Inspirations: from the ruins, hope rising

I am standing in the centre of Christchurch, New Zealand. It is my first visit since a series of devastating quakes shook the city to pieces. The most violent, in February 2011, killed 185 people, two-thirds of them in the collapse of a single building. And I am stunned at the destruction, even two years on.

The Christ Church Cathedral – icon of a city for nearly 150 years and the raison d;’etre for its founding in 1850. Now a ruin, due to be demolished.

I took this holding the camera above my head to avoid a fence, pointing and guessing…This is the third attempt.

Demolition under way.

The Christchurch I knew is gone. The centre city is a wasteland of shingled and empty lots, ruined buildings and demolition trucks. Surviving tower blocks lean with tired abandon, like rows of crooked teeth. Most are due to come down.

Tumbling rocks devastated houses beneath – and above.

Beyond, houses lie empty. Just two years ago they were proud symbols of domestic prosperity. Today they are abandoned, their walls cracked, shingled roofs askew, grass growing tall through cracks in the driveway. Grey silt, the dried remnants of liquefaction, lies unexpectedly here and there. Cars bibble over rippled tarmac; bridges that were once smooth are arched.In the seaside suburbs, houses teeter on the edges of new cliffs, rubble still piled below. Walls of shipping containers shield roads and houses from fresh falls.It is a city devastated.

And yet it is also a city with hope. Everywhere, Council trucks and diggers are working to renew sewerage, water, gas and electricity lines. Some buildings are swathed in scaffolding. The Arts Centre – the former Canterbury University buildings, where Ernest Rutherford worked - is being repaired. Near the old Cashel Mall – where masonry tumbled into the streets, crushing people – there is a mall of shipping containers. It is abuzz with sound; singers perform on a stage, people sit drinking coffee and enjoying the sun.

Sunlight and shadow made life very difficult for the camera, the modern CCD is not as good with tonal variations as film, and the exposure was on the concrete. I had to adjust the shadow balances post-production.  This is a detail of the original image.

That’s more like it. This is straight out of the camera, unedited apart from  the copyright notice and re-sizing to fit the blog. Christchurch’s shipping container mall – 2013.

There is a spirit here which speaks of hope, of life, of a brighter future. It is inspiring.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

The perils of life around the real Mount Doom

New Zealand’s Mount Tongariro erupted today for the second time in four months.

A photo I took a few years ago. Lake Taupo, with Mount Tauhara (another volcano) in the background. Taupo isn’t a placid lake filled with trout. Well, it is. But it’s also the caldera of one of the world’s biggest supervolcanoes. Uh – yay.

The blast happened without warning. Geological and Nuclear Sciences staff had been worried about possible eruption from the next-door volcano, Ruapehu. But nothing from Tongariro.

It’s apposite. The Hobbit is revving up for its premiere next week – and back in 2000, Peter Jackson used Mount Ngaruhoe, technically one of Tongariro’s vents, as Mount Doom.

How it will develop – if it does at all – remains to be seen. The eruption earlier this year lasted for days, dropped ash across my home town of Napier, and sent a cloud of hydrogen sulphide drifting across the North Island. That reached Wellington, where I live now.

Still, it could be worse. It could be nearby Taupo, one of the world’s 50-odd “supervolcanoes”.  Taupo last erupted in 186 AD and gave the Romans spectacular sunsets (think about it!). But that blast was a tiddler compared to the real ‘blow’, 27,000 years ago. That mega-eruption sent over 1150 cubic kilometres of debris rocketing skywards, annihilating everything in the central plateau and blowing a great gouge out of the crust.

That’s our real Mount Doom. Kind of funny to realise that today it’s a lake, and a pretty placid one, too.

I wonder what it will be tomorrow?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Not the apocalypse…not yet…

Here in New Zealand we woke Tuesday morning to news that Mount Tongariro had erupted – briefly, but with enough vigour to send ash falling over my home town, Napier. I don’t live there these days, but I have family who do.

The Oruanui eruption, Taupo, 26,500 BP. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Taupo_2.png

It was the first eruption of Tongariro since 1897 and came by surprise. New Zealand has an excellent seismograph and volcano warning system – there are live webcams in the craters. Here’s White Island’s, complete with dinosaur. But this Tongariro eruption was left-field. It’s officially over as I write this – Geological and Nuclear Sciences have reduced the danger level - but White Island also erupted last week and Ruapehu is on heightened alert.

All these are tiddlers beside Lake Taupo, an active caldera in the same league as Toba and Yellowstone. The last big eruption, Hatepe, was around 180-230 AD and coated the central plateau with ash. It also gave the Romans and Chinese wonderful sunsets. The Oruanui eruption, around 26,500 years before the present, was the largest the world has seen in the last 70,000 years. It changed the structure of the lake, obliterated everything in the central North Island, and sent dust whipping through the upper air worldwide.

The immediate risk, though, is Auckland.  William Hobson chose the site in 1841 on the back of musket wars politics. Nobody knew, then, that it was atop a lava field. That’s why there are so many small extinct volcanoes – they’re driven from one source, and it erupts in a new place, usually, every time. Maori knew. Rangitoto – that island in the middle of the Waitemata – means ‘bleeding sky’. Hmmn…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Blasted awake by a quake

On Tuesday I posted some pictures of New Zealand’s Tolkien-ish landscape. There are reasons why it’s so rugged. And at 10:36 last night, 3 July, one of them happened. New Zealand’s North Island was rocked by the biggest quake it’s had in many years.

It shook Wellington like a terrier rattling a bone. Listen for yourself – here’s the noise it made in a Wellington church during a recording session. The quake starts around 00:45: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/7219667/Earthquake-captured-on-organ-recording

I was asleep when it hit, blasted awake by the jolt – and wondered whether it was local. There wasn’t any sound of stuff crashing around the house so – well, I went back to sleep. Hey, we’re used to these things. We’re prepared. It was nowhere near as sharp as one in December that caught She Who Must Be Obeyed and me in a masonry building (we dived under a table).

My personal ‘felt estimate’ for the intensity around our house was around IV/V on the Modified Mercalli scale (building creaks, dishes and plates rattle, people woken). But I wanted to know the absolute magnitude and epicentre. New Zealand has a fantastic seismic network. Our Geological and Nuclear Sciences department posts early estimates in near-real time. By the time we were up at 5.00 am this morning (discovering nothing dislodged around the house) they had a final figure for the quake and its location. It was a big one; magnitude 7.0, luckily off the Taranaki coast and very deep. Probably the Pacific plate moving.

A happier Christchurch – a picture I took of the crowd at the 2009 arts festival.

It wasn’t expected, but there are several known faults around the country which are overdue to move, including one that will trigger the ‘big one’ in Wellington – a quake of 8+ magnitude with a likely ‘felt intensity’ of X on the MM scale. The lesson was brought home when Christchurch was devastated by a succession of quakes beginning in September 2010 – including one in February 2011 that killed 182. The official enquiry into why buildings collapsed is under way now.

There is a theory that the Christchurch sequence was triggered by a 7.8 magnitude quake that hit Fijordland in July 2009. It did no great damage in that remote location but seems, some geophysicists think, to have stressed the system – which then fractured in Christchurch. Whether the latest quake is going to do anything on the Wellington system is a moot point. GNS said today they haven’t the resources to look further into it just now.

But, to me, not it’s something to lose sleep over. We have to live with quakes, here in New Zealand. And volcanoes. And pointy sticks.

Well, actually not the pointy sticks. But definitely quakes and volcanoes. They’re gonna happen – we have to accept them. And be ready.

+++Coming up: a contest. Watch this space.+++

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

A walk through time in art deco Napier NZ

I’ve been in my home town. Napier, New Zealand this weekend. It’s a special time – art deco weekend, a three-day fantasy celebration of 1930s life, inspired by the architectural style that has put the place on the world map. I got a bit enthusiastic with my camera. The pictures here are a small selection from the shutter frenzy.

But hey - it’s a weekend to party – a weekend where the town fills with period cars, where there are steam locomotive rides, aerobatics displays by period (ish) aircraft, jazz bands, art deco themed picnics and 1930s-homage street entertainments – all to the backdrop of a city architecture that was openly inspired by Santa Barbara and Hollywood movie fantasy.

The Tom Parker Fountain, a gift to the people of Napier in 1936, modelled after a fountain in Britain – but evocative of a Hollywood fantasy. Coloured bulbs illuminate the sprays at night. I know the guy that once had to change the bulbs.

Today’s joy emerged from tragedy. Back in 1931, the town was flattened by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that destroyed the surrounding district and killed 258 people. Over the next few years, Napier’s town centre was rebuilt to the latest styles of the day – Chicago School. Streamline modern, Spanish Mission and Moderne. It was utterly new, utterly up-to-date – an expression of all that defined the look of the 1930s – and absolutely inspired in detail by what Hawke’s Bay architects saw across the Pacific in California, a place with very similar climate.

Now, I wrote the last major book on that disaster, and the reality of the recovery and lifestyle is very different. The architecture wasn’t even called art deco – that was just one specific aspect of the styles most people referred to as ‘modernism’. Penury destroyed early plans to re-create central Napier as a theme ‘Spanish Mission’ city modleled after Santa Barbara. Instead, small buildings went up as property owners could afford it. And the lifestyle of the day wasn’t the carefree partying of the Hollywood rich, either.

Back in the 1930s, kids wore sugar sacks over their heads to keep the rain off as they ran barefoot and hungry to school. Families jammed cheek-by-aunt-and-uncle into houses that went unpainted, though not unloved. Things were pretty bad.

But razor-accurate history isn’t what art deco weekend is about. It’s all about having a good time today, and doing it in a city with an architectural heritage that is unique in the world. That’s something which wasn’t realised until the 1980s, by which time some of the best modernist structures had already succumbed to the relentless march of urban renewal. The revival of interest in a unique heritage that began back then has blossomed into a three day annual summer festival that brings tens of thousands of people to the city. To party.

And, to me, that party also carries the real meaning of 1930s Napier. Back  then, town boosters such as the ‘Thirty Thousand Club’ were eager to to bring something of the magic of California and Hollywood to depression and disaster-wracked Hawke’s Bay. Their efforts included the ‘sound shell’ on the Napier foreshore – a scale edition, basically, of the Hollywood Bowl. it’s just visible in the background in the second photo from the top. The fountain on the left in the same picture was put up in 1936 and glows at night with multi-coloured lights (I knew the guy that had to change the bulbs). In the dark, it looks like a Hollywood set of the period.

To me, that is what Napier’s art deco festival really echoes. It brings alive the spirit that those folk of 75 years ago hoped might one day come to their town. It’s just magic. Hollywood magic. The spirit of 1930s dreams, made real through a twenty-first century lens.

I think so, certainly. I hope you do too.

My Sunday ‘worldbuilding for novelists’ series returns next week.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

‘Thank God for the Navy’

The Royal New Zealand Navy came into Wellington today for its seventieth birthday. I wandered down to the waterfront and took a few photos.

I had to scrabble over boulders to get this shot. Foreground is Denis Glover's plaque from the Wellington Writers' Walk; background, HMNZS Te Kaha at quayside, Te Papa national museum background (the Tracy Island look-alike).

It was a fabulous, fabulous spring day. Brilliant sunshine, warm breezes – well, look at the pictures. A step up, I think, from Soest, Netherlands. And a trip down memory lane for me. In another century I wrote my master’s thesis on New Zealand’s naval policy 1909-14. Then in 2000-01, I wrote a book which the RNZN very kindly adopted as their official 60th anniversary history, Blue Water Kiwis. This was launched (not literally, of course) from the flight deck of their frigate Te Mana, in a very nice ceremony MC’d by the Head of the Defence Force, the New Zealand equivalent of the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nice guy. It was a memorable evening. Can’t believe it’s been a decade.

Since then, the navy’s expanded – got a new logistics ship, two blue-water patrol boats, and four inshore craft. Every so often, politicians looking to razor back a bit of budget question why we have a navy. I could trunk on about New Zealand’s blue-water trade routes, our international obligations, and humanitarian peace-keeping work in places such as Dili. Or about the way they’ve plucked people from certain death in stormy oceans.

HMNZS Te Kaha, ANZAC class frigate. The sailors in the RHIB were sponging the hull. 'Tight and tiddly', I think it's called. Flag is "Kilo" - 'I wish to communicate with you'.

But I’ll just say this. Back in February, when Christchurch was hit by an earthquake and 185 people died, HMNZS Canterbury was in Lyttleton. They had men ashore within minutes, helping – an organised, disciplined and well trained force who knew what to do and could be brought to bear. Then the ship toggled back and forth between Wellington and Lyttleton, bringing heavy equipment, supplies and everything else needed.

That wasn’t the first time the navy had done this, either. In 1931, ships of the New Zealand Naval Division (the predecessor of the RNZN) hastened to help Hawke’s Bay folk whose homes had been mashed by an even more lethal quake. ‘Thank God for the Navy’, a survivor said afterwards. Too right.

I wrote a book about that too.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011

Woe betide us – Japan’s nuclear folly

The 8.9 magnitude quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan this weekend is a human tragedy of a scale that the individual mind can scarcely comprehend.

It puts New Zealand’s Christchurch quake - awful though that was and remains – in the shade.

Art offers a lesson. Ishiro Honda had a very explicit metaphor in mind when he conceived Gojira (Godzilla) and portrayed destruction by radiation. It was founded in post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki cold-war fears, but the lesson transcends the era. Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser summed it up in 1977; nature always shows up human foolishness.

Nuclear plants are installed near fault lines because those making the decision to build have faith in the engineering. It’s rational, scientific, and carefully considered. And most times, that works well.

But not every time.

To me – as a writer and historian interested in such matters - the point sums up quite a bit about the human condition. Damn.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011

Rays of hope amid the gloom

Today I attended a memorial service in New Zealand’s Parliament grounds for those killed in the Christchurch quake.  It was a sad, solemn moment. And yet for me – as a writer and historian – there was also hope.

Back in 2000, when I wrote Quake – Hawke’s Bay 1931, I argued that the human response was shaped by the experiences of the First World War. I wondered then whether that spirit of trust, support and self-sacrifice might ever be reborn for a generation that had never known war. It has. The people of Christchurch  responded as their grandparents’ generation did in the Hawke’s Bay disaster. Wonderfully, indomitably. Courageously.

Which is a wonderful message for us all.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011

Christchurch in happier days

I was last in Christchurch in January 2009, staying a few days to finalise some research for my book Old South. An arts festival was on; the city was alive with entertainers, crowds – people from all walks of life. The stone buildings of the centre city were fabulous – historic, redolent of the colonial-style Englishness around which the city once styled itself.

A happier Christchurch - a picture I took of the crowd at the 2009 arts festival.

All gone now, of course. And that’s sad – sad for the people, sad for history, sad for New Zealand.

Christchurch was established at the turn of the 1850s for the Canterbury Association’s ideal church settlement. It was there – as opposed to the Wairarapa or Hawke’s Bay – for political reasons, the best compromise after a bloody battle of words between the British government, New Zealand Governor, New Zealand Company and the hopeful Canterbury Association who hoped to establish an Anglican church colony. They could as easily have been in the Wairarapa or Hawke’s Bay if the arguments had played out that way.

The Christchurch art gallery - seen here in 2009.

All did not go as planned in Canterbury; the Association was short of both colonists and money. As early as June 1850, Edward Gibbon Wakefield bemoaned the ‘episcopacy of Canterbury’, which was ‘as I feared it would be; the church settlement is, to a great extent, lost in the island see.’  The idealistic, hopeful, evangelistic crusaders of the Canterbury Association were too late, crushed by penury, their world overtaken by pastoralism.

Christchurch never did grow as the devout church community that was intended. But grow it did – becoming centre of a vigorous district and one of New Zealand’s main centres. And nobody suspected that it had a tectonic time-bomb lurking beneath it.

The quake of 22 February was the most lethal natural disaster to strike New Zealand in 80 years. As I write this, the precise toll has yet to be determined. It will not be low. 

One thing seems certain; the quake is a profound human tragedy, and for all the difficulties faced in the past, the city’s greatest challenge is before it now. And I have little doubt, knowing the history of the city and of Kiwis in general, that this challenge will be met.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011

Remembering the quake of ’31

My book on the 1931 quake. The quake seismograph trace was used as a varnish overlay - not visible on this scan, alas.

I appeared on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report this morning, talking about the recovery from the Hawke’s Bay quake of 1931 – eighty years ago today.  Here’s the interview. My part starts at 3:26.

And it’s a decade ago this month since my book Quake – Hawke’s Bay 1931 was first published. Joining the coverage I gave the quake in Hawke’s Bay – The History of a Province (1994);  Havelock North – the History of a Village (1996); Napier: City of Style (1997), Town And Country (2000) – and, of course, Historic Hawke’s Bay and East Coast (2010).

Where have the years gone?