Tag Archives: south island

Part 3: B-Right-On

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New Brighton, or Brighton, or B-Right-On is a seaside suburb. So is Sumner, but the difference is that while Sumner is quite nice, Brighton is a bit shit.

Bedposts

The trouble with New Brighton is that it used to be a boom town. For a couple of decades, it was the only place in New Zealand with Saturday morning trading. People would flock there, and it got to the point that the main street was pedestrianised to cope with the weekend swell.

But now it feels almost like a ghost town. The main street stretches out long with ’70s era retail buildings, but they are now occupied by discount shops, second-hand shops or just empty.

Though there is a glimmer of the new and the lively. At the end of the main street stands the new library building. (It has a bar attached, which is a nice consideration.) And jutting out from the library is the New Brighton pier, because if a place is called Brighton, then it must have a pier.

But this ain’t no English-style pleasure pier. It’s a fishing pier. It’s like a long pedestrian motorway out to the middle of the ocean, where all you can do is sit and admire the expanse of sea, or fish.

After walking the 300 metres to the end, I found a bogan fisherman giving some Chinese fishermen tips in a strange mock broken English. “I buy bucket from North Island,” he explained. “Cheap. Courier them. Only 25 dollar. Engineering shop. Hardened steel.”

Suddenly excitement erupted. One of the fishermen had caught a kawahai. It flipped and flopped and bled all over the pier. Fortunately clean-up hoses have been provided for dealing with such bloody messes.

Bay watch

The pier lead me back to the library, where I found myself just in time for a presentation on the history of the Edmonds Cookery Book. “Did you win a prize,” an old lady sitting next to me asked. Well, no, but it turns out she had won something for writing a short story about the Edmonds cookbook.

We watched a 1955 short Edmonds promotional film called “Cookery Nook”. It’s a pro-Edmonds propaganda comedy, showing a bumbling dad’s baking attempts being sorted out by his resourceful daughter and her home economics class school pals. You see, being a good cook is as much about planning and saving time as it is about making delicious food. But maybe this love of time-saving has mutated into our modern love of takeaway joints.

A guest chef revealed to the audience that a lot of cafes will use recipes from the Edmonds Cookery Book. Those Afghans, the ginger crunch, the Louise cake – it’s all Edmonds, baby.

So why bother baking ginger crunch at home when you can go to a cafe and get a nice slice of it made from exactly the same recipe as the Edmonds one? Oh, I suppose there’s the joy of cooking; the togetherness of eating.

But there was to be no togetherness with my lunch. I found a cafe and ordered a relatively harmless looking item of food called a “Mexi-bean burrito”. While this was doing a few ceremonial laps in the microwave, a staff member sprayed my table with something called Revive. It had the opposite effect on my spirits.

Is this the future that 1950s home economics teachers prepared us for?

Part 2: The house that wasn’t there

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Simon and David were two businessmen in their mid 40s. David was visiting Christchurch and it was Simon’s job to give his colleague a tour of the city. Today they were visiting the Canterbury Museum and had stumbled across the Bluff Paua House exhibit around the same time I did.

But before we were allowed into the replica of Bluff couple Fred and Myrtle Flutey’s front room, we were first ushered into an anteroom and were required to watch a context-setting audio-visual presentation to help explain why there was half a seaside house filled with paua shells inside a museum in urban Canterbury.

“It’s Kiwiana, David,” Simon explained as the video started. “I thought it was just a house with a few pauas,” David said.

I’m suspicious of anything described as Kiwiana, because it all seems to just be things from the collective childhood of Baby Boomers. The video name-checked all the usual suspects – Jandals, pavlova, Buzzy Bee and, of course, paua shells. David was suspicious too, so Simon further explained, “It’s part of our heritage – Lemon & Paeroa, tomato sauce, fish and chips.”

The video over, we made our way into the replica house. It smelt clean, un-lived-in. “It’s quite a small lounge, isn’t it,” Simon observed. Well, it’s not like anyone actually lives there.

Simon and David didn’t take long to see the paua room and they soon headed for the exit. Taking one final look around, David said, “It’s ‘Fred’ and it’s ‘Myrtle’ but it’s just a bunch of paua shells.” And I realised this was true.

When the Fluteys were alive, to visit their crazy paua-shell house you had to travel all the way to the bottom of the country – the bottom of the world! – and then go inside this eccentric old couple’s actual house, with the knowledge that this wasn’t just a museum space; it was their real living room.

Reconstructed as a museum exhibit, it comes across more as a memorial to both the Fluteys and to Kiwiana. It’s a crazy frozen moment of something that doesn’t actually exist any more.

But in the absence of the Fluteys, has Canterbury Museum now taken on the role of the eccentric collector/hoarder?

Here’s this serious museum with its dioramas of pre-European Maori, collection of taxidermied birds and hall of Antarctic exploration, and yet there, lurking in a corner, is a pretend house filled with paua shells and other kitsch objects. (Even Te Papa at its most manic was never like this.)

And like the Fluteys, it almost seems that it’s something the museum hasn’t set out to do deliberately. It’s just found itself with a big collection of shells and done the museum world equivalent of opening your seaside home to busloads of tourists.

So let’s stop pretending that the paua house at Canterbury museum belongs to Fred and Myrtle. No, Canterbury Museum is your great-uncle who has built a replica house in his shed and is arranging shells on the wall for the tourists.

Shrine

Part 1: Four days, maximum

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Wellington is quite a nice place, Ron the taxi driver tells me. Well, at least it was the last time he went there – which was in the ’80s, when he was in the circus. Though, he says, he did have trouble finding a hotel that would serve him a drink.

The pressure of conversation is weighing on me. It’s a long way from Dunedin city to the airport. I know what I’m supposed to say – “The circus, Ron! You were in the circus? How does a bloke like you end up in the circus?”

But I couldn’t. I was too tired. It was too early in the morning and I was fighting off a cold that had emerged a couple of days earlier. All I wanted to do was get on the plane and fly back to Wellington, with all its bars and circuses.

The last time I’d been in the south of the South Island was on a family holiday in 1993, which I like to remember as being full of majestic scenery, with REM’s “Automatic For the People” playing on my Walkman, but yet my diary insists that it was the most boring holiday ever and that I listened to that new Nirvana “Incesticide” album.

So, the South Island held a strange allure. It was big, empty, full of tourists and I was going to go there on holiday some day. No. We were going to go there on holiday some day. No. I was going to go there on holiday some day.

Then Megan and Ned in Christchurch announced they were getting married on Labour weekend, so there was my motivation to finally get down to that part of the country – four days in Christchurch, four days in Dunedin.

…
I climbed to the top of the Christchurch Cathedral tower to orientate myself with the city. After being shamed out fitness-wise by an old lady, I discovered that Cathedral Square is essentially hemmed in by tall buildings, obscuring any panoramas that may have previously existed.

But maybe the cathedral itself would offer some sort of insight into the Christchurch character. In the sacred space of the cathedral, a talkative fellow observed, “People kept asking, ‘Who are you?’ And John Lennon said, ‘I am the walrus. I am the egg man.’ Yeah, well, what is the egg man?” Hey, maybe John Lennon was right about the whole “bigger than Jesus” thing.

I stumbled across a little area by a pedestrian mall. Loud classical music was being piped out into the space – youth repellant! Because classical music is so naff, drunken youths won’t loiter around that little area. They won’t sit around drinking cans of cheap beer and yelling “Are you drunk yet! Are you drunk yet! Oh, get some more inside you!” They won’t scare off the tourists.

I found the Whitcoulls that I’d last visited in 1993. Back then, I bought an issue of Film Threat magazine, which introduced me to the radical idea that there are good films that never make it to your local multiplex, and the even more radical idea that if you don’t like the films out there, you can make your own.

So I checked out the magazine rack, wondering if I’d have a similar inspirational experience. But the only magazine that caught my eye was “Ponies!” magazine, and that was for all the wrong reasons.

Back in the Square, some tourists were talking to a local (or was he talking to them?). “If you’re serious about seeing Christchurch, you need five, six days minimum. You can’t do it in four.”

But I only had a total four days to see Christchurch. What if I missed out on some vital Cantabrian experience because I was selfishly flying on to Dunedin? What if I never experienced the real Christchurch and was left with a false impression of the flat city?

Well, I had three more days to find out.