Stories of Auckland: New exhibit tells story of migrants who helped build city

Tuesday, 16 March 2021

Auckland is one of the few cities which can boast the contradictory elements of being tucked away in a remote part of the planet, while still having the whole world on its doorstep. It is a veritable melting pot of cultures and backgrounds – arguably what makes it such a desirable, and exciting, place to live.

The city’s heterogeneous nature is the crux of the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s latest exhibition, Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland.

It tells the diverse narratives of the people and places that call the city home, with a particular focus on early immigrant families who had – and continue to have – a fundamental impact on its formation.

Pioneering Chinese settlers were the driving force behind one of the country’s most recognisable fast food chains and its first ever supermarket, Foodtown, while a Lebanese family birthed one of the regions most widely acclaimed vineyards. The Samoan-German Kronfelds, despite their beginnings in business, have gone on to leave a lasting impact in all manner of other industries. Former All Black Josh Kronfeld is a testament to that alone.

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The Kronfeld family, who moved to Auckland in the 1890s, have had a particularly trailblazing existence.

In as little as 10 years after moving, Prussian Jew Gustav Kronfeld boasted a hugely successful import-export business and had become a naturalised member of the British Empire. Along with his Samoan wife Louisa he also helped care for those who passed through Auckland from the Pacific Islands, in a grand house he had built himself.

Emily Parr, the Kronfeld’s great-great-granddaughter said her ancestors' warm and familial hospitality helped countless travellers and established Pacific Island roots in Auckland, at a time when very few Samoans were in New Zealand.

“Louisa being in Auckland paved the way for a lot of Pacific people to be here,” she had told me over the phone, when I called for a lesson in Kronfeld family history.

“When people think of the Pacific migration to Tāmaki they think it is in the 1950s onwards, but Louisa is the perfect example of how there were families here much earlier.”

Louisa had been a woman of lofty status in her native Samoa, and, once combined with her husband’s burgeoning reputation, the two were soon rubbing shoulders with Auckland’s elite. They were friends with “musicians, politicians and Tongan royalty” Parr revealed, and their house, which they already shared with 10 children and fleeting students, was incessantly pulsing with life.

The house was named Oli Ula, and it’s a place Sandra Harrop, Gustav’s 77-year-old great-granddaughter, remembers with fondness.

“It was a beautiful big villa in Eden Crescent that he had built himself, and it had a full concert grand piano in the lounge, beautiful furniture and lots of treasures and taonga,” she reminisced.

The collection of taonga the Kronfelds had – some of which had been collected from Gustav’s travels, others gifted to the pair by their high-profile friends – made up a significant, hundreds-strong collection which was later gifted to Te Papa and Auckland Museum.

A small selection of the collection is on display for the Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland exhibit. It includes a large, bronzed kava bowl from Mata’afa Iosefo, a paramount chief of Samoa and close relative of Louisa Kronfeld, and an anie tōga – a finely woven mat – gifted by Queen Salote of Tonga.

There is no story without struggle, however. With the onset of World War I, anti-German feeling led to Gustav being declared an enemy alien, and he was forced to intern with other Germans on Motuihe Island.

Great loss ensued. A number of Kronfeld’s properties were confiscated, including a prominent waterfront warehouse (now preserved in Auckland’s historic Britomart Precinct), while trading relationships that Gustav worked so hard to forge with Auckland and the Islands were ruined.

“He brought so much to this country, particularly his establishing of the trade networks, so this was really painful for him and the family,” says Parr. It is evidently a loss which still reverberates even the most distant scions of the Kronfeld family.

Parr, despite being “greatly removed” from that era, said she still feels “terrible” about the incidents that took place and empathises with the woes of her great-great-grandparents.

Harrop, who describes the internment as one that caused “huge devastation” to Gustav, points out that the family has still gone on to flourish, despite the setbacks.

Flourish they certainly have. Gustav’s descendents have continued to make a significant contribution to New Zealand in every facet of life, from sports to academia, clergy, art, education and the military, and they still remain a large part of Auckland’s fabric today, almost 150 years after Gustav and Louisa arrived.

It was unparalleled business acumen that similarly led to the rise of the Ah Chee ménage in the late 1800s.

Chan Dah Chee (later referred to as Ah Chee) moved to the city in the 1860s and established a number of important trade connections between Auckland and China, exporting fungus and importing Chinese food stuffs and medicines. It was his grandson, Tom Ah Chee, who opened the first supermarket in New Zealand, Foodtown Otahuhu, and was even the brains behind the legendary Kiwi fast food chain Georgie Pie.

I called Louise Chin, Ah Chee’s great-granddaughter and Tom Ah Chee’s daughter and chief pie-taster, for an insight into the life of the successful Chinese magnate, Chan.

“He was quite the entrepreneur,” she had told me, going on to say how at one point he owned seven shops on Auckland’s bustling Queen St alongside gardens, a boarding house, restaurants and a smattering of other businesses.

Chin had been quick to make known that, in the same vein as the Kronfeld tale, it was the Ah Chee’s matriarch who was behind much of the family’s prosperity.

Not only did Ah Chee’s wife, Joong Chew Lee, pave the way for the Chinese immigrant women that would come after her (in the 1881 census there were only nine Chinese women in Auckland compared to 4995 men) but she was also proficient in the English language, making her a key driving force in the family’s cultural assimilation.

Together the two established roots in Auckland, had many children and jump-started a thriving family business. It’s success, said Chin, can be credited to the Ah Chee’s “traditional Chinese values”.

“It was those values that built up this business empire, and in those values there is a lot of hard work and respect for others,” she said.

“They didn’t step over people to [become successful], they supported everyone, and those values were passed down through all the family and all the people who work at Foodtown.”

Hard work and unwavering respect is something which Brian Corban, grandson of Lebanese settler Assid Corban, also attributes to his family’s notable success.

Assid Corban arrived in Auckland in the 1890s and worked as a hawker before opening his own shop on Queen Street. Driven by the desire to live in the countryside to better his wife’s health, he then purchased land in West Auckland which he turned into a successful vineyard: Mt Lebanon.

By the 1920s, Mt Lebanon was the largest winemaker in the country.

It became a booming family business and served as the first domino that set off a chain of similar Corban-made success stories.

When I had spoken to Brian Corban he had discussed his relatives – “all hard-working people that worked like hell” – and their achievements at great length, barely stopping for pause.

One cousin carried on the family legacy and earned an OBE in wine-making, while another ventured into politics and was the mayor of Henderson before becoming the first mayor of Waitakere City, he had told me. Brian Corban himself has had “three Queen’s honours”, including one for merits to broadcasting.

The family has also contributed a lot of time and money to community-focused and philanthropic endeavours in New Zealand, something which Corban described as “giving back to the country that is the land of peace and plenty” which offered his ancestors respite from war torn Lebanon.

If Aotearoa is the land of peace and plenty, I asked, then what is Auckland? He had reeled off praising adjectives – “vivid, colourful, vibrant” – before describing the city as a multicultural society where “there is an opportunity for everyone to fulfil their potential”.

It’s a question I had posed to all the descendents, what their description of Auckland would be, and the term “vibrant” was one that was iterated without hesitation by all.

The Kronfeld’s Emily Parr had gone on to say how the breadth of cultures within Auckland “speaks to all of these complex and important histories,” while Sandra Harrop described the city’s bustling migrant population as “marvellous.”

They are the people who make Auckland richer, she had beamed.

If the Corban, Ah Chee and Kronfeld dynasties are an example of anything it’s that Auckland has long proven to be a fertile stomping ground for all nationalities, and those multinational denizens continue to play a vital role in carving the city that stands today.

With its exhibition, the Auckland Museum is bringing attention to these foreign legacies that are often overlooked or misinterpreted. And, while it is unable to showcase each and every important immigrant family, it certainly provides a superb jumping-off point to get educated.

Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland opens on March 24 at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.