Mrs Swaby wanted a healing group in this area (Tawa) to represent Petone. Originally she hoped her son would do it but her son died and so four of us from Petone opened it out here as the Tawa Healing Group. We must have run about 18 months before but the obvious follow-on to that was to become a church. That was the start of Porirua church following on from Petone church.
In fact it was the Tawa Healing Group, my group put on the first seminar in 1980. We put on one out here using all the Petone people because we worked in as one. We put on a whole weekend seminar for $5 and it really worked. We had 250 people both days, you wouldn’t get that today. Five dollars was a lot of money back then but there was always food. We had proper caterers come in. Peter (Peter Lee?) was a dietician in Wellington, and he and his crew came in and did all the food for us. It was beautiful food. I’m not sure whether that $5 included food or whether we charged for food, a very minimal charge.
Ron Gibbs came and opened the seminar and we had several people come down from Auckland. We covered everything, we had all different types of people and Mrs Swaby was going to do clay modelling (ie psychic art). However, she was taken ill and couldn’t do it. We were going to have a colour therapist and he wrote the week before and said he couldn’t come from Wanganui. We were at our wits end. What the heck were we going to do for a prime time, 3 o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday? I rang Kor Kent (the Petone President) and he said “Who have you got speaking on spiritualism?” I said “Nobody”. He said “Well, let’s have Doris White.” Doris White was a great member of Petone church, a delightful lady. She stood up on the platform and spoke very simply, very sincerely, on spiritualism and what spiritualism meant. She was the weekend! And so one pulls out, someone else steps in and what happens is the right thing to happen.
That seminar brought a lot of people into the church. We were down in the Linden Community Centre and 12 people sat in a house praying for us all day long because we were working for the devil.
It was the most wonderful sensation working there because the whole atmosphere was so wonderful.
– Muriel Clapton
Source: Reproduced from “Spirit in Petone”, Issue 28, March 28.