, vainly wooing the farming community.
"The meeting was very appreciative" but Bennetts came a distant last at the polls. Nevertheless, he fronted up to the knockabout heckling of a public hall meeting, something modern politicians seem unwilling to face.
The hall was where local men were farewelled and welcomed back from the front and it also became a picture theatre as Alex Thomson trundled through Central Otago bringing Britannia Electric Pictures to all the small towns. (A treat which folded in 1917 after Alex was arrested at Maheno for failing to pay maintenance to his wife).
After the war a Returned Soldiers’ Ball became an annual fixture as did dances organised by the spinsters and the bachelors. In later times the Nurses’ Ball arranged by the women at the Waipiata Sanatorium was an eagerly awaited part of country courting rituals.
By the mid-1920s more fundraising by the hall committee included concerts, dances and selling sheep at the Burnside stock sale. In 1923 alone the committee raised £400 ($50,000 today) for extensions to the hall. One report read "Although our ball has just recently been enlarged it was hardly big enough for the crowd present. About 90 couples sat down to a sumptuous supper, served in the supper room." Easy to see what inspired Peter Cape to write "Down the Hall on Saturday Night"!
More recent times have seen Anzac Day services, school concerts, drama and musical shows and a procession of funerals as local identities are farewelled.
The local community is in the midst of discussions with the council over the hall’s future but with an annual use of about a dozen events bringing the council a mere $600 or so the bean counters will be prophets of doom. But the fact remains that a community hall is a vital cog in the machinery which actually makes a community and the Central Otago District Council must strive to retain a hall in Patearoa. They are, after all, elected and employed to serve the community.
• Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
