So began four days in the city where I spent four years as a student and two as a bus driver before leaving for Fiji and eventually the world beyond the Pacific. It soon became clear that Auckland’s diversity was exactly as described in the Northern Explorer commentary, beginning with a hotel lobby full of young women and a few young men in evening dress as part of a graduation event. All of them were Chinese. The two receptionists were continental Europeans. The two staff who served me at the nearby restaurant where I ate dinner were European and Indian. This pattern of ethnic diversity was to repeat itself over and over again during my stay.
Similarly, the architectural vandalism which had occurred in Wellington
was repeated in Auckland, where Queen Street in particular had fallen into a
very depressed state, with souvenir shops near the station and anchor
department stores, like Milne & Choice, now departed, as was the adjacent
Bank of New Zealand. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions, notably the
splendid new Art Gallery (Toi o Tāmaki ) which combines an existing building in the French chateau
style with a glass and wood structure in the 21st century manner,
providing views into Albert Park, beyond which is my alma mater. Less appealing is a slim block of flats
on Waterloo Quadrant, opposite the university campus, which replaces the
building where I lived. Rising like an obscene gesture, this tower is out of
scale with the surrounding buildings, which are similar to the one that was
demolished to make room for the pointing finger. The adjacent surviving buildings include – surprise,
surprise – an art deco style block of flats. Our flat overlooked the rear of
this block, not unlike the set up in Hitchcock’s film, Rear Window, and our small balcony had a fine view of
the harbour where one morning we watched the brand new liner, Oriana, sail up the harbour to the dock
at the foot of Queen Street, as cruise liners continue to do to this day.
Other forms of vandalism had taken place nearby. The NZ Dairy Marketing Board, a very powerful body in a
country with such a large dairy industry, pretentiously and somewhat opaquely renamed itself Fonterra, while also
constructing a high status high rise block fronted by the gutted remains of the
former Grand Hotel where, occasionally, we would visit to have a posh drink in
the lounge. I chatted with the friendly security guard, who told me that the new building was leaking so badly that it
would have to be emptied while repairs were made. I felt that this was due
punishment for the pretentiousness and architectural vandalism of the Fonterra
grandees.
Fortunately, a few other architecturally interesting buildings in the same area have been preserved, even if changed in function. Just around the corner from Fonterra Tower is the unique building which, in its heigh day, housed the radio station, 1YA. It is now in posession of the university, to whom it was given by a member of the Meyer family, whose long association wih the civic life of Auckland is commemorated in several such places.
One of my contemporaries at university was a member of the Meyer family,
and we attended lectures in the various buildings which then made up the city
centre campus. One of these included a splendid house, one of a line of repurposed high status houses opposite the main
campus on Princes Street. Several
of these are now the premises of New Zealand’s best English language school,
Languages International (LI), which I visited to learn about the current state
of the industry from Darren Conway, who is chair of English NZ, the ARELS
equivalent. . The meeting had been arranged by one of his colleagues, Craig
Thaine, who also showed me around the very well equipped school, before we
adjourned to one of the high rise office buildings overshadowing 1YA.
Commendably, the ground floor, which is decorated and furnished like the lobby
of a swish hotel, is open to the public,
and a coffee bar-cum-bistro
provided a very pleasant venue.
I learned that the NZ industry has been suffering from a quite serious
decline in volume, not even a quality operation like Languages International
being immune. As to the regulation
of the industry, this appeared to fall between several government agencies,
with predictable results. Apparently, regulations governing part-time
employment benefitted university students (and universities recruitment), while
disadvantaging students attending a language school like LI. English NZ wasn't very happy about this
situation.
The growth of an ELT industry in NZ, and the adaptation of fine houses to
a language school, weren’t envisaged when I lived round the corner from LI, and
when I mentioned to the friendly Frontera security guard that I had driven
buses for a couple of years, he recommended a visit to MOTAT (the Museum of
Transport and Technology) where I would certainly find on display one of the
Daimler buses that I had driven.
So, I took a bus out to Western Springs, on Great North Road passing a
line of car show rooms dedicated to the sale of distinctly up market brands,
Audi, Porsche and Bentley, replacing the Daimler car show room which had been
on the same location in the 1960s. Daimler as a brand has long since been
extinct, and today the well heeled buyer heads for the showrooms of the German
super brands, which include British Bentley, now part of the VW group.
When I was a bus driver in Auckland, a significant percentage of my fellow
drivers were Maori, with a few Polynesian islanders. We weren't actually 'drivers', but were called ‘bus operators’ because we issued
the tickets and cashed up at the end of the shift. Although being a bus operator involved shift and weekend
work, it was a good job, there was a strict dress code, and navigating a large,
powerful vehicle along Auckland’s roads was in many ways a little boy’s dream
come true. Today there is still an even more ethnically mixed driving force, which now includes Asians as well as
Polynesians. Even more importantly, it also includes women, because one of the most
significant developments in NZ since the 1960s has been changes in gender roles and
the opening up of a wide range of jobs to women – including those of PM, Helen
Clark, over three successive terms from 1999 to 2008, and Anglican bishop, its first
female bishop, Penny Jamieson, being consecrated in 1990.
I took the tram – a green W2 Melbourne class as it happens
-- to the Sir Keith Park Memorial Aviation Collection, which is dominated by a
huge Lancaster bomber and a replica of the statue of Sir Keith which stands in
London. Park applied a measure of
Kiwi practicality and pragmatism to the somewhat hidebound direction of the RAF
at a critical time: the Battle of Britain. Although acknowledged in the war histories, it was only
recently, thanks to a campaign, that Park has been honoured with a statue in
the country he served so significantly.
MOTAT deals with the technology – railways, cars, tractors, aircraft –
which are integral to the development of NZ as a modern country and
economy. In this respect, it
provides a valuable and necessary corrective to the galleries of Te Papa, which display sparce evidence of the
European/pakeha presence and contribution to the shaping of the NZ
identity.
I continued exploring areas where I had lived as a student. Parnell was one of them. This is one of the oldest suburbs, being
settled in 1841. In my time the
two sides of Parnell Road were entirely different, one being very down at heel,
with many houses in multiple occupancy, the other, with the harbour views and
the Parnell Rose Garden, being distinctly well heeled. It is also where the
Anglican cathedral is located. The buildings on the ‘wrong’ side of the road
have now been extensively gussied up and repurposed, mostly as cafes and
restaurants. The general tone of the area can be judged from the cars parked
along the street in the flickr photo: a Mini, a BMW X5 and a Porsche 911. Further up the street an oddly named example
of the Asian influence on Kiwi eating habits, the BBQ Resturant Sushi, was just opening for business, maybe for
Sunday brunch?
The BBQ Sushi restaurant is in a new building, but most of the old parades
of shops remain much as remembered, including one containing a launderette
which could just possibly be the same one I took my laundry to. It had been run by a Hungarian
family who would have come to NZ as refugees. They were clearly bourgeois, and the matriach who presided
over the launderette gave the impression that this was not how she had planned
to spend her mature years. From time to time her son, who obviously had other business interests eleswhere, would
appear and they would conduct what sounded like vituperative arguments in
highly expressive Hungarian.
As one of the oldest central suburbs, Parnell still has houses from the 19th
Century, of which the one in the flickr photograph is a fine example. In fact, it is virtually an archetypical house of those to
be found, in varying sizes and degrees of splendour, throughout NZ and
Australia. The central front door
opening onto a verandah, and the hipped roof, traditionally of corrugated iron,
are typical features, and are often mimicked, though with less success, in some
modern houses.
I moved from the shops to the ‘correct’ side of the road to find the block
of flats where I had lived for a year.
While exploring, I discovered an unexpected architectural gem, a pair of
art deco houses which must have been built by a very avant garde builder in the
1930s, when the preferred style of house was (and still largely is) as shown in the photograph of a bourgeois house from the 1930s.
Both styles are in danger of being replaced by higher density three story
town houses. Auckland has always been a widely dispersed city, houses having
large plots (up to a quarter of an acre) and suburban life being the preferred norm. However, such expansion can't go on
forever. It looks as if the city suffers from a piecemeal approach to transport
infrastructure, there being only one harbour bridge, for instance, no tunnels under the harbour as in
Sydney and no urban rail services to the northern suburbs as in Wellington. As
a result, the practicable limits of expansion are being reached, for which the recently
created Auckland Council is proposing a solution.
In 2010, the
functions of the existing regional council and the region's seven previous city
and district councils were merged into one "super council" or
"super city" governed by a mayor. The Auckland Council is the largest
such body in Australasia, with a $3 billion annual budget, $29 billion of
assets, and approximately 8,000 staff. One of those staff is a CEO who, when appointed,
was to receive a salary of
$675,000 and an incentive bonus of $67,500. This costly appointment was just
one of many contentious issues which seem to have plagued the Auckland Council,
and while I was there the latest controversy had hit the media: a Council
proposal to encourage the building of 3 storey town houses as in-fill. It sounded as if a strong NIMBY
movement was in the process of working up a head of steam. Just near the art
deco gems on St Stephen’s Avenue were examples, albeit upmarket ones, of what
could become the norm in the suburban landscape of the future.
From a contemplation of the architectual future of Auckland’s suburbs, I
moved on to the Domain, having first bought some tucker at Pandora, a Panetteria, an exotic form of baker’s
shop in another parade of Parnell shops which had benefitted from the paint
brush. They are opposite the Anglican cathedral, a sort of ecclesiastical
architectural layer cake, starting with 19th century Victorian gothic in timber
and moving through a brick layer to 20th century Kiwi gothic.
On the Domain, I found a seat, opened my tucker bag, and was immediately
visited by a spruce white sea gull and a bevvy of little brown birds. Indigenous New Zealand birds are not
common in a city like Auckland, and I realized that the little brown visitors
were not natives. They were sparrows.
This feisty little flock are the antipodean relatives of a species
rarely seen in the UK nowadays. The
British sparrow has immigrant relatives thriving in NZ where they have gone
native. Having fed myself and the
rapidly expanding flock of gulls and sparrows, I walked up to the Museum and gazed
out over the war memorial, which is a replica of the Lutyens one in Whitehall,
and the city and the harbour.
A group of adult skateborders were using the nearby paving as a rink,
and a young family approached, making their way to the museum. Without the skateborders, this and the view of the profile of
Rangitoto, was a scene pretty well unchanged from fifty years ago.
My next stop was Waiheke, now virtually an off shore suburb of Auckland.
My next stop was Waiheke, now virtually an off shore suburb of Auckland.
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