Mind Field

Self (anon.), Mind Field, 2018, mixed media abstract, 102 x 57 Cm.

Kiwi Glam 1966

A significant time for Down and Nearly Under: post-colonial dependency on the Mother Country faded into fond memory for our expats as the fancy new passenger jets began to encroach upon our cozy insularity (and put paid to Kerosene for domestic heating).  When designing forms for the new PAYE tax, the Department of Inland Revenue learnt that the average mental age of Kiwis was twelve. 

The Government Statistician projected that our population would reach five million by the end of the millennium.  He would have been right, but as successive statisticians noted, in the interim 1.2 million of us had declared, upon departing, our long term intent to seek greener pastures (Queensland benefited most from The Great Kiwi Brain-Drain).

But the residue, wanting to assure ourselves worthy of star rating upon a nebulous international stage, adopted the images of what we perceived to be Western sophistication, as this ubiquitous visual cliché appears to indicate.

Photographed opposite the village store at Castlepoint, a small beach-side town on the Wairarapa coast of the Wellington Region. To the far Right can be see the lighthouse, which stands near the top of the northern end of a one kilometre long reef.

But the real interest is the nippy little roadster  - an early example of a Mark 1 Tiger, circa 1964.  Behind the Walnut dashboard lurks a 4.3 litre, 260 cubic inch V8 engine.  From an idea by Jack Brabham, to a design by Carroll Shelby, built by Jensen for the Sunbeam Motor Company of England and bearing the badge of a world speed record holder, this car appealed to the North American market so much that the Yanks bought the company during the model's run.

New price circa NZ$3,500 - currently fetching around NZ$150,00 for a really good one.

The image came to the digital dark room as a scan of a scratched and pitted 35mm enlargement of an over-coloured half-tone lithographic impression.  Might have graced a garage workshop calendar in an earlier incarnation.

Artificial Intelligence in Freemans Bay

This image is a photographic montage comprised from three frames of a 14 minute film entitled New Zealand, 1950's from the Huntley Film Archives:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg7Oo7eg0VU

It depicts a 1955, South-westerly aspect of the South side of Wellington Street East, Freemans Bay from near what was the intersection with Union Street and is now the overpass across a motorway junction.

Three years earlier the territorial authority had served compulsory purchase orders on most of the properties in the area, with compensation set at 1952 valuations.  However, the Council was not in a hurry to complete acquisition, which, amid much resentment and controversy, was eventually completed in 1979 - at 1952 valuations.  In the interim property owners were reluctant to incur the expense of anything beyond what decreasing rental values would justify.

And so it came to pass that what had once been an inner city suburb renowned for the solidarity of its social cohesion and the political unrest that had been a thorn in the side of conservative governments from 1913, declined into abject dereliction.  

In what was possibly one of the ugliest examples of the corporate psychopathy that might seem to have plagued the Auckland Council since its inception, the consequential window of opportunity was used to plaster the popular Media with images of the deplorable state into which the area fell - dodgy propaganda justifying the premeditated demise of a community.

Although the houses that comprise most of the image survived from the late 1860s until 1977, the photograph is date-able to 1955 by the lack of houses and shops in the block between Howe and Hepburn Streets, which were subsequently replaced by the Freemans Park development of apartment blocks and courtyard houses.

The artificial intelligence bit is the acquisition of every known digital image of the area and then renaming all of the images firstly with the date, then with the geographical location, aspect, elevation, etc., followed by relevant keywords up to a length of 256 characters in the file name.

The in-house Ponsonby & Freemans Bay database includes works of art, photographs, maps, ephemera, audio and video, etc., all of which adhere to the same file-naming protocol.  An easy familiarity develops with the landmarks and eras to be seen in the images and the database becomes increasingly accurate (and interesting) as the knowledge-base expands. 

Although there is a tendency to think of landmarks as steeples and towers, etc. below consciousness there is a whole other level of landmark recognition - a fact readily brought to mind as a strange sense of alienation when much of central Christchurch vanished in a cloud of dust a few years ago. 

So whether it's swanning around downtown, or soaking up a Freemans Bay slide show, markers accumulate below consciousness ready to spring to one's aid with a slightly fuzzy sense of familiarity in a four dimensional cognitive model.

1955  14-19 Wellington Street East  South side  South-westerly aspect  Union Howe Hepburn Pratt Franklyn  'New Zealand, 1950's'  14 min film 30854  Huntley Film Archives.jpg

String Band Promo

Promotional announcement for a concerto in eight short movements for piano and chamber orchestra by the Wellington composer Lyell Cresswell (b.1944).

Auckland Chamber Orchestra - www.aco.co.nz

Lyttelton 1982 & 2007

Two pairs of views of Oxford Street, Lyttelton from early February, 1982 and November, 2007.

Taken from adjacent locations at the intersection with Exeter Street, the upper pair of images depict a north-easterly view of lower Oxford Street, with the lower views depicting a southerly aspect of the upper levels of the street.

Although there are few structural changes in the ensuing 25 years, the ubiquitous change of house colours is probably symptomatic of the progressive gentrification of the town as a trendy suburb of the close by provincial capital of Christchurch. But the real change is in the tripling of the number of motor vehicles to be seen in the images.

Oxford Street was the nascent town's first principal thoroughfare. Original location of the seat of the government of the province, it was also the site of the township's first school, town hall, post office, prison and hotel, etc.

Thanks to Gerard Richards of Auckland for the 1982 photographs.

Lyttelton early February, 1982.  A westerly aspect of the principal shopping precinct in London Street from the intersection at Oxford Street across Canterbury and Dublin Streets to Hawkhurst Road.

The photographer supplied three faded Kodachrome prints of a visit to the town in January or early February, 1982.  The angle of the shadows in the images indicated that they were taken close to mid-day on a weekday when children could be seen wearing school uniforms, which ruled out the school holiday month of January.

Until about 1990 colour fading of Kodachrome chromogenic process 35 mm prints was caused by spontaneous chemical changes in the image dyes of colour prints.  Today's prints are more stable and significant fading will occur in about forty years at room temperature, the colder the conditions, the slower the fading.

Thanks to Gerard Richards of Auckland for the original photograph.

The Tramway Hotel, Millerton, New Zealand, 1902-1982.

Seen in the 1902 photograph is the newly opened Tramway Hotel just above the Taramakau bridge on Millerton Road.  The hotel offered fourteen guest rooms, three lounges, a billiard room and a dining room with seating for thirty.

By 1982 (lower image) the old hotel had been closed for some time and within a further three years virtually nothing of the building remained, all of the recyclable materials having been taken by the community for improvements to their homes.

Thanks to Gerard Richards of Auckland for the four 1982 pics of the hotel, restored and blogged in fond remembrance of good times at Millerton in the '80s.

_____________________________________________

 

The Village Green Revisited

The communal centre of the village of Freemans Bay at Auckland, New Zealand, from a pair of aerial photographs, dated to the 18th of February,1954 and the 5th of July,1979.

Known to bureaucracy as the Pratt Street Block in the time of the earlier image, the area is enclosed by Wellington, Hepburn, Anglesea and Collingwood Streets.

Pratt Street Block 1974

Subjected to compulsory purchase orders all of the properties within the block (with a few exceptions in the South-west corner) were cleared of all structures, the site was extensively landscaped using bulldozers and Pratt Street became a cul-de-sac culminating in a pedestrian entrance to an internal square of beguiling sylvan beauty (below).

The 1979 image was taken shortly after the completion of the Community Hall (1), the Kindergarten (2), the shopping centre (3) and the first and largest of the three apartment blocks (4)

Much is knowable about the people who have lived here, from the time when the first cottage (5) overlooked a swamp at the bottom of its backyard.

For instance the eight-room, two story Grocery shop at the corner of Wellington and Pratt Streets (6) first appears in the photographic record in 1881.  By 1908 it belonged to a widow, Ellen Wilkins also owned the two-room cottage next door and the pair of two storied town-houses beyond that.  Mrs Wilkins sold her shop in 1920 and was succeeded by the Francis, Emmerton, Barchard, Jeffs and Rupa families until it was demolished in 1968.

Or Richard and Esther Poulgrain of 18 Pratt Street (7).  Born in 1851, the proprietor of the Vulcan Ironworks in Albert Street, raised eight children in what had begun as a simple two-room cottage in 1873.

Both the widow Wilkins' shop and the Poulgrain's cottage would make way for the 30 apartment Wellington Court building (4).  Completed as social housing in April 1979 for $440,099, the territorial authority sold the freeholds of most of the apartments between 1997 and 1999.  And so it came to pass that within four decades these handy little pied-à-terres would be changing hands at around 40 times their initial cost.

Denniston, New Zealand, 1981.

Fifteen kilometres up The Coast from Westport, Denniston is situated on the Mount Rochfort plateau, 600 metres above the beach and about one and a half kilometres inland.

The sitting room had panoramic views to the West out across the Tasman Sea to the curvature of the earth (amazing sunsets).   Windows at the other end of the room looked out to the snow clad peaks of the Papahaua mountain range.

By the time that this photograph was taken the population of Denniston had reduced from around 1,400 to 23.

Taken from near the front of the fire station, to the Right is the garage of Denniston Motors, with a petrol bowser on the forecourt and, unmoved for many years, an early 1930s school bus within.

Across the intersection, with its' red-lead painted corrugated iron cladding is the Doctor's house and surgery facing the (unseen) Post Office.  Beyond the Doctors' is the Police Station, with the cell block (unseen) in the back yard.

It was a good time to be living on the sub-alpine plateau, the residents were mainly artists, musicians and potters, etc. and there were great parties that would attract friends from across the island and go on for days. 

But the halcyon era would not last, by the 1990s commercial dope growers had moved in, arson became the new game in town and the doctors' was fortified, even the garage burnt. But what little is left slumbers on as a no more than a ghostly curiosity for tourist.

Original photo by Gerard Richards of Auckland (his sporty Vauxhall HC Viva to Left), subsequently tarted up and reminisced upon by self.

The Village Green

An elevated westerly aspect of the village green at the south-west corner of the intersection of Wellington and Hepburn Streets, Freemans Bay, Auckland, New Zealand.  Sunday, 31st December, 2017.

There was a time when our village green was a swamp where waterfowl roamed amid marsh-misted reeds at the headwaters of a stream.  One hundred and seventy eight years ago the least affluent of the earliest European settlers came to this place to cut bull-rushes for the liveable huts they would construct nearby.  

By the beginning of the 1850s the stream was forded by a steep livestock track that led from David and Margaret Archibald's suburban farm on Franklin Road to the garrison towns' markets.  The first settler's cottage stood close to where a fashionable Japanese restaurant can now be seen just to the right of centre in the photograph.

By the mid 1860s the stream had been enclosed in a brick tunnel down to the lagoon at the far western side of Freemans Bay, where the last boat shed survives opposite the supermarket.  As the pressure of suburban in-fill increased six houses and three shops soon occupied the site of what is now the village green.

With its panoramic views of the city and the harbour Wellington Street West, as it was formerly known, was originally deemed to be in the suburb of Ponsonby, rather than industrial Freemans Bay, and thereby to nominally separate it from the city end of the street, with its pubs, boarding houses and brothels. 

Between 1878  and 1886 Auckland's population doubled and about a dozen shops; grocers, bakeries, a butcher, and a boot maker, etc. formed the centre of the village.  Suburban in-fill was complete by 1900 and remained more or less intact until 1970.  Diagonally opposite the green one the original grocer's shops survives as the iconic Rupa's Cafe.

From 1952 the territorial authority began acquiring much of the Freemans Bay area by compulsory purchase for residential redevelopment.  Demolition of the structures on the site of the village green took place from 1968 to 1974.  Formerly occupying the back garden of a cottage on Hepburn Street, only the gnarled tree to the Left of centre in the photograph survives from the early 1950s, all of the other trees in the image are less than forty years old.

Opposite the village green on Hepburn Street, new social housing was completed in 1965 (David Lange, sometime Prime Minister of New Zealand, lived here in his time as a Legal Aid lawyer at the Magistrate's Court). Gentrification of Freemans Bay began in 1970 with the completion of the Sheridan Square town-house development opposite on Wellington Street, and the eleven shops that adjoin the village green were built between 1974 and 1978.

The population of Freemans Bay peaked a century ago at 10,500, today it's somewhat less than half of that.  More than a million dollars is now required in order to acquire a bijou town-house in the vicinity of this village green that's within an easy walk to both the Paris end of town at Ponsonby and the centre of Auckland city.

Not trusting the fallibility of received history, the foregoing was mostly compiled from contemporary newspaper reports and 339 old photos.

Auckland, New Zealand Then & Now

Dated to 1979 and 2018 is a pair of northerly aspects towards the Hobson Street ridge, with the Central Police Station visible to the Right.

Postcard from the Edge

This could be entitled Swamp Gully sure ain't what it used ter be, but is in fact the subsequently renamed city of Auckland as might be seen from the South Island of New Zealand, or in the Godzonian* dialect as The risible naïveté of Pig Islanders as sympathetically viewed from the Mainland.

* Godzonian; adjective derived from Godzone, an ironic contraction of God's Own Country, being a trope that's indicative of the gullibility that permeates within our snug South Sea Bubble.

Program cover - Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Program cover for the Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Raye Freedman Arts Centre - 5pm Sunday 26 November 2017

Concert: Capriccio

Peter Scholes conductor
Soloist Ben Hoadley bassoon

Program

Ibert - Capriccio
Sofia Gubaidulina - Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings
Debussy - Syrinx
Arnold - Divertimento
Ravel - Introduction and Allegro

Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Fleeting Fragments Artful

Program cover for the Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Sunday Morning Boulevardiers, Ponsonby, Auckland, 2017.

The Cruise of the Rosaura

With nearly a hundred cruise ship visits to the Auckland of 2017, we're currently beset by our bureaucratic spin doctors' assumptions on just how popular their alleged world-class super-city has become as a port-of-call.

However, such hyperbolic acclaim is reduced to a mere shade of a much earlier era when internecine war between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan, which included the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons, put paid to the Far East as a destination for the cruise ships of the 1930s. 

And so it came to pass that the fashionable landing-places of the South Seas enjoyed a prosperity that would not be repeated for eight decades, for in that earlier time the sight of three or four cruise ships lined up along our wharves was not uncommon, with even the Oil Wharf at Freemans Bay called into duty as a passenger terminus.

However, this particular tale doesn't concern those ships, but rather about the first of the large Passenger Yachts to call, which was to be seen at the Oil Wharf in February 1935.  Well we might goggle at the floating gin palaces that flaunt their owners' brazen wealth in the environs of what is now called Viaduct Harbour, but when 55 year old brewing magnate Wally Moyne brought his entourage of through-and-through posh persons to town aboard his 83 metre Rosaura few gobs were left unsmacked among the more impressionable our forebears.

Also known as Lieutenant Colonel Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, DSO & Bar, said Wally was cruising for four months on his new boat - he'd sunk her predecessor, the equally gargantuan Roussalka, when she ran on to a rock in thick fog off the Irish coast 17 months earlier. On that occasion all of the passengers and crew were rescued, as was his pet Panamanian monkey.  Named Gandhi (to whom it bore a peculiar resemblance), the antics of the securely chained beastie were now amusing the colonial beau monde, whose eyes had never bulged further from their sockets.

Eight en-suite staterooms provided accommodation for up to a dozen guests, but by the time the graceful craft arrived at the farthest reach of her 52,424 kilometre cruise, there were only three passenger aboard.  First was Wally's lady friend Vera, better known in the gossip mags as the estranged wife of the Baronet Sir Henry John Delves Broughton, who is chiefly remembered for, (although acquitted), murdering the Earl of Erroll (an event that was the basis of the 1987 film White Mischief).

After their wining and dining the Governor General and his missus at Wellington, 43 year old Vera Broughton, that big game hunter and intrepid sports-person, thrashed Viscountess Bledisloe at tennis before flying from Rongotai aerodrome to Auckland's Hobsonville in an open two seater biplane, from whence she made an amphibian flight to the Bay of Islands for a spot of big game fishing.

Also aboard was Terence Philip, with just a touch of Attila the Hun around the jaw line, Philip was excruciatingly handsome, charming and a well-heeled London art dealer, who specialised in flogging expensive British pictures to rich Yanks.  He was also a good mate of the last passenger's 'æsthete' cousin by marriage.  She was the 50 year old Mrs Winston Churchill, who would seem to be having a sorely needed break from the frenetic lifestyle of her manic-depressive husband and the rough-and-tumble of his more dubious chums.

So far we've recounted not much more than bowdlerised version concerning the toffs swanning around our coasts on their floating realm of conspicuous wealth, but for rat’s arse connoisseurs of lascivious titillation, let us digress to a tad more dishing of the that most fiercely spiced of dirts...

Mr Pug, who'd lead us a decade later to a two-nil victory in the final round of that spot of bother we had with the Boche, had finally outgrown his rambunctious predilection for batting for the other side - that virtually ubiquitous rite of passage among his caste, (among whom it was reasoned that such experience went a long way to making a enlightened sort of cove more fun for an eventual better half when it came to bedroom sports).  So exotic matinee idols that looked like Tarzan, but talked like Jane, gave way to an heterodoxical sort of bit on the side named Doris.  

Emanating from the wrong side of the tracks, the Viscountess Castlerosse had taken life by the scruff of the neck and screwed her way to the top in her role as outrageous enchantress on the international society circuit.  Legend would have us believe that she bewitched the naïve Winnie with the Cleopatra Clench.  A talent for which technique she was said to share with a certain American divorcee, who would besot a king-to-be on a previous cruise of the Rosaura.

So while her husband was snuggling up with his notorious courtesan on the Riviera, darling Clementine fell head-over-heels for the only superficially eligible guest aboard the motor yacht. Unburdened by an overwhelming work ethic, or anything so shoddy as driving ambition, and so utterly unlike her husband in almost every respect, the suave Terence Philip, an homme fatale, with a reputation for witty drawing-room persiflage was "not the marrying kind" - as they used to say in those relatively well-mannered days before we all succumbed to politically correct gay-speak.  

And so, after a fortnight on our coasts and laden with a couple of Komodo Dragons, a pair of Tuatara and two Malayan Sun bears in a deck cage, the Rosaura cleared Deep Water Cove in the Bay of Islands for New Caledonia, while a somewhat embarrassed and melancholic Clemmie, who'd been shaken to her core by Terence Philip's extravagant travesties of flirtation, moped around the ship's ultra-luxe music room and library.

Retold and embellished by subsequent generations, the past is said to be the only dead thing that smells sweet, so, of course there's a whole lot more to this tale of adventure, but this ain't gonna be the place for it.  We'll just have to settle here for the eventual fates of those involved.

Named after Moyne's daughter, the Rosaura was the first to go; requisitioned by the Royal Navy the motor yacht struck a mine off the coast of Libya in 1941 and sank taking 78 lives with her.

At 64 the colossally rich, well-meaning, and intelligent bon viveur, Lord Moyne was assassinated at Cairo by Israeli terrorists in 1944.

Considered one of the best-dressed women of her time, the distinguished ethnographic photographer Vera Broughton never remarried, soldiering on to a timely demise in 1968.

Subsequently a life peeress in her own right, Baroness Clementine Ogilvy Spencer-Churchill, died at the age of 92 in 1977.

To have news value has been likened to having a tin can tied to one's tail and Terence Philip's place in posterity appears to be represented by no more than his friendship with Clementine Churchill.  However, the alleged receiver of swollen goods is depicted by the actor Simon Williams in the 2002 TV movie The Gathering Storm, a biographical film about the Churchills in the years between 1934 and 1939. Other parts include Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine Churchill, John Standing as Lord Moyne and Albert Finney as Winston Churchill.

La penultimo Dogaressa of the unfinished Palazzo Venier dei Leoni at Venice, Winnie's by then impoverished girlfriend Doris, whose Lion-hunting career among the denizens of deepest Belgravia might be compared to the ups and downs of a barmaid's knickers, turned out to be just another notch on some mighty fine bedposts.  Exhausted, the grande horizontale succumbed to a drug overdose in 1942.

Winston had wanted every kind of love that was available, but couldn't find all of them in the same person, or the same sex.  But like Rudyard Kipling, having at the end of the day probably come to the conclusion that a good woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke, at the age of 90 he faded away to a real bonzer send-off in 1965. 

And the moral of the yarn?  Like the more ostentatious of our current batch of gadflying Real Estate speculators, with a fondness for beige Leatherette - you'll never know how popular you are until you own an effin big motor boat.

The Last Cruise of the Reliance

Arriving from Melbourne on the 11th of April, 1938, with 140 American and 60 German passengers and 374 crew, the Hamburg-Amerika Lines' 19,618 ton cruise ship Reliance of 1914 is seen here berthed at Auckland's Freemans Bay Oil Wharf.

Superseded in the Hamburg - Southampton - Cherbourg - New York service by such crack German liners as the Bremen and the Europa, like many a grand old lady of the sea, Reliance was by then circumnavigating the globe on a regular basis.  However, the war between Japan and China at that time had precluded the usual East Asian ports-of-call for luxury cruise ships and Reliance found herself joining the 18,017 ton Mariposa and the 42,348 ton Empress of Britain at the city's overly crowded wharves.

After a three night stay at her 25th port of call since leaving New York on New Years Day, the 590 foot (180.4 metres) Reliance cleared port for Wellington, before returning to New York six weeks later via Suva, Apia, Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Panama Canal and Havana.

Less than four months after leaving Auckland Reliance met her end at Hamburg on the morning of the 7th of August, the day scheduled for her afternoon departure on another world cruise.  A suspicious fire broke out at 6 a.m in a store of ballroom decorations.  Although brought under control within five hours, the midships section of the passenger accommodation was destroyed  ( https://www.meherbabatravels.com/ship-travels/reliance/ ).  The vessel was laid up and shortly after declared a total loss.  Seventeen months later Reliance was sold to the Krupp Werke and was broken up at Bremerhaven in 1941.

As to the other cruise ships in the historic photo, the largest ship ever to visit New Zealand up to that time: the Empress of Britain (1931-1940), was sunk by the Germans as the hulk of the Reliance awaited her final demise.  However, the much loved Mariposa  (1931-1974) sailed on for another thirty-six years, the latter part cruising the Caribbean as the Homeric.  In 1973, a major fire destroyed much of her galley and restaurant and she was scrapped in Taiwan.  During the breaking process, her sister ship, the Chandris Lines' Ellinis (ex-Lurline 1932-1987), suffered major engine damage on a cruise to Japan; Chandris was able to purchase one of the Mariposa's engines from the ship breakers.

The above image is but a detail from a much larger photograph in the digitalnz.org collection, where it is mis-dated to 1934 and merely annotated as "View of Freeman's Bay and the Ports of Auckland main wharves with docked ships, showing Mechanic's Bay and Auckland city central business district"  https://www.digitalnz.org/records/30657644/view-of-freemans-bay-and-the-ports-of-auckland-main-wharves-with-docked-shi

Bird's-eye view of the last exit before the extinction event

Arriving by sea, it's best to enter enter a port at dawn as the rising sun burns off the motionless sea mist.  When the air has been freshened during the night and seems to hold a faint scent of flowers.  Dew gleamed on every leaf and blossom, creating the feeling that the place had been created anew that very morning. The ship slowed to a speed at which the throb of her engines was no longer perceptible and the vessel glided silently into the tranquil harbour.

But then again, for the more modest and chaste-souled of closet ethnographers, it's probably all about ways of seeing...

An all fur coat and no knickers sort of town, where it's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody, this is Auckland, largest conurbation of what Orstryliuns know as the sheep-shaggers of the shakey isles.  You might well think so, but one couldn't possibly subscribe to the Ocker opinion that a Kiwi leisure centre is five sheep tied to a lamp post, or that the only reason that they have women here is because the sheep can't cook.

Although exemplifying the Oceanic Malaise of apathetic boredom and vapid monotony of incurious minds, this little world unto itself is a cheerful, friendly kind of place, peopled with escapists, unpublished poets and endearing halfwits with comic accents.

Protected by mediocrity and insensitivity from the terrors of the world in a cultural climate that hopefully engenders patience and stoicism among expatriates, Homo Kiwiensis enjoys a comfortable lower middle-class existence with a mental outlook of its own, self-judged and self-approved (each little sugar-coated embellishment seems to be the outward denial of an inner doubt). 

Unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, or any other, it's becoming an increasingly polarized culture, not yet freed from the disturbing passions of its past, but already troubled with anxieties about a very different future, quite possibly as an ark where the residue of civilisations' last golden age might shelter from a seemingly inevitable ecocide.

Along a Road Less Travelled: a Preface

After a more than five year hiatus, Mr Canterbury Heritage returns, to endanger his relative anonymity in recounting a more personal history of the province in particular, and thereby to a recent saga of these remote islands in general.

The narration of our earlier stories proved quite unexpected results, not the least of which is that, since its inception, this social history and its ancillary extensions have accumulated a readership now well within its second squillion.

But more surprising was, that although the subject has been exclusively about a provincial backwater of a society that's long been used as a literary trope for remote obscurity, New Zealanders account for only fourth place among the readership. Those in North America and Europe comprise a significant majority.

However, the inspiration and encouragement to return and proceed upon a road less travelled rests mainly with a whole lot of Kiwis.

From smarmy criminals to old school chums now with chairs at distinguished foreign universities.

From those who've farmed their land for seven hundred years to visceral magnates with political influence and a hankering to slither up the social ladder.

From neuro-developmentally disabled indigents living under city bridges to painted cougars in the caravanserais of senescent nomads that wander our byways.

From belligerent bureaucrats, with antisocial personality disorders, to Prime Ministers come to borrow the mower.

And yea, even unto to the sixth affluent generation of patrician gentry, whose influence may have waned since they threatened the wrong prime minister, but nonetheless still get wheeled out for a spot of dinnertime persiflage with visiting foreign heads of state.

And many more...

This then will hopefully, for awhile at least, become a quasi-ethnographic assessment of an era at a place where the surge, of what we term civilisation (for better or worse), dissipates on its farthest shore.

In lieu of a suitable illustration for this preface the writer makes so bold as to include a recent effort, of which a local swineherd was the muse.

The portrait is a result of the ArtRage computer application, which facilitates not only a full range of the artist's traditional tools and palettes, but much that was previously unachievable by painters of old.

Christmas card, 2011

The belated image is of Canterbury Heritage's Christmas card for 2011, a truly memorable year in which a spot of the whimsical was sorely needed.

Christchurch Heritage Tragedy

It was announced on the 31st of July, 2009 that a two storey Sydenham warehouse dating from the late 1860s is to be demolished to make way for a new terminus for Leopard Coachlines.

Situated on the eastern side of Montreal Street, between the railway line and Disraeli Street, and forming part of the complex of buildings that has been the premises of CRC Salvage and Demolition since 1984, it is Christchurch's oldest surviving industrial building.

Canterbury Heritage calls upon the Christchurch City Council and the Historic Places Trust to save this historically significant part of our cultural heritage from destruction.


LINK TO PHOTO SET OPENS IN A NEW TAB OR WINDOW
Above: details from street and rear views of the historic warehouse, from a set of seven photographs by Greg O'Beirne.