Tohu Heritage does not list a category until a real place fills it. Rather than showing empty categories with nothing behind them, each one activates only once a captured site belongs to it, so every category you see live on the map actually leads somewhere.
Today, a fifth category opens for the first time: Transport.
Transport: Waka
Ferries, trams, buses, carriages, and cars, alongside the stations, terminals, bridges, and depots built to serve them. The first transport site published on Tohu Heritage is Steam Ferry Toroa, the last of Auckland’s steam ferries, launched in 1925 and now under restoration at Henderson.
Waka names a canoe, a vessel, a means of carrying. It holds both the craft itself and the act of moving people, which is what this category is meant to gather.
Toroa opens this category differently from the four before it. Every site published so far carries some form of listing. Toroa carries none. Rules under the New Zealand Heritage List and Auckland Council’s Unitary Plan exclude movable watercraft from formal heritage recognition, because a historic place is anchored to land and to the things fixed to it. A hundred-year-old steam ferry being restored plank by plank has no listing pathway, no heritage covenant, and no archaeological authority standing behind it.
That absence is the reason to document her. A record that does not depend on the vessel surviving, and does not wait for a listing that cannot come.
Two categories remain closed for now: Māori Heritage and Commercial. Each will activate the same way, the moment a real place is captured and published. See the full list on the Heritage Categories page.
