At its launch the estimated cost of Christchurch’s new convention centre was given as $284 million, to be funded by central government. In 2014, the contract has been let and the figure for completion is now more like $500 million. It is to be built by a consortium made up of a local development company, the Carter Group, Ngai Tahu Property and Plenary Conventions New Zealand, which is part of the international Plenary Group. In Australia, that company’s website cites specialised experience in public–private partnerships, creating ‘highly complementary commercial properties that have leveraged private investment to help defray the overall project cost to government’: South Wharf is quoted as an example, which delivered retail, residential and commercial development in conjunction with the Melbourne Convention Centre.
Christchurch’s convention centre is on its way. The BLUEPRINT has landed.
I AM BACK AT THE START. The very start, as I cross Victoria Square. She’s there, on her plinth, the little empress, above a roll call of men killed in South Africa. Today, her presence has taken on another meaning. She is there as one of the signatories to the Treaty of Waitangi, for this area is where Thomas’s map disappears and we go back to a beginning that is also a future: the past bubbles up, sets solid in the sun and the wind, and becomes the substrate for what is to come. This is to be the site of Te Puna Ahurea, the cultural hub that will reassert the presence of Ngai Tahu at the heart of the re-imagined city. There will be a building for the hosting of powhiri, the performing arts, the civic welcome: a dignified building surrounded by flax and native planting.
In 1999, after over a century of persistent negotiation and renegotiation, Ngai Tahu reached a settlement with the Crown and with that settlement came an increase in economic influence, political power and cultural confidence. In 2011, when CERA set the rebuilding in motion, Ngai Tahu was included as one of the parties to be consulted on an equal footing with the Christchurch City Council, the neighbouring Selwyn and Waimakariri district councils and ECan, a development the kaiwhakahaere of Ngai Tahu, Sir Mark Solomon, described as ‘the best expression of the treaty settlement I have ever seen’. In the same article in Ngai Tahu’s magazine, Te Karaka, Howard Keene greeted the rebuilding as ‘a chance to build from scratch a post-colonial city, inclusive of everyone’.
Pre-colonial. Colonial. Post-colonial. I walk through them all, along the riverbank. A cool little easterly is blowing in from the sea and the shops on the pop-up mall are preparing to close. The visitors are being ushered from the building housing the Earthquake Experience.
For some months, part of that experience was viewing Godley, or at least his statue. It had stood for decades in the Square on a plinth made from marble left over from the Auckland War Memorial and moulded from bronze melted down from Russian cannon captured in the Crimea. While successive councils toyed with traffic flow in the Square and paving style and concepts of urban space, Godley had stood calmly facing the cathedral, coat over one arm, hat in hand, a man setting off on a journey. The statue outstayed the original, who returned to England after only a couple of years in the colony.
The man went on to public acclaim, government appointments and an early death. The statue stayed behind, like the shell of a cicada stuck to a fence when the body inside has grown wings and flown. It had been competently executed, the work of Thomas Woolner, whose own emigration to Australia prompted the image of the colonist in the tondo by Ford Madox Brown known as The Last of England.
The man stands at the ship’s railing, coat collar turned up, looking grim and gripping the hand of his wife. She wears a wide-brimmed bonnet and if you look closely enough you can see that her other hand clasps the hand of a tiny baby, barely visible, tucked inside her shawl. To the rear, the cliffs of Dover slide away and off the couple go, to try their luck in the Antipodes. It doesn’t look too hopeful. And in fact, Woolner didn’t stay long, returning with his wife and family to England within a matter of months, where he developed a steady career producing statues like the one outside the cathedral. A whole series of Great Men of the Empire, cast for all eternity in bronze.
Woolner also, incidentally, gave his name to the little bump on the rim of the ear that Darwin identified as the vestige of a primate’s pointed ear. It’s called ‘the Woolnerian tip’. Woolner had pointed out the feature to the scientist on a statue of the god, Pan.
I’d never been able to see if Godley had a Woolnerian tip. The statue had stood high on its plinth in the midst of the city. But when it was brought down to earth with a thump, snapping the neck, and stored for a time at Quake City, I was able to take a closer look. He lay on his back, feet in third position. His neck was ringed with a red solder mark, his arm was snapped at the elbow. It was difficult to examine his ears as his hair was long, but I think it’s there: that little pointy echo of a monkey’s twitchy ear.
All sorts of things have come to earth with a thump. They have snapped and cracked along lines of fracture and we have been able to take a closer look, make out the detail.
THE BLUEPRINT IS A CURIOUS artefact, an expression of its era as surely as any earlier map. In the place of cautious, affordable reconstruction by individual landowners, it proposes precincts and structures for current priorities and preoccupations. It is a grandiose dream. It is Thinking Big.
Maybe the inflated scale reflects the fact that we have been so badly frightened. When small children draw themselves, it is usually an inflated image. They draw themselves in felt tip, a blue line for the sky above, a green line for the grass beneath their feet, as the biggest thing in their projected universe. Their house is small and wobbly, their car is a tiny box, their mum or dad or dog are minuscule compared with this big child. It is not the reality, of course. The child is utterly reliant on that mum and dad, and small enough to need a booster seat if they are to see properly out the windows of that car. But in that suppressed knowledge of their actual powerlessness, they draw themselves big. In the act of drawing, at least, they feel invincible.
An earthquake is awe inspiring and in its grip, we feel fear. Real, gut-wrenching fear. Grown men and women pee themselves. They crouch under tables, refusing to re-emerge for hours. They have bad dreams afterwards. They can sleep only with some talisman on the bedside table: a torch, a phone. And no one is immune, not even the planners or the man vested with absolute power. Perhaps in that state, it feels good to contemplate building something very, very big. Something completely and absolutely quake-proof.
Or perhaps the fear is more generalised, prompted by the sensation that we are vulnerable upon this planet. In his A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright quoted the increasing gigantism of the moai on Rapa Nui/Easter Island as proof of human behaviour in the face of this fear.
As the islanders, a population estimated to have been around 15,000, steadily eroded their own environment, they carved increasingly large images, ‘each generation … bigger than the last, demanding more timber, rope and manpower for hauling to the ahu’ until they were so large that they could no longer be moved from the quarries where they had taken shape. The rice palms that had once clothed the land were all cut down and wars broke out over ‘ancient planks and worm-eaten bits of jetsam’. The people ‘ate all their dogs and nearly all the nesting birds’, wind and rain removed the topsoil and when Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, it was to an island so barren it appeared to be composed entirely of sand where a remnant population ‘eked out a desperate existence in caves, guarding their scant resources’.
It’s a compelling image, and a great metaphor for planetary destruction. But it’s not true.
The log of Jacob Roggeveen, captain of the first European ship to visit the island, tells a very different story. He had been in search of just such a treeless sandy island for one had been recorded at this point on the map by the pirate William Dampier, jaunting about the Pacific in 1687 on the jolly ship, the Bachelor’s Delight. The island the Dutch came to, however, was hilly and what had looked like sand at a distance turned out to be
dry grass. Dampier and his mates, fumed Roggeveen, ‘must stand convicted of a whole bundle of lies in their reports’.
The ‘lies’ extend to this century and Wright’s account of a population in terminal decline. On the contrary, Roggeveen encountered a healthy population of people ‘well-proportioned … with large and strong muscles: they are big in stature … and exceptionally provided with snow-white teeth’ strong enough to crack nuts. Far from starving, the Rapa Nui were able to supply his ship with ‘a great abundance of sugar cane, 60 fowls, yams and 30 bunches of bananas’. They occupied large houses, waterproofed with thatch, with ‘stone stoops outside on which they sit and chat in the cool of the evening’.
A young German officer on board confirms in his diary this impression of plenty. The Europeans’ first gesture on coming ashore had been to shoot twelve of the islanders and wound an uncounted number, and in response the islanders brought foodstuffs, ‘in order that we might more readily surrender to them their slain’. He notes even greater bounty: 500 live fowls, many roots and sweet figs, all derived from gardens and plantations that were everywhere ‘neatly cultivated, the fields and trees in full bearing’. The islanders themselves he describes as ‘blithe and merry’, and the women ‘sat down before us and disrobed and were very friendly’.
And there’s the clue.
Within fifty years, Rapa Nui did indeed resemble Wright’s apocalyptic picture, the population dwindled from around 15,000 to thirty-five, not because of some feckless indifference to the destruction of their own environment, but for reasons that are only too painfully familiar in the history of islands across the Pacific: European germs, including syphilis, tuberculosis and measles, had taken their cataclysmic toll, along with violent slave-raiding to serve the mines of Peru.
Wright’s attribution of cause may be faulty, but it is true that the islanders do appear to have carved larger statues as their people died or were taken into servitude, the gardens and plantations of fruit trees went untended and the survivors’ desperation increased.
So maybe the moai do have something to tell us, speaking across the long blue reaches of the Pacific and across centuries as the ancestors do. Maybe in this world, where species extinction is all around and there is a gathering anxiety about our own survival, we also want to carve bigger heads to face out to sea away from the desolation within.
Maybe that is what we do when we plan big buildings.
If buildings are our outer skin, then let us puff ourselves up, inflate ourselves to many times our actual size. Let us, as the realities of overpopulation and dwindling resources become more real and pressing, swell our primate chests and roar and stare the terror of extinction in the eye.
Or perhaps the big structures proposed in the blueprint are simply good business. Critics have questioned their end use: the convention centre will stand empty for much of the year, the stadium also. But perhaps this is missing the point and their primary purpose is not the hosting of conventions or rugby matches or the occasional concert by some elderly rocker having another stab at the hits of his youth in a final, ultimate, definitely-last-chance farewell tour. Maybe they do not represent a civic purpose as much as an opportunity for certain companies to draw down the maximum amount of insurance payout and public money while New Zealand taxpayers are still sufficiently impressed by the needs of quake recovery to tolerate such expenditure. Viewed from this angle, CERA’s bland tower becomes not so much an administrative capital as a funnel for the smooth delivery of funds to the companies and individuals selected to rebuild the centre of the city.
Or maybe it is, as the architect of another man’s grandiose dreams once put it, that large buildings are the expression of recently acquired wealth at the edges of empire.
MAPS TELL A STORY. They do not offer only, as Jerry Brotton says, a ‘spatial understanding of events in the human world’. They are also about time. A map ‘asks the viewer to observe how these events unfold one after another. We … look at maps visually but we can also read them as different stories.’ They are deeply passionate artefacts, driven by impulses that are as much ‘personal, emotional, religious, political and financial, as geographical, technical and mathematical’.
It is easy to feel lost in post-quake Christchurch, fighting for breath amid an avalanche of acronyms and entities, names and roles, claim and counter-claim, policies, decisions, proposals. Numbers and percentages rise and fly about like bubbles, popping at a single touch. How many people worked in the central city before the quakes? Twenty thousand? Fifty thousand? I’ve seen both figures quoted. How many heritage buildings have come down? Two hundred? Five hundred? How many buildings have been repaired? What narrative are we to believe? The one that has it that all is well, we are living in boom times, or the one that takes a more cautious line?
Is the rebuilding of the city, for example, a source of immense profit and well-being, a God-given opportunity? Certainly, there have been winners: Fletchers, of course, and the big companies in receipt of major contracts, but also smaller concerns. The father-and-son plastering business, the architect employing a single draftsman working from an office off the garage, the suburban supplier of firewood or home heating systems or some other trade requisite — you hear that they are busy, they have found themselves taking on more staff, expanding into larger premises. They are doing well.
Other stories lack the glow. There have been many bankruptcies in the city since 2010, people defeated by loss of premises, high rentals, roadworks that have impinged on customer access, a raft of difficulties. Included in that roll has been a number of building-related companies that one would have expected to do well. In May 2014, The Press reported ‘an unprecedented number of building firms … going bust despite the post-quake boom’. Between January and March at least eighteen companies — twice as many as in the same period in 2013 — had gone into liquidation or receivership, owing creditors around $4 million. They were, for the most part, small contractors, many less than five years old, supplying painting, building, insulation and roofing services. Several were among the 1200 contractors accredited by Fletcher EQR, and some directors blamed their failure partly on the ‘inconsistency of contracts coming from EQR’, something the company acknowledged. Opportunity has its risks.
Each morning, beginning on the very morning of the first quake, The Press has published these and other stories of the day. John McCrone, Philip Matthews and their colleagues have filed the city’s narrative in cramped porta-cabins out by the airport and, after many months, in new premises smack dab in the middle of the CBD’s demolition, looking out over the expanse of river silt and gravel where the old Press office once stood.
Nihil utile quod non honestum.
When the building was demolished one of the photographers caught the moment when it was almost gone, just ‘Nihil’ left on the lintel above the remains of the front entrance. And in a way, it is nothing, this cleared space, but it is also intensely populated, covered in thick sedimentary layers of narrative, of stories laid down on this patch of the planet like stones borne down to the plains. The stories of the city tumble into your life with The Press each morning, adding to all the stories you hear from friends or people you meet at parties or at the petrol station or when you’re waiting in line at the supermarket. A great communal narrative of courage, or despair or cynicism or amazing kindness or hilarity, of creativity that lifts the heart and professional negligence that sickens the stomach.
Elsewhere in the country, a different narrative of the city has been created. This is an intensely provincial country. The newspapers of other cities maintain their local focus, while the national magazines seem preoccupied with other matters: How to reach your money goals! Train your brain for lasting weight loss! Is chocolate good for you? Television in this country is completely commercial, with no public service channel. With the honourable exception of a single current affairs programme on TV3, the state of the city goes largely unexamined. There is no Hard Talk cross-questioning of the peopl
e responsible for overseeing the recovery from the country’s biggest and most expensive natural disaster. The screens of the nation are filled instead by chefs, cold-case detectives and aspiring models.
When stories located in Christchurch do feature they tend to be of individuals in desperate straits, struggling with intransigent insurers, for example, or repeated flooding. They arouse — and quite rightly so — pity, but not anger. They are not placed in a politically charged context as part of some exposé of the government’s refusal to regulate the insurance industry, or to divert resources from grand designs to fundamental repairs. The narrative of the city is reduced to fragments of human interest in which the family living in the caravan or cleaning up the mud in the living room remain isolates experiencing ‘bad luck’ rather than people experiencing systemic failure. And such fragments are insufficient to counter the dominant narrative as it is told nationally, which is boom times, the rebuild framed as a plus, a major component, along with the dairy industry and a housing boom in Auckland triggered by increased migration, of the country’s GDP, mainstay of the current government’s self-styled ‘rock-star economy’. For private homeowners, insurance companies are stern about the notion of ‘betterment’, but in CERA’s CBD, betterment is a fundamental concept, funded by insurance payouts augmented from the public purse.
So here we stand, in this place of Flax Swamp and Broken Ground, waka and inanga, great famine and the abduction of heiresses, sufficient price and land grab, facts and figures, anecdote and newspaper report, proposal and counter-proposal, hope and cynicism and the flight of capital and the playground seesaw.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 12
