Gold has been all-in-all to us

Hokitika, 1867 (Via Alexander Turnbull Library)

New Zealand author Charlotte Randall’s fifth novel, Hokitika Town, is set on the West Coast of the South Island in 1865, during the boom years of the gold rushes that brought a motley collection of colonists from all over the world to the wild and wet ribbon of habitable land that is still isolated and largely untamed to this day.

The book’s protagonist, a young Maori boy making his way in European settler society, is called by many names: Halfie, Harvey, Thumbsucker, Pipsqueak, Bedwetter and Cocoa.  His narration, naive and curious but also fiercely independent and loyal, is a real treat, as Randall portrays his growing confidence with English and the ways in which he makes himself an intrinsic part of the town’s life and local dramas. Here’s Halfie, early on in the tale, discussing his place in the West Coast economic food chain as an errand-running  ‘coin boy’:

The gold and the coin got some kind of joinment I not unnerstand. If you find a bit of gold, whitey give you coin, but if you already got coin, whitey give you a bit of gold. They not the same but somehow equal. Not that I ever done this swapping, but I seen it. Sometimes I get tired tryna figure it all out. I go for a sleep in the sun on the river bank. When I wake up fresh, that’s when I like to go to Hokitika town. I go down the street with all them hotels. All them young whitey girls stand in the doorways in their pantalons. They call out, ‘What yer staring at, little boy?’ and pull up their long skirts to show their pantalons. If I do what they want, let my tongue hang out, act like a dog that want a big drink, the girls laugh and throw a piece of bread. I not unnerstand what’s intresting about seeing them frilly pantalons around whitey girls ankles but I do pretty much anything for their bread.

Hokitika, which during the time in which the story is set was a booming mining service town and the second busiest port in New Zealand, is now a trifling town of around 3,000 that seldom features in national news headlines, aside from during its annual wild food festival. It’s sometimes hard to picture how quickly a thriving, if grimy and somewhat ramshackle and lawless, town sprung out of the narrow West Coast sand.  It was built on the rush for gold, which saw thousands of diggers flock to the Coast from New Zealand and Australia, with ships often having to fight off insistent would-be passengers convinced that by missing out on passage to Hokitika they would be missing out on the richest early claims at the nearby Waimea, Ross and Kaniere goldfields.

A traveller journeying by sea from Nelson to Hokitika on a small sailing vessel in February 1865 at the start of the gold rush left his impressions of the town upon his arrival, quoted in a tome by the prolific popular historian J. Halket Millar:

Okitiki is at present represented by two long lines of buildings which stretch from the wharf, or rather the landing place, forming a street about 40 ft. broad. These buildings are mostly built of calico, and are occupied as stores for the sale of grog and provisions. A few of the Hotels and Bank Agencies are built of wood and iron, with some of the lower kind called shanties as mere tents. Each person is allowed for business purposes an allotment measuring 30 ft. of frontage by 70 ft. in depth […] In the place there was neither law nor order observed further than the arrangement I have mentioned about allotments. Each holder of property has to support his claim by power of his own right hand, and Lord Bounce reigns supreme […]

The sandy flat on which the township is erected is covered over with driftwood that has evidently been brought down by the Okitiki [River] on some great overflow of its bed, and there are many who declare their belief that some day Okitiki shall exist, or cease to exist, at the bottom of a great lagoon of water caused by the flooding of the river. At present there is no limit of firewood to be had where one chooses to pitch a tent […] The place seems to be well enough supplied with stores, as I counted about 40 already erected, and about a dozen more in process of erection.

- Quoted in J. Halket Millar, Westland’s Golden Sixties, Wellington, 1959

A few months later the distinguished traveller Julius Haast expressed his surprise at the speed with which Hokitika had risen up:

The principal street, half a mile long, consisted already of a large numbers of shops, hotels, banks and dwelling-houses, and appeared as a scene of almost indescribable bustle and activity. There were jewellers and watchmakers, physicians and barbers, hotels and billiard-rooms, eating and boarding-houses, and trades and professions of all description […] Carts were unloading and loading, and sheep and cattle driven to the yards; there was shouting and bell-ringing, deafening to the passers-by; criers at every corner of the principal streets which were filled with people – a scene I had never before witnessed in New Zealand.
Hundreds of diggers ‘on the spree’ and loafers were everywhere to be seen, but principally near the spit and on the wharf where work went on with feverish haste. Before arriving at Hokitika, I counted seven vessels at anchor in the roadstead, amongst them a large Melbourne steamer; whilst in the river itself, five steamers and a large number of sailing vessels were discharging their cargoes, reminding us of the life in a European port.

- Quoted in Philip Ross May, The West Coast Gold Rushes, Christchurch, 2nd ed, 1967, p.313-4

May’s comprehensive The West Coast Gold Rushes lists some Hokitika population projections at the peak of the boom years – which must be regarded as speculative due to the transient nature of much of the population at the time and the lack of effective administrative control:

 

Year	Month	Pop	Source
1865	Apr	2,000	W. Seed
	July	3,000 adults	Lyttelton Times, 17.07.1865
	Sept	2,500	Lyttelton Times, 29.09.1865
	Dec	2,000	S. Carkeek
1866	Feb	11-12,000	West Coast Times, 05.02.1866
	Apr	6,000	C. Fraser
	May	8-10,000	W. Wilson
	Dec?	7,000	Southern Provinces Almanac 1866

- May, 1967, p.501-2

The town boasted its own newspapers, including the West Coast Times, which published its first edition in May 1865. A Saturday edition published a few months later on 12 August displays a front page heaving with advertisements for services designed to part diggers from their hard-won gold, including the classy-sounding Mac’s Nonpareil Pie House: ‘Meals at all hours – good beds – wines, spirits, and malt liquors of the best brands’. The Times’ editorial column called for increased spending on the Coast by the Canterbury provincial government, claiming that:

From the Grey River on the North, to where the main range touches the sea on the South, and backward in a wide sweep between those two points to the snow-clad hills, the whole of the country is one vast goldfield, little prospected, comparatively speaking, but rich wherever the miner has been tempted to try his fortune. For very many years the West Canterbury goldfield will be worked with profit, if the science of the geologist and the teachings of practical experience are to be relied on.

- West Coast Times, 12 August 1865

However, this proved to be an empty boast. As the easily-accessible gold was plundered and claims ran dry the diggers largely fled to other goldfields, although some remained to work the new West Coast coal mines or fell the plentiful native timber. But the origins of the West Coast and Hokitika itself were quite distinctive, as May points out:

Among the gold rushes of the mid-nineteenth century, that to the West Coast was unique. Elsewhere pastoralists or agriculturalists had been the pioneers, and settlement had preceded a gold rush. Mission stations and cattle ranches were established in California when the ‘forty-niners burst into the Great Valley. The goldfields of New South Wales and Victoria erupted in what was already a gigantic sheepwalk; squatters had explored and occupied the range and basin country of Otago before the rush of ‘sixty-one. ‘The actual beginning of the Westland was its gold discoveries’, explained the West Coast Times: ‘Gold has been all-in-all to us’.

- May, 1967, p.476

RNZAF Red Checkers

Following on from yesterday’s naval parade through the city, today featured an aerobatics display from the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s Red Checkers display team. Five pilots put their New Zealand-built single-seat CT-4E Airtrainers through a challenging and presumably crowd-pleasing routine above Wellington harbour.  I say ‘presumably’ because I actually observed the display from my deck up in Highbury.  The Checkers did a loop around my house, so I like to think they spotted me on the deck with my camera and did a special lap just for me! The display finished with a dramatic starburst manoeuvre, which must have looked fantastic from the waterfront and from the Cook Strait ferry, which was just leaving port and had all the action going on directly overhead.

Royal New Zealand Navy 70th anniversary

Yesterday the Navy had free run of the capital when it began a weekend’s celebrations commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the independent Royal New Zealand Navy. Ceremonies began with a march down through the city from Parliament to Civic Square, and then crowds of Wellingtonians descended on the 11 Navy vessels that were open to public visits. I met up with Richard to have a look at a few of the vessels, and managed to investigate the multi-role vessel HMNZS Canterbury, the offshore patrol vessel HMNZS Wellington, and the inshore patrol vessel HMNZS Hawea.
Before 1941 our maritime defences were the responsibility of the Royal Navy, although a distinctly New Zealand naval force was established as early as 1913, and from 1921 until the foundation of the RNZN the RN had a New Zealand squadron, which included the 18,500 ton battlecruiser HMS New Zealand.
Navy parade
Pictures taken from in front of the Supreme Court building opposite Bowen House at the start of Lambton Quay.






HMNZS Canterbury







HMNZS Wellington





HMNZS Hawea

A mode of conveyance

In 2007 I sold my trusty Mitsubishi Mirage wagon, which was my first car, the day before I flew out to live in London. It had been a reliable vehicle, making the journey from Wellington to Auckland and back plenty of times without any incident, plus coping admirably with a week driving around the varied roads of the South Island. By the time I sold it the Mitsubishi was 17 years old, so I was prepared to take whatever I could get for it, mainly to save my family from having to sell it in my absence. As it happens, finding a willing buyer was no problem at all. I polished the bodywork, tyres and interior to within an inch of its life and took it to a small car fair in downtown Auckland.  Within ten minutes of driving into the car lot I had sold it! Clearly the buyer recognised the opportunity to make a quick buck, because he would have been able to sell it on to backpackers later in the day for a profit. This didn’t bother me at all – I hadn’t paid much for it to start with back in 2000, and anything I got from its sale after seven good years of driving was a bonus as far as I was concerned.

Then in my four and a half years in England I had no need for a car. I only drove when visiting New Zealand, or on the one occasion in England and Northern Ireland when my friends Ruth and Phil and I had a rental car and I was able to get behind the wheel for a couple of days. But now I’ve returned to live in Wellington it was always part of the plan to acquire a car for shopping purposes and for weekend expeditions.

And here it is. This is the trusty wagon that has belonged to a friend’s dad since the mid-90s, and now sits in my garage. It may only have two hubcaps and they may not match each other, it may be as old as my old Mitsubishi was when I sold it, and it may only last a year or two before its retirement, but for now it’s great to be mobile again! 

Lost in memories of punishing velocity

The Isle of Man TT motorbike races have killed 237 people since they began in 1907. Each year they wound and sometimes kill more and more riders. Yet the ones who survive are ever eager to pick themselves back up, get their wounds stitched, bones re-set and spines bolted into place, and get out racing again on the most dangerous roads in motorbike racing.

It's a form of collective insanity demonstrated time and again in the interviews that form a large part of the documentary TT3D: Closer To The Edge, which followed the 2010 races. These are people, mainly men but a few women too, absolutely in the thrall of this ultimate motorcycling challenge. In a sensible world, the TT would be banned. But luckily, the people who participate and the fans who love the sport are not sensible people. You can see it in their eyes and the repeated tales of being cruelly injured one year and being back racing the next; in the voice of the former racer who drives the film crew around the circuit in a car - his excitement is palpable, and he even makes motorbike engine noises like a little boy, lost in his memories of punishing velocity. 

The clear star of the film is the rebellious larrikin Guy Martin, with his Wolverine muttonchops and rakish charm: he talks non-stop and most of what he utters is complete tosh, but the camera loves him and so do the crowds, who will him on to the winning title he has thus far never claimed. He tinkers with his bike incessantly, sleeps rough in his van re-watching old race videos searching for a lost fraction of a second, and foolishly flouts track regulations out of sheer petulance. Every second he's on screen is a small joy. The other riders are equally fixated to the point of obsession too: a veteran champion in his golden Winnebago trying for one last trophy, a quietly-spoken local Manx tryer hoping to delight his hometown fans, and the compulsive Steve Davis-like figure of a would-be King of the Mountain, pumping iron in his gym in case it gives him the slightest edge.

The 3D camerawork is exciting, without being intrusive or overplayed - it perfectly illustrates the brutal yet somehow graceful kineticism of low-to-the-road racing. The slow-motion flight of a 1000cc superbike over one of the TT's many bumpy village roads is both exhilarating and strangely terrifying to watch, because in every feat of superhuman control there lurks the smallest possibility of terrible disaster.  One wheel wobble and it's all over. (In a cruel but apt piece of irony, the race grandstand looks out onto a packed local cemetery, close at hand for those who require its services). One brief segment of only a few seconds sums up the visual power of TT3D - a swooping helicopter shot follows a pack of racers throwing themselves into the tightest of hairpin bends on a steep hillside spur, then follows them for a moment until they're lost around the next hair-raising bend.  

And this is no glossed-over story, despite the rather incongruous narrative by the American actor Jared Leto. Riders are injured, and yes, some even lose their lives. The carnage is astonishing, but it's handled sensitively, and those who survive are allowed to tell their story before the truly terrifying crashes are shown to the viewers. One can only wonder at their fortitude, or perhaps at their inability to see death staring them in the face.

I've never ridden on a motorbike, and perhaps I never will. It looks pretty dangerous to me. But being in the cinematic company of people insane enough to race these machines and run the very real risk of falling off them at 170mph on an uneven road, going around a tight corner hemmed in by drystone walls? That's a rare pleasure. TT3D is a must-see documentary for anyone who appreciates an exciting story peppered with tremendous imagery and fascinating, yet somewhat mental, characters.

TT 2010 summary (spoilers, naturally - don't read until you've watched the film!)

TT3D trailer:

Auckland's new old art gallery

The new wing, Auckland Art Gallery

On Saturday I ventured into downtown Auckland on the train from Onehunga to pay a visit to the refurbished Auckland Art Gallery after its three year closure. While a small part of me resents the loss of the fountain in the exterior courtyard that so fascinated me as a child, the extra space and the $120m new extension to the Victorian building is undoubtedly impressive. It was also pleasing to see so many Aucklanders visiting the gallery on its first day - possibly the busiest day in the gallery's history?

The new spaces are strikingly modern and upmarket, but the interior contrast between new and old is not jarring. From the outside the shift from stonemasonry to ultra-modern might be problematic, but realistically there isn't much of a vantage point to view the whole structure, because the building stretches along the narrow Kitchener Street.

The original gallery building

Three new art installations impressed me on my first visit: Choi Jeong Hwa's Flower Chandelier and Red, and Jeppe Hein's Long Modified Bench Auckland.  These definitely have the potential to become attractions in their own right, and it's only a pity that a delightful work like Flower Chandelier will only be on display in the gallery for a year.  I expect its constantly inflating and deflating petals will need patching up after a full year of display.

'Flower Chandelier'

'Red'

'Long Modified Bench Auckland'

Exterior roof detail

As for the conventional art collections, the building displays a surprisingly impressive range of overseas and New Zealand material. Julian and Josie Robertson's magnanimous Promised Gift collection, which includes a sumptuous range of Picassos and other greats, will form the backbone of the expanding overseas collection and enable the gallery to attract a superior range of visiting exhibitions in future. But there's also an eye-opening range of European art that rivals many of the smaller galleries of Europe, including a splendid village scene by Brueghel and plenty of Raphael engravings.  Sure, there's also a pretentious conceptual art space upstairs too, but it's not excessive.

The refurbished Art Gallery will boost Auckland's status as a city that respects culture, and will act as a popular tourist attraction too.  I will definitely be paying another visit to its collections the next time I'm up in Auckland, because there's still plenty more to see. It's heartening to think that Auckland finally has an art gallery that can be considered world class.