Foreign territory.
It wasn’t a city I knew. I had visited it only twice before, once as a child when my mother brought us to visit one of her cousins, and once to a student arts festival back in 1968. Christchurch was the city on the lid of the biscuit tin where a river flowed between willows and banks of golden daffodils. It was the garden on the cover of the Edmonds Cookery Book, ornamental flowerbeds, afghans and ginger crunch. It was the city of my mother’s Cousin May, who did good works for the diocese, accommodating exprisoners on their release so they could find a job and a place to live. They hung about her cavernous house, big and brooding like dogs you could not entirely trust. May was pale and kind and took us to evensong at the cathedral, where small boys sang difficult arrangements of the Psalms and I longed for ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, something with a bit of a ta-dum while compositional invention echoed in the high rafters of the nave.
In 1968 Christchurch was the city where, for some inexplicable reason, the university was in the process of moving from buildings that looked like a proper university with clocktower and cloisters to a bleak campus miles from downtown and anywhere interesting. Bare-boned concrete blocks stood about in a boring suburban nowhere and I was so pleased I had chosen Otago. There the university still occupied the centre. The streets of Dunedin were lined with flats of student antiquity. Their hallways smelled of fish and chips and mould and I slept with my boyfriend under sleeping bags and army blankets on sheets gritty with coal dust from the ineffectual open fire. We emerged from bed onto damp streets where the air smelled of chocolate and coffee and hops from the brewery. It was infinitely preferable to soulless, Stalinist modernity.
So when I arrived in 1992 it was to a new land. A place glimpsed as square fragments from the windows of a Saab 340 as it bucked in on a pesky nor’wester. It took time to put all those fragments together.
I had a room in a house near the centre of the city, because I don’t see the point of living in a city where you can’t walk to the middle. A four-square Edwardian villa in a cluster of small streets by the river from the biscuit tin, the one with the weeping willows. The woman who owned the house was a photographer. Juliet recorded houses and gardens for lifestyle and gardening magazines. She had her darkroom by the back door and that first night, as I lay to sleep in my new bed, I could hear her moving about, working late. The click of a door. The trickle of water through pipes.
For years I had lived in another house, hearing other sounds: the muffled thump of my daughter coming in late from a party, the man next door who worked shifts roaring down the street on his motorbike, the stereo from the students who flatted over the back fence, the tom-tom beat of youth signalling to youth like kakapo booming on a mountainside for the attention of a mate. Sounds that had become familiar over many years. I could place each of them on that internal map we all carry: the one that answers that fundamental human question.
Where am I?
And then the marriage soured. It wasn’t that my husband was unkind. Far from it. He was a good and decent man, but I had found myself, as I lay in bed, thinking about another house. It existed only in my mind. It was a cottage. It had a living room with bookshelves and an open fire. It had a verandah with roses growing over it and they had beautiful romantic names: Gloire de Dijon, Souvenir de la Malmaison. The house became compelling. I lived there on my own.
And now here I was, and what I had imagined was in the process of becoming real. There was the thrum of traffic on the treed avenue I had glimpsed across the river. The rippling of water under the bridge. At doubtful 1 a.m. Uncertain 2 a.m. Remorseful 3 a.m. Panicky 4 a.m.
When it was light I went out. I got on my bike and went for a ride. I needed to make a new map, to find out where the avenue led, how this street intersected with that and how it all linked to the centre. I need to do that wherever I am: figure out where things are, get my bearings. Know where is east, and where is west, so that when I lie down to sleep I know which way my head is pointing and which way my feet. Without that certainty, I am in freefall. I am nothing, I am nobody, adrift on a directionless current.
Hilly cities are simple to understand. When I lived in Auckland for a few months, I climbed the little volcanic cones, looked across the gullies from roads that followed the crests of ancient lava flows. The gulf lay on one side of the narrow isthmus, the Manukau Harbour on the other, east and west. From a distance, the Sky Tower twinkled like a minaret, calling the faithful downtown. It was not difficult to put together names already familiar form books and magazines and television: North Shore, Titirangi, Grey Lynn, Shortland Street …
Wellington, too, is readily comprehensible from streets that sidle high along the contour lines or flow downhill into the caldera. And Dunedin lays itself out, clear as can be, at a single glance, as you swing around the corner on the hills of the northern motorway.
But Christchurch is flat and tricky. I rode out that morning into puzzlement. Up one flat street, turned into another, across a bridge, through suburbs that changed abruptly from Arts and Crafts two-storey to concrete-block units to post-war state houses to 90s plaster Provençal. Past suburban shopping centres with pharmacy, minimart and video rental. Out to the coast where lolly-coloured houses surveyed the sea beyond the sandhills, and back to the centre through blocks given over to light industry, into a square with cathedral and pedestrian precinct and across a park to that suburban university, which still looked bleak despite the rhododendrons and the landscaping. The kind of place where you emerge after working late at the library, not onto city streets, but to the desolate walk to the carpark and the Red Riding Hood possibility of wolves in the shrubbery. I rode back into town, losing my way on streets of tall fences and leafy gardens, so that I was forced to cast about for a glimpse of the Port Hills, like a calf that had lost its mother’s smooth brown flank in a wide field.
This city took time to assemble.
THERE’S A MAP PINNED BY my desk as I write this. A 2007 Kiwi Minimap that presents the city as a mosaic of tiny interlocking squares, labelled 1 to 12 from west to east and A to T from south to north.
Not a big city, as cities go. In 2007, it was home to around 480,000, spread over 1426 square kilometres. On a global scale it would scarcely register as a village, let alone a market town.
At this point in its history, 150 years after the whare on the riverbank and the gazetteer of Anglican bishoprics, it had lost some of its original concentration, sprawling over flat land and hillside. But the grid was still visible, framed now by the Four Avenues that supplanted Thomas’s town reserves.
The Anglicans’ cathedral was still there, at the centre, though it was no longer the tallest structure. Its steeple was no longer the place from which you could take in the city at a single glance, paying sixpence to climb the stairs for the panorama. It was walled about by office blocks, demonstrating, in their very height, the encroachment of other creeds. The towers housed the local branches of international hotel chains, Australian banks, American-based insurance companies.
Remnants of the Victorian and Edwardian past hung on. On the Square’s south-western corner stood the Renaissance palazzo that once accommodated the chief post office, all decorative red brick and white stone trim. In some awkward 80s compromise between conservation and demolition, it was now pasted as a kind of architectural footnote to one of those towers. Telecom and the post office lurked somewhere behind a tourist information centre and Starbucks.
East of that, at the cathedral’s shoulder, there was another Italianate fantasy, more princely and Palladian. The Old Government Building was erected to house the departments of Public Works, Labour, Stamps, Valuation, Customs, State Fire Insurance, State Coal, the Registrar of Births and Deaths, the Public Trust Office and the office administering State Pensions — the whole panoply of civilisation — back when New Zealand was laying fair claim to being the world’s most progressive social laboratory. In 1913, they were set up in style, in monumental masonry, polished totara and stai
ned glass.
Across the street were the offices of the daily newspaper, The Press: four floors in red-and-white-striped perpendicular Gothic. Elegant windows, a folly of a tower on one corner, a pigeon house on the roof for the birds that flew in before telex and faxes and email, and Cicero quoted above the front door. ‘Nihil utile quod non honestum.’ Nothing useful that is not honest. The phrase had been lifted from a treatise written in great haste in the last year of the philosopher’s life, addressed to a son who was off in Athens studying and no doubt wasting his time, as students do. With the threat of death by assassination or execution looming, Cicero had penned a desperate argument for the concept of a republic against the political forces unleashed by Julius Caesar that would result in imperial autocracy.
The treatise considered the obligations of the citizen in such a state: How does the individual citizen live a decent moral life within a state where political rights are being subverted?
He himself had little time to live, morally or otherwise. A few months later, in December 43 BC, he was murdered on the orders of Antony — yes, that one. The ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ Antony. Cicero met death with dignity, leaning from the litter on which he was being carried to a ship and safety, to give the swordsman a clean blow. His head, and the hand with which he had written his polemics, were then carried to Rome where Antony had them nailed to the rostra in the Forum from which speeches were delivered, as a mild disincentive to dissent. His wife also amused herself by placing the head on the table at dinner and poking pins through the philosopher’s tongue. I wish I had known about the pins when I was plodding through Pro Milone at school.
Next door to all that noble intention stood a bluff old John Bull of a hotel, Warners, now a pub and backpackers, and next to that, until 1993, a cinema, the last of several that had sprung up around the Square as temples of modernity. By the time of the Kiwi Minimap, however, the cinemas had migrated to the multiplexes of the suburban malls. Tourist shops selling merino sweaters and paua keyrings had taken their place, while the Old Government Building offices were being refashioned as apartments. Cafés were springing up in odd corners, including one on the northern flank of the cathedral, the odour of sanctity mingling with cheese muffins. The trams that had once rattled through the Square were long gone, leaving a survivor on a circular track for the tourists, going round and round like some representative of a dying species — a dolphin perhaps — crazily circling some hellish aquarium. Off it went, ringing its little bell, ting ting, down Worcester Street, now retitled Worcester Boulevard, towards the former university, transformed, as Victorian redundancies everywhere were transformed at the close of the twentieth century, into an arts centre: theatre and boutique cinema, Saturday morning market selling soap and pounamu to the tourists, a pleasant bar and cafés. The site where Rutherford had made the preliminary studies that would lead to the splitting of the atom now served as character-filled background to young women in mob caps selling cubes of passionfruit-flavoured fudge.
The retail action of the central city was also migrating to the suburbs and their malls, but Ballantynes, the city’s principal department store, remained at its post on the corner of Cashel Street, now pedestrianised as a mall with trees and planters. By day, there was the pleasant buzz of small businesses — 5710 of them, according to Statistics New Zealand — in the central city: bakeries, clothing shops, gift shops, cafés and bars, supported by the regular daily inflow of the 40,000 or so who came in to work at the hospital, the law courts and central police station, the city council, the polytechnic, the government departments and offices. There were B&Bs and hotels flying the flags of an assortment of international chains, and a convention centre — the country’s largest — with auditorium and theatre and plate-glass façade. At night, the city remained busy with people drawn to a multitude of restaurants, the town hall and its concerts, the bars along The Strip, overlooking twinkly trees by the river. Later in the evening, things got a little rougher. Hookers worked the corners round Manchester Street, boy racers in customised Subarus throbbed around the Four Avenues, the bars revved into raucous life.
AROUND THE CENTRE, THE SUBURBS arranged themselves along those wide flat streets, their invisible borders marked by a row of shops, a mall, a school, and all the endless subtleties of race and class and taste that operate in this intricate little country.
Out on the coast were the Brightons — North, New and South — each at a slightly different point on the income and demographic scales, but all sharing their closeness to the sea and the holiday lightness of being that brings. Surfboards on the deck, the beach fading away into mist where the dog could release its inner wolf, shrug off that urban leash and run like the wind.
A little inland lay Bexley, Avondale, Burwood, suburbs built in the closing decades of the twentieth century when engineers were all-powerful and nothing was impossible. Dams could be built on faultlines, houses could be suspended over cliff edge or ravine, motorways and museums could be constructed on land only recently lifted from the sea, and swamps could be drained for subdivision.
When drainage and subdivision were proposed here in the 80s, it sparked a fight. One of those debates of its era that pitted environmentalist against developer, fought not with the placards and marches of the 60s and 70s but in the new fashion, via close Talmudic reference to the relevant acts and regulations. In 1984, 2044 city residents requested that ‘certain low-lying areas of the area now designated the Bexley Employment Zone … be retained for wildlife, landscape and flood alleviation purposes’. But the city council ruled against it. A tiny portion — 12.5 hectares — was set aside as an ‘Ecological Heritage Site’, while the remainder became subdivisable land where council brochures promised ‘large growth in medium-sized, bungalow-style houses … confidently expected to continue well into the future’.
To the south and west, the medium-sized bungalows shaded into suburbs of houses built square and solid to one of the state’s 300 approved patterns and all that tourist flimflam of ‘the English city’ fell away. Aranui, Wainoni. The streets filled with Maori and Pacific Islanders. This was Aotearoa. It was the Pacific.
Closer to the estuary, the land roughened around shallow waters no longer famed as Waipatiki, for flounder and the little koura that were marketed to near extinction within a couple of decades in the nineteenth century as ‘Redcliff prawns’. Now the estuary contained the oxidation ponds, which were at least an improvement on the raw waste that trickled into its waters, via the pipes and pumping stations of the city, for over 100 years. By the twenty-first century there were swans and ducks.
Across the estuary, tucked in against the old volcanic hills was Sumner — affluent, but outdoor, not stuffy. Mountain bikes in the garage, ski rack on the 4WD. And on the steep hillsides above, there were Redcliffs, Mt Pleasant and other hillside suburbs, with a view of the whole broad sweep of the bay and the snowy tops of the Kaikouras gleaming in the distance.
Around the curve of the hills and across the wide expanse at their foot, the suburbs assembled, block by block. Some were leafier, like Opawa and Shirley, some were unadorned: Woolston, Linwood, Waltham, Sydenham. The differences between them might be accounted for by the presence of a busy road, or because once the railway had its workshops nearby, or because there were eleven tanneries here in the nineteenth century, not to mention a skinnery and factories on the banks of the river producing glue and soap and ink, and the wind blew all that stink over this suburb and not that one, so this suburb is where the poor people went, and where they stayed, more or less, though the factories had gone and their stinks now drifted over suburbs in Guangzhou or Dewas.
The suburbs stepped westward, and north and south, rising barely perceptibly as they moved further from the coast. They became grand abruptly, in Fendalton and Merivale, then modest, then flash, then plain, switching from 60s brick and tile to 70s timber to 90s Hardiplank, from elms and camellias to gravel low maintenance to contemporary subdivision on former orchards and mar
ket gardens. And finally the city stuttered to a halt amid paddocks and the 10-acre lifestyle and the mountains of the Main Divide reappeared, bordering the plain with their fretwork of rock and snow.
Not a big city, as cities go. Nor an especially beautiful one, though it fancied itself as the ‘Garden City’, as if it were the only one, as if the world were not in fact, crammed with ‘Garden Cities’. Some were planned as a social ideal, in imitation of Ebenezer Howard’s original, the ‘slumless smokeless city’ with its satellite settlements — Gladstone, Concord, Philadelphia, Justitia and Rurisville — linked by a municipal canal and railway line and its Home for Waifs, its Home for the Insane, its Home for Convalescent Women and an unspecified number of Epileptic Farms set about the perimeter of a city of 58,000 freeholders occupying 12,000 acres of smokeless perfection. There are eighteen Garden Cities in the States alone, not to mention Toowoomba in Australia staging its annual Festival of Flowers or Canada’s St Catherine’s, where the garden has become a little trampled with the death of General Motors. It fights for its Garden City life with a plethora of telephone call centres and a new stadium built to house the local ice hockey team. There’s Cairo’s Garden City, leafy home to diplomats, and Cape Town’s Garden City with its bevy of senior citizens. There’s Vina del Mar on the shaky quake-prone coast of Chile and Georgetown in Guyana, where the statue of Victoria fronts the Halls of Justice with her nose flattened like some tough little scrapper after a few heavy rounds, and its canals are choked by the broad leaves of the plant named for her, Victoria amazonica. A friend who spent five years of her childhood there remembers gardens lush with papaya and mango and the canefields of Demerara stretching to the horizon. Christchurch had its trees and roses, but it did not by any means have exclusive right to being the ‘Garden City’.
Nor did it possess the heart-stopping architectural perfection of one of those Italian hilltop cities — Urbino, for example, or Siena or L’Aquila — where civilisation truly seems to have found expression in a concentration of golden stone. It had none of the profoundly satisfying order of Bath, none of the drama of Sydney or Auckland or Stockholm viewed from across the water, none of the curiosity of New York’s endlessly astonishing streets. Tourist postcards focused on the city’s setting, choosing long views with the city downstage centre and those most photogenic of mountains to the rear. Or some determinedly limited vision of the cathedral or willows weeping into the Avon. There were parks and the tree-lined waywardness of the rivers, but for the most part, the city lay bareheaded to the Canterbury sky and that family of breathing winds. Wide, treeless streets were lined with low-slung houses peeping tiptoe over wooden fences, or cubes of concrete and glass like random dice holding an interchangeable selection of light industry, medical services or farming supplies. The city’s beauty lay in the shining expanse of Pegasus Bay, the lava tips to the peninsula hills, the mountains making an exquisite border to the plains, and the purity of that unsullied east coast light.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 5
