Hu Weiyi, 2021, The Dust Now Inhaled Was Once A House
Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery rarely disappoints. It shows contemporary Chinese work of exceptional quality. I have written about this elsewhere. But I was startled again by the quality of the craft, by the formidable layers of meaning and by the absolute self-confidence of the expression. No self-censorship. None. Some of the work comes from Chinese artists working in Australia, but most of it comes from mainland China. A reminder once more that the world as constructed by the media is an imperfect representation of reality.
I met my friend below somewhere near the entrance as inches of rain fell on Chippendale. The three works we are looking at were all to some degree show-stoppers. On the left looking like sheets of Pantone colours was I think ‘Library’ or possibly and more interestingly ‘Bibliography’. [It’s actually called ‘Bibliotheque’. That could make me half right or twice right. Okay … half right, or less.] On the right is a painting of a bedraggled horse being lowered from a ship. During the First World War, China sent thousands of horses in freight ships to support the Allied war effort. These horses have apparently been a popular subject in Chinese art and are usually portrayed in warrior-like poses, rearing and snorting, desperate to launch into the fray. This artist took an alternative view. In the middle is a very precise model (at 1:20) of the US Capitol building made from wood by 20 artisans over 8 months. Tilting. Unstable. ‘Freedom’, the statue on top, looks remarkably like a Buddhist bodhisattva. I had never noticed that before.
But the photo has four parts and the not least wonderful is the attendant. I asked if I could take his photo just there. We looked at the set-up together and he could see what I meant. I took the photo and he got his copy. But it struck me that in a gallery how much the people looking, the spectators, become the spectacle. I thought I’d take photos of the works as I, and others, saw them. Including the others.
The exhibition itself is founded on a killer idea.
A BLUEPRINT FOR RUINS
REVERBERATING WITH THE SHADOWS OF THE DISPOSSESSED WITHIN CHINA’S URBAN METAMORPHOSIS.
Beneath the glossy surface of progress lurks a simmering undercurrent of violence. Cities tear themselves apart to make way for towering skyscrapers and gleaming high-rises. However, in this bright new world, one question arises: where have all the people gone? Streets devoid of life and vacant apartment blocks stand as haunting reminders of an abandoned dream. Like solemn tombs from a long-lost civilisation, these forgotten monuments silently bear witness to the cost of rapid urbanisation, where each new creation necessitates the destruction of another.
Anyone who has seen contemporary Chinese cities will know what that’s about. It is both a foreign experience and an experience of foreign-ness to be looking at the endless rows of tower blocks (built at least partly with Australian iron ore, the foundation of our economy) some of which are lived in, but the conspicuous feature is how many aren’t. The theory? We build housing to drive the economy to provide jobs to keep spending ticking over to sustain the economy to build more housing to … I thought of this as an ouroboros, the very ancient idea of a serpent consuming its tail often used to suggest the ‘nothing ever really new-ness’ of life. But it’s not like that. There is no metaphysical or cultural edge. This is an economic adventure, and the dialectics of its materialism will be resolved. An end point will be reached. Inevitably.
But that’s all by the way.
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Zhou Dong, 2018-19, Red Marginal
Drawing Architecture Studio, 2019, Analogous City for Art
A group of architects using their digital engineering drawing software to have fun.
Two bits ofChen Wei, 2015, Drunken Dance Hall
Empty dance hall, slightly vertiginous mirrored entry, collapsed mirror balls, a pole dancer’s pole, a photo of a magician in his box impaled by swords, empty bar, empty bottles, a coat check with a leather jacket chained to the rack … this was the party piece.
Missed the tag. But you get the idea: lost items, in the broadest sense.
She’s looking at this. Li Lang, 2019, A Long Day of A Certain Year. Six Diaries Monday – Saturday, 2019
Six screens with slides constantly flicking through them, with voices over apparently reading from their diaries, with sub-titles in both Mandarin and exactly rendered English translation (which made them look, and sound, odd). The topics are mostly about domestic transitions, and just how you live and how you can live in different environments. Utterly absorbing.
Bai Yilou, 2011, Illumination. 905 aged rustic oil lamps.
Tu Wei-Cheng, 2003, Bu Num Civilisation Revealed
Looking at first glance like ancient Sumerian tiled masonry, looking closer you can see the decoration on the stones: computer parts, mice (mouses?), people at work in an office setting and so on.
Missed the tag and wasn’t overwhelmed by the two pieces but pleased that the attendant agreed to smile at me in the mirror. She took her copy too. An art event.
He Chi, 2019, Goodle
We are looking at 1000 mis-fired porcelain cups, quite a puzzle to look at. They are sitting above a mirrored surface and it appears that what you’re looking at is identical to the reflection. It takes a moment or two to realise that they are doubled, similar cups fused together around their lips, top to bottom. Similar, but none of the pieces is the same. They were originally fired hundreds of years ago, discarded and buried. He Chi has somehow unearthed them and turned them into this display of transformation, common utensils become something quite different.
He Chi made up a name, ‘Goodle’, for this sort of failed porcelain. The characters for the rhyming sounds ‘gu’ and ‘du’ conform to the Chinese conventions for rare and precious words with an added flourish of English-ity. ‘Goodle’, he says somewhat ambitiously but why not, is a symbol for Independence, Freedom, Equality, Innocence, Kindness, Beauty, Happiness, Civilisation and Love.
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He Yunchang, 2009, When Pigs Can Climb Trees
There is a Chinese saying: ‘Men are reliable when pigs can climb trees’. And here pigs are cavorting most gaily in the branches of a bronze tree. No one in the picture but it was a wonderful piece for a final note.
We have for some time now been concerned about the fate of New Zealand’s National Dish, the cheese scone. The Cheese Scone has been one of the drawcards which has brought us back so many times over 30 years. Like this …
… and this one isn’t even mine. I had to ask the woman sitting next to me if I could take a photo of hers because it was the last one available that day at Floriditis (Cuba St, Wellington; very reliable for a bit of something during the course of the day.)
It’s actually cheese and parsley but it’s got it all. Good size. The cheese garnish is browned. Excellent texture, quite open and fluffy, light, hasn’t been handled too much in the making, cut rather than hand-shaped. Prospectively lashings of butter. THAT is what we’re talking about. THAT.
Two years ago I expressed my concern in another blog about what I can only call the hipsterisation of the NZ bakery offering. There we were in C1, Christchurch’s Home of Cool, looking at a cabinet which included lamingtons w/- white chocolate, coconut and [I quote] ‘a hypodermic berry syringe’. Below the Banoffie Pies and the Custard Squares and to the right of the Caramel Walnut Brownies and the Marshmallow Caramel Slice were ‘Hemp Raw Balls, w/- walnuts, almonds, linseeds [sic], sunflower seeds, dates, apricots and prunes dipped in vegan chocolate (🤔), pumpkin seeds, cranberries and Kako Samoa.’ Good I’m sure, even remarkable, but NOT the cheese scone.
However, we think the cultural worm may have turned. It’s quite possible we were wrong in the first place and the locals were just hiding them from us. Graham and Barbara will remember that we took them on an excursion to find the best Cheese Scone in the North Island, and it was a task. We found some monsters, but size while useful is not everything. There was some suggestion that they were trying just too hard. But this investigation entailed effort. You should just be able to breeze into a coffee shop or a bakery — just anywhere really — and, bang, there they are, smiling up at you, fresh and inviting consumption.
Whether things have changed or whether it was just happenstance, we think things Cheese Scone-wise may be on the up, maybe scone-wise in general.
Here are some options, for example, lined up at The Record Keeper (and yes they sell records as well as sustenance) in Geraldine. [And a big Hi to Ricky and Marty.]
From the right: the parmesan cheese and rocket scone, the date scone, the Cheese Scone. Exemplary.
But this must become a story of a return visit to Union Co. of Port Chalmers, a cute — can I say ‘cute’, well… about anything really in NZ? In context it sounds like an aspersion is being cast and that’s my furtherest intention. I withdraw. Port Chalmers, a picturesque ville 14 kms along the side of the Otago Harbour from Dunedin where things are unloaded from ships and moved and stored with a tidiness bordering on the anally retentive.
This is some of Port Chalmers. Find the roundabout with the big white building. (Activities are built into this blog. Also explore: ‘historic’, ‘library’, ‘formerly Town Hall’.) Diagonally opposite is a red roof and just to its left is a reddish triangle. Its triangular shape is just one of the endearing features of the Union Co. (Espresso and Baked Goods).
Look at this for a spread. From the top: the Date Scone, warmed sliced buttered; then I’ve forgotten how it was named here [revision 17/4, with the help of Pete Cole, the baker. It is an apricot fruit slice with what were probably Moorpark apricots. They usually get their fruit from the Dunedin Farmers’ Market]; spinach and fetta roll w/- leaf salad; and the Pièce De Résistance, a sausage roll which is a (delicious) sausage wrapped in a roll of pastry, served w/- homemade chutney, that is to say — an actual SAUSAGE ROLL. How elemental. How fundamental.
They also serve a very fine version of The Cheese Scone.
It’s a destination not a cafe. Michelin has no award sufficient.
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Elsewhere. … Just say no.
‘Bench with a great view’
As long as you like hills, Dunedin is a great place for walks. (It still has the Guinness record for the steepest street in the world.**)
We have a favourite which includes a climb up to Royal Terrace for a tour of the grand houses (see eg at right) and subsequent immersion in the deep greenery of the Town Belt.
In the course of this process recently, something new caught our eye.
On Google Maps: you can see the degree of magnification, quite low. Not down to blocks and street numbers. ‘Bench with a great view’! Unusual, possibly — who could say? — unique. Or … a deadpan Kiwi joke? That would make sense.
This is the bench.
This is the view.
Mmm … yeah. Well not really. Not in this context. Not in this hyper-competitive field. I’m leaning towards the joke.
Same walk, later. B. Findlay correctly identified this as being down the end of Lonely Street.
[** Footnote: Baldwin Street, 1: 2.86. A town in Wales laid claim to the title in 2019 but Dunedin courageously fought back. The decision to reinstate the previous record holder was reached in 2020 following the completion of an extensive review of an appeal brought by representatives of Baldwin Street.]
And just incidentally …
The backyard of Dunedin’s Otago Boys High. Just boys. Doing boy-type things. NZ stuck with gender-segregated secondary schools longer than Australia but now, of the country’s 2528 schools, 2410 are co-ed. Nonetheless those 108 segregated schools enrol 92,000 students. The substantial buildings? The splendid grounds? Dunedin was settled/ occupied by Scots who have long believed in a) well set up and lasting public buildings (preferably stone), and b) education. The city’s University of Otago was established in 1859, the first in the country, still with a strong reputation and a marked impact on the vitality of its host city.
This service may be of assistance to some readers.
Dunedin again. George St, the main commercial street, is being pedestrianised? beautified? Tarted up anyway. But first they have to catch these creatures. I don’t know whether they cook them or what.
Christchurch: Recovering
We have been following life in Christchurch since the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. (See here and here and here for example.) And, unsurprisingly, it has been a slow and difficult recovery. As indicated at left, buildings are still coming down. The distraction this time was bushfires, if not as we know them, brushfires maybe, in the Port Hills.
But the city itself seemed to have breathed a huge sigh of relief since our visit two years ago. It would certainly be that many of the ubiquitous building sites had finished their work. The center of the city looked a bit like that. The shipping container shopping centre has been moved on for example. And the tourists seem to have returned.
Only tourists would take the tram. But, route substantially extended; carriage full.
Taken from almost the same position in High Street outside the coffee palace C1: in 2008, 2012, 2024. The corgis — and the seat for that matter — have gone, but otherwise the restitution is near complete.
20222024
Captain Scott may have been tampered with but in quite a congenial and impermanent way.
We do repeat ourselves.
Major Hornbrook’s Track, Port Hills. 2022, and 2024. Drier. Warmer.
Attempts to take photos of NZ mountains
There’s a lot of art going on currently preparing for an exhibition later in the year. It has a vegetal theme. But it also needs backgrounds, mountains preferred. So we set to to take snaps of mountains and sort of kept failing. These all come from within 100kms of Waiau, an area which both has hills rather than mountains and was very very dry. The green bits you can see are either being irrigated or pine plantations. The Otago, the Canterbury Plain and Marlborough (especially) were in the grip of record-breaking droughts. We were going to climb Mount Isobel at Hanmer Springs but were prohibited from doing so because of the danger of fire. That’s different.
A Lloyd Rees Moment at Kaikoura
One of the pleasures of Kaikoura is this walk around the headland, past the seal colony and the lone pine, on towards the soft hills, each cape and bay with its own special nature.
I climbed up this lump and took the photo below of the next bay, and that’s what it looked like. At this point of the day, evening coming on, they are the colours with the big pads of limestone plumped up below the shallow pools and that interesting set of weedy browns and dark greens.
Lloyd Rees I thought. That’s it! That’s his landscape.
Above, we have left and clockwise, ‘Portrait of Some Rocks’, ‘The Road to Berry’ and ‘The Summit Mt Wellington’. A Lloyd Rees is always worth seeking out.
Pursuing the same colour palette, artiste enjoying landscape.
And just incidentally …
Whoooooosh. Yes. Right. Whoooooosh. What’s next?
The last time we took the waters at Hanmer Springs it was snowing. This time it was hovering round 30. Can I say, it is more pleasant lowering yourself into springs of about 38C when it’s very cold rather than when it is quite hot. However, excitingly, the centrifugal tog dryer was there … except that I now discover they can be found at select locations on the Australian mainland.
Earthquake-proofing Wellington
There was, as usual, plenty of life in Wellington’s streets. These folk were making pom-poms to give away and entertaining passers by with general good cheer. But you might note that Open Happiness Monty’s Cuba Food Market is For Lease. The streetscapes had far more black eyes and missing teeth than in the past. One major reason is the notice behind me. This one.
Prompted by the disaster in Christchurch and the major quake centred just out of Kaikoura (which had an impact on some Wellington buildings), in 2017 the NZ Government decided to review its requirements for earthquake-proofing buildings. For the first time, the new guidelines included buildings with pre-cast concrete floors in the ‘at risk’ category and significantly downgraded their rating. (Earthquakes don’t shake you up and down; they mostly shake you side to side, and that is what buildings need to resist. Flat and very heavy pre-cast concrete will wobble back and forth and then may, as happened in Christchurch, collapse.) The City Council estimates that there are 150 buildings in Wellington with pre-cast floors, including many government buildings and a number of new-ish hospitals just for example.
2019. The Wellington Public Library, ‘the city’s hub’, was the first building closed. Truckloads of books and artefacts were moved elsewhere. You can imagine the scale of the job. And this is how it looks today. Still shuttered and empty five years later.
Then came Wellington’s largest office building, the 17-storey Asteron Centre opposite the railway station. A new building assessment reduced its quake rating by more than two-thirds, prompting another scramble to leave by tenants. Next came the building where the 1000 Education Ministry staff were housed.
The Amora on the waterfront with a commanding view of the harbour from every room has also been closed for five years. It was once our hotel of choice. There are scores of other buildings in a similar state.
The notice above is on this building in Cuba St, heart of lively Wellington. It is immediately below another notice which indicates the building’s heritage status. Once the Wellington Workingmen’s Club, it turns out not to be one building but two, built in 1904 and 1908, the newer one including the baroque arch. I doubt that the millions required for earthquake-proofing will be spent here. Two ideas meeting uncomfortably. As a Councillor recently noted: ‘Heritage listings make buildings almost impossible to tear down, and also impossibly expensive to fix.’
Speaking of which, above is the Town Hall (100m down the street from the library) as it was when it opened in 1904, described by a local realist as ‘a stone and masonry building, on unstable reclaimed land, in a city built on a fault line’. Trouble, or what?
At right, decorated in scaffolding, is how it is today.
This has been going on since 1931 when the 50m clocktower and classically-derived portico were removed after earthquakes near Hawkes Bay. The decorative elements around the roof line were dispensed with in 1942 after further quakes in the Wairarapa.
A report commissioned 30 years later by the Historic Places Trust described it thus: ‘The building in its present state is of dubious merit both historically and architecturally. It has lost the greater part of its original Victorian swagger, pomposity, and grandeur, and become an ill-proportioned mockery of a classical work of architecture.’ No one but builders have been inside since 2013. The current revision, which includes earthquake-proofing will end up costing more than $300 million, a lot of NZ dollars, and an eleven-fold increase on the initial estimate.
This is the sort of thing you have to do.
This building was over the road from our hotel which itself had new triangulating steel trusses in its corridors. But here they’ve chosen to do it to the front wall (that you can see, probably the other three exterior walls as well), that is to attach an entirely new superstructure of what I considered to be massive steel beams designed and fixed to avoid lateral stresses.
In new buildings like the near new Tãkina conference centre (next to our hotel and housing not much more presently than a Marvel comic exhibition and a coffee shop. (Cheese scones: 😕)) the triangulating reinforcement has been integrated into the initial design.
Understandably Mark Dunajtschik who built and developed the Asteron Centre is not pleased. He is quoted as saying, ‘Earthquake engineering is built on so much uncertainty that it makes weather forecasting look good’. He notes the plans for the revision to his building will cost more than the original design and many millions more to realise. ‘The chance of somebody getting killed on the way to this building is vastly greater than their chance of getting killed inside the building. Take the current risk aversion to its logical conclusion and Wellingtonians will soon be living in nuclear fallout shelters.’
Engineering New Zealand says the risk to occupants of a building which doesn’t meet the new requirements is 10 to 25 times that of an equivalent new building that just meets the code. The new building target is around 1 in 1,000,000 chance of death – about the same as a lightning strike. Now that’s risk averse.
Complex these things.
These changes have certainly knocked downtown Wellington around. But cheer up. You can still get meat on fries for $18 at the Cafe Laz.
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Always so much to enjoy in Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud.
Ian Scott, 1967, Mount Sefton Section (‘block’ in Australian English)found in the NZ Portrait Gallery, Wellington
A NASA image of New Zealand’s South Island, Te Waipounamu (‘the place, or waters, of greenstone — NZ jadeite — which can be found all along the beaches of the west coast). Stewart Island, Rakiura, is just visible off the coast to the south. The protrusion lower right is the Otago Peninsula where Dunedin can be found. Christchurch, Hanmer Springs and Kaikoura, which all have their own stories, are hidden by cloud.
It was taken from well above the earth on July 11, 2003. Winter. The Southern Alps are picked out in snow. (And, just by the way, the fault line of the two tectonic plates meeting on the island looks like it has been drawn with a ruler.) In their southern half you can see the lakes — in spots, a shimmering and authentic turquoise — which the snowmelt drains into: Tekapo, Pukaki, Ohau, Wahea, Wanaka, Wakitipu, Te Anau.
Not my photo either. It was taken by Meghan Maloney who loves her country’s landscape with a keen-eyed passion. There was no caption but I think it is Lakes Hooker and Mueller in the Southern Alps near all 3724m. of Aoraki/ Mt Cook. If that’s right it won’t far from Mount Sefton just out of the pic to the left. The painting above is to some degree ironic. Mount Sefton is a loooong way from most places.
Many of these rivers and lakes are remnants of glaciers. Below from McKinnon Pass, is the Clinton Valley, the first full day of the Milford Track. Its classic glacial U-shape is text-book obvious. With an average annual rainfall of more than 7 metres, it generally rains 200 days or so a year here. One of the regular highlights of the walk — along the bottom of one glaciated valley, steeply up over this pass, then down to the base of another one following the Arthur River — is the water cascading down the valley walls.
In summary: mountains, hilly, lots of ups and downs. Everywhere. Expect them to the point of not even thinking about it.
This time we arrived at Frankton airport which services Queenstown, itself built into one wall of Lake Wakatipu with scarcely any flat land, and these days, with endless traffic. The feature of arriving here by plane is that as you land you slide along one side of a mountain range with, first time anyway, the near certainty that at least one wing is going to be removed.
The runway is just to the left of the lump in the mid ground. The Remarkables, the mountains referred to, are in the background.
This was the view from our kitchen window. Island weather.
Just incidentally, for those overwhelmed by Queenstown’s crowds, there is a nice sequestered shingle beach where the peninsula thins out to the left of the pine tree plantation. Swimming isn’t completely implausible.
But the entertainment was climbing (on a domestic scale). At Arrowtown it was a choice of Big Hill or Tobin’s Track. To break ourselves in we went for the latter. Easier.
It turns out there’s more to Arrowtown than the main street of the old town. From where we were standing in this photo we could hear with great clarity the playground noise from the school near the oval. I can report that to get the kids back into class they use music instead of a bell.
At Glenorchy we might have been (and were) walking on the flat but still surrounded by striking mountains.
The first two are sections of the Humboldt Range. The third is the head of Lake Wakatipu and one entry to the Routeburn Track, one of the 10 ‘Great Walks Of New Zealand’. In this case unarguably. The Earnslaw Range is on the right with what I think is The Sugarloaf in the background over modest little Lake Reid, the northern end of which was this day covered in bird life. Covered.
The one really wet day in four weeks we had scheduled for climbing Ben Lomond which looms over Queenstown and offers, on good days, spectacular views. Anyway, we did. You cheat by getting the chair lift up to the gondola and after that there are several hours of unrelenting uphill. (Does ‘unrelenting’ sound better than ‘relentless’? Milder? It is intended to mean — but in a mild way, it’s not Everest — there are NO flat spots or short downhills until you get up as high as you want to go.) Mountain weather.
I’m summarising again: mountains, hilly, lots of ups and downs. Everywhere. Expect them to the point of not even thinking about them.
And then there’s Invercargill.
The Horizontal City
We’d been to Invercargill before. There’s a walk over to the left of the arrowhead called the Tuatapere Hump Ridge that we tried and failed to find interesting. At the time Invercargill too seemed bleak, at 46.5 degrees South somewhere really quite near to the end of the world. It was, and is, windy, cloudy and cold. The average high ranges from 9.5°C to 17.8. The hottest temperature on record is 33°C one day in 1948. It has eight hours of daylight at the winter solstice (you could say 9 to 5) and 16 hours at the height of summer (you could say, a lot). It averages about four hours of sunshine a day and in NZ is out-windied only by Wellington.
In 2010 it featured in the news for the collapse of its sports stadium’s roof under the weight of snowfall.
I like … appreciate … admire this photo for several reasons only one of which is the lowering grey cloud. It’s a Southland photo which belongs to the culture of the Fiordland Big 3. (Strictly not Southland but close enough.) ‘The idea is simple – adults hunt and catch a deer, a pig and a pest. To win, they have to be the heaviest combined weight. Children catch one possum, a hare or a rabbit and one pest.’ It’s the land of the hardy warrior, one might say pictured here amongst, and looking over, the quite spectacular devastation.
But most significantly Invercargill is flat. So flat. So profoundly flat. So stimulatingly flat.
If you go back to the aerial photo above you will note that most of the lower lakes run north-south and drain south. Invercargill (‘Inver’ from the Gaelic for ‘mouth of’; Cargill an early Superintendent of the Otago: 🤔) is on the edge of a large plain of alluvial sands generated by and partly carted there by glaciation. And swamp residue. The Waihopai River strolls in from the the north-east and then just sits there, part of a substantial estuary.
The river.
Below is the road, a sort of causeway across the river and its swamp, connecting the city proper with Otatara and the airport.
Anyway this time I found a lot to like about it and not just the late shadows and long uninterrupted views.
This is a city, in size one-fifth of a Geelong, where apparently there is a market for these shoes.
It is a city where, on a prominent corner of the main drag, the city impact church nestles up against ‘Hemp Health — the natural choice’ and the sex shop (which handily also offers record cleaning).
The main prominent corner (Dee and Tay) features these features. [Footnote: Invercargill street names often tend to stop at just one commonly Scottish syllable. Bond, Leet, Spey, Tyne, Forth, Eye, Tweed, Earn, Jed, Ness, Bute. Ease of pronunciation maybe?]
Bottom left, war memorial in the middle of the roundabout. To its right what was once a bank associated with New South Wales. I liked the patterns its scaffolding made in the late western light. Then above that is the ‘Maori/ Celtic Wall’. The internet has next to nothing to say about that. ‘After first arriving in Southland about 1100 AD the Maori developed a sophisticated culture, the Scottish settlers began to arrive in the mid-1800s. This wall symbolises the merging of these cultures on Southland.’ You could probably do better than that.
And then there’s the XO Church. ‘XO Church was founded more than 50 years ago formerly as Bethel, Cornerstone and now Crossover [XO I guess], and has always had a heart for the city and the nations [sic]. We are a family of Christian believers, who do more than just meet on a Sunday for a service. We are dedicated to Jesus, and the people of this city, and our desire is to help others to reach their full potential, becoming the people they’ve been created to be through relationship.’
One way they do this is by distributing 1160 easter eggs and 1800 hot cross buns, this easter anyway (2024). Their property and their digital presence suggest a very active, young and thriving concern with very smart people running it.
There is some grand architecture which takes you above the first floor.
That’s the Town Hall (and Theatre), a building of some distinction. Below is the First Presbyterian Church which I was going to say seemed, in the correspondence and relationship of its forms, to be influenced by American architecture and not least by Frank Lloyd Wright. And I discover the architect, J. T. Mair who later became the nation’s Government Architect, studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and feel, momentarily, virtuous.
It’s a very fine building. Also peeping above the skyline is the dome of St Mary’s Basilica.
Churches and purveyors of body-building supplements (‘Supp South’) both with fervent adherents, hot old bangers with straight-through exhausts touring up and down the main drag, customers for winkle-picker shoes, huntin shootin and fishin: it’s a place of contrasts.
Elsewhere in the world, Invercargill might be best known, without the knowers actually realising it, for this: ‘The World’s Fastest Indian’.
Bert Munro, an Invercargill native, born and dead, had a lifelong interest in speed. His first motor bike was an early model Indian Scout with a top speed of 55 mph (89 kmh). He immediately began to modify it. He later rode this bike at 206 mph (331 kmh) in the world record speed championships on Bonneville Salt Flats in the US having largely rebuilt it with parts he made himself. It had begun with a displacement of 600cc. When he rode it at Bonneville it was 950cc. He travelled there 10 times (once in his words as a ‘sight seer’) and set new world speed records in 1962, 1966 and 1967. The 206mph run didn’t count. He crashed before completing it.
That much at least is true.
‘The World’s Fastest Indian’ is also a film starring Anthony Hopkins as Burt. (He changed his name after regular misspelling in American magazines.) The film transports us from Invercargill to Hollywood, and not just geographically.
While modifying his motorcycle, an ageing Burt has a heart attack. An ambulance takes him to the hospital and he is told he has angina, and is advised to take it easy and not to ride his motorcycle. He — of course — ignores this advice.
Burt is finally able to save enough to travel by cargo ship to Los Angeles, working his passage as the cook. But when he arrives, he experiences bureaucracy, scepticism, and the indifference of big city people. So far, so deeply predictable. And who knows, he probably did. It is his blunt but gregarious nature (right there a national characteristic, right there, 100 per cent) which overcomes each hurdle. He wins over the motel clerk, a transvestite named Tina (of course; obvious), who assists him in clearing customs and helps him buy a car. The car salesman allows Burt to use his workshop and junkyard to build a trailer, and later offers him a job after Burt tunes up a number of the cars on the lot. Burt declines the offer, however, and shortly afterwards begins his long trip to Utah.
Following? Could be true. Allow yourself Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief …
Like Odysseus, Burt makes friends along the way: a Native American (yes!) highway policeman who helps him fix his trailer, a woman named Ada who allows him to repair his trailer in her garage and briefly becomes his lover (mmm … required), and an Air Force pilot (good looking but troubled, possibly?) who is on leave from military service in Vietnam. (You can see the writers sitting there in a backroom saying, ‘Come on. What else do we need? Where’s that damn list?’)
He eventually arrives at the Salt Flats only to be blocked (mandatorily) by race officials for not registering his motorcycle for competition in advance, and for not having the mandated safety equipment (Of course! Get with it!! He’s a Kiwi!!! He’s from the land than gave us bungey-jumping!!!!) In a show of sportsmanship, however, various competitors and fans in the Bonneville series intervene on his behalf (ooo … close to jumping the shark here), and he is eventually allowed to make a timed run. Despite various problems, he succeeds in his quest (amazingly) and sets a new record (just wait for it …) at the 8th and last mile of his run. Amazing. By the end, his leg is burned by the exhaust, motorcycle and man collapse. But, what a relief, survive.
To proof. Here’s the inside and the outside of the actual bike, part of a rather grand exhibition at the sumptuously equipped hardware store E. Hayes & Sons in Dee Street.
So much to see and do in Invers. But what I loved as much as anything were the Jeffrey Smarts, not everywhere you looked but, so many of them. Flat, and perfect.
That one’s for Marge, Denise and Rex.
A Linguistic Digression
Australians are notoriously bad at Kiwi accents. ‘Fush and chups’, they go. Then, ‘Yuck yuck yuck’. I fear that’s just how things are: we are not yet in all ways a mature nation. But are Kiwis bad at (rendering) Kiwi accents too? I want to review this fine Invercargillian graffito in that light.
‘Death and Tixes.’ And, could be ‘clap’ or ‘clup’. For reasons of uncertainty we’ll leave that out.
There’s an antipodean version of something like Grimm’s Law that says as you go east from Cape Byron and, completely ignoring vocabulary, you should at least consider the prospect, with variations, of a vowel shift one slightly to the right. ‘A’ to ‘e’, ‘e’ to ‘i’ etc. That leaves with you with a problem at ‘u’, but nothing is easy in this world.
Still I want to say about ‘Death and Tixes’, let’s try harder: push the ‘e’ in ‘death’ over into ‘i’, and the ‘i’ in ‘tixes’ more correctly to ‘e’. I realise I should be using phonetic symbols here, but I think I would have written ‘Dith and Texes’. Then they would have known what we were talking about.
Further south: Bluff
Can you go south of Invercargill? Yes you can, and probably must simply for the adventure of it.
The adventure of it … AND the prospect of popping in to the Bluff real estate agents for a flat white and a brandy snap basket.
The short drive to Bluff, the South Island’s southernmost town is flat, industrial. At left above, that ship is at the end of a jetty with close to a kilometre to reach the shoreline. Bluff Harbour is not a deep water port making it, among other things, a suitable place to farm the remarkable oysters for which Bluff is known. (Oooh … Bluff oysters. Is Bluff a place then?)
Bluff proper is a strip of shops looking for the identity they once had backed with a few streets of, can I say ‘shacks’? Some of them are quite ambitious but, I think it’s fair to say, Bluff provides a comprehensive treatise on the wear occasioned by proximity to the winds and water of the Foveaux Strait.
$35 NZ a night in dormitory accommodation here. If you were young and restless that might be just the thing.
But the visitor drives through Bluff. You are en route to Stirling Point from which you will embark on the Bluff Track.
French motorcyclists at Stirling Point taking photos of one of those sorts of signs. London is 18,958km away, New York 15,088, the Equator 5133, the South Pole 4840. Sydney the even 2000. Dog Island 6. But we also have Kumagaya and Suqian. What and where are they? I looked up Kumagaya and it’s got a rugby pitch. Just for moment I thought that might be it. But they are, of course, Invercargill’s sister cities (in Japan not so far from Tokyo, and Northern China).
The track is cut into the low, thick and hardy vegetation of the littoral. No special views; more just having been there.
Slope Point and Curio Bay (not far away) are the actual southernmost parts of the South Island. But this is a contender, the beacon on the southernmost part of Bluff Track with Stewart island in the background. If you want to talk about New Zealand entier you can quite happily say from Bluff to Cape Reinga, the tip of the North Island, according to the sign 1403km away.
A final effort at orientation
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With reason, I’ve gone on and on. The ‘Other Stories’ can be found right here.
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