30 April 2025
A Way with Words
Manawanuitanga. Going Against the Grain.
interview : kristy mcgregor in conversation with mary biggs
photographer: sara tansy
For our annual Shepherdess team weekend – held last October in Pae Tū Mōkai o Tauira Featherston – eleven of us bundled into the town’s charming Dickensian Bookshop & Tea Rooms for Devonshire tea with Mary Biggs, 65, and her husband, Peter – better known as Biggsy. They’re an integral part of the group of locals who started Featherston Booktown in 2015. More than just a festival, a Booktown is a town that has forged its identity around books. Intrigued, I recently spoke to Mary, who has been Featherston Booktown’s operations manager for the past seven years, to find out more about the impact the initiative has had on the small South Wairarapa community.
Mary enjoys a cuppa at the Dickensian Bookshop & Tea Rooms. “I think if parents can see that Booktown is making positive change with their kids, they’re going to get behind it. I think that’s what gets me up and gets me going, really – that we’re working at the children level. If we can grow that love of reading and books in kids, that’s going to change society in the long term.”
You moved to Featherston from Wellington twenty seven years ago. Why did you choose to move? What did you think of the place when you first came here?
We’d done a big renovation on a small house in Seatoun in Wellington, and for three months over the winter, while the roof was off, we lived in a little cottage on the road from Featherston to Martinborough. I loved it. We went back to Seatoun, and Biggsy was working in Auckland four nights a week. My oldest child would’ve been about nine, and we’d made the decision that I would be at home. And I was really happy to be doing that. But I was very conscious that there would come a time when all the kids will be at school, so, “What’s Mary going to do?” So that thinking was going on, and the love of living in the Wairarapa for those three months, and also realising that the family needed to make a shift because it was hard work, what Biggsy was doing – it wasn’t that conducive to family life. And we wanted our kids to grow up with country kids rather than city kids. Biggsy came home one day from Auckland and he’d seen this article in the paper about Te Puhi, the house that we now live in – a very old, beautiful house with seven hectares. It was up for sale and it was a reasonable price – if we bought it, we could get rid of our mortgage and give Biggsy more options about his job as an ad agency CEO across Auckland and Wellington. We came and saw it. We loved it. We spent most of the time in the garden, actually. And the thought in the back of my mind was I could grow organic lavender and make a business of that. That’s a long way of saying that we needed to make a change as a family. And this opportunity came up and we grabbed it. There was a perception even then that Featherston was a bit of a backwater, a tired town. But what I very quickly found was it was an amazing community – the kids would be surrounded by community and generous people. And I didn’t have to queue in the post office at Christmas time. I could get a park whenever I wanted to. And all the afterschool activities for the kids were run by volunteers. That was what grew my love of Featherston – that amazing community of volunteers and people supporting each other. Making their own fun, essentially.
"You know, people who read for pleasure, it’s shown, are more likely to be better citizens, volunteer, become part of the community,” says Mary. “It teaches empathy and those sorts of things. So reading and books – they're a superpower, I think.”
What sparked the idea of Featherston as a Booktown?
Ten years ago, the perception of Featherston was not good. A number of things had happened, including a couple of brutal murders. The town was totally demoralised and feeling quite hopeless because a lot of things were happening to it from the outside. People were driving through the town to go to Greytown and Martinborough – other towns in the South Wairarapa which had unique stories. Our next-door neighbour, Lincoln Gould, was working for Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand. His daughter Rosie lived in the UK and had been to Wigtown, the Scottish Booktown. She had suggested to Lincoln that the Booktown at Wigtown had regenerated that town and might be something that could work for Featherston. I think the key thing to stress, though, is that there was change happening back in 2015 when we had our first Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival, which is our now-annual week long event. There were active groups working to get a Paul Dibble sculpture about the First World War camp – that’s amazing to have a Paul Dibble sculpture in Featherston. A lot was going on in the community at that time. We had the railways history; we had the military history of the camps in the First and Second World Wars. C’est Cheese, which opened in 2013, seriously helped to put Featherston on the map and get people to stop their cars – and still is today. But we didn’t have a defining principle. We felt that Booktown would be a concept that could work in Featherston to give it a unique identity. The first Karukatea Festival was literally done on the smell of an oily rag. And so many people volunteered, and we got about 2,000 people. We didn’t realise that it was going to take off in that way.
Continue reading the full story in our Ngahuru Autumn 2025 Edition.
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This story appeared in the Ngahuru Autumn 2025 Edition of Shepherdess.
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