The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

by Farrell, Fiona

  In the 1840s, 5000 tons of corn were sent annually from Navan in Meath for export; 10,000 pigs, 27,000 sheep and lambs and 100,000 cattle were dispatched to the Dublin markets. Eighty per cent of this livestock was owned by the county’s 2500 grazier families, who in the 1841 census represented 7 per cent of the population.

  Thousands meanwhile lived in rudimentary cabins along the roadside verges and hedgerows between those productive fields. On their way from their estate at Killegar, off to visit the neighbours or attend Sunday service, the Godleys would have bowled past such cabins and seen their deterioration as the seasonal work the men had depended upon dwindled: farmers in the region were switching from tillage to cattle. There was more profit in cows and bullocks. The domestic linen industry that had supplied some work for local women had also declined, as manufacture shifted to city factories.

  So when the potato crop failed, disaster was swift. By 1847, the Meath Herald was reporting that the town of Kells, for example, was ‘one entire Bazaar of Beggars. Daily and hourly are they increasing. Scores of famished women and children prowling about from morning until night, from door to door, shivering with cold, attacking every individual that may chance to come to town with wailing for relief to save them from perishing.’

  A pawnbroker in the town recorded that ‘both peasants and tradesmen and women … [were] in such a miserable state of nudity’ that they were unable to attend religious service. A profound deprivation in a deeply religious country. Near naked, afflicted with cholera and nameless fevers, unattended, the Irish died in their hundreds of thousands along the roads, in hovels, or piled into cemetery chapels, where they crawled in to lie down among their neighbours and await death on hallowed ground.

  Too little and too late, the authorities opened soup kitchens, distributing a gruel of rice and the Indian corn which landowners across the Atlantic had discovered was sufficient to keep black field workers alive and able to cut sugar or pick cotton. Boiled in those big army cauldrons you see around Ireland, rusting in the corner of rural museums or growing pansies in the yard, it caused scouring and diarrhoea in starving bodies.

  In the midst of genocide and administrative negligence, Godley came up with a scheme. Ship a million Irish, at government expense, off to Canada, where they would repay the investment by forming a colony on the ownerless acres of Ontario while releasing the rich meadows of Meath and Leitrim to cattle and sheep. The people might prove reluctant to take such a step, sailing off over an ocean they had never seen to a barely imaginable future, but Godley added a clever tweak to the plan: ensure that the emigrants would be accompanied by a clergyman of their own faith. Catholic priests would lead their people, like some bellwether leading the flock into the abattoir, calming their panic with a reassuring presence.

  Godley’s scheme did not meet with universal approval (the administrators in Ontario were not so keen on absorbing boatloads of starving Irish), but his work found a ready audience in the author of A View of the Art of Colonization.

  The springs of Malvern — the Holy Well, St Ann’s Well and the others bubbling up through fissures of gneiss and limestone — were believed curative. In 1847, Wakefield was there, recovering from a stroke, and Godley too, trying to cure the persistent hoarseness that proved to be the precursor to tuberculosis. Wakefield’s theories had borne fruit. The New Zealand Company had established several settlements: in Wellington and Wanganui in 1840, New Plymouth in 1841, Nelson in 1842. With the confidence of success, Wakefield proposed a meeting, and over a restorative cup of mineral water perhaps, he and Godley discussed their concept of colonisation and, in particular, this vision of Wakefield’s, which would see a New Zealand settlement not of Catholic paupers, but of sturdy members of the established Church of England, with the blessing of a company composed of two archbishops, eight bishops, several peers and other men of unquestioned probity. Their plan had a kind of missionary purpose. They hoped to ‘set an example of a colonial settlement in which from the first, all the elements including the very highest of a good and right state of society shall find their proper place’. They also had an eye for a good investment, though none might have expressed it quite so crudely as Felton Mathew in the privacy of his diary.

  Godley became a director of the Canterbury Association, designated to travel to New Zealand to oversee the orderly arrival and settlement of the colonists. Perhaps the change of air might also solve that persistent hoarseness and clear his lungs.

  So here he is, three years after that conversation, stepping ashore in Lyttelton, ready to take charge. And all the talk and journalism has come to this: a new map.

  IT HAS SOMETIMES BEEN CLAIMED that Christchurch was designed by the same man who designed Adelaide: Colonel William Light, a soldier and surveyor, born in Malaya as the son of the British superintendent of Penang and a woman of mixed Portuguese or French or Malay or Siamese descent. A child of empire, in other words.

  Light’s Vision, as the map for Adelaide is known, combined a military regularity in a grid of streets, some wide, some narrow, with a healthy allowance of open space. There were five parks within the city proper and a surrounding belt of 1700 acres, permitting the circulation of fresh air. Light, like Godley, had tuberculosis and died soon after his arrival in Australia. He was clearly concerned for the lungs of the city’s inhabitants. The result is a plan that is beautiful and efficient, and over 100 years later it is still a lovely, humane structure in which people can live. But Light died in 1839, too soon to have a direct role in the design of Christchurch, though his vision may have had some influence on that other military man, Captain Thomas, when it was time to come up with a plan.

  The result has often been referred to as an ‘English city’. For years, Christchurch was marketed to tourists as ‘more English than England’, with its punts on the Avon and Cathedral Square. In fact, it bears no resemblance at all to any English city. They are much more random affairs, evolving over time, their streets built on the banks of waterways long buried, or around the whims and follies of great men and their architects. They are hotchpotches of style and use, palimpsests of successive cycles of demolition and renewal.

  Christchurch was intended to improve on this with a classical simplicity that had its origins in the work of the Greek philosopher and mathematician Hippodamus. In the fifth century BC he devised a perfect city of streets set at right angles to one another within a rectangular frame. Sites within this rational structure were reserved for sacred, public and private use. Temples and public buildings would occupy the centre, around an area deliberately left empty for public converse and trade. The remainder of the city area would be taken up by houses for a population, ideally of 10,000 men, along with their women, children and slaves. The scheme was orderly, though not in some ways as practical as the randomly evolved settlements it planned to supplant, where a maze of narrow alleyways was much simpler to defend from the bloody irrationality of invasion. But it had an undeniable beauty and was adopted in the building of several classical cities. The Romans found it especially useful in the construction of frontier cities, erected at speed to impose the restraints of civilisation upon restive tribes.

  Which was not so far, when Europeans took to expansion and empire, from the reality underlying all the noble talk of ‘the good and right state’. In America, in 1683, William Penn designed a city of brotherly love as a ‘greene country town’ of regular lots, each 1 or half an acre, where owners might garden and lead a life of genteel self-sufficiency. Penn’s grid is centred upon a square and each quadrant is centred upon a park and the mathematics are disturbed only, as in Christchurch, by a wilful river. Fifty years later, Savannah took shape in the mind of a military man, General Oglethorpe, who planned a grid of wards each centred on an open square where the citizens might marshal for military exercises. At the time that Captain Thomas was imagining Christchurch, townships across the plains of the American Midwest were leaping up like the warriors in legend who sprang from dragon’s teeth, each a regular
grid, 6 miles square, their Main and Chestnut streets intersecting at regular intervals with their First, Second and Third streets.

  In Canterbury, the grid was less an artefact of military expediency than an aid to efficient subdivision and sale. Its designers worked at speed: Thomas, who was forty-five, ex-India, quick tempered (he would be dismissed within a few months by Godley and was last heard of establishing a mine in Australia), and his assistant, Jollie, who was only twenty-five.

  There are several sketches of the riverbank and the hut where Jollie lived while surveying the city: a canvas-roofed whare, formerly the property of a man named Sydney Scroggs, who had given up on colony-making to return to England and a less demanding career in the church. There are other huts nearby but their owners’ names go unrecorded, like the figure who stands sometimes in the foreground, holding a long staff. A taiaha, perhaps or, minus feather and ornament, conceivably a surveying pole, the kind of thing required for accurate trigonometrical survey. The man is exotic interest, a touch of local colour, as anonymous as the men who are labouring to cut a road to link the port to the new city. ‘Two or three hundred Maoris’ brought down from Wellington, Godley reports, are at work on the route along the steep crater wall. It’s the numerical vagueness that gives the man away. These are not individuals, any more than those gangs of Irishmen back in England building the new railways and the canals whose original name, ‘navigations’, spawned a new word for men engaged in backbreaking labour: ‘navvies’. You don’t have to bother counting them properly. They’re just another mass of muscle. Warriors transformed to road crew in the blink of an eye.

  JOLLIE SPREADS OUT THE NEW MAP. Thomas adjusts his gold spectacles and opens a copy of Burke’s Peerage, with its list of Anglican bishoprics. Thomas reads the name of a bishopric aloud. If Jollie likes the sound of it, he writes it on the map as the name of one of those straight streets. Colombo is the via principalis, running north–south across the Square. Salisbury, Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester cross it at right angles, running east–west. There are Cashel, Tuam and Kilmore too, from Ireland; Madras and Colombo from India and Ceylon; Barbadoes from the Caribbean — until the whole grid is criss-crossed with Anglican propriety.

  This is how Jollie, years later, recalled the scene. There is such insouciance in the telling of it. It is the account of men at play, making a real city while their descendants must settle for fantasies of creation, taking on the invisible cloak of the Master of Atlantis, advancing from Mortal to Hero to Titan to Olympian, when the reality is sitting in your bedroom before a screen at your mum’s place, with little chance of a job in a country with 30 per cent youth unemployment and no power whatsoever and none of the trappings of success. Just those dreams of Cadillacs.

  But for Thomas and Jollie, agents of a country with imperial ambitions and a pressing need to rid itself of restive youth, the revolutions of 1848 still fresh in the mind, there was real power. Palpable power. The land had been purchased, the colonists were on their way, the streets were named and numbered. A few months later, in February 1851, the settlers formed a queue outside the building on the riverbank that acted as a land office and selected the portion for which they had paid Wakefield’s sufficient price: £150 for 50 rural acres and a quarter-acre section within the town grid.

  When, a few years later, a descendant of Tautahi, Hakopa Te Ata o Tu, attempted to challenge the legality of these sales in the Native Land Court, his claim to the ancestral site of Otautahi and the site of Puari was rejected on the grounds that they had been ‘already Crown-granted to Europeans’. Maori of the South Island had to be satisfied with the reserves apportioned by another surveyor, Walter Mantell who, in calculating how much land he ‘would give the Natives, allowed ten acres [soon revised to four] for each man, woman and child … I tried to allow as little as the Natives would agree to take’. The idea, he explained, ‘was to allow enough to furnish a bare subsistence by their own labour’.

  Land was now property, to be bought and sold.

  A later map of the city has taken on greater detail: there is still a barracks for new immigrants, but the Church of England’s cathedral is stuttering into shape. (It will not be completed until 1905.) Further east, the Catholics, too, are at work on their cathedral and there are churches for German Lutherans and Scottish Presbyterians, and a synagogue. There is fresh air in the city: a large, open area called Hagley Park on the western border and two smaller squares within the grid, named for the Protestant martyrs Cranmer and Latimer. There’s a newspaper office, and theatres, a music hall, a club for the graziers who come up to town from the countryside. The river has been bridged in several places, a tunnel is being driven through the hills to link the city to its port, and the Great Southern Railway rules it all off with a single black line.

  There is a botanic garden where plants may be tested for their adaptability to this new environment: gum trees from Australia, oaks from England, those weeping willows, Salix babylonica, that Linnaeus had mistakenly thought to be the willows of Psalm 137 upon which the Israelites hung their harps in exile, though he got it wrong and the trees in fact came from China. In one corner, other species are making their own versions of adaptation. Trout, for example. And hedgehogs. And ferrets transported from England at great difficulty and expense, for they must have fresh bloody meat every day, so hundreds of pigeons have come too, fluttering down the latitudes.

  And bumblebees, who also prove difficult to transport but make it at last in the holds of the refrigerated ships that have carried frozen mutton, pheasants and sheep’s tongues. The bees embark for the return voyage, a little buzzing emigrant cargo in the cool hold, travelling through the tropics and round the Cape, stars of the emigrant trade. For hasn’t Darwin himself pointed out their importance in the political scheme when he proposed that it was old maids who were the mainstay of the empire, for they owned the cats that killed the mice that ate the nests of the bumblebees who alone, with their especially long tongues, could pollinate the red clover that fed the cattle that became the beef that nourished the soldiers of the Queen? And here they are, in their fuzzy black and yellow, doing their bit for empire in a corner of the Christchurch Botanic Gardens.

  Political theory is finding expression in trees and bees and streets and corrugated iron and stone as the frontier oppidum grows beyond the frame, up the slopes of the volcanic hills and across the plain. The Town Reserves that had marked the boundaries become wide avenues named for notable men: to the east Fitzgerald, for the first superintendent of the province and founder of its newspaper, The Press. To the north, Bealey, named for a man who made a lot of money selling land and became the province’s third superintendent on the strength of that and not much else, a man dismissed as a ‘platitude grinding nobody’ by one of the city’s poets, though FitzGerald called him ‘safe and steady … with the good fortune to be married to a lady’, which was more than he could say for ‘that lot of half-breds’ related to the man for whom the southern avenue was named: Moorhouse.

  Moorhouse had argued strongly for the railway, but he finds his name linked for posterity to the western avenue named for one of the men, Rolleston, who had argued just as vehemently against its construction. And here they all are, this tangle of men scrapping over land and power and money, locked together as the Four Avenues that frame the central city as it moves up and over, stepping away from the centre.

  The swamp is being drained, driven back by the force of human ingenuity. Civilisation is being realised in concentration.

  WE EACH COME TO A CITY in our own fashion, walking our fingers down the map, finding our way from home, finding our way back.

  I arrived in Christchurch in 1992. I had a residency that year at the university. I was also in the midst of the slow and painful disintegration of a twenty-five-year marriage. The plane carried me away from all that, up over the broad green acres of the Manawatu with its hieratic squiggling of muddy waterways, through the buffeting over Cook Strait and down along the coast, heading so
uth. Through the little cabin windows I caught glimpses of blue, that east coast blue of my childhood rather than the roaring Tasman I’d become accustomed to in adulthood, charging in from the west onto beaches of firm grey sand tangled in mounds of broken timber. The plane churned along over its shining Pacific twin, propellers tossing shards of light onto the cabin roof.

  Below our wings were crumpled hills and, further back, the snow-capped tops of mountains. And then the engines shifted up a note and we began to descend, coming in over a wide plain carved into geometric shapes by lines of dark shelterbelt and long straight roads with their ant hordes of cars and trucks. The whole place looked as if it had been mowed one Saturday afternoon by some mild obsessive going for a Best Kept Province award.

  We banked low over the gleaming braid of a river and a nor’wester began to toss us about — not seriously, just fooling — and we were flying over the city, map gods in our machine, looking down. It was spread bareheaded beneath our wings. Its centre was a reef of high-rise towers, surrounded on all sides by suburbs stretching across the plain and out to the curving coast round Pegasus Bay and up the lower slopes of the Banks Peninsula hills. We flew lower yet, over the 10-acre blocks round its perimeter, the paddock for the pony, the blue rectangle of the pool, and the earth was coming up fast, there was a bump. We were there.

  And where was that?

  Christchurch.

  New Zealand’s third largest city.

  The largest city in the South Island.