Australian Geographic
Adventurers, Explorers and Trail Blazers
Install App?
Australian Geographic
inside.australiangeographic.com.au
This is how the Install App dialog will look like once your App goes live.
casts off for a flying-fox ride down
Christchurch’s all-age Margaret Mahy
Playground (named for a well-known NZ
children’s author). At 1.6ha it’s the biggest
playground in the Southern Hemisphere,
and credited with “bringing theheartbeat
back into the city”.
city rises
on 22 February 2011 killed 185, wrecked
the city’s CBD and undermined its eastern
suburbs. Ten years on, Christchurch has learnt
some valuable lessons in city planning.
It wasn’t the biggest quake in its series. Five months earlier, there’d been a 7.1-magnitude tremor centred 45km west of Christchurch that damaged the city. But 22 February was different. It was magnitude 6.3, smaller than the previous quake, but the epicentre was just 6km south of the city and even on an international scale it was very violent. Two multi-storey buildings in the CBD pancaked and the low-rise masonry in older parts of the city centre cascaded onto the streets.
The steeple and bell tower of Christ Church Cathedral collapsed into the square, and its whole front face and beautiful rose window – the spiritual and symbolic face of Christchurch itself – teetered, and would later collapse onto the entrance portico, opening the nave to wind and weather, and the pigeons of Cathedral Square.
The February quake killed 185 and triggered an immediate state of local emergency that gave top-down control to civil defence. Then emergency legislation in April 2011 changed it to a state of national emergency that shifted top-down control to a Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery, Gerry Brownlee, and appointed a Christchurch Earthquake Recovery
Authority (CERA).
That absolute control by the minister and his department proved to be right and proper, for as the years went by, the government would spend more than $14 billion of New Zealand taxpayers’ money on the Christchurch recovery and rebuild.
Yet it was the people of the city, not its appointees, who’d laboured by the thousand amid wreckage to help each other in those post-quake days. It was therefore equally right and proper that the emergency legislation of April 2011 didn’t just set up the top-down authority of a minister and his department, but decreed a bottom-up approach. It called for the people of Christchurch to be given 90 days to prepare a draft plan for building their new city.
THREE MONTHS. It wasn’t long but the population was already primed. The post-quake days watchword was “When a city falls apart, the people come together” and the people had done that.
Then came the invitation to “Share an Idea”. The newly social Christchurch population clinked its glasses, took another sip and clocked up the highest level of community response to city planning NZ had ever seen. The submissions were rendered down to 106,000 separate ideas, broken into themes by council planners and organised into a draft plan that was dispatched to the minister. The mythology of that time has it that the people of Christchurch redesigned their city on a visionary flush of alcohol.
CERA took the plan, set down five-year confidentiality agreements for its planners to sign, then closeted itself for a 100-day rewrite. What emerged came to be called the Blueprint (see AG 113) and it specifically acknowledged the first plan of the city laid out in 1850 by surveyor Edward Jollie. Across Christchurch’s flat land the 25-year-old Jollie had laid out a uniform, regular street grid loyal to cardinal directions. At its centre was a cruciform square, with the Avon River – now the Otakaro/Avon – left to wind its own eccentric path across it all.
The Blueprint channelled Jollie’s orthogonal spirit. It took the logic of the grid and enhanced it with a conceptual frame that defined straight-line boundaries to the CBD on three sides. The frames defined precincts – each as wide as a city block, and most six city blocks long. To the north lay the arts and culture precinct. The long inner-city residential precinct was east. To the south was the innovation and health precinct. Then, to complete the western precinct on what was otherwise a strictly rectangular template, the Blueprint gave itself over to the Avon’s meanderings and became the precinct for river-sitting, riverside strolling and on-river punting. ►
Development Unit and Christchurch City Council
The Terrace look across the newly paved
promenade and its step-down basalt
terraces to the water, all part of opening
up the CBD to the Otakaro/Avon River.
The frame enclosed the 74ha space of the CBD, and within that space the Blueprint set out various specialist spaces. The locally beloved Ballantynes Department store would anchor a new retail mall. Justice and Emergency Services would be housed close together. There’d be a new library, a new bus exchange, a big space for a new Convention Centre right next to the Avon, and, at the centre as always, Jollie’s Cathedral Square.
It would be a green city, a walking city, a living city, an intimate city, a market city, a city turned to the river, a city with a height limit of seven storeys – aside from those few high-rise buildings that survived the quake.
These were all features of the draft plan, and Hugh Nicholson, the council’s design leader for the draft plan, was pleased with the Blueprint overall. As for many others, once it came before the public, he’d push back against the Convention Centre site.
THE DAMAGED CHRISTCHURCH Town Hall didn’t figure in the CERA blueprint. It was a Brutalist structure of the 1970s, revered as an avant-garde architectural antidote to old Christchurch’s decorative gothic style. Its concert hall had the best acoustics of any performance space in the land. Its big front pillars stood in reflective pools of water right on the riverbank. In the 2011 quake its subsurface had liquefied as the quake struck, and those front pillars and other foundation columns had sunk at variable rates and twisted the superstructure above.
CERA wanted the Town Hall’s performance functions transferred to two proposed theatres in the Blueprint’s arts and culture precinct. The council came under pressure to demolish the Town Hall and put its $68 million insurance money into those theatres. But at the end of 2012, the council voted to keep it.
It was the first push-back against CERA’s control of the rebuild. The structure was strong enough to survive nuclear attack but not, suggested CERA and the minister, lateral spread, the slow slide of its unstable footings towards the river.
Ten years on, Gerard Smyth, filmmaker, sits in the extensively quake-damaged then exquisitely rebuilt Isaac Theatre Royal. When the earthquake first struck, he grabbed his Sony EX3 and walked straight into the debris to film, one hand pressing into place a lens that had broken away from its mount. He filmed his approach to the fallen dome, shattered masonry, unstable pillars and stone angels of the Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, sobbing as he progressed. In the opinion of many, the basilica had been a finer building than the Anglican cathedral, though tucked away in Barbadoes Street, far from the CBD.
Gerard produced the quake documentary When a City Falls. For the 10-year anniversary in 2021, he produced a follow-up documentary – When a City Rises.
One of the film’s protagonists, mental health worker Ciaran Fox, divides up the 10-year recovery period so far into three distinct phases – first a heroic period of rescue, then a honeymoon period of participation, but now a period of disillusionment.
It’s a big claim to make amid a $14 billion spend, but as CERA folded up its tent in 2016, the New Zealand auditor-general – the gold standard for unbiased government reportage – investigated CERA’s five-year record, and suggested why that might be true.
True, the anchor projects had fallen behind. The Margaret Mahy Playground, named after a NZ children’s author, was the only anchor that hit its delivery date. Still, the bus interchange, the Oi Manawa memorial and the Otakaro/Avon River Precinct, though late, engendered such delight that it didn’t seem to matter.
Other delays, though, had an effect on morale. The new sports stadium, originally slated to open in 2017, remains on hold. The Convention Centre’s opening has been put back four years to 2021. The Metro Sports Facility’s opening is deferred by six years to 2022.
The eastern frame’s medium density residential living is paced according to demand – 172 apartments to date, with another 68 under construction with prices ranging from $399,000 for one-bedroom apartments to three-bedroom terrace designs at $1.25 million. Three-quarters of the estimated build – 660 units – still lies ahead. The eastern frame doesn’t impress Gerard. ►
tourist circuit and handy
transport for locals who
hold annual passes.
In the days after, Peter watched
Christchurch react: “You could see in
people’s faces a real sense of shock, of
fright. Pinched faces, no laughter. It affected the body language. People were unsure. It was like a mist came over the city. It was very strange.”
If the Christchurch trams don’t run – even if only briefly – it signals a city in trouble. They shut down for three hours during that March rampage. They shut down for two and a half years after the 2011 earthquake. And they shut down for two months during the COVID-19 lockdowns. “The trams are so iconic in Christchurch, so much a symbol of normality, that [their running indicates] the city itself is open again for business,” Peter says. After the COVID lockdown ended he observed “a wonderful atmosphere return to the city”.
The success of that lockdown nationwide, the determination of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the so-called team of 5 million to halt the spread of the virus, mean that New Zealanders now travel freely across the country, and the government has put in place programs to encourage domestic tourism.
As he commentates the City Tour now, Peter notes in passing that the Christ Church Cathedral has bird poop ankle-deep in the nave right now, but that’ll pass. He notes that the ANZ Centre between Cashel and High streets, though 25m high, has foundations 30m deep and that the city is now re-engineered and as safe as it can be, with the highest standards of quake-proofing.
“We didn’t ask for the earthquake sequence to happen but we’ve been presented with this chance by Mother Nature to just get it right,” Peter tells his tramful of attentive travellers as he clangs the bell and the tram sways forward.
______
THE OTAKARO/AVON flows past what was once her front door en route to the sea. The eastern suburbs of Richmond, Bexley and Dallington all flourished along this river corridor before the 2011 quake. The liquefaction sand beneath these suburbs is weight-bearing when it’s stable, but any earthquake acts like a giant pump. The river corridor sank during the 2011 earthquake by about a metre, and the silt burst through and ruined, or put at risk, 6000 homes.
CERA’s response was to Red Zone wide swathes of land on both sides of the river, buy out the homeowners and demolish their houses. That left an apocalyptic landscape serviced by damp roads to nowhere with leaning lampposts and cul-de-sacs of silted neglect. The sections they served are still populated by backyard fruit trees and delineated by border hedges, but the houses and people have gone.
Diana Madgin was a gardening columnist. Her staple weekly column was a “caulis and cabbage” affair, discussing what vegetable suited what season, but after the quakes she wrote about what supplements and growing techniques suited what types of soil – the differences perhaps between the alluvial soils of this eastern delta and the clay of the Port Hills – because people were shifting around en masse and wanted to know. Then she started to write about trees, and what they meant for the people who’d had to leave them behind. The fruit trees that marked the seasons, the trees planted to mark an anniversary, or to mark a buried pet, or the trees that guarded the ashes of a cremation. “It was all written on the garden page – a whole collection of those memories,” Diana says. “People would say I can’t bear to leave this because Dad’s ashes are under the trees in the corner of the garden, or under the beech tree by the river. And they’d express their feelings, and why they felt like that. In a way it helps you to know, and it also helps you to leave, because the more you know, the more you can carry away with you. Not that it’s easier to leave but you need to be better informed because leaving is also an act of courage.”
The Crown (the national government) spent more than $1.5 billion acquiring 8000 properties in the various Red Zones of Christchurch. In 2019, when the government negotiated its final global agreement with Christchurch as part of handing all rebuild control back to the city, it sold this 640ha of river corridor to the council for $1.
The 2011 quake was unusually violent. The filmmaker who embodies a city’s determination to retain its spirit, the mayor who embodies the city’s political will and the gardener who embodies a love of place are characters arisen from a city’s extraordinary travail. And all are pleased, after a year-long vacillation between retaining or demolishing Christ Church Cathedral, that restoration is at last underway. Cranes pick away at it and engineers figure how to quake-proof without compromising the heritage. A restored cathedral seems likely to be the final capstone of the recovery, but it’s still many years off, and perhaps the man who most closely embodies the reality of it all is Hugh Nicholson.
“With any major city in the world if you do one major work in 10 years you’re doing okay. Big projects take a long time and we were trying to do 10 of them, probably more when you take into account all the repairs at the same time. It was madness. Occasionally I get to show people around and suddenly I see gaps
and think, ‘My God, they’ll think we’ve been doing nothing. But remember maybe 80 per cent of the CBD came down. It was huge, and I’m really proud of what we’ve done.”
Beauty on the brink
IT’S JUST AFTER lunchtime, the morning rains have finally cleared and the sun begins breaking through the clouds. Max Breckenridge, a captive release project officer with BirdLife Australia (BLA) is slowly walking along a dirt road that cuts through a patch of untouched spotted gum–ironbark forest in the Lower Hunter Valley in New South Wales.
Our new conservation superpower
There were expectations it would reveal much about the evolution of this continent’s largely unique mammal fauna, and it has. But to most scientists working in Australian wildlife conservation, it didn’t seem to have a lot of practical relevance.
Lifeblood of the nation
Below the modern Brewarrina Weir in north-western New South Wales, a 2km bend holds the remains of this ancient structure, a complex of dry-stone walls and a site of engineering brilliance. Displaying advanced knowledge of river hydrology and fish ecology, the traps were designed to catch Murray cod, golden and silver perch and other fish, but allow breeding stock to pass through.
Grantham’s road to recovery
IT WAS 10 JANUARY 2011 and once again it was pouring with rain. Queensland had already endured its wettest spring and December on record, and yet still the rain kept coming. I was working at the time as a freelance photographer for Queensland’s main newspaper, The Courier Mail. And weary of capturing “wet weather photos”, I’d decided to stay dry inside my Toowoomba office.
Conservation canine-style
IN 2004, THERE WAS no way David Williams, then an environmental science student at Deakin University, in Victoria, could have predicted the chain reaction a last-minute assignment submission would create. A paper he’d written outlined an environmental management plan that suggested using trained Maremma sheepdogs to protect little penguins from fox predation on Middle Island, off the coast of Warrnambool, in south-western Victoria.