Postcards From a Broken City - Christchurch 2011

Removing the dome, Regent Theatre Complex, Cathedral Square Church door, Durham Street

Army check point Gloucester Street

Graffiti and EQC markings, Gloucester Street

Wrecker's Ball, Oxford Terrace

Office Block, Cashel Street

Office Block, Cashel Street

Crane, Oxford Terrace

Demolition, Manchester Street

Demolition, Manchester Street

The Morning After the Party, Tuam Street

Patched facade, Durham Street

Demolition, Hereford Street

The Arts Centre - Braced & Patched

Broken windows, Oxford Terrace

Our City - Otautahi , braced & strapped

Barry's Provocative Unpublished Minutes - 135

"After the Quake #1"

More post-earthquake observations from one of New Zealand's top printmakers.

Click on Cleavin, below, for more in this ongoing series.

Sumner - After the Earthquakes

Rapanui, more commonly known as Shag Rock, is not what it used to be.

Once around 11-metres high, the iconic Sumner/Recliffs landmark has been reduced to an unsightly hump on the end of the beach, at the mouth of the Avon-Heathcote River Estuary.

Just another sad loss we can blame on the earthquakes that have plagued the Canterbury region since September 4, 2010.

As you head around the cliffs to Sumner Village, there's a sense of running the gauntlet - especially under Kinsey Terrace, where broken million-dollar homes teeter on the top and hefty, concrete-filled containers march in soldier-like rows around the base of the cliffs - ostensibly to catch any falling debris - huge boulders and falling houses alike.

These images of the main street of Sumner speak for themselves.

Like most roads in Christchurch, they've been cracked and torn assunder.

And the march of the containers, continues right around Wakefield Street and down and around Heberdeen Avenue. It's quite an impressive sight.

Settled from late 1849-early 1850 by workers building the road to Lyttelton, Sumner is one of the oldest settlements in Christchurch. Named after John Bird Sumner, who was the then newly-appointed Archbishop of Canterbury and president of the Canterbury Association, it got its first shop in 1870. The proprietor of that shop, one S.E Horneman, was also the village postmaster from 1873-1876. Located right beside the sea, it went on to become a popular seaside resort. A friend of mine remembers catching the tram out to Sumner as a child. Her grandparents, who lived in the centre of Christchurch, had a holiday cottage by the beach there. So did many others.

These days it's a wealthy suburb. The cliff-top homes and sections sell for a premium and hillsides are heavily dotted with expensive modern homes and owners, who want a slice of those beautiful ocean views. That was the case prior to the earthquakes anyway. Now that the cliffs have become so unstable and many homes have been damaged beyond repair and owners evacuated, it may be some time before Sumner prices recover.

The village itself is struggling too. The streets have a desolate look to them.

The Sumner Museum and Community Centre at its heart (above), has now vanished - demolished a fortnight ago, leaving another hole in the settlement's retail fabric. I like to think that come summer, things will improve; that winter is as much to blame for the quiet streets and the empty beachfront, as the earthquakes are. But like much of Christchurch, it will take much longer to heal.

Personally, I'm done theorizing about how and when that might happen. I'm over discussing after-shocks and when I start seeing beauty in the ruins, I think I've become a little immune to the devastation they've caused. I'm not sure if that's a good thing, but I keep telling myself it is a worthy distraction from our broken reality.

City Scene - 22

Butcher Shop in Sydenham Christchurch

(Not sure if it's still standing after the earthquakes)

February 2009, Ajr.

Underwater Worlds

I've never liked the idea of diving myself but I am intrigued by underwater photography and the amazing images that are possible at depth. I was sent these images recently by the team at Dive! Tutukaka , at the Poor Knights Dive Centre, north of Whangarei.

Dive! Tutukaka is New Zealand's premier, full-service dive charter operator serving the Poor Knights Island Marine Reserve, where crystal-clear waters near the edge of the continental shelf are bathed in subtropical currents. Sheer cliff faces, sea caves, tunnels and archways are teeming with a wide range of sea life, including many subtropical fish species not normally found in New Zealand waters. The reserve, rated one of the top 10 diving spots in the world by Jacques Yves Cousteau, is strictly controlled by the Department of Conservation.

Dive! Tutukaka has the largest dedicated dive charter fleet in New Zealand and you hit the water with qualified dive guides. Some of the team are also award-winning underwater photographers, so you'll get great tips when you descend to the deep. Among the adventures are dive expeditions to the wrecks of the HMNZS Tui and the HMNZS Waikato. Both of these large navy vessels were prepared for diving before being sunk to deiver-friendly depths - the Tui in 1999 and the Waikato in 2000. You can watch a video of their sinking at www.diving.co.nz and see how they have become part of the underwater world eleven years on.

Barry's Provocative Unpublished Minutes - 134

"Tying the Knot"

Another in the ongoing series from one of New Zealand's top printmakers. Click Cleavin below, for more.

In the Footsteps of Pioneers

It was a grey, drizzly day on Four Peaks Station in South Canterbury on February 22, 2011 and I was huddled by the fire in Sutherland's Hut [above], (on the Fairlie side of the property), drinking tea and munching on lunchtime sandwiches with four others, when the massive 6.3 earthquake struck Christchurch at 12.51pm. None of us felt a thing. Sutherland's Hut was built in 1866, by James Radford from Timaru, a stonemason, who had come out from England. It is believed to be the oldest surviving early stone shepherd's hut in New Zealand and when you're there, you may as well be a million miles from anywhere. The hut sits on a low ridge just above a pretty stream and is surrounded on all sides by the huge, rolling green hills that characterise much of the South Island's remote high country. Four Peaks itself is owned by Steve and Jo McAtamney, who have spent a great deal of time and energy restoring the shepherds' huts on their 15,000 acre property, so they can be used as comfortable retreats for those who do the 3-day Four Peaks High Country Track. Walkers do a 40km circuit across spectacular landscapes, following the route of the pioneer fencers and musterers used in the 1850s (mountainbikers can do 60km); or if you're short on time, as we were, you can do the The Pack Run, which takes you the same route (in 4-6 hours) by 4WD vehicle.

Jo McAtamney prepares lunch in Sutherland's Hut

However you make your way across the Four Peaks Range, there are astonishing views of Burke's Pass to the southwest and right down to Moeraki and the eastern coastline. Fiery Pass at 1,284m is the highest point on the Pack Run and Walk. On the Geraldine side of the station, the farm gets 40-60 inches of rain annually; on the Fairlie side it gets 28 inches.

I have huge admiration, not only for the early settlers who tamed this temperamental land as best they could, but also for the modern-day farmers like Steve and Jo, who devote their lives to continuing the back-breaking tradition. It requires a certain sort of determination, passion and commitment to make a go of farming this sort of rugged country. And I love the generosity that sees them sharing these remarkable landscapes with others.

They've made the three huts on the walk - Pleasant Gully, Sutherlands and Devil's Creek - warm, cosy and comfortable, with bunks, fireplaces, flushing toilets, showers and even a miniature shop at Sutherland's, where you can pick up a bottle of wine for $25.

Pleasant Gully Hut (above, with the toilet and shower block in the upper photo), was built around 1900. It's the classic little corrugated iron shepherd's hut and was used as the musterers' base hut in the early days of the station. It's been repiled and lined with beautiful Oregon timber - and as tiny as it seems, it comfortably sleeps four. It's the spot where the 4-5 day sheep muster would usually begin and end. Because the high country track is steep in parts, the Pack Run by 4WD is very much weather dependent. The track is open to walkers and mountain bikers from November through April. It costs around NZ$275 per person to bike, NZ$295 per person to walk and the pack Run costs NZ$325 per person. Money well spent if you ask me.

And, as it turned out, it was a pretty safe place to be during a Christchurch earthquake!

www.walkfourpeaks.co.nz

StreetscapeNZ - 116

Logan Brown Restaurant

Cnr Cuba & Vivian Streets

Wellington

April 2010, Ajr

City Scene - 21

Juice Truck

Ponsonby Road, Auckland

June 2009, Ajr

Hedges and Histories

As I look out my window and see my own front hedge running rampant, untamed, untrimmed, unloved, I wonder why I planted it. As much as I adore hedges, I am not a good hedge keeper. I prefer to admire them from afar, in other people's gardens, or undulating across the countryside. The hedge has a very long history of doing just that - they've been used as field boundaries in England since Roman times. Anglo-Saxons also used hedges extensively and many that were used as estate boundaries, still exist. Systematic hedge planting didn't really begin in England though, until the first stages of The Enclosure Movement of the 13th century, when landowners started taking over common land and dividing it up with hedges. This reached its peak with the Enclosure Acts between 1720 and 1840, when over 200,000 miles of hedgerows were planted. Much later, with the intensification of agriculture in Britain after World War II, many were removed and over 118,000 miles of hedgerows have disappeared since 1950. Ancient hedges are now very often protected in Britain.

It's a different story here in New Zealand, where the hedge is either employed as a practical wind-break on a farm (especially in the lower South Island); to give structure to elaborate formal gardens; or as a utilitarian property divider in city suburbs. We have some old hedges but we don't have ancient hedges.

I've made no secret of my passion for hedges - as you'll see if you click Hedges in the label line below this blog. They are synonymous with my own history. I grew up in a garden filled with hedges and with a father who was passionate about maintaining them perfectly with his electric hedge clippers. It was often my job to rake up the clippings and I still remember the smell of that snipped foliage, the sound of the rake scraping across the driveway. I remember crawling into holes in hedges, hiding from brothers and friends, never thinking of spiders, insects, or torn clothes. I remember the 'treasure box' I hid safely in a hollowed-out space behind the roots of the hedge that sidled along the road-side edge of our country property - it was five steps to the left of the oak tree on the chimney side of the house. No one ever found it and even if they had, I doubt my treasures - an assortment of acorns, a china-blue chip of blackbird's egg, a rounded stone, the charcoal sticks I had made for drawing - I doubt any of those would have interested my older brothers. I remember too, the long summer days when I would roam miles from our home, traipsing across country paddocks, following the line of the spiky barbary hedges to find birds' nests. I knew all my birds - their calls, their nest shapes, the patterns and colours of their eggs; and arriving home scratched to pieces from barbery thorns was a small price to pay for the childhood adventures.

Perhaps my childhood memories of hedges are the key to my love of photographing hedges all these decades later - not so much for the sheer physical beauty of the hedge, or even its wayward, scruffy dishevelment but rather for the way they trigger memory. Like the sparrows I watch outside my office every day - their chubby, feathery forms wobbling on the bare winter branches of my birch trees. I can't see them without thinking, in some random unkempt corner of my mind, of the big, unruly sparrow nests I found as a kid, tucked into the eaves of our garden shed - riotous gatherings of straw with a soft, hidden, inner belly of feathers and fur. Memory and history are like that - interwoven, unordered, ready to spring upon us in unexpected moments, in our confrontations with the everyday. Personal histories are written in those hedges, those birds' egg fragments, those nests, those single, treasured, polished stones.

Barry's Provocative Unpublished Minutes - 133

"Earthquake Still Life 1"

I've been so remiss with my blog these past few months that I can't recall if I've shown this image before or not - apologies if I have; but rest assured, our favourite New Zealand printmaker has much more to say yet. This was one of his early responses to the September 2010 earthquake. To see other in this ongoing series, click on Cleavin in the label line below.

Sightseeing in Australia - 8

I don't know why I spend so much time trying to photograph Australian gum trees - it's not as if we don't have plenty of the good old Eucalypts in New Zealand after all, but there's something special about them in their own Aussie environment; and they're so quintessentially Australian. Call it a challenge - and it is most definitely that. I have come home with hundreds of photos of gum trees and most have ended up in the delete bin. Turns out it's actually quite difficult to capture all those forms and shadows without it looking like...well.... a boring solid mass of trees. I was reasonably happy with this shot - taken one soft, sunny morning on a massive drive around the Fleurieu Peninsula, south of Adelaide in 2007. If you just happen to be travelling to Adelaide, I'd strongly advise you to pick up a rental car and make a day of it - better still a couple of days because there are plenty of wineries, beautiful landscapes and interesting towns to visit. The south of the peninsula also gives you access to Kangaroo Island. I love Melbourne's Flinders Street - that one mile long (exactly they tell me) stretch named after explorer, Matthew Flinders, that runs almost parallel to the Yarra River. It's where you'll find the incredibly busy Flinders Railway Station which is, in my view, just about one of the best people-watching places on the planet; and just across the road, Federation Square with its galleries, cafes, restaurants and events. I'm heading across the Tasman in a few weeks' time and you can be reasonably certain that I'll be spending an unnatural amount of time hanging out here with my camera. This is the very handsome State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, which is located in front of the Queensland Museum of Art. It opened after extensive redevelopment in 2006 at the hands of Australian architectural practice, Donovan Hill Peddle Thorp. In 2007, it was voted Australian Building of the Year by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. I spent half a day in both buildings back in 2008, on my way home from a wild adventure in the Queensland Outback. Brisbane, it must be said, seemed tame and very civilised by comparison. A perfect little building in the Victorian town of Malmsbury - little more than a speck on the map, with just 587 people (or thereabouts), 96km northwest of Melbourne. Gold was discovered here in 1858 and the town became a centre for diggers on their way to Bendigo and Castlemaine. I discovered it in 2010, when I hit the road in rural Victoria with a map, a camera and an assortment of drinks and snacks. From Woodend, an hour north of Melbourne, I headed north past Kyneton, and turned off the highway, heading for Malmsbury, then in a giant loop back to the south, and north again to Woodend. It was one of those magnificent days of taking ten hours to do a trip that would normally take 3-4 hours - stopping all along the way to explore and take photographs. My idea of heaven.

Canterbury - A Place of Panoramas

For the last ten months I have been immersed in two things - earthquakes and travel guide writing. Both, as it turns out, equally taxing on the body and mind.

I am physically finished with one and emotionally finished with the other. For too long, I have been absorbed by and obsessed with earthquakes and after shocks. My camera is tired of the bleak vistas that Christchurch currently offers. So I am dipping into my photo files to remind myself of the wider beauties of Canterbury - those sprawling golden-green plains that occupy at least 12,000 square kilometers of the province; the spectacular plaited rivers that weave their way from mountains to sea; the tussocky high country with its boulder-strewn foothills and its spiky peaks. It all sounds like such a tourist cliche but it's true - and it's even better in real life. I took these images near Castle Hill, in turn near Porter's Pass in February. That's about 90 minutes or so from Christchurch. I went there to escape the constant after-shocks for a few days. It's a landscape I've always adored and it should have been a perfect retreat - silent, peaceful, remote - yet, like most Christchurch residents these days, I spent most of the time wondering where I would run to if an earthquake struck, which boulders would hold fast, which mountain faces would collapse in an unstoppable torrent of shingle and stones. Five months and many hundreds of after-shocks on (over 8000 since September 2010), it seems a silly self-indulgence and a waste of a perfectly good escape but I suspect if I were to drive up there tomorrow, I would still experience those same thoughts and insecurities. That's the thing about the earthquakes I resent the most - not the obvious destruction, the mess and the physical losses, but the way they have tampered with my own sense of self, my own sense of surety and my normally adventurous spirit. I feel I have grown 'smaller' in the face of this constant shaking and battering, that my urge to move beyond the comforts of home to the unknown and untried is diminished. That bothers me because I want my life to be a panorama, not a vignette. My eldest son from Australia came to Castle Hill too. He knows the meaning of adventure. He knows how to climb mountains - both physically and metaphorically; and as I watched him blithely climbing every rock face in sight while I cowered at the bottom wondering about rock falls, I envied his personal certainty. I know I have that certainty too. It's just been 'smudged and blurred' and tested more times than I can count in the last months. I just have to tease it back out again. I hope it won't take too long. I hope the earthquakes haven't made me less brave, less adventurous. Because there are too many landscapes like these Too many magnificent panoramas yet to explore. I want all the grandeur, all the minutiae the world can throw at me I have always been a person of the land, of Nature. I suppose that's why I feel 'betrayed' by the recent events in Christchurch. Nature no longer seems reliable and dependable. Yet for all that, I think it will be through Nature, through my love of the land, that I will regain my 'larger spirit.' I'm certainly ready for that. "Nature is an excellent sedative. It pacifies, that is, it makes a man carefree. And being carefree is of the essence in this world." Anton Chekhov.