A dragon's tooth

The mileposts of the Great South Road belong to myth as much as to history. Sometime in the winter of 1862 they were cut artlessly from native trees, splashed with white paint, and pounded into the muddy road, to mark its progress from the colonial enclave of central Auckland through burning forests towards the Waikato frontier of Tawhiao's kingdom.

Like medieval theologians disputing some indeterminate event in the irretrievable life of their saviour, colonial historians have argued about the role and meaning of the mileposts. Were they raised so that the imperial authorities paying for the construction of the road could calculate their costs precisely? Were they intended as aids to the lonely men who built and manned toll booths on the frontier road? Or was their meaning symbolic? Was their progress south, toward the edge of a recalcitrant Maori nation, supposed to express the anabolic expansion of the world's greatest empire? Were they the architectural equivalent of a promissory note, harbingers of the forts and taverns and courthouses that were coming to the Waikato Kingdom?

Today a few mileposts survive, in the flowering front yards of suburban homes or in the cold closets of local history societies. Paul Janman has retrieved a milepost from the innards of the Nathan Homestead and included it in our Ghost South Road exhibition at the Homestead's gallery. Uprooted from the colonised earth that once nourished it, the post looks curiously abstract. It might one of the teeth of a storied dragon: something once fearful but now devoid of its old meaning, its menace.

We'll be discussing relics of the past this Saturday afternoon at Nathan Homestead.