Time of the phoenix...

Yesterday I drove round the harbour, as I usually do on Saturday mornings, to the Lyttelton Farmers' Market. After the February quake the market ceased briefly and then decamped to Mt Pleasant Community Centre. Within a month it was back in Lyttelton, the stall holders bravely setting up, even though the crowd that usually throngs the Saturday market was much diminished. One lady who sells beautiful summer produce - tomatoes, peppers, aubergines etc - told me how nervous she was about coming through the Lyttelton tunnel. I'm not surprised given that the epicentre of the quake was very close and that the tunnel itself, which I use frequently, is looking sad and poorly maintained.


But yesterday, for the first time, I sensed a change in mood. Little roadside stalls were popping up along Oxford Street. There were more people. They were talking not so much about the devastation as about the future. Conversations have turned to what could be. It seems that, as more and more historic buildings are demolished in London Street and Norwich Quay, the empty blocks - the spaces - are enabling new visions to emerge. I too feel this confidence. I know the residents of Lyttelton are strong enough, and sufficiently determined, to drive a rebuild that will meet their needs as a community.


One of the things that has concerned me, especially in the city, is that I will see empty spaces and wonder 'what was there?' - even in a city I know so well. However yesterday I noticed something different about the spaces. That you can look through. That they open up unexpected vistas. Obvious, yet unanticipated and strangely liberating. As though we need to be reminded that the absence of a building is a space and an opportunity. This parallels the many conversations I've had with friends and acquaintances about the post-quake, changed relationship with possessions. Items that we have treasured and lost seem unimportant in wider scheme of things. 'Stuff' is just stuff - and in times of emergency, a potential encumbrance. Perhaps we all feel lightened (literally and figuratively). Never could I, as someone who treasures objects and buildings with history and personal import, have imagined this possibility. It has taken a seismic shake to realign my/our relationship with the man-made environment.

Sad scenes in Lyttelton...

Some of the buildings that help define Lyttelton township have been damaged. No word as to whether The Empire and the Harbourlight can be saved. The demolition (?) teams were hard at work today (Sunday) while a good chunk of London Street remained cordoned off.

Empire Hotel, London Street - cracked facade

Empire Hotel

Looking down London Street to the Harbourlight

Shoring up the Harbourlight

Cracking visible

More trouble along Oxford Street

Reading the landscape #1

I've often wondered just how much of Lyttelton Harbour was covered in bush, pre-settlement. It's relatively easy to visualise the bush cover in Akaroa harbour or in the eastern peninsula bays. There are still the dead trunks of a ghost forest to remind us. But Lyttelton, with its rock-hard clay pans? Was there scrubby bush to the water? Larger, more luxuriant cover in the damp gullies? What did it look like? sound like, smell like? Is the planting of Otamahua/Quail Island a planting or a re-planting? I would like to know what a landscape we regard as 'iconic' looked like before human presence.

Over the hill...

In the South Island you hear the term ‘over the hill’ used in a variety of locations and to describe some significantly different ‘hills’. West Coasters talk about going ‘over the hill’ to Christchurch. Here the ‘hill’ refers to the Southern Alps. Residents of Golden Bay travel ‘over the [Takaka] hill’ to Motueka and Nelson. In this case the hill is the ‘marble mountain’, geologically ancient, massively solid.

In June 2003 I moved ‘over the hill’ from suburban Christchurch to live in Governors Bay at the head of Lyttelton Harbour. By comparison with the Southern Alps and the Takaka Hill, the Port Hills, which separate the city of Christchurch from Lyttelton Harbour and Banks Peninsula, are insignificant in size. Fifteen minutes in a car will take you from Governors Bay to the top end of Colombo Street. Yet there is something more than time and relative size involved here. The Port Hills form a barrier between two very different environments and two very different worlds and ways of living. The boundary/barrier is physical but it is also psychological - a reluctance to return to the ‘car-infested swamp’ as Hugh Wilson puts it. One’s focus and allegiance turn away from the city and towards the Peninsula.

Banks Peninsula is a beacon. In the flat city of Christchurch on the flat Canterbury Plains, the Port Hills provide visual relief and a welcome reference point. Drive south, west or north out of Christchurch for the day and the Peninsula beckons on the return journey. Fly south from Wellington or north from Dunedin and a first sighting of the Peninsula signals that one is nearly home. Stand on the beach at Amberley and Banks Peninsula hovers mistily above the sea to the south, visual proof of the ‘island’ of Captain Cook’s observation in 1770.

Cook was mistaken – what he was seeing from 10 miles offshore was a peninsula and not an island. But he was also correct. For most of its geological life - around 15 million or so years - Banks Peninsula was an island, formed in violent volcanic eruptions and subsequent erosion that eventually formed the craters of Lyttelton and Akaroa Harbours. This outlier was only linked to the South Island mainland about 20,000 years ago as debris from the Southern Alps washed and blew across the Canterbury Plains. As Gordon Ogilvie points out, the first Europeans were confronted by swamps, lagoons and streams which bisected the landward flank of the Peninsula, accentuating its isolation. Even today, despite the relative accessibility of Banks Peninsula, something of this ‘island’ feeling remains, in its geography and in the minds and attitudes of its inhabitants.