Fiona Farrell's story

About stories, poems and buildings At the 2012 Annual General Meeting of the Akaroa Civic Trust, Fiona Farrell, a distinguished author and local resident, delivered this thoughtful and inspiring address to our members.

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’ve heard many talks at the AGM of the Civic Trust over the past 20 years or so.

They’re generally by architects, historians or planners – but I can’t talk about such things. I’m a writer, so today I am going to talk about stories, about poems and about buildings. And I’m going to begin by telling you about a story I first read when a child. It’s called The Little House and it was written in 1942 by Virginia Lee Burton.

It's an American children's picture book

by Virginia Lee Burton. 'The little house’ is built to house a family sometime in the 19th century. The opening pages show the house in each season – spring, summer, autumn, winter – and in daylight and at night under the light of the moon and the stars. It's a happy little house, but as the years pass, the lights of the distant city approach and the traffic on the road begins to grow, until the house itself is surrounded by apartment blocks that grow taller and taller until the little house can no longer see the sun or the moon and stars and no longer registers the changes in the seasons. It becomes dilapidated and sad, but is saved from demolition when the greatgranddaughter of the man who built it discovers it and has it moved back out into the country, where it is placed once more on a hilltop among apple trees and is happy once more. It's a very simple tale, but it made a huge impact on me as a four-year-old.

Just a children’s book – the first book I took out from the Oamaru Public Library.

When I was four my father took me to the library and said I must always take two books that had numbers on the spines, and two that didn’t. This book was one that didn’t and it had a profound effect on me – as good children’s stories always do.

In a few carefully crafted words, it contributed to my aesthetic education. What did I learn from it? Well first, it planted a

A little Akaroa house, happy where it sits in a town that has been largely protected from unwise, out-of-scale development.

notion of beauty. I loved this book and its illustrations – in particular, that image of the little house on its hill in spring, among apple trees in blossom. I learned from it that the perfect building exists in proportion to its surroundings. It does not try to dominate, but exists alongside trees and hills, amid the natural world. It is made by human hands to combine beauty and purpose.

I learned too that buildings, like us, exist in time. Seasons pass, history happens.

Season follows season, year follows year yet there is an overarching circularity to things, a conviction that becomes clearer the older I become. And I learned that buildings have personality: like humans they convey feeling.

They are repositories of stories, they have a narrative, they express human values.

This book was not of course, the only contributor to my aesthetic education. We absorb lessons from many sources. From our homes, for instance. I was brought up in an old house, an Edwardian villa. If you peeled away the paper, you found layers underneath, right down to newspapers at the bottom with pictures of women in funny dresses.

I learned from my home that buildings contain history, they are artefacts.

I learned about buildings too by building huts – endless huts everywhere – in the garden, in the gully at my aunt’s place,

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everywhere. That taught me some basic principles of design – what made something stand up, what felt good to be in, and in particular that wonderful feeling of freedom that came with being in your own purposebuilt little space, far away from grown-ups. A hut was a place where you could be completely yourself.

The education continued in a wider field too. I learned from the town I grew up in, as you will have learned from the towns where you were raised: in my case it was Oamaru.

What luck! Every day I passed amazing buildings, beautiful buildings: banks that looked like the Greek temples in my encyclopaedia, a post office with a tower that looked as grand as a castle. And in adulthood there was travel: seeing the structures humans had made elsewhere, in different landscapes: villages perched on mountain tops. Enormous palaces filled with mirrors and gilding. Tiny chapels, city streets. It’s a lifetime of learning and we all experience it in our different ways.

And then something cataclysmic happens and a whole other learning begins.

I think we have been enormously privileged to live right here, right now, to go through a major earthquake. I don’t want to sound upbeat here and Pollyanna: the past two years have been dreadful. I know that: terrifying, exhausting, appalling seeing or reading about the experiences of people in this region – but nevertheless it has been an enriching experience I think.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time in other places over the past couple of years.

Dunedin, Auckland, London, Strasbourg – and those places were lovely. Auckland for example, where we lived for two months in the winter. It was beautiful. It was warm, it was relaxed, we went to the movies at the Civic with all that amazing plaster decoration, we sat in cafes with high brick walls – just as we used to here and it was fantastic. But to be honest, it didn’t feel quite grown-up; in Auckland in the daily paper, they were bothered about political donations, house prices, a gruesome murder.

I loved it – but I was glad to get back here. Back to the stories, to the sheer driving narrative of this place, the intense drama of living here, the stories that people tell you, the astonishing things they do and say, all the time.

A friend whom I interviewed for The Quake Year called it ‘uncovering’. The quake and the months that have followed she said, had ‘uncovered her.’ The truth, the reality of who she was, what she valued, how she felt about her family, her home, herself – became apparent. The thing I found most interesting in talking to people for that book was their directness. There was a kind of openness: no pretence, no affectation.

You sense this uncovered reality in yourself, and you sense it in other people: people you know well who do the most extraordinary things, exhibit the most unexpected qualities of courage or determination. This poem comes from a book, The Broken Book, in which I reflect on my own and others’ experiences in the earthquakes.

Lipstick Marge ran out in her pyjamas. But that’s no way to end: crumpled in faded pastel, barefoot, pinned to the earth by the clothesline’s scrawny cuddle.

She climbs back into the shaky dark, finds her fluffy jersey, the one everyone says brings out the blue in her eyes. Her fine wool trousers.

Italian leather shoes.

And lipstick.

A dash of crimson.

Thick enough to leave its mark on any saviour, should one come knocking, kissing her awake, in her tomb of shattered glass.

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This process of uncovering extends beyond us, beyond the personal. It is apparent too in the buildings which surround us. When the walls crack and fall away in our homes we see the reality of their structure.

City buildings we thought strong and grand turn out to be frail things, badly built. The truth of our environment becomes apparent.

A couple of weeks ago I was standing outside Alice’s. There was that expanse of gravel, and a huge nor’-west arch overhead and I thought for the first time how very flat the landscape was. I mean, I knew it was flat, I knew the city had been built on a vast plain, but suddenly there were no buildings to give the illusion of height and contour. The Port Hills were very visible – like the walls to a big bare room. And the old Maori myth that the plains had been raked flat seemed utterly believable in the way myths often do. I drove out to Brighton that afternoon to get my sewing machine fixed and drove back into the city along a road that was so very clearly a river bed, through suburbs that were so evidently flax swamp. The truth of this place had been uncovered.

The other thing that has been uncovered is more difficult to describe: it’s that deep divide we also learned about back in childhood, on the primary school playground: between the tough kids who got what they wanted by ganging up and brute force and the arty kids who had to figure out other ways of surviving. We’ve all grown up now. The tough kids are the old dunga brigade, pragmatists who seem almost gleeful in destruction, staging lotteries to see who will press the button, indifferent to history, concerned only with what’s economic, what’s practical with no mention of beauty, and they operate – in fact create – a political environment that defers to ‘market forces’, though in practice from what I’ve seen, it seems to be private homeowners who have to deal with that, while at the centre in the CBD the ‘market’ has been displaced by a political system that is more unashamedly hierarchical, more driven by direct government intervention, than any in our history. Personally, I don’t understand why it is necessary to have someone – anyone at all – operating with powers of veto two years after the quake. We’re not in a state of emergency any longer: surely, we are in a state of steady-as-she-goes rebuilding.

Surely, powers of veto should be redundant by now in the interests of proper, open debate.

It is an aesthetic and political divide, and it will find its expression in buildings and design, as political realities always do. Think of the Square for example, the centre of the

city. Once, the cathedral was the tallest The dominance of Christchurch's Cathedral at the centre of the city in years past made a statement about the values that guided the city’s th development until the second half of the 20 century.

building, just as cathedrals are in other cities.

In Florence, for example, where it is illegal to build higher than Duomo – not just for aesthetic reasons but because that deference reflects an ongoing social truth: that the church is still a dominant force in Italy.

Christchurch’s cathedral used to be surrounded by major civic forces: the Press building stood at one shoulder, the MOW building on the other. In the thirties the cinemas arrived, that dazzling new technology that was housed in splendid fake palaces of plaster and brick. But the cathedral remained dominant, the tallest

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building until the late 20th century when religion went into decline. So what came to dominate the Square then? Bank buildings, insurance offices, the branch offices of the international corporations who now dominate our world.

And now something new is to be built there and we have a blueprint, a map of the CBD’s redevelopment. Now, I like maps. I like old maps of New Zealand settlements in particular: they’re so hopeful. So optimistic!

Okarito with a reserve set aside for a university, Birdlings Flat with a stretch marked ‘Promenade’, and my personal favourite, the map of Wellington set as a grid on the flat land at Petone, within four city walls, a fort at each corner, and down by the waterfront the ‘Presidential Palace’. All so Mosquito Coast, so rakishly South American.

I watched this new map, the blueprint for Christchurch’s CBD, with total fascination.

The sun rose over dark hills, a couple pedalled past on a tandem, and in three and a half minutes of upbeat music, the map delivered an invitation – not aimed at me, I suspect, but at overseas investors – to become ‘part of this unparalleled opportunity to inspire the world’. I watched the launch in Auckland and to be honest, I don’t think the world was taking much notice: the blueprint didn’t even make the front page of the Herald in the morning – too many good murders and political donation scandals to discuss probably. It occupied a few paragraphs on page four.

But I loved it as I love all these maps for NZ settlements for its optimism and for the way in which it reflects so very accurately, as maps always do, the values and beliefs of its creators, and the mood of this era, in this country.

There is for instance that large blue rectangle reaching over three city blocks between Hereford and Tuam Streets, from Madras to Barbadoes. The stadium. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. Something that belongs to this period at the start of the 21st century.

The building, the whole concept of a stadium, has its origins in Greece, as so much of our built environment in the western world does. Those banks in Oamaru, for example, which were built in a style designed to broadcast stability in unstable times when banks went bust with monotonous regularity.

The stadium as an architectural form took shape for the Olympics when that consisted only of a single running race, along a track measuring 600 human feet long – 180 metres – a length called a stadion. The form was then developed by the Romans, dedicated to keeping the restive poor diverted with handouts of bread and bloody circuses, then ceased to be built altogether when Christianity took over and chariot races and all that naughty entertainment was banned.

Cathedrals took their place as the largest buildings in any city, demonstrating by their sheer scale, their height, their location, the great power of the church and its centrality to human life. Sports and races were consigned to the outer limits, to fields or on occasion to the town square – like the Palio which still takes place in the centre of Siena.

Stadiums on the Greek model were not built again until the end of the 19th century, to house the masses of industrial cities, the restive men who must be kept diverted – bread and circuses again – by sport.

Lansdowne Road in 1872, Stamford Bridge 1877, Yankee Stadium 1931.

Me – with my Little House values – I’m a bit mistrustful of stadiums: they’re too big, they foster tribalism, the loss of any sensation of individuality. It’s all swept up in a place designed for the howl and the roar. They’re male places. Good for marshalling sides in this substitute for war, a controlled conflict with simple rules: two teams, win/lose. And war itself is not far away: the obvious example is Berlin’s vast stadium, built by the Nazis for the Olympic Games of 1936 and, with no adaptation whatever, the perfect venue for those vast rallies, filmed with such power by Leni Riefenstahl in her Triumph of the Will, where the forces are mustered, the flags fly, the men roar in approbation as the leader, in that incantatory style that mesmerised a whole nation, spoke the poetry of blood and land and the fatherland.

Today, in the 21st century, stadiums are massive swollen structures: North Korea has one that seats 150,000, Salt Lake City – 120,000, Melbourne Cricket Ground – 100,000 – and they’re hugely expensive. The MetLife stadium in New York opened in 2008 cost $1.6 billion, Wembley Stadium rebuilt in 2007 and seating 90,000 cost $1.25 billion.

New Zealand’s stadiums are smaller but relative to the size of the population, they

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exhibit exactly this quality of excess: the large scale relative to their surroundings, the reckless expense. In Dunedin, for example, a small cabal of men have left their mark on the cityscape: their stadium is the first thing you see as you arrive from the north, it dominates university, hospital, the commercial centre. It makes no sense at all economically, of course, blowing out on the budget for construction, occupied only 35 days of 365, depriving other projects of funding, plunging the entire city into financial difficulties.

But like other stadiums it demonstrates in its sheer scale the power of corporatised, commercialised sport: that world where teams are highly paid entertainers, wearing uniforms sponsored by multinational companies with greater turnover than most nation states, playing in structures whose names change as fast as their owners can buy and sell. I suspect the vogue for the stadium hints at some underlying force, some expression of the zeitgeist, that it is something to do with a gathering sense of unrest as vast numbers of young males all over the world are disenfranchised, without the stabilising influences of work and their own home and family. In China, for example, by 2020, there will be 30 million more young Chinese men than women. That’s a lot of energy to contain. Once the restless young males could have been sent off to distant colonies, or when they began to talk of revolution, to the trenches in France, where the herd was culled as efficiently as a farmer getting rid of the young steers before they became too hard to handle. Now it’s a matter of keeping them diverted, and as the Romans understood, one way is spectacle, the tribal roar in the stadium.

It will be interesting to see how Christchurch’s stadium develops. Will the men who are driving the redevelopment follow Dunedin with something modern and massive – maybe contemporary, maybe James Carr’s steam punk version with battlements – but in any case, whatever its style, highly profitable for its builders, while in the long term diverting funds from other more socially accessible functions? Economically and socially useless, given the dwindling audience for rugby. A vast arena that will house 30,000 for the occasional game – while public swimming pools cannot cope with demand and children are turned away

and deprived of their recreation. Libraries attract more users in a month than a stadium will attract in a year. (Christchurch’s central library pre quake, for example, made six million issues per annum.)

On the map of the proposed stadium there are a couple of little nicks on the rectangle. There’s one that isn’t visible but it does exist: it is the Edwardian building on Madras Street owned by NG – and if ever you wanted a perfect image to convey the divide between the pragmatic old dunga team and the arty team, the one that has poets and artists and designers in its ranks – it is that conjunction: that old and finely proportioned building, which survived the quake unharmed and houses a clothing designer – one of NZ’s best – and an art gallery, being threatened with demolition to make way for rugby corp.

It’s difficult to visualise of course because the map, the blueprint, was from the air. We flew about above the city like futuristic visitors, zooming from street to street. The scale of the building of the stadium from street level, as we’ll actually live with it, is obscured. But think of the Cake Tin, the Dunedin stadium, set down by Latimer Square: it will dwarf everything, a great wall dominating the much-touted Green Frame – which isn’t when you look more closely at the map all that green, in fact. It is dotted with little squares and rectangles which in ten years time are designed for commercial and residential development. So this blueprint is no different to those 19th century maps that promised land-hungry paupers in England an acre of farmland and a sturdy cottage, when the reality was towering bush, pakihi and starvation. ‘106,000 submissions were received,’ says that jaunty voice as the couple on the tandem pedal through the park.

‘And here is the healthy green result.’

Well, no, not exactly.

Mass demolition, forced land acquisition, vast concrete and glass malls framed by a temporary land bank were not, I think, what those submissions had in mind. Certainly not what I, or anyone I know who took the trouble to make a submission, had in mind. To say so is simply cynical sugar-coating. I doubt, for instance, that a single submission suggested a convention centre covering several city blocks. Now there’s something to ‘inspire the world’, purpose built in an era when the convention market is dwindling following

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economic recession, the loss of the cheap airfare, the development of increasingly sophisticated communication technology that makes sitting on a jet for 20 hours redundant, not to mention vigorous competition from cities like Melbourne, Singapore, Paris with their attractions of art, culture, shopping, fantastic food.

What will bring conventioneers to this massive new centre? What has persuaded convention organisers in the past to book into New Zealand? It’s interesting to look at the report prepared back in the halcyon days of conventioneering, pre-2008, for the Auckland convention centre: the major drawcard evidently was our ‘100% NZ pure’ brand – and we all know what has happened to that: we have the Prime Minister’s word, the Minister of Tourism’s word – that that brand is worthless, a con.

The convention centre, the stadium, the anchor projects for this little southern city: in the upper left hand corner of the rectangle occupied by the stadium there’s a tiny nick.

It’s the site of the temporary cathedral. And there you have another perfect and unmistakable metaphor. The tiny cardboard structure for the old faith tucked up against the massive concrete flanks of the new.

The debate concerning the cathedral is fascinating: save, repair, demolish, rebuild?

The sides in the debate seem to occupy different territory: I have read the report by the Bishop’s study tour to cathedrals around the world. She regards them as a cleric should: as places for the communion of the faithful. For others, the debate seems to be more concerned with aesthetics or civic history or even tourism.

For me, as a writer, it is the poetry of ruins. I love that beauty for which we don’t have a precise word – though the Japanese do. They call it ‘wabi’ the beauty of the imperfect, the broken. A cracked cup for example, can be ‘wabi’.

Ruined buildings have enormous power: like the ruined building at the centre of the Hiroshima Peace Park, the epicentre of the atomic explosion. There are flower beds and seats, but it is the burned out twisted remains of the building that are most powerful. It is not an especially remarkable building – it began life as a prefectural Trade Hall designed in 1915 to showcase the products of the city.

Armaments, as it happened, for that was

Hiroshima’s speciality.

The appalling weaponry that was used against New Zealanders and Australians with such devastating effect only a few decades later.

But in its ruined state, that building takes on a greater majesty, a great nobility.

To me, Christchurch’s Anglican cathedral in its ruined state has taken on a greater spiritual significance than any repairs could ever give it.

Christchurch's other ruined cathedral. Could it inspire a Wordsworth of the future?

It stands there at the heart of the city, expressing a profound truth about human life and our vulnerability before nature. For me, the ruins are the perfect memorial: they have scale, they hold the story, a narrative about this city, they offer beauty, wabi, proportion, a place of meditation for those wanting to remember the people who died, crushed beneath great slabs of concrete in a building nearby that also expressed the values of its builders and engineers, flawed and careless and profit driven.

There’s a fine tradition of poets finding the beauty in a ruined cathedral. There was that poem we studied at school. Wordsworth, that great romantic, seated on the banks of the Wye above the ruins of Tintern Abbey, that great monastic foundation that for four centuries had dominated the region, until a change in politics – that ultimate pragmatist, Henry VIII – handed it over to one of his henchmen, the Earl of Worcester, a thug, indifferent to beauty, who simply saw profit: tore off the roof for the lead, left it to crumble.

Wordsworth was prompted by the ruins and the valley round it to meditate on sensations Felt in the blood and felt along the heart…

As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.

Seated there, above the ruins he thinks about human existence and how it passes until with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony,

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and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

son who had been there only minutes before the quake, how he was coming down in the lift and the doors opened at one floor and he looked out and saw all these young people and he thought, isn’t that nice, they’re here studying in Christchurch. Then the doors closed and he carried down to the ground floor and out, while they remained. It’s about buildings the poetry of cities.

The poem that is like a city This poem is like a city. It is full of words.

Doing words. And Being words. And words that compare one thing to another thing and words that hold everything together.

This poem has a high rise at its centre with a view across the plains to the hills.

It has a CBD and CEOs and a thousand acronyms whirring like wheels. This poem is going places. It also has small prepositions where people pause, drink coffee and read the paper. They go to and from and sit before and behind.

They walk across the park, crunching like gerunds on white gravel while watching dogs splashing. Ducks quack and rise. Like inflections? At the end of phrases? The way we do here? This poem is a crowded street where words clatter in several languages and every thing you see or touch has many names.

This poem is written in the gold leaf of faith and in the red capitals of SALE and BUY NOW and all the people walk among the words as if they were trees and ornament and would never fall off the edges of their white page.

That’s what a ruined cathedral can do.

So – now I’m going to finish with a poem. It’s about the city and the quake from The Broken Book. I read it a few months ago in Wanaka and a woman there, an environmental scientist, told me a word: a new word, coined by an Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. He was trying to find a work to describe the feelings of people whose landscape has been devastated by natural or human causes. He invented it to describe the feelings of people in the Hunter Valley whose environment had been destroyed to make way for dams and opencast mining, though it could apply just as well to the feelings of the people on Tuvalu whose islands are sinking with global warming, or the Maori here in Akaroa in the 19th century as they witnessed their hills and food places put to the torch.

It’s ‘solastalgia’. It’s the longing you feel for a landscape that has gone. It’s a feeling made up of loss, grief, anger, powerlessness – and those are the feelings that many of us have witnessing the destruction of our own homes, or places that we have loved, the cinema we used to go to, the shops we visited.

It is the feeling that many of us have who are living through this particular episode in the long history of this region. Those of us who are not, and never will be, members of the old dunga brigade.

I’m going to read about two cities: the phantom one that still exists in the mind’s eye, though it is fading. And the current one.

The poem is about the CTV building and the young people who died there learning another language. A friend told me about her

This poem jolts at the caesura and all the words slide sideways, slip from the beam in dusty slabs. The children who were learning how to say hullo tap good bye good bye in all their voices, reaching in the dark for the mother tongue. There is no word in English for this. No word in any city.

This poem is palimpsest, scraped clean each morning and dumped in the harbour. But at night it rises.

The moon buttons back the dark on

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tower block, mall and steeple. Cars boom hollow on a phantom avenue, cups fill with froth and nothing and an empty bus wheezes up Colombo Street. Stops for the children who perch, waiting like similes for chatter and flight, tapping their abbreviations.

Ths pm is lk a brkn cty all its wds r smshd to syllbls.

Each syllbl a brck.

[Thanks to Lisa Potts who kindly transcribed Fiona’s talk so it could be included in this Newsletter.]

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