The Rocking Cave will draw you into another time, another culture, another world view. As a play it is well written and this production is well cast and supported by the set, with the added cultural experience of the Gaelic language and social customs. However, the Waipu Presbyterian Church's perspective is that The Rocking Cave is fiction, and we are disappointed the Waipu Museum has seen fit to back this production.

The play centers on tragic human circumstances not unusual in a community. Historically, an unmarried woman did bear a child. The child died in suspicious circumstances and its birth was not recorded. The woman was confined to a room after the birth in a home on The Braigh for a period of time. She was one of the Nova Scotian settlers and a contemporary of the Rev Norman McLeod. She was 40 years old when Rev Norman died in 1866 in his 86th year. The woman never married and died in the late 1800s.

Descendants of the family concerned still live in Waipu. A niece of the woman was a member of the Presbyterian Church when I arrived in 1990. She has since passed on, but made strong objections to an attempt to stage this play at that time, on the grounds it fictionalised many aspects of her family's struggle with someone who was mentally unwell. The woman was rehabilitated back into the community, which accepted her, as always, as one of their own.

The play's portrayal of the woman and her family is fictitious, as is the portrayal of The Minister, who is undoubtedly modeled on the Rev McLeod, our congregation's founding minister. Our church is very disappointed at the play's innuendo that The Minister (and therefore by implication the Rev McLeod) is possibly the father of the child. How can we adequately defend this? We can't, except to remind you that this play is fiction. Historically, this never happened. The play is fiction. In the real world the confinement of the woman would be unlikely to have been censure and punishment by the Elders. It is more likely to have been a community response to the care and wellbeing of the woman and her family.

On a positive note, the play captures well Waipu as a geographically isolated community with its distinctive culture, lore and law. Waipu did not operate under English law while Rev Norman was alive. Rather it was governed by a very Christian interpretation of clan law based on a restorative rather than punitive approach to both moral and criminal offences against the community. We are dealing here with alleged infanticide. Imagine what would have happened to the woman in Auckland under English law. Imprisoned for life? Lunatic asylum? Gallows? Well done the Church and community of our ancestors in restoring this woman in real life despite the enormity of the alleged crime.

As a community we need to be watchful of interpretations of our history least fiction invades, and by intermingling with the truth creates a new history. The Rocking Cave is an unfortunate intruder of our history - that is my judgment. About five years after Rev Norman's death, one Rev John Dickson visited Waipu on behalf of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland's Mission Society and wrote: 'Though possessed of some peculiarities, the Rev Norman McLeod was a man of great force of character, and singular energy and zeal, and has left a memory hallowed beyond anything I ever knew in the recollections of his people. It is very affecting to hear them, often in broken English and with tears in their eyes, telling of noble traits that would remind you sometimes of a prophet of Israel, and sometimes of a Christian apostle.' (History of the New Zealand Presbyterian Church. 1899).

The Rocking Cave. It is fiction, it is fiction, and it is fiction.

Rev Peter Dunn B.A, B.D.
Waipu Presbyterian Church
June 2007