Historic bogs

For some people, historic architecture means castles, churches, marae. Right now, though, the old buildings that fascinate me are the toilet blocks of small town NZ. I became immoderately excited by this photo, which shows the opening of Kaitaia's segregated rest rooms.

Kaitaia's rest rooms were opened, along with a new library, in 1940. Maori & Pakeha had separate conveniences. By that date a series of North Island towns, including Hamilton, Tauranga, & Te Aroha, had barred Maori from using the same toilets as whites.

The exclusion of Maori from rest rooms typically followed complaints about their alleged lack of hygiene and alleged use of the facilities to socialise. In some towns, Maori were first excluded from rest rooms, then told they'd have to pay for their own, segregated facility.

Women's rest rooms were sites of particular anxiety for mid-century Pakeha in country towns. Often women's rest rooms included showers, changing rooms, & kitchens; they made it possible for females from farms to spend a day in town, shopping & socialising.

During the wars of the 1860s many Pakeha obsessed about wives & daughters being ravished by Maori enemies; by the '30s & '40s this anxiety had modulated into a fear that 'their' women would suffer racial contamination, in liminal public spaces like rest rooms.

In some towns grotesque compromises between integration & outright segregation were achieved. In Cambridge, for example, Maori 'congestion' prompted the creation of a separate entrance to the rest rooms for natives.

I've been looking for photographs of the segregated rest rooms to include in the short illustrated history of white supremacism in NZ that I'm putting together this summer. Unlike the US & South Africa, though, NZ seems to have little visual record of its segregated toilets.

The photograph from Kaitaia is the only image I've found, so far, of rest rooms that were segregated, & the segregated nature of the facility is not obvious in the photo. If anyone has access to more images of our segregated rest rooms, then I'd love to see them.