Hawkesbury, New Zealand

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Hawkesbury also known as "Cherry Farm" (and sometimes erroneously as "Evansdale") is a small residential and industrial area beside State Highway 1 between Dunedin and Waikouaiti.

[edit] Cherry Farm Hospital

Hawkesbury has been developed from the remaining buildings of the former "Cherry Farm Hospital", a psychiatric hospital serving the Dunedin area which relocated here from Seacliff.

When the hospital closed, some patients were transferred to Wakari Hospital in Dunedin while others were re-housed "in the community" as part of a mainstreaming policy.

[edit] Hawkesbury today

Hawkesbury has a looped network of curving streets in a typical post-war "public works" plan. There were a number of small hospital residential buildings known as "villas", some have been converted and modernised as houses and many others have been demolished.

There are also shops, a post office, library and school, all of which are unused. The former hospital chapel is used regularly by a local Christian group.

Larger multi-storey office and accommodation buildings have been developed as low-cost rental housing.

A swimming pool, Moana Gow Pool, remaining from the hospital days, serves the surrounding areas of Waikouaiti, Karitane and Blueskin Bay. (This should not be confused with the olympic-sized pool in Dunedin with a similar name.)

Hawkesbury's main business and attraction to passing traffic is the Evansdale Cheese factory and shop, which relocated here from Evansdale when it outgrew its old premises.

[edit] Place names

The name "Hawkesbury" was an early Pakeha name for the settlement at Waikouaiti, and is still applied to the lagoon there. The developers of Hawkesbury probably changed the name from "Cherry Farm" because of the social stigma attached to the psychiatric hospital. The cheese factory's prominent signage here sometimes leads to Hawkesbury being erroneously referred to as "Evansdale".