Books
The old place
by Nicholas Reid
Our childhood heartlands shape us as much as class or culture.
I was born and raised in the east Auckland suburb of Panmure. Where I lived my first 21 years was equidistant beween two churches on a street that, in my earlier childhood, was a cul-de-sac ending in a horse paddock. Up the road was a 19th-century wooden Catholic church, with a very large graveyard where the clergy of the diocese were buried. Down the road was an original Selwyn Anglican church, with a picturesque little graveyard and a beautiful huge macrocarpa tree rising over the church spire. Beyond was the Tamaki estuary, and beyond that the rolling farmlands of Pakuranga.
Time changes everything. A new bridge was built and the road ceased to be a cul-de-sac. The Catholic church was demolished and an undistinguished brick thing put in its place to accommodate expanding congregations. The Anglican church stayed put, but the vicar chopped down the tree because apparently it was rotting within. Pakuranga ceased to be farmlands. It’s now solid suburbia all the way to Whitford. The traffic roars ceaselessly.
But here’s the point of this nostalgic ramble. Rationally or irrationally, what was imprinted on my childhood brain remains my basic heartland. If I hear the word “church”, I think first of one of those two churches. If I hear “river”, I think of the Tamaki estuary. I ended up writing the biography of somebody buried in the Catholic cemetery. Place, and especially childhood place, is what defines us as much as class and culture.
It’s that philosophy which informs Heartlands. This collection of 15 essays was written (as a mildly facetious pre-face tells us) partly to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. This book is such a pleasure that I’ll dispose of my one whinge straight off.
There is nothing of Auckland in it.
The opening essay, an eloquent account of his Rotorua turangawaewae, was written by Paul Tapsell of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. But that’s as close as the book gets to the Queen City. I know central Auckland has had its historical places battered and developed out of existence. Still, I’m sorry the editors couldn’t have commissioned somebody like Russell Stone, the master chronicler of raffish 19th-century Auckland, to point out such traces as remain.
This gripe apart, Heartlands offers a wonderful variety of observations, and it’s interesting to see how many of them begin in childhood memories.
John Wilson clearly would not have felt so much about Stewart Island if he hadn’t taken childhood holidays there. Helen McCracken has known and loved Petone Beach since she was a kid (and – good for her – she makes some sensible comments about how inaccurate most historical “re-enactments” are). Michael Kelly, expatiating on the Basin Reserve as the “lung” of Wellington, must be drawing on at least some wool-gathering he did while looking out the windows of old St Pat’s, where he went to school.
Not that these or any other contributions are merely descriptive nostalgia. As historians, all contributors move from the personal to the broader historical perspective. Gavin McLean begins with his early impression of Oamaru as “a smug, cocky-dominated, rugger-bugger dullsville”, but his account of the harbour gives a shrewd overview of the clash between “green” (nature) and “brown” (history) conservation styles. Jock Phillips’s tramp around the war memorials of Wanganui can’t help but imply things about the martial impulse in New Zealanders. Kynan Gentry’s version of Cape Kidnappers becomes an examination of the leading problems in nature conservation.
With a book like this, there’s always the temptation to play favourites and nominate a “best” essay. I’ll resist it. But I can say which two essays I’ve personally found most useful.
As an Aucklander currently sojourning in Dunedin, I’ve found myself using Erik Olssen’s detailed contribution (the longest in the book) as a handy guide to this city’s architectural sites and sights. And when I, an ignorant outsider, took a spin up to Palmerston, I required Tom Brooking’s essay to explain to me what that monument on the conical hill is all about – and also to smartly correct some common myths about how New Zealand’s farmlands were formed.
Just one warning. Maybe it’s best to read the essays in this book one at a time and at leisure, instead of back to back the way I did. No matter how enlightening they are individually, arguments on conservation and restoration can become repetitive when encountered en masse.
HEARTLANDS: New Zealand Historians Write About Places Where History Happened, edited by Kynan Gentry and Gavin McLean (Penguin, $35)
