The trick of standing upright here

Elmwood Park, looking toward Heaton Street, on an afternoon in June.

On 13 June, when the second earthquake came, we were at the park. An hour or so earlier we'd been at home, and after the usual rush for the comparative safety of the doorway, we had sat on the couch and waited for some minutes, in that period of unnatural quiet that always falls after a large earthquake, when time seems to slow and your senses are preternaturally attuned to the smallest signal from the natural world. You sit and you wait for what happens next and you hope that when it comes you will be equal to it. My daughter's arms were tight round my neck. Her breath was warm and regular on my cheek. The lights stopped swinging and the power was still on and everything was quiet and nothing else happened. After a while I found my phone and sent the usual texts to family members. I heard the neighbours' cars reversing down their driveways. I picked up some things that had fallen from the shelves in the dining room, and found my shoes, and my daughter's shoes and her coat, and lifted her into her buggy, and tucked a blanket around her legs. We set off for school on foot, turning into the park along the avenue of old chestnut trees behind the cricket club.

Elmwood Park on a winter morning

Because I grew up down the road, I've spent a lot of time at Elmwood Park over the years, as do most local children, including, now, my own. A stony path around the perimeter of the park measures almost exactly one kilometre; it's a peaceful flat green field bordered by graceful avenues of 90-year-old old trees. The park's used by joggers, dog-walkers, private school kids wagging class, sun-bathers, kite-flyers, picnickers, mothers with small children, and young teenagers mooching about by the playground looking for an escape from their parents. There's a tennis club, and a croquet club, and a bowls club. The cricket club is a proving ground for many of Christchurch's representative players. My step-brother, who captained the Canterbury cricket team back when they were still amateurs, once described Elmwood Park as his second home.

Along with the neighbouring Heaton Intermediate School, Elmwood Park was part of the original Elmwood homestead of Sir Robert Heaton Rhodes (1815-1884), who made his money shipping frozen meat to Britain. The park was laid out in 1920 after the council purchased the land from Rhodes's son, though the son's gift of a final small parcel of land following World War II has meant that history largely remembers the establishment of the park as an act of benevolence from one of Canterbury's founding families. The original wooden Rhodes house off Heaton Street, built in the mid-1860s and said to be 140 feet in length, was razed by fire in 1882 and rebuilt in 1883; its grounds included a notable collection of imported specimen trees, including elms, some of which are still standing near the Papanui boundary of the old property. There was an ornamental lake with waterlilies and a rustic bridge, extensive conservatories, and a tennis lawn which was excavated to a level lower than its surroundings so that it could be flooded with water from an artesian well. The upper part of the estate was built on reclaimed swampland.* That's the land that's subject to liquefaction in a major earthquake, as the underground water is squeezed to the surface.

Elmwood in 1899. Photograph via Christchurch City Libraries. The architect of the second version of Elmwood was Frederick Strouts (1834-1919)**, who designed many notable Christchurch buildings now destroyed or severely damaged by the Christchurch earthquakes, including an old section of the Ballantynes buildings on Lichfield Street, the Rhodes Convalescent Home in Cashmere and the three-storey Stranges Building on the corner of High and Manchester Streets. Strouts also designed the famous Otahuna homestead for Rhodes's son.

Robert Heaton Rhodes died shortly after Elmwood was completed. The grand wooden house eventually became a holiday retreat for Governors General, before being occupied by the military during the war and falling into disrepair. For some years Heaton Rhodes junior grazed a herd of red poll cattle on the lawns around the house, to keep the grass down.

In 1947 the Elmwood homestead and what was left of its grounds was purchased under the Public Works Act by the Education Board as an intermediate school for local Form 1 and 2 boys. Men had returned from the war; babies were being born; the middle-class suburb of Merivale was growing rapidly. It was a period of educational and cultural expansion, as New Zealand moved from Dominion status to independent nationhood. Only one street away in Leinster Road, Allan Curnow had written some of the great poems of New Zealand's mid-century nation-building period, including 'The Skeleton of the Great Moa at Canterbury Museum', and was moving towards a more personal version of what he later described as his 'geographical anxieties'.

Signage at Heaton Intermediate after the February earthquake.

By the time the legislation to purchase the school grounds was enacted, the front sections along Heaton Street had already been sold off by the Rhodes family: many of the grand, streamlined, boxy 1950s houses which were built there over the next few years remain today, though a particularly fine one in brick is damaged beyond repair. (It's interesting to note that the purchase of the land for the state intermediate school was achieved in the teeth of fierce opposition by the board of governors of St Andrews, the private school next door which took over the neighbouring Strowan Estate: there was still something of a Mexican standoff evident between the two schools when I was at Heaton in the early 1980s.) Rhodes's Elmwood was finally demolished in 1954 to make way for the barracks-like weatherboard brutalist buildings of Heaton Intermediate School. The only part of the Victorian homestead that still remains is the entrance to the underground cellars in front of Room 15.

Damage to buildings at Heaton Intermediate School following the February earthquake. Some buildings have stretched as the ground has spread laterally. There has also been extensive liquefaction throughout the school grounds. But happily, it's open again.

But the past has a way of returning, and Christchurch is currently locked in what seems an endless loop of feedback as the swamps rise to the surface again and the seaside cliffs remake their edges. It's the 'new normal', as the local cliche goes, and it is surprising how quickly one can get used to the strangest things. On 13 June, at the end of the park, by the beech tree with the memorial plaque in the corner, there were the few customary circles of liquefaction, like giants' footsteps in the grass, which had only recently disappeared after the February quake. Having threatened to fall for nine months, the block wall bounding the bowling club had finally succumbed to gravity and peeled away like a Mobius strip, opening a private green world to public view. I was looking at it when I met my neighbour coming the other way, wheeling her bike. "They've just sent the kids back into class," she said, smiling. "Everyone's fine. No one's hurt. They're getting to be old hands at this."

The fallen wall at the bowling club.

When I got to school the small guy's class were on the mat listening to a story. I put my head round the door, half apologetically, and his teacher sent the small guy out to see me.

"I didn't actually realise there was an earthquake, Mum," he said. "We were playing rugby out on the field. But then suddenly I saw people sitting down and crying, and I thought something must have happened. Handy you're here though, because I fancied a wee and Mr S always gets a bit cross if you're putting your hand up and going out of the room all the time getting drink bottles and weeing."

So we arranged to come back at 3 o'clock, and the small guy disappeared back into his classroom.

A council notice nailed to a tree at Elmwood Park after the February quake.

Back at the park, I strapped my daughter into the baby swing, and wondered, not for the first time, what would happen if there was a big earthquake while she was on the play equipment. It takes considerable discipline not to be consumed by such thoughts. I checked Twitter and saw that the aftershock had been centred in Sumner and measured M5.4 (this would be later revised upwards to M5.6, and be considered a foreshock of what came next).

She had just got off the slide when the big earthquake struck. There was a deep, terrible low boom, first, I think, though it's hard to remember the exact sequence in which things happened. The park tipped from side to side and I couldn't stand. I caught my daughter up in my arms, and sat down hard on the damp bark chips of the playground. The trees and the lamp standards beat back and forth furiously. I saw waves run across the big green field, as if it were liquid, as if it were an ocean, as if it were a tablecloth picked up and shaken out at a Victorian garden party. Across the stream the back wall of a house, seriously damaged in the earlier quakes, collapsed in a cloud of red brick dust. A huge pile of slates slipped off scaffolding around a partially-repaired roof and crashed to the ground. A jet of water shot skyward from the drinking fountain.

There was silence, and then the sirens started.

I sat with my daughter for a while on the bark. She didn't cry. The ground shivered from time to time, and then it went still. I stood up. I sent the usual texts to family members. I lifted my daughter into her buggy and covered her legs with her blanket. And then we walked slowly and deliberately down the long avenue of trees to the crossing. This time the pavement had fallen in; the sinkhole had opened up in the same place as in February. The same muddy stream was flowing along the road. At school, the children were outside again in their class groups. The teachers were holding clipboards, as before. I collected the small guy, and we walked home. "At least the war memorial's already fallen over," he said. And then: "Some kids were frightened because this was their first or second big earthquake, but I felt OK because this is my third." The roads were choked with slow-moving traffic and it was hard to cross Heaton Street. My boots were caked in mud. We met N in the very centre of the field in Elmwood Park, the point he'd reached in biking from town and coming to find us.

"I've come from home," he said. "It's still standing. We're OK. Everything's OK."

And it was, and we are.

The cricket pitch roller at the park, which was there in my childhood and has presumably been there since 1920. It's not used any more as the council groundsman drives a motorised one like a tiny steamroller. I hope this roller,  which thousands of kids over many generations have climbed on and skulked behind, is still there in another 90 years.

But Christchurch has always been a hauntological kind of place, a place where evidence of the futures imagined in the past but never realised in the present was reflected in the faux-Englishness of the Gothic Revival buildings and the willows along the riverbank, in the neo-brutalism of the university's architecture and the prosperous mercantile Venetian Gothic buildings of the CBD. It is a place of contradictions, in which a central enclave of high culture and old stone buildings is surrounded by acres of sprayed-polystyrene cookie-cutter subdivisions and used-car lots. It is a place in which people have always made their fortune by speculating on big parcels of land and selling small sections to people poorer than themselves; and a city ostensibly concerned with heritage in which an elite few have always made money by tearing down buildings and building new ones in their place. Since the first days of European settlement in this most civilized of New Zealand cities, Christchurch's guilty secret has been rapacious property development.

And although, after this terrible swarm of earthquakes, nothing in the city will ever be the same, nothing has changed. The people who hold the big parcels of liveable land will win, at the expense of others who do not. It would take the equivalent of an invocation of the Public Works Act to acquire suitable land in order to re-settle many of the people whose houses, or the land on which their houses stand, are now damaged beyond repair. There seems little appetite for that. Instead there is a reliance on the market to provide. This is an event out of which some people will make a great deal of money, while others lose it, along with their homes and their dreams of a future that never happened.

Heaton Street from the park, late one afternoon in June. In the background a giant digger is demolishing the last wing of Parkdale, the grand old house on the corner of Rossall and Heaton Streets designed in 1920 by an American architect named Delamore.

*In the early years of Canterbury settlement, the low-lying district now known as Marshlands (an area of which is shortly to be renamed Highfield, as a new subdivision for the people displaced from their homes in the earthquakes) was known as Rhodes Swamp, after -- as the Christchurch Star had it -- both the landowner and the boggy soil in the area.
**The great Arts and Crafts Christchurch architect Cecil Wood was articled to Frederick Strouts; modernist architect Miles Warren in turn worked in Cecil Wood's office. There is a genealogy of Christchurch architects which to the best of my knowledge hasn't yet been written; many of the buildings, of course, are now gone.


I've drawn information for this blog post from a range of sources, including the Christchurch City Libraries Heritage material, now an extraordinary resource of images of our lost past. My information about the gardens of the Elmwood homestead is taken from Thelma Strongman's authoritative history of landscape design in Canterbury, The Gardens of Canterbury, published by Reeds in 1984.

Merleau-Ponty in New Plymouth

Once, years ago, I was in New Plymouth for a few days, and went into an interesting-looking record shop. I flicked through the bins and inspired, asked if they had anything by Merleau-Ponty. The guy said he didn't think they did, but he'd look up the catalogue.

I realised after a couple of minutes as he thumbed through the pages that I'd given him the wrong name.

"Sorry, my fault, I mean Carlo Ponti!" I said.

"Oh, OK," said the record store guy, and turned to the 'P' listings, but couldn't find anything, though he took ages, looking in several catalogues for me.

It wasn't till I'd got down the road I realised I'd actually meant to say Paolo Conte. But by then I didn't feel I could go back to the record shop and ask. Ever.

Supply and demand

The small guy's class has been doing an economics unit at school, as a consequence of which his teacher has allowed trading with a special classroom currency, in order to teach the kids supply and demand, saving and spending, theories of pricing, and so on. The small guy was regrettably loathe to trade any of the thousands of small pieces of plastic nonsense that litter carpets all over our house. Instead he has drawn a series of pictures which he will offer for sale. A characteristic example of his art-for-sale is reproduced above.

He is also considering offering to write customized stories with his friends' names inserted as heroes, in which they defeat a villain of their choice. (In order to prevent unpleasantness, I have specified that the villains are to be fictional only and bear no resemblance to any mutual acquaintance.)

Meanwhile, from the art of economics to the economics of art: artist and lecturer Roger Boyce has a few thoughts of his own on serious money and art in post-quake Christchurch.

Star Wars: Episode VIII. ‘Zombies from the Underworld’: A Special Beatles edition

Because George Lucas is not getting on with it quickly enough, the small guy has decided to write the next three episodes of Star Wars himself.

He's completed Chapter VII as a project for school: this is the genre-bending Chapter VIII, featuring The Beatles having a massive fight with Justin Bieber and a pack of zombies. In describing the narrative to me, the small guy said "And then I played a massive loud guitar chord, and defeated Justin Bieber with the power of music, and then the zombies woke up..."

--

Star Wars: Episode VIII

‘Zombies from the Underworld’: A Special Beatles Edition

Part One begins
A long time ago in a galaxy far far far away, Jedi knights Falafel Pizzatush, Gidget Wafflechunks and Snotty Wafflechunks were enjoying a Beatles concert. Then a mad man, a mad woman, evil Justin Bieber, Grandma Loobrush and Fat Dude (the Sith) stomped into the concert and threw a guitar at the audience and stole Paul McCartney’s microphone. They also pinched George Harrison’s sandwich and broke Ringo Starr’s drums. The Beatles started fighting. They threw chicken drumsticks at the evil guys. Little did they know that they weren’t just bad guys. They were ZOMBIES.

Snoddle and Splott came running in to the concert. “Did you know that those evil people are zombies?” they cried. “What zombies?” Snotty asked. “The ones that are attacking the Beatles!” Snoddle yelled. “Hey Gidget!” said John Lennon, who was friends with him. “Can you come up here? I hear you have battled evil Emperor Laughing Sock before, and I think you could battle zombies, who are probably less harmful.” “Here we go again boys!” said Falafel. “Another adventure.”

Just then an evil old woman trotted in. But none of them noticed her, because she was disguised as a banana. You’d think that someone would disguise themselves as a man in a raincoat and a hat reading a newspaper. (Though hats don’t read newspapers.) You wouldn’t expect them to be a banana. “I have a plan to defeat evil Justin Bieber and his henchmen,” Snotty said. “We’re going to need a lot of giant electric guitars. OK, Falafel, you get everyone who isn’t a zombie some ear muffs. Gidget, you get some really big speakers. And me and the Beatles can be in charge of the giant electric guitars. When you’re done, meet me on the stage.”

“Finished!” Felafel and Gidget wheezed. “OK,” Snotty said. “Gidget, you attach those really big speakers to the pile of giant electric guitars in the middle of the stage. Falafel, we all need a pair of earmuffs each. Now, grab a giant electric guitar each. Beatles: you do the same. Put on your ear muffs, and start strummin’.”

Bang, clatter! The massive chords made the building tremble. It just so happened that Falafel, Gidget, and Snotty were hopeless at playing guitar. It didn’t matter at that moment because they needed to try and make the zombies deaf with a horrible noise. Once the zombies were deaf, they became humans again. But it made the villains deaf and still villains. However, Grandma Loobrush kept a secret supply of pink earmuffs in her handbag, although none of the good guys knew this. But some people in the crowd did, and they were trying to shout it out to the good guys, but the good guys couldn’t hear because of their earmuffs.

Grandma Loobrush was not a deaf villain. She was also not a zombie. She was the most dangerous witch in the world, and she went up on the stage and got her handbag and knocked Falafel out with it. “Oh no! Falafel’s gone!” Gidget, Snotty, Splott and Snoddle cried. But they fought Grandma Loobrush with her worst nightmare: the toilet plunger. Now four against one wasn’t fair, and Grandma Loobrush was defeated and the good guys won. Splott and Snoddle got it on her feet so she couldn’t walk; Gidget got it on her head; Snotty and Falafel, who was conscious again by now, got it on her arms. And so she didn’t make it. And to celebrate their glorious victory they went to the movies. And the Beatles went with them.

The End

Star Wars: Episode VIII
‘Zombies from the Underworld’: A Special Beatles Edition
Part Two begins

The story continues.

Gidget, Snotty, Falafel, Splott and Snoddle were watching a soccer game. The Brazilian soccer star was versing Cool Dude Man. Justin Bieber was not deaf from the last episode. Because he was wearing his iPod earbuds and listening to some of his favourite songs. Justin Bieber wanted to get on that stage in the Beatles concert. He wanted to sing one of his rubbish songs. The Beatles were playing at the half time at the soccer stadium. Justin Bieber was terrorizing everyone. He burst the soccer ball with a pin and he switched the Brazilian soccer star’s and Cool Dude Man’s soccer outfit with tutus and hung his washing on the goal posts.

It was finally half time and the Beatles started playing Here Comes the Sun. Justin gave the signal for Robber Ducky to attack the Beatles. But Falafel was waiting for him he punched him and Snotty attacked from the rear. The Beatles song was done by then so the soccer players started playing. Cool Dude Man accidentally kicked the ball into Robber Ducky’s shin; he screamed and then collapsed. Robber Ducky was defeated. Next Splott and Snoddle got out their catapults and fired water balloons at Justin Bieber’s hair. “My beautiful hair” he cried then he collapsed and that was the end of him.

The End

"Drop in jacuzzi: Enjoy!"

Something I really dislike is being commanded by a waiter to 'Enjoy!' whatever he or she has brought to the table. It can put me right off my food. When this happens, which it does quite often (or at least it did, prior to the earthquake, when cafes were open in the central city), I think to myself that -- actually -- I'll enjoy what's been served if it's any good, and if it's not, I won't, whatever you tell me to do. And then I catch myself thinking this stuff (of course I never say it) and feel like a complete tosser and slightly ashamed, as many years ago I realised there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think it's fine to be unpleasant to people in service roles and those who do not.

My linguistic intolerance is not only confined to chafing at commands to enjoy myself; self-indulgent references to "me-time" make me gnash my teeth with impotent fury. A while ago when the people's folk-punk poet Billy Bragg commented in an interview that he really enjoyed walking, as it gave him a chance for much-needed me-time, I went right off him, A New England notwithstanding.

However, the small guy, who has recently been learning to write procedures at school, has come up with what I think may be the only acceptable use of "Enjoy!"

Here it is.


Procedure for making Crunchy Cockroach Cupcakes, by The Small Guy

Hennessy Youngman on Relational Aesthetics

He had me at "Relational aesthetics is when someone with an MFA wants to meet new people."


In other videos, he discusses how Bruce Naumann saved the planet from an asteroid, and how to deal with curators.

Wolfman of Merivale

The Merivale Wolf hanging around the bins

Here's a photograph the big guy took while biking to work through Merivale this morning. Clearly even before the quake Christchurch was always more than a little feral, but this is something else again.

What are we fighting for?

The story goes that when Winston Churchill was told by his finance minister that arts funding must be cut in favour of the war effort, he simply replied ‘then what are we fighting for?’

The story is apocryphal, but the sentiment is not, and it may be one to bear in mind as the furore over the future of cultural heritage in Christchurch grows increasingly heated in the wake of the devastating earthquake on 22 February.

Meanwhile, if further proof were needed of the enduring importance of art and culture in times of crisis, may I present this photograph, submitted by an anonymous artist to a new site celebrating local creativity: Show Us Your Longdrops.

A song from under the floorboards

When I was seven or eight years old, my family moved into a Georgian house in a cathedral town in the south-west of England. The house was built of rendered brick and stone. It had once been quite grand, by our standards at least; it had large sash windows, tall french doors, and a servants' wing of four small rooms which jutted into the walled back garden. My bedroom had a disused fireplace and an old hand wash basin. It also had a crack between the wide oak floorboards where I posted letters to the future.

We lived in that house for about three years, sometime between the hot summer of 1976 and the rise to power of Thatcher's Conservatives in 1979. It was a time of rolling strikes and industrial unrest; I remember the interminable power cuts during which, unable to read, I lay in bed looking out of the window as the night closed in. I was a bookish child; I spent most of my time escaping into other worlds; for one glorious year I was a paid-up member of the Puffin Club, with a badge and a quarterly magazine about new children's books arriving in the post. We left for New Zealand during the so-called Winter of Discontent, early in 1979, when the snow lay in great drifts over the hedges in the fields. I wore my Puffin Club badge on the plane.

My favourite books were those which revealed the secret strangeness in the midst of the everyday. There was the extra hour struck after midnight by the clock in Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, where a modern boy opens the back door to find a sunlit garden and a girl dressed in old-fashioned clothes ready to play with him. There was Joan Aiken's Midnight is a Place, where the hero Lucas falls on hard times and becomes a tosh boy, trawling the sewers under Regency London for ancient treasure in the company of a homicidal maniac. I never tired of the gentle weirdness of Tove Jansson's Comet in Moominland, which recounts a journey taken across the hot undersea sand on stilts after a comet passes too close and the sea dries up; E.C. Spykman describes something similar in A Lemon and a Star, where one day all the water in the town reservoir disappears and the children walk across the cracked mud to an island they've never seen before. Natural disasters, supernatural visitations and wrinkles in the fabric of time heralded the beginning of perilous adventures.

From my life in the world of books, I strongly suspected that real life similarly concealed secret places where the past intersects with the present and where the world of appearances is turned on its head. Like many British children of my age, I spent my childhood tapping walls in an attempt to find sliding panels and priest's holes. I peered hopefully into wardrobes. I looked for hidden drawers in old desks. I scanned pebbles on the beach in the hope of finding a moon-stone. I lay on my back on the carpet and imagined the house turned upside down, with light fittings sprouting out of the floor and the chairs on the ceiling. And I lived in perpetual hope of discovering one of the Roman hoards of gold coins which were still, occasionally, being dug up in suburban gardens in the 1970s. I understood from Puffin books that time and place are not always cast in stone and that something strange could happen at any moment, and I kept a close watch on the world so that I would know when it did.

Sink hole in the playing fields at St Andrews School, Christchurch, 28 February 2011

When I posted the notes through the crack in my floorboards, I imagined a girl in the future reading them. "I am seven years old," I wrote, "and I live with my father and my mother and my brother and two cats. My cat is called Hoffman and he is black and one quarter Abyssinian and my brother's cat is ginger and he is called Tractor." I wrote the kind of letter you might have written to a pen friend in the 1970s. There was a dark hidden space between the floor of my bedroom and the ceiling of the rooms below where my notes, folded into quills, piled up over a period of months. It crossed my mind after a while that the notes might stay there for a very long time, until the house was demolished or the floorboards taken up. I wrote in pencil as I thought that ink might fade, as felt-pen drawings pinned to the wall do over time. I wanted my notes to reach someone, in the future. It's the reason a writer writes.

Our house was number one in a street of semi-detached townhouses, built about 1830 at the time that the cholera epidemic swept through the city. The house predated the European colonization of New Zealand. Its stone steps were worn down in the middle by a century and a half of occupation. Our next-door-neighbours through the dividing wall were an elderly couple, Bill and Jane Hoskins. Their house was the mirror image of ours, except they had deep red velvet curtains and thick carpet that your feet sank into and which made your ankles wobble. On our side there was worn sisal that gave your knees a nasty graze when you fell over and slid along it. The Hoskins's hallway had black and white tiles, like a stately home, and there were lilac trees in their garden whose heavy perfume wafted over the garden wall in spring. Jane cooked on a venerable Aga stove. There were piles of books everywhere.

The son of a local baker, Bill Hoskins was a retired professor of history from Oxford. He founded the first department of local history at a British university; his particular contribution was the impact of economic activity on the British landscape. By the time we met him he had written a dozen scholarly and popular books and had made two TV series for the BBC, the first in 1972 based on his best-selling book The Making of the English Landscape (1955) and the second in 1976, called The Landscape of England. On my tenth birthday he and Jane wrapped up a Victorian finger bowl from their collection for me. I took it out today in Christchurch New Zealand -- where it has survived a journey across the world and two major earthquakes -- and held it and thought of them. When Bill died in 1992 they put up one of those circular blue historical plaques on the house where he was born.

Prof. W.G. Hoskins

Bill Hoskins could look at the landscape and tell you a two-thousand-year-old history of the people who had lived and worked and died on it. He campaigned endlessly, and successfully, to save the ancient landmarks of the city from modern development: not just the buildings, but the open spaces, such as the Bull Meadow just outside the old stone walls of the city which bounded the old Jewish cemetery, which he prevented being plowed under by an inner-city bypass in the mid-1970s. Bill Hoskins was concerned with memory. His life was spent recalling the past to the notice of the present. He was determined that we should not forget.

"Forgetting remains the disturbing threat that lurks in the background of the phenomenology of memory and the epistomology of history," wrote the French historian of memory, Paul Ricoeur. I've been thinking a lot about the danger of forgetting, in the past ten days since the Christchurch earthquake.

Damaged Christ Church Cathedral, 1888, after a 7.3 earthquake in North Canterbury, from Te Ara

Quite simply, we forgot about earthquakes. We lived as if they didn't exist; we paid lip service to the idea that one day the 'big one' would strike, but I don't think we really believed that it would happen during our life-times. Earthquakes remained a perpetual abstraction in a world of possibility; something that had happened in the past and may happen again in the distant future but not here and now in the life of the present. Earthquakes were, essentially, fiction, like dried-up seas and clocks striking thirteen. I forgot the incontrovertible fact that despite ten years in earthquake-prone Wellington, the biggest quake I've ever previously been in was in Christchurch in the mid-1980s, when the windows rattled and the light fittings swung in a crazy arc and we had no idea what was happening.

We forgot that it is inevitable, living in New Zealand, that one day the ground will shake and cracks in the road big enough to swallow a bus will suddenly open up and that in Christchurch water from the underground cathedral of aquifers over which this city is built will rise to the surface and choke entire suburbs in filthy silt that sets like concrete. It had happened before, but little about the design of our central city suggested that we had remembered. We had forgotten that the spire had fallen off the cathedral twice before during major earthquakes. I'd seen those famous historical photographs of the damaged cathedral, but I realize now that I'd dismissed major earthquakes as something that happened in colonial times. In stories. Not now. Because it hadn't happened within living memory, effectively it was as if had never happened. I think collectively we forgot that the modern world remains subject to ancient and implacable natural forces. That modernity is not a cure for nature.

Damaged Christ Church Cathedral, 2011, after the 6.3 earthquake, via Anglican Taonga. Neil Dawson's Chalice, shaped like an inverted conical spire, is in the background.

Previous generations, closer to the last event, hadn't forgotten. Earlier this week it was widely reported that a crane driver found two time capsules in the rubble under the toppled statue by British sculptor Thomas Woolner of John Robert Godley, one of the founding fathers of the city. There have also been reports of another capsule in the base of the metal cross which surmounted the spire of the cathedral. The time capsules -- messages from the past -- are now in the care of Canterbury Museum, where they will be opened slowly and carefully by conservators in order to preserve the material fabric of the message. I am, in a way, less interested in what they have to say than in the fact that they felt they had to say it; that citizens of the past knew there would be a time when the statue would be removed from its base by forces natural or otherwise and they could speak without constraint to the future.

You can see it in the landscape. You can see it in the sharp outlines of the Port Hills at the edge of the city -- which, since the earthquake, are now some two feet higher than they were last Monday week. You can see that New Zealand is a young country, whose shape is still being formed by the movement of tectonic plates. Poet James K. Baxter described it as a 'cold threshhold land', whose 'mountains crouch like tigers'. A hard place to live. When we came to New Zealand, along with the built history, what I missed the most was the soft green Wordsworthian folds of the English hills, worn down by centuries of cultivation and weather and the sheer force of history. New Zealand's landscape looked sharp and hard and brash by comparison, and its buildings looked provisional rather than solid and venerable like the house we'd left. But thirty years later, it feels like home.

Damage to the homestead at Mona Vale, Fendalton, Christchurch, 1 March 2011. The architect was Joseph Clarkson Maddison, who designed many of Christchurch's large-scale early brick buildings, including commercial buildings, grand houses, and freezing works and other industrial buildings.

When artist Rita Angus wrote in 1946 that she was ‘colonial, six generations, and for me New Zealand is in essence medieval’, she was presumably referring to the relatively short duration of New Zealand’s European cultural history as well as to the comparative longevity of her own family’s place within it. In the late 1940s, thirty years before the Maori Renaissance informed a more critical view of its history, New Zealand felt like a young country to its Pakeha artists and writers; and with the youth came a consequent insecurity as well as an uneasy self-consciousness about its identity which has never really evaporated (although they feel very far away at the moment, the arguments around New Zealand's participation in the Venice Biennale are a classic case in point). Long before the Darfield and the Lyttelton earthquakes laid waste to the historical quarters of Christchurch city, and its sandy and swampy suburbs, heritage buildings were being torn down to allow shoddy development in their places. We were always razing the place to the ground and starting again. We are, effectively, at a medieval stage of history. It is more critical than ever that we safely preserve the heritage we have left, and that we construct new buildings, and urban spaces, with an expansive vision worthy of future generations that allows the past a continued life in the present. Because without it, we're lost.

I'm an art historian because I know that historical art brings the past nearer -- art is, like cinema, a time machine -- and because I believe that contemporary art has something to tell us about the present and might, at its best, reveal a new way of looking at the future. When the Minister in charge of earthquake recovery, Gerry Brownlee, says that "heritage is both forward and back" he is absolutely right. But when he says that -- apart from a few civic buildings -- the heritage buildings which remain "have no place in our future history" he is demonstrably short-sighted. Demolishing our history offers no useful solution to the fears of the present day. Without the material presence of the past we are cut off from our collective memory, and there is worse danger in forgetting. Like the world of speculative fiction, the everyday world is capable of sudden and violent change at any point and the more information we take forward with us from the past the better we are equipped to deal with the great and certain strangeness of the future.

The week of magical thinking

This time, when the earthquake came, it was just after lunch and I was at home, in the lounge with my daughter. She was watching children's TV. I was writing notes for a talk about the possible futures of public art in Christchurch. At 12.48pm, I sent a tweet.

Three minutes later, at 12.51pm, the quake struck.

If you have the misfortune to experience a major earthquake, and the great good fortune to live through it, you will know that there is no warning, no gradual build-up, no time to plan or prepare or even think. You will know that the violence is immediate. Last time the quake came across the plains like a thief in the night, like a band of raiders in a cloud of dust, vast and powerful and inexorable like a great ship in drydock let slip from failed moorings. It was a clear cold night in September, and the sky was powdered with stars. We stumbled around afterwards for many hours as if in a dream, one of those terrible phantoms of the subconscious whose invisible bonds you struggle to wake from. Real life started again with the dawn. This time the quake came in broad daylight with the numbing certainty of a car crash. The sun was shining. The TV was on. My daughter had a spoon to her mouth. She was laughing. I was wrestling with a paragraph. And then time slowed, as the ground accelerated beyond the pull of gravity.

Just after a major quake, it is very hard to concentrate or even think. You operate on instinct. An ancient animal part of the brain takes over. When the shaking stops, you check that you are alive. You check that people around you are alive. Then you look around to find a safe place, an escape route, firm ground on which to stand. You decide what to do next. You do what you can. You are still, and time is suspended; and then you start moving.

A minute later, I looked up. The house was standing. The terrible shaking had died away. The power was off. Silence fell. I held my daughter. I stood up from the doorway where I'd crouched over her. A huge pane of glass from the front porch slid to the ground behind us. The phone lines were down. I sent a text to N anyway. We're OK, I said. We're going to school now. I found my shoes. I sent a tweet. It seemed important to say something. I stood there stupidly, the phone in my hand. Only three words came. I added a full stop and the #eqnz hash-tag. It felt unsatisfactory, but there were no more words. We left the house.

In this wordless primitive state, I made the remarkably poor decision to drive to school, rather than walk. As I backed out of our drive, the car bucked and yawed like a small boat in rough seas. I thought we had a flat tyre, perhaps a broken axle. Behind us the power lines were bouncing in a parabolic arc like a child's skipping rope. We carried on. The roads were broken, choked with cars, the traffic lights out. I saw the father of an old school friend of mine, on the street outside his house. His hand was held to his mouth. An unmarked police car accelerated down the road at speed, a blue light flashing on its dashboard. The wail of sirens rose. "Look! There's Allen Curnow's house! Is the doggie there?" said my daughter, as we passed its laurel hedge. We waded through a couple of inches of dirty whitish-brown water, flowing down the street like a river. At school the children were sitting in their class groups on the field. The teachers stood by them, holding clip boards. The headmaster carried an old-fashioned megaphone.

The small guy was sitting quietly, his arms and legs folded, next to a friend. He was wearing his school hat. The friend was crying.

"How's it going mate?" I asked. "You OK?"

"Hi Mum," he said. "Did you know there's been a big earthquake?"

We sat on the school field for a while. I felt as if I was waiting for something. I had other people's children sobbing in my arms while my children played under the old trees nearby. Every so often the small guy waved reassuringly to me. The stone war memorial had toppled over and lay smashed. The water had leapt out of the school pool. The soft earth under the grass trembled like a jelly. A light rain began to fall. A friend came over, tears streaming down her face, her eyes wide open. "I can't get hold of Ben!" she said in a tone of deep foreboding. It'll be OK, I said. The phone lines are down. I can't get hold of N, but I know that he'll be all right, and so will Ben. It will be all right.

Later, after more mothers had arrived and taken their children and the crowd was starting to thin out we drove home, the traffic at a crawl. I saw a woman in a business suit and four inch heels picking her way across the silt and liquefaction on Heaton Street. Cars described a slow arc around a sinkhole that had opened up near the park. Our neighbours were out on the street. One got on with the business of demolishing what was left of his front wall. "I've just come from town," said Andrew, "and it's bad there. I hitched a ride, but it was quicker to walk. I watched the CTV building come down, out of the office window. It just fell down. And that old church across Latimer Square; there's nothing left of it. Just a pile of stones. I think a lot of people have died." He paused. "If N doesn't come home soon, come round to our place."

When N arrived home some hours later, his face was white and the shirt was sticking to his back. He shook his head. His feet ached from the long walk home. That night, the children slept on mattresses under our solid oak dining table. The small guy made a sign for the table, as he did once before, back in September. We slept on a fold-out couch nearby. The house creaked and grumbled around us as aftershocks rolled through.

When the power came back on, we watched TV images of the city. Buildings I'd grown up with lay in ruins. Hundreds of people were missing. Smoke rose from the rubble. Clearly I am not a religious person; but when I saw the broken cathedral I cried.

I spoke to my father on the phone. "It's like the Blitz," he said.

Both my parents were war babies. My father was born in 1940 and some of his earliest memories are of bombs falling on London, and long dull hours spent in the air-raid shelter. My mother was born in 1942 in the school-house in Ecclesbourne Road, Islington; her grandfather was the school-keeper. Evacuated with her mother, she spent the War with her cousins in a fishing village in Essex. She was four years old when she met her father, on his return from the front in Egypt. My parents grew up in the East End and North London amid the rubble. Weeds and rubbish accumulated in the vacant lots among rows of Victorian terraced houses built for industrial workers. Eventually, whole streets were knocked down and communities destroyed to make way for the new modernist high rise housing estates. All through my peripatetic childhood  -- we'd lived in three countries and six houses by the time I turned twelve -- my parents would tell us to tidy up our bedrooms by commenting that it looked like a bomb had hit it. "It's a bloody bomb site! Clean it up."

The thing I've read about the Blitz is that you never quite knew what was going to happen next. There would be nights without bombs falling, when you might almost forget that there was a war on; and then nights of relentless bombardment, when the ground shook and the air became super-heated and people died in their beds and on the streets. You never hear the one that hits you, the saying went. But if it had your number on it, then it would get you. No matter where you were, or what you did. If your number was up, then it was your turn to go.

There are many things I can't bring myself to think, or to say, or to write. I expend considerable effort trying not to imagine anything worse than what has already happened. I am trying to think sensibly about cause and effect. The central city looks like a war zone. Yesterday I went for a bike ride round the streets of Merivale, the suburb where we now live and where I spent my teenage years. Graders have pushed piles of silt 10 foot high to the sides of the roads. Eddies of foul-smelling white dust are billowing everywhere as the silt dries. The dust gets in your eyes and your nose. You taste grit in your mouth. I biked through the deserted grounds of Heaton Intermediate, where the basketball courts are a lunar landscape of sand mountains. The flag at the tennis club flapped listlessly at half-mast. Out on Papanui Road, the half-timbered and brick stately Arts and Crafts homes designed by Miles Warren's mentor, the architect Cecil Wood, lie in ruins. Last time people felt phantom aftershocks, but this time there's none.

The earthquake on 22 February took people, and it took buildings. All the haunted literary Gothic places. Christchurchness. The earthquake took the city's history. The past that persisted in the present has gone, lost in a pile of rubble. Our history is now history. It's a new way of life, ahead.

Towards a newer Centauromachy

"Next Halloween I'd like to be a centaur. All I will need is the back end of a horse to attach to myself. Or maybe I could get a two-person centaur costume. I would be at the front end, because I'm better with people than Hamish is. Plus, if you were at the back end of the costume, there would be fart danger. If I was at the front then it would be me doing the farting."

Image titled 'A young centaur, with a kind of disturbing grin', from the Capitoline Museum, via Katie.

Neo-Classical Gothic

A recent photo I took of the Baptist Church on the corner of Madras Street and Oxford Terrace, in the centre of Christchurch. Sited next to the central Fire Station, the Baptist Church is close to the monument to the 911 NYC fire-fighters, a large-scale public work by Graham Bennett constructed from horribly twisted steel girders from the World Trade Centre. It seems these days that half of central Christchurch is either a ruin or a monument, or both.

Completed in 1882, the Oxford Terrace Baptist Church was designed by early Christchurch architect Edward J Saunders (who, the Historic Places Trust notes, had been a local surveyor in Canterbury in the 1860s, but was dismissed for "incompetence and habitual intoxication"). Twenty years later Saunders won a competition for a 'neo-classical preaching hall'; the Gothic Revival style which dominates Christchurch's church architecture had dubious associations with papery, and with the unspeakable 'bells and smells' of High Anglicanism, which the small yet strong-minded group of Canterbury Baptists were eager to avoid. Saunders's original winning design, for which he had received 25 pounds, was radically pruned to reduce costs, losing a vestry and organ gallery. I understand from architect friends that this remains the common fate of innovative architectural designs to this day.

Sanders's building, which is included on the Historic Places Trust's Category 1 Register, was severely damaged by the earthquake on 4 September last year, and has an uncertain future. It has huge open cracks across the pediment and entablature, and is currently supported by massive props.

A short story

Sometimes I agonize for twenty minutes over writing a single sentence, wrestling with different constructions and nuances until I am heartily sick of both the job at hand and myself, and need to pop out for a coffee or a little walk. No such wafting about with the small guy, who is a man of action when it comes to writing and experiences no terror of the white page whatsoever. I admire the workmanship in this recent short story, pictured above.

The 6pm call

Ring ring! Ring ring!

"Hello?"

Pause. Click.

"Hello! I am from the computer maintenance department."
"Of what?"
"The computer maintenance department for all the people in New Zealand who are online on their computers."
"I am from the fuck off department."

Of course I didn't say that, it would have been rude. But I should have. I wish I had.

Bloody cold-calling call-centres. They are the new Jehovahs witnessses.

The hermeneutics of the puerile

"Heidegger is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack."*

On reading this, not for the first time it occurred to me that staying up late to watch Monty Python in the 1970s has entirely informed my worldview.


*From Paul Johnson’s Humorists: From Hogarth to Noël Coward, reviewed by Dwight Garner in the New York Times: a "warmly appealing if slightly dotty book" which I am very much looking forward to reading. The photograph above is an entirely unrelated picture of Heidegger and his brother on a path across a field that Heidegger used to walk on a lot, and that he wrote about, at length, after his "turn".

"Satiation is no longer a dream"

Calling all Art Lovers

"For the art hungry who are feeling the cold fingers of cultural starvation gnawing at their vitals, satiation is no longer a dream. Melissa Sharplin has popped up like the genie from the lamp to show the world her latest exhibition "Swit Swurl" held at Archibalds Audi showroom. Wrapped in a dress by Gillian Melhop, Melissa, looking gorgeous, almost competed with her own paintings."

from CC: See and Be Seen, issue 9, 3 December 2010, p.8.


More art writing like this, please. I shall get on to EyeContact about it.

Tossery at #twecon

Yesterday I took part in the inaugural Episto Tweet Conference on Twitter, organised by @HORansome (the admirable Matthew Dentith, academic philosopher of conspiracy theories and "one of New Zealand's top debunkers".)

Here is @HORansome giving his opening address (nice suit):

The rules were very strict. A paper in six tweets, one of which was to be the title, each of which must be numbered consecutively and contain the hashtag #twecon. The papers were delivered as delegates made themselves available throughout the day. There were some questions from the floor, but as @kittenypentland noted, thankfully no conference weirdies. (Regrettably, there were also no conference drinks.)

Here's a copy of my paper, which could very well be subtitled "Imma Tosser".

Many of the papers were very good. I particularly enjoyed @SarahLibrarina's exposition of hand-painted signs on Dunedin student flats (research for her forthcoming book), and @KittenyPentland's consideration of ethics on Twitter. (Matthew Dentith has full transcripts of all papers available on his blog.) The event itself was a great success, and will be repeated. It also indicated the possibilities inherent in new modes of academic communication, which Mike Dickison discusses briefly here.)

In  short: despite unspeakable tossery from me, #twecon was a good thing. Looking forward to the next one.