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An Auckland buyer wanted to purchase his totara by the cubic metre, to supply NZ$1,600 designer lamps. This retired Wairarapa sawmiller chose instead to turn it into NZ$89 lanterns and sell them himself.

For fifty-three years, Dulcie Pethybridge kept a light in the kitchen window so her husband could find his way home. Then, in a single summer, Selwyn Pethybridge lost her and the old totara she looked at every night. The Wairarapa Post looked into a story that has woodworkers and a good many grown daughters talking well beyond the district.

By Jocelyn Hargreaves · The Wairarapa Post · 9 min read · Reported from Eketāhuna, Wairarapa

Eketāhuna, Wairarapa. Selwyn Pethybridge, seventy-six, will not be running a saw again. In the shed behind his house, which he framed and lined himself in 1974, rough-sawn boards are stacked along the wall on thin strips of timber, the way millers have dried totara for two hundred years. Some are as wide as a door. Some are barely bigger than a breadboard.

These are not ordinary boards. They are the last of a totara that came up on the river terrace outside Eketāhuna around 1812 — before the first mill ever opened in the valley, before the Treaty was signed — and stood there through two hundred and twelve summers. Selwyn proposed to his wife, Dulcie, under that tree. They built their house so she could see it from the kitchen sink.

Today Dulcie is gone. The tree is gone. Selwyn can no longer hold a saw. And a buyer working for an Auckland design studio wants to purchase every board he has left, to make the heirloom-timber lamps that studio sells in its Ponsonby showroom and to boutique hotels for between NZ$800 and NZ$1,600 apiece.

Selwyn said no.

What he decided to do instead has surprised everyone who knows him: turn what is left into lanterns himself, and sell them directly to the people who will put them in their windows. For NZ$89.

This is how two hundred and twelve years of a Wairarapa totara ends — and why one man's decision has carried a long way past Eketāhuna.

The timber in his blood: when a millhand's son found the one tree you don't cut

Selwyn Pethybridge did not choose timber. Timber chose him.

His father, Athol, ran a two-man mill on the Ruamahanga and carted totara logs out of the Tararua bush every winter. Selwyn rode on the logging truck with him from the time he was six. He could tell totara from matai by the smell of the sawdust before he could ride a bike.

But the tree that stopped him was one his father refused to touch.

“We were marking timber on a block east of town. I was nineteen,” Selwyn says, one hand resting on a stack of boards. “There was this totara up on the river terrace, all by itself, big as a shed, bark like crocodile hide. I said, Dad, there's ten cubic metres in that one. He didn't even look at me. He said, some trees you don't cut, son. Some trees you build next to.”

That one sentence decided the rest of his life.

He had gone to work at the timber mill in Masterton at eighteen, and he would stay forty-four years, most of them as head sawyer. The summer after that walk with his father, he took a girl from the district library up to that same terrace and asked her to marry him under the tree. In 1971 they scraped together enough to buy the sixteen hectares, and on weekends Selwyn built the house himself, board by board, with the kitchen window facing the river terrace.

“Dulcie picked where the window went,” he says. “She stood out in the grass with her arms out and said, here. So she could see the tree from the sink.”

Dulcie: fifty-three years, and a light in the window that was never once off

Dulcie Pethybridge was not a woodworker. She ran the front desk at the district library for thirty-four years. But the first winter Selwyn worked the afternoon shift at the mill, she started a habit that never broke.

Every night, when it got dark, she set a small lantern in the kitchen window. The totara stood black behind it on the river terrace. When Selwyn came up the Eketāhuna road after midnight — a frost coming down, headlights full of river fog — the first thing he saw was that little light, and the tree standing behind it.

“I asked her once what it was for,” Selwyn says. “She said, so you can find your way home. I said, Dulcie, I've driven this road ten thousand times. She said, then it's so I know you did.”

Fifty-three years. A daughter's homework at that kitchen table, a few thousand suppers, and a lantern in the window every single night — even after he retired and there was nobody left out on the road to wait for.

“People reckon mill work is loud. Mostly it is cold. You stand at the breaking-down saw for ten hours in July and you don't feel your feet. What got me through was knowing that when I came up that drive, there'd be a light in the window and the tree standing behind it. She used to say: that tree was here before any of us, and it'll be here after. I believed her.”

— Selwyn Pethybridge

Between them they raised a daughter, Shona, buried two dogs under the totara, and never once let the window go dark. Selwyn sold the odd piece of furniture he built in the shed — to neighbours, to the church hall, once to the library where Dulcie worked. Dulcie kept the books, answered the letters and told him when a chair was done. Selwyn knew how to cut and how to finish.

Then, in 2024, everything changed.

Dulcie is gone, and the totara with her: when the shed becomes his last refuge

January 2024. Dulcie Pethybridge passed away. They had been married fifty-three years.

“Dulcie was the light, and I mean that plain,” Selwyn says. “Out on the road she was the thing I drove toward. In the house she was the reason there was a house. Without her I'm a man with a key and no reason to go in.”

Five weeks later, the tail of a cyclone came down the valley on the back of a thirty-degree day. Selwyn woke at three in the morning to a crack like a rifle shot. At first light the totara lay across the paddock, split at the base, limbs strewn the length of the fence.

“Two hundred and twelve years,” he says. “And it went the same summer she did. I stood out there in my boots and I couldn't have told you which one I was crying about.”

For months he did not go near it. His daughter, Shona, a school principal in Palmerston North, rang every evening. She offered to drive up and get a crew in to cut it for firewood. Selwyn told her no. In May he rang an old mate at the mill, and together they docked the trunk, sawed it into boards and stacked it in the kiln.

One morning in November, not sleeping, he went out to the shed at four o'clock and switched on the light. He took a short totara block off the stack, squared it on the saw and started to shape it — the same thing he used to do on winter nights while Dulcie sat at the end of the bench with a library book.

“I couldn't have told you what I was making,” he says. “There was nobody to give it to. I worked because the sander made enough noise that the house wasn't quiet.”

What he made was a base. On it he set a glass shade with a branching tree inside, lit from underneath, and he carried it into the house and put it in the kitchen window. For the first time since January, there was a light on.

For the next year and a half Selwyn cut and sanded. Every night. Ten bases. Fifty. Two hundred and twelve — one for every ring he counted on the stump. Each one finished as if a museum were waiting on it, and each one different, because a two-hundred-year-old tree never repeats.

Two hundred years old, with a grain nobody can copy

Totara is the slowest, toughest timber in the valley. Every year of its life is written into the trunk as a ring — wider for a wet year, hair-thin for a drought, a dark scar where fire found it sometime before the first sheep came over the hill.

Sand a block and rub in oil, and those rings come up tight and warm red-brown, packed so close you need a fingernail to count them. Through them run the dark heart streaks that give old totara its depth, and they shift when the light moves. No two bases carry the same pattern.

“People reckon somebody printed those rings on,” Selwyn says, turning a finished base under the shed light. “Nobody printed that. That's two hundred summers. You can't print it. You have to wait for it.”

And anybody can check it at home. Old totara is heavy for its size and still smells faintly of resin and tannin. Turn the base over, count the rings, hold it to your nose. A moulded copy has no rings, no weight and no smell.

“When people dropped in, Dulcie always walked them to the kitchen window first. She'd point down at the river terrace and say: that tree was standing there before the Treaty was signed. Then she'd hand them a piece of totara out of the woodshed and tell them to smell it. She said it smelled like the inside of a church.”

— Selwyn Pethybridge

Bruce Hollings, a retired forester who has dated old totara through the Wairarapa hills for thirty years, walked the paddock after the storm. “Ring count, weight and smell — you can fake one of them, never all three,” he says. “And a totara that old, standing on its own out on the terrace? Most foresters never see one come down.”

“Your hands will not get you through another winter”

Spring 2026. The X-rays at the clinic in Masterton show arthritis in both hands, worst in the joints a sawyer uses most. His grip measures thirteen kilos. In 1998 it was forty-seven.

“You are done with the saw,” the doctor tells him. “Not one more board, or you'll leave a finger on the table.”

Selwyn wasn't surprised. Some mornings he had to hold his hands under hot water at the kitchen sink before they would close on anything.

That weekend Shona drove up from Palmerston North. In the shed she found the shelves of finished bases, the untouched boards, and her mother's reading glasses still lying at the end of the workbench.

“Dad, you have to do something with all of it,” she said. “Mum kept a light on for you for fifty-three years. She wouldn't want her tree sitting in the dark out the back.”

Of everything he heard that spring, that was the one sentence he couldn't argue with.

The buyer in a pressed suit, and the call that changed everything

That same week the phone rang. A timber broker who sources “character timber” for a design studio in Auckland had heard about the tree through the kiln at the old mill, the way word travels between millers. He offered to take all of it — the rough boards and the finished bases both — by the cubic metre.

Selwyn asked what he intended to do with it.

Dress it flat, stain it, and turn it into lighting for the studio's Ponsonby showroom and the boutique hotels it fits out. “Heirloom Wairarapa totara.” Table lamps listing between NZ$800 and NZ$1,600 apiece.

Selwyn asked the number. Three thousand four hundred dollars a cubic metre, cash, one appointment — a little over thirty-four thousand dollars for the lot. As a price for timber it was fair, and he knew it. But he did the arithmetic standing there in the driveway. Dulcie's tree would end up in hotel foyers and on the bedside tables of people buying a label, who would never be told that it stood on a terrace outside Eketāhuna for two hundred and twelve years, or that a woman watched it from her kitchen window every night for half a century.

And the broker would take his margin. The studio would take theirs. The showroom would take theirs. The tree Dulcie loved would end up behind plate glass on a street she never walked down.

“I told him no and I walked back inside. The thought of that tree getting dressed flat and stained grey, with some stranger's name burnt into it, sitting in a hotel foyer in Auckland — I couldn't do it. Dulcie kept a light in that window for fifty-three years. That tree was meant to be a light in a window, for somebody coming home. Not a display piece.”

— Selwyn Pethybridge

The decision got made that evening at the kitchen table with Shona. The tree would not go to the broker. It would be made into lanterns. And those lanterns would go straight to the people who would put them in their windows.

NZ$89 lanterns: turning one old totara into a light people can actually keep

The idea came from Shona. She knew a small workshop in Palmerston North that finishes and posts for local makers. The plan was simple: take the bases Selwyn had already cut and sanded, fit each one with a glass shade and a warm, battery-operated light, and send the finished lanterns directly, with nobody in between. She picked the glass herself, because the tree inside it looked like the old totara on the river terrace at dusk — bare limbs against a lit sky.

Not sixteen hundred. Not eight hundred. NZ$89 — a number set to cover the glass, the light, the finishing and the postage, with no showroom markup on top of it.

Selwyn agreed on one condition.

“No fancy marketing,” he says. “I want people to know where the timber came from. I want them to know which year of that tree they've got, because I counted every ring. And I want them to turn off the big light the first night it turns up, and see what Dulcie saw from that window.”

What sets this lantern apart from anything sold in the shops

The rest of the lantern is deliberately simple: a glass shade with a branching tree inside it, a warm light underneath, battery-operated, no cord, and a hand-numbered base of Wairarapa totara. Two hundred twelve exist. There is no restock, because there is no second tree.

The tree grew on the Pethybridges' sixteen hectares and came down on its own. When the last base is numbered, it ends with him. This is not warehouse stock — it is what one tree and two people left behind.

“I don't want anybody's charity,” Selwyn says. “I want these in the windows of people who still leave a light on for somebody. People who'll tell their grandkids what it is. People who know the difference between timber that took two hundred years to grow and plastic that came out of a mould.”

Neighbours of fifty years share their stories

Word of the lanterns moved through Eketāhuna first. People who had watched that light in the Pethybridges' window for decades started writing in.

“The first present I ever gave my mum that she leaves on every night”

Selwyn reckoned he would be selling to woodworkers. What happened next caught him off guard.

Daughters buy them for their mothers. Widows buy them for friends who just lost someone. Grandmothers buy them for a grandkid's room. The lantern turned into something people give when they want to say something that's hard to say out loud.

It makes a certain sense. A light in a window is one of the oldest signals people have: somebody is home, somebody is waiting up. An ordinary lamp carries light. This one carries something else — two hundred years of a tree, and fifty-three years of a woman who never once let the window go dark.

How to get one before the shelf is empty

What is on those shelves is everything left of the totara Dulcie watched for more than fifty years. Nobody is going to grow another one like it on that terrace. When the last base is numbered, it is finished.

The launch price is NZ$89. That is not a promotion. It is the decision of a seventy-six-year-old man who would rather see his wife's tree in the windows of people who know what it is than in a showroom selling it for sixteen hundred.

Selwyn is out of the shed on 30 November, when he moves in with Shona in Palmerston North. After that she posts the rest from there, while stock lasts. Every order is checked and packed by hand and is dispatched within one to two working days, and every lantern carries a 30-day money-back guarantee. “If it doesn't make you turn off the big light the first night, send it back,” Selwyn says. “But in forty-four years at that mill, nobody ever sent a board of mine back. Once people hold it, they don't want to put it down.”

For anyone who still leaves a light on for somebody — and who wants two hundred years of Wairarapa totara in their window before what is left is gone.