I had left my travel plans open for getting to Palmerston North (or
‘Palmy’ as it seems to have become), intending to rent a car to meander north
before joining the Northern Explorer
on Friday. My attempts to
rent a car in Wellington proved fruitless, so I travelled by coach from
Porirua, one of the Kapiti Coast suburbs near where I was staying. Long distance coach travel wasn't so
common 50 years ago, trains being more popular for a journey from Wellington to
Palmy. Today there is an extensive coach network providing a cheap substitute
for the largely defunct inter-city rail network. The coach was bound for Wanganui, with a 30 minute comfort
stop at Palmy, where I disembarked and took a taxi to my motel. In the course of conversation with the
driver – Casper II was his call name
– I asked about buses to Feilding, explaining that I wanted to visit because I
had gone to high school there.
Casper offered to take me there and back for $45.00, so I took up his
reasonable offer, and off to Feilding we went.
In fact, the distance to Feilding isn't that great, being only 20km,
although 50 years or more ago, a trip to Palmy was a major excursion reserved
for serious shopping. In those days, the speed limit was 50 mph, and when a
neighbour who took delivery of a Ford Consul, the first truly new post-war
British Ford, he was pleased to report that it ‘cruises very nicely at 45
mph’. Casper didn't break any
speed limits in the Toyota Camry en route to Feilding, where we arrived during
the lunch hour. Unfortunately, the
usual providers of fast food are well established in Feilding, but an
unexpected choice presented itself as we drove into the town centre: a sushi
shop! Not even Henley-on-Thames
offers a such a choice.
The remarkable thing about ‘Friendly Feilding’ is that it
is, well, unremarkable. The town takes its name from Colonel William Feilding,
rather than the Maori name, Aorangi. He was a son of the seventh Earl of
Denbigh. Col. Feilding (thus, presumably, the deviant spelling) was a director
of the Emigrants and Colonists Aid Corporation Limited and on a visit to New
Zealand, he negotiated the
purchase of a 100,000 acre (400 km²) block of land from the Wellington
provincial government in 1871. The first British settlers arrived on 22 January
1874 to begin farming on what had been called the Manchester Block. Like
Canterbury, this area of the Manawatu was opened up as part of a scheme to
replicate Britain on the other side of the world. Settlers were selected from
among ‘respectable’ applications, and they were expected to be industrious and
hard working. Importantly, like
all of New Zealand’s settlers, they came voluntarily.
Industriousness and fortitude were certainly needed, but
after a slightly wobbly start, the settlement of the Manchester block and the
development of Feilding proceeded apace. Indeed, it’s quite salutary to realize
that when we went to live near Feilding in the 1950s, the farms on the
Manchester block and the town itself had come into existence only three
generations previously. The town evolved to service the farming hinterland, and
it boasts the largest stock yards in the southern hemisphere, as well as
branches of national chains such as Paperplus (a kind of Paperchase +
Waterstones), Postie Plus (clothing) and a branch of that eponymous and
ubiquitous roaster and purveyor of coffee, Robert Harris.
In my adolescence, ‘going to town’ meant going to Feilding,
and with the shops open on Friday night, this was the time when many people
from the district went shopping.
Most of the premises, and a few of the businesses from that era, still
exist in a town centre in which most of the buildings date from the early part
of the 20th Century.
Like Blenheim in Marlborough, Feilding is disposed around a central
square containing a clock tower, a war memorial – and an immaculately
maintained public loo not, however, in art deco style. On one corner of
Manchester square is the Feilding hotel whose origins date back to the earliest
days of settlement. If the lamp
standards and the modern cars were to be removed, and only the red MGB GT left
in place, this is a scene which could have been photographed when I went to
school in Feilding.
It seems that a lot of thought and effort has gone into the
beautification of Feilding’s CBD, and the town has won the annual New Zealand's
Most Beautiful Town award 14 times.
There is no question that Feilding is a prosperous and pleasant town,
now with a population of around 14,000 (fifty years ago, it was about half
that) and much civic pride is in evidence, as well as a politically
conservative outlook, the MP being a member of the National (i.e., Conservative) Party. The paint brush has also been active, and some rather non
Edwardian colour schemes have been applied the town’s Edwardian buildings,
although there is a discretely styled two-story block built in 1992 in the
Edwardian style replacing the original Darragh’s hardware store, where one of
the Darragh daughters, a fellow pupil at the high school, would serve on Friday
nights. Darraghs appear to continue their hardware business as a Mitre
franchise – a nationwide B&Q equivalent -- on a trading estate beyond the centre of town.
Unfortunately, the freedom allowed to the choice of colour
schemes has also been extended to the fascias of the verandas which are a
virtually universal feature of NZ and Australian towns, providing shelter from
rain and sun as a kind of open air precursor to the now ubiquitous shopping
mall. Whereas in the conservation
area of Henley’s town centre there are strict constraints on shop signage,
there seems to be no such limitation in NZ or Australia, and I found the effect
visually discordant and hectoring. In the past I've felt that many of the local
council’s signage decisions in Henley have verged on the petty, but now having
seen the effect of a signage free-for-all in, of all places, Friendly Feilding
and even Sunny Nelson, I’ve come round to the council’s way of thinking.
Before leaving Feilding, I needed to visit my old high
school, so Casper, with me navigating from memory, directed the Camry to what
was formerly known as Feilding Agricultural High School (FAHS). The inclusion of ‘agricultural’ in its
name was a deliberate decision by the founders, who felt that agricultural
education was, in the NZ context, both important and, at the time, under
valued. By the time I attended the
school in the 1950s, FAHS was pretty much a regular high school, albeit with a
significant agriculture stream, serving pupils from the Feilding district and
even far beyond. Unusually, it had a boarding wing for boys only, farmers’ sons in the Ag classes who
came from beyond the local catchment.
(Posh farmers in the Feilding district sent their sons to Wanganui
Collegiate and daughters to ‘Dio’, Diocesan School for Girls).
Today, apparently after much debate, ‘agricultural’ has been
dropped from the name, mostly it would seem as a marketing ploy because the
school recruits international students, for whom the term may have associations
with the peasantry. Some of these international students stay in the boarding
accommodation previously occupied by the farmers’ sons. There are plenty of other changes, most
notably in the governance of the school,
in which the school council operated by the students for the students is
responsible for the allocation of funds for the various clubs. According to the
rather scrappy school website, FAHS (as it still remains) was the first school
in the country to set up such a council. Its existence also helps explain why the school
library (where, for a year I was librarian) is now the council chamber. I forgot to ask whether and where the
school library is now to be found.
There have been other even more significant changes on the
sports field. In the 1950s, rugby
was the only game; ‘football’ meant rugby. Today the school also has four soccer pitches. This would certainly not have been
envisaged by the First Fifteen of 1953, whose photograph I checked out in the
old ‘A Block’, and whose current whereabouts I briefly pondered on. I've never maintained contact
with any of my contemporaries, none of whom went to Auckland university, and
I've never been able to attend any of the reunions which used to be such a
feature of the FAHS calendar. Ultimately, this is probably because FAHS
occupies a much less significant place in my life than does Auckland
university.
Having completed this brief trip down part of memory lane, I
returned to Palmy where I was to spend the night before catching the Northern
Explorer, the train to Auckland.
Like Feilding, Palmy is built around a square with a clock tower and war
memorial. Unhappily, at some point
last century, the city council built a brutal new council building which abuts
into the square, disrupting what, fortunately, remains a pleasant civic space,
despite this bit of architectural vandalism. There are, however,
other threats to the low rise scale of the city, with several multi
storey buildings hovering on the perimeter of the Square as if waiting to land
and complete despoliation begun by the benighted council.
Some of the Edwardian buildings on the Square have been
repurposed, a notable example being the old DIC department store, now the city
library. Unlike the intrusive council
HQ, this is a sound innovation, ensuring that, at least as long as there is
funding and use for a library, the building has a secure future.
Palmy’s credentials as a cultural site were burnished in the
old days when travelling theatre companies, such as that run by Jane Campion’s
parents, would perform at the local theatre. I recall going in a school party
to see a performance by the New Zealand Players theatre group. of Midsummer Night’s Dream in Palmy. Above all, Palmy was, and still is, a
place for serious shopping. Then
the DIC was the town’s main department store, and it’s there that we bought an
extremely robust tandem push chair for our toddler twins when on a visit from
Fiji to my parents, by now retired in Feilding. Mindful of the needs of lady visitors to the town,
during the 30s, the town council had provided a discrete and practical art deco
addition to the Square’s facilities: the Ladies Rest. It is still present,
serving its original function.
Palmy has been referred to as the Croydon of NZ, but it’s
difficult to see in what ways they resemble each other. Like Croydon, Palmy does have a
university, Massey, which has considerably expanded from its origins as a
training ground for agriculturalists and veterinarians to a regular university
which now has a campus in Albany, a northern suburb of Auckland. Massey has been very assertive in
recruiting international students and in setting up partnership arrangements
overseas, some of these ventures being less than successful. Even so, for Palmy the presence
of an international student body has had an effect on expanding the range of
eating places, although for my evening meal I opted for Bella’s, a very smart
restaurant near the DIC, where I ate one of the best meals of my trip. The restaurant is around the
corner from what might be called Fashion Alley, a street containing some up
market frock shops for the well heeled and fashion conscious women of Palmy. In
this respect, Palmy has something in common with Henley-on-Thames, where there
is a plethora of similar shops.
The next morning, as arranged, Casper arrived on time to
take me to the railway station.
Whereas most existing old station buildings have been retained, even if
they are now largely unused, the
original one in Palmy had been replaced, probably some time in the 70s, by a
completely undistinguished ‘modern’ structure which now, in its largely
abandoned state, has not aged at all gracefully. I was disconcerted to find no sign of life, and it was only
when I got to the platform, that, reassuringly, there was any sign of
action. Here I joined a small
cluster of mostly middle aged to elderly people who, like me, were waiting for
the Northern Explorer. There being no station staff to hand, we attached
destination labels to our luggage ourselves, and waited for the train to
arrive. When it did, the train
manager, who I later learned was from Sir Lanka, supervised the loading of correctly labelled luggage into
the luggage van. This is a vestige
from times past, when all heavy luggage was put into what was then called the
guard’s van. This sensible
practice avoids having to haul heavy luggage onto the train and finding a space
to stow it.
In those far off days, the only train service between
Wellington and Auckland was the so-called Limited Express, or ‘Limited’, which
travelled over night. Passengers sat upright on hard seats, although pillows
could be hired to provide a smidgen of comfort, and while there was no catering
on the train, at intervals, it would stop at remote stations, such as Taumaranui,
for refreshments. The catering
staff would have lined up cups of strong tea and that staple of kiwi food, the
meat pie, would be available, almost as hot as the tea. At the next station stop, the used
crockery would be collected and removed.
It was a well organized system, and the whole experience, little did one
realize it then, was a good preparation for long haul economy class travel
decades later.
The Northern Explorer, like its South Island counterparts,
provides de luxe travel, though the journey is longer than those on the
southern routes. This is largely
owing to the constraints on railway engineering imposed by the country’s
topography, one outcome of which is the Raurimu Spiral, which the Institute of Professional
Engineers (NZ) has designated as a significant Engineering heritage site. This
piece of engineering heritage lay ahead of us as we set off from Palmy across
the Manawatu plain, before having a short unscheduled stop at the deserted
Feilding railway station, where evidence of the town’s beautification efforts
was clearly visible, together with a truly surreal sight: superannuated
carriages of the Gatwick Express on a siding.
This now largely abandoned station is the same one at which
the royal train stopped in 1953 when the Queen alighted onto a specially
constructed platform to be greeted by the mayor of Feilding, who happened to be
‘our’ English teacher, Mr MacLure, aka ‘Caesar’. Meanwhile, a
large gathering of citizens, including hundreds of school children, waved flags
and gave vent to expressions of loyalty.
Having met the town dignitaries, the Queen and her party got back on the
train, which then continued on its journey north. The whole event lasted about ten minutes. Feilding could feel very pleased with
itself: it had been a stop on the royal itinerary.
The Queen would, of course, have been passing through or
stopping at railway stations and towns specially spruced up for her visit (paint sales must have spiked before her visit). What neither she nor the rest of the
country could foresee on that journey was a catastrophe which occurred shortly
after her northern rail journey, on the evening of 24th December,
when the Whangaehu River bridge collapsed beneath the Auckland bound Limited
Express, with the loss of 151 lives.
The collapse of a temphra dam holding back the crater lake of nearby
active volcano Mt Ruapehu created a lahar – a mudflow of slurry, rocky debris
and water – which destroyed part of the bridge minutes before the train started
to cross it. The tragedy had a
truly profound effect on the country, and the Queen specially mentioned the
disaster in her Christmas Day speech given from Auckland. The bridge was eventually replaced and
a special warning system installed to prevent a repetition of the tragedy, a
similar lahar in 2007 demonstrating the effectiveness of the new bridge and the
warning system, reassuring for those of us now retracing the tracks of that
ill-fated Limited Express.
The town of Feilding which the Northern Explorer was now
leaving is on the edge of gentle hills into which the railway line travels,
passing through startlingly green pastoral landscape, before skirting along and
above the Rangitikei River, which
in this area flows through a series of gorges which provide one of the
country’s most thrilling white-water rafting trips. After Taihape, “New Zealand’s one and only Gumboot City”,
the track moves into the central plateau, which is largely tussock country,
unsuited to farming. In that part
of the journey, Mount Ruapehu
was fitfully visible through clouds,
and then the train moved into timber country, large areas of the central North
Island having been planted with pine trees as a timber crop. From there, the train continued
north through the Waikato, prime dairying country, and by now into the
fading winter sunlight. Eventually
in darkness the train reached the southern suburbs of Auckland, when the
informative recorded commentary informed us that it is one of the world’s most
ethnically and nationally diverse cities, a useful advance organizer for
travellers expecting a totally Anglo-Saxon city. Nearly ten hours after leaving Palmy, I arrived in Auckland, the journey
ending in the splendid new underground station constructed under the now
repurposed Auckland post office at the foot of Queen Street, on the edge of the
harbour, and a short walk from my
hotel.
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