It’s hard to believe that nearly a year has passed since Te Whare Whakatere opened its doors, and the new library and civic building has been embraced by all those who visit or work there.

While Council buildings need to be functional, there’s no reason they can’t be aspirational, so it was a pleasure to read the letter of a former mayor, extracted from a time capsule sealed in the foundation of the old civic building.

Here are the wise words of D. O. (Darcy) Digby, mayor of Ashburton in 1974:

To generations yet unborn, may God give you the courage and conviction to strive for the betterment of mankind in your time, as we who have gone before have endeavoured to do in our small way.

To you this building may not grace the surroundings of your ‘city’ or represent much, compared with the developments of your era, but to us it is the culmination of the efforts of Mayors, Councillors and Citizens past and present from 1852 to 1974.

We look back with pride and admiration on the first settlers of Ashburton who in 1852 lived in sod houses and suffered the privations and hardships of founding a new land, in their struggle to provide for their children and posterity.

We are conscious of the efforts and achievements of our forebears, which have provided for our good standard of living and the development and progress that has evolved from man’s ingenuity and search for an “El Derado”.

Whatever you may achieve during your lifetime, greater things will be done by those who supercede your decade and so on to the end of time.

I am confident that the future is in safe keeping and that the march of time will show that we of this generation are respected in the knowledge that we have contributed to posterity.

“Be ye Builders, Vital doing, architects of life and fate, ever striving and preparing for a higher nobler state. Not in sighing, ageing, dying is the measure of a man. But in growing, living, building. Life fulfils a master plan.”