Obelisk - Night Shift at the Woollen Mills

This obelisk was created by Margaret Ryley a ceramic artist from Rangiora. It commemorates the Woollen Mill workers like her father who travelled some distance to work the night shift at the Kaiapoi Mill that closed in 1991. It is her interpretation of the Kaiapoi River. A Kotuku (white heron) visits the Kaiapoi River north of the swing bridge each year, so it is portrayed on the Obelisk along with the more common gray herons. Also in view from the riverbank site are Mt Thomas (Tawera) Mt Karetu and Mt Grey (Maukatere) unchanged since they were first viewed by the two cyclists in the 1930s.

Margaret Ryley was born in 1933 and is a highly regarded ceramicist with artworks in many public and private collections. She completed a Fine Arts degree at the University of Canterbury and taught at Riccarton High School and for 38 years sculpture classes at the Christchurch Women's Prison. She references her father Jack Ryley who she portrays in the design where he is riding his bike to the Mill. Margaret remember this time and writes;

‘1930’s New Zealand was in the grip of an economic depression. The Kaiapoi Woollen Mills however, flourished with looms working night and day. Jack Ryley and Jack Sinclair worked the night shift, biking on the rough shingle roads from Fernside, sugar sack bags slung over their shoulders containing cold tea, bread and cheese for overnight sustenance. Jack had a family of 10 to provide for while Jack who was my father would arrive home in the morning laden with discarded loom parts and wool. An enterprising man he built a huge loom which dominated the living room in the Brick Kiln Road house, and wove tartans which he sold to the various Scottish families of the district.

I started school in 1939 wearing hand woven clothes which embarrassed me as I wanted to look ordinary like everyone else. Jack had an exploratory mind and completed a Psychology Degree atCanterbury University during the first year of my 4 years at the School of Fine Arts’.