It’s a new idea being used across the city for rebuilding on TC3 land, the land prone to liquefaction. When the plates shift again — and they will, though maybe not for a long time — the building will float upon the surface as the ground turns to quicksand. Should it slide off-kilter, cunning keys in the metal framing can be adjusted to tilt it back to true. The rafts, the manufacturers say, will dramatically reduce labour time and costs. No need to dig footings, no need to excavate. And it will, they promise, be ‘seismically resistant’. Sarah Miles voices caution on her blog, but the system has been approved by the Building Code and it is the system chosen by our insurers. So sometime in the next year or so, the flat will rise again, poised on its featherweight rib raft, set to surf the waves of the future.
When it is rebuilt, I shall bring the roses back, put them in another garden, give them another go at living. They’ll survive. They have in fact thrived on neglect, in that overgrown backyard where the cherry tree has escaped from its espaliered restraints and is jostling among a jungle of self-sown plants taking back the territory: there are lancewoods raising their brown spears by the fence, and cabbage trees with their strappy chevelure and ground nettle and ivy and puawananga fighting to cover the lot in white blossom.
It’s beautiful, despite the beer cans and the broken plywood, and it’s buzzing like the entangled bank that marks the conclusion of Darwin’s great work. There are the insects and the worms and always a blackbird in the overgrown trees in the empty house next door with its gaping windows. The bird is whistling away and even if all it’s saying is ‘Piss off! Piss off!’ to other birds, it sounds like pure poetry.
This garden will disappear with all its multitudinous life and the flat will come down and something else will replace it and in time that, too, will disappear and something else will fill its place. If you step back far enough, standing in that place occupied by the map god surveying the world, the city is a dot and, in time, the dot will fade. All the houses round about will vanish. All the suburbs and the buildings in the CBD, the stadium, the convention centre, the cathedral. In time, they’ll crumble and fall because that is how it is.
It may be a quake that buries them. Or a tsunami sweeping in from Pegasus Bay.
It may be that they are displaced by some new technology, some new manner of making a home on this part of the planet. There may be millions living here amid the gleam of glassy towers.
There may be no one at all, complete depopulation, an abrupt absence, lancewood and ivy growing over abandoned ruins, a dystopian vision of plague or invasion and the collapse of whatever empire has had hegemony over the inhabitants. It may be a future where a handful of human survivors huddle in the remains of a building they no longer recognise as an ancient convention centre, some relic of the distant Vinyl Age.
We have no more chance of imagining it than that Roman Briton placing the tiles on a floor. The only thing that is certain is that this will change. All the evidence of this city and the empires of which it has formed a part will be buried. We will disappear. We will be carried with all our ideas and all the things we’ve made down from the surface into the dark, because that is how it is.
We are carried down into the dark.
And then we are lifted back up, grain by grain, into the light.
I wish to thank many people to whom I have spoken in the preparation of this book.
Special thanks to Dr Terry Ryan, Kaawai Kaitiaki of Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu. Thanks to Dr Francesco Zimei, Dr Silvia Mantini and her family, Dr Kathryn Bosi-Monteath, Anna Rogers, Hugh Wilson, Donna Allfrey, Keith Locke, Alison Locke, Mike Moss, Simone Rewa Pearson, Doug Sexton, Siobhan Murphy, the Ohlsen family, Diana Madgin, Christopher Moore, Glenn Busch, Bev Prout, Quentin Wilson, Coral Atkinson, Nigel Dunlop, Bronwyn Hayward, Tony Simpson, Valerie Crichton, Robyn Stewart, Juliet Nicholas, Ken MacAnergney, Jen U’ren, Morrin Rout and Gerrard Smyth.
And, finally, I wish to thank Creative New Zealand, whose Michael King Fellowship enabled me to work on this project in 2013/14. This book is the first half of a two-volume project titled ‘The Villa at the Edge of the Empire’ that examines a city in recovery through the twinned lenses of non-fiction (Vol. 1) and fiction (Vol. 2).
Among many books and essays, the following have been particularly rich sources of interesting facts and ideas:
Johannes C. Andersen, Old Christchurch in Picture and Story, Simpson and Williams, Christchurch, 1949
M.J. Barnett, H.G. Gilpin and L.J. Metcalfe (eds), A Garden Century: The Christchurch Botanic Gardens, Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1963
Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Penguin, London, 2012
Virginia Lee Burton, The Little House, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1942
Hamish Campbell and Gerard Hutching, In Search of Ancient New Zealand, Penguin, Auckland, 2007
C.E. Carrington, John Robert Godley of Canterbury, New Zealand, and His Friends, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 1950
David Collins Esq, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales to Which Are Added Some Particulars of New Zealand, Whitcombe and Tombs, Christchurch, 1910
John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, Cork University Press, Cork, 2012
Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits, Zhingoora Books, San Bernadino, 2013
Bruce W. Hayward, Graeme Murdoch and Gordon Maitland, Volcanoes of Auckland: The Essential Guide, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2011
Jenny Robin Jones, No Simple Passage, Random House, Auckland, 2011
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Knopf, Toronto, 2007
L’Aquila Bella Mai Non Po’Perire / Beautiful Aquila Must Never Die, Gangemi Editore, Rome, 2009
Robert C. Lamb, Birds, Beasts and Fishes: The First Hundred Years of the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, The North Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, Christchurch, 1964
— From the Banks of the Avon: The Story of a River, Reed, Wellington, 1981
Robert McGregor, The Hawke’s Bay Earthquake: New Zealand’s Greatest Natural Disaster, Art Deco Trust, Napier, 2002
Albert Métin, Le Socialisme sans Doctrines, Felix Alcan, Paris, 1901
Sarah Miles, The Christchurch Fiasco: The Insurance Aftershock and its Implications for New Zealand and Beyond, Dunmore Publishing, Auckland, 2012
Gordon Ogilvie, The Port Hills of Christchurch, Reed, Wellington, 1978
Michael Reid, ‘Does the Reform of English Local Government Contain Lessons for New Zealand?’, in Policy Quarterly, Vol. 7, November 2011
Geoffrey Rice, Christchurch Changing: An Illustrated History, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 1999
Anna Rogers, The Shaky Isles: New Zealand Earthquakes, Grantham House, Wellington, 2013
Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea, Penguin, New York, 1987
Jeremy Salmond, Old New Zealand Houses 1800–1940, Reed, Wellington, 1986
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, trans. Harry M. Hine, Natural Questions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010
Mark Stocker (ed.), Remembering Godley: A Portrait of Canterbury’s Founder, Hazard Press, Christchurch, 2001
W.B. Sutch, Takeover New Zealand, Reed, Wellington, 1972
Te Maire Tau, ‘Ngai Tahu and the Canterbury Landscape’, in Southern Capital: Christchurch, (eds) John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2000
Philip Temple, A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2002
John Wilson, Lost Christchurch, Te Waihora Press, Akaroa, 1984
Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress, House of Anansi Press, Toronto, 2004
About the Author
Fiona Farrell is one of New Zealand’s leading writers. Born in Oamaru and educated at the universities of Otago and Toronto, she has published volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, non-fiction
works, and many novels.
In 2007 she received the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and in 2012 was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature.
The Broken Book, a book of essays relating to the Christchurch earthquakes, was shortlisted for the non-fiction award in the 2011 Book Awards and critically greeted as the ‘first major artwork’ to emerge from the event.
Her work, which The New Zealand Herald has praised for its ‘richness — of both theme and languages’, has been published around the world, including in the US, France and the UK.
Copyright
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire is planned as a
work in two volumes, one non-fiction, one fiction.
This book is Part One: non-fiction.
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the 2013 Creative New Zealand Michael King Fellowship in the writing of this book.
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First published by Penguin random House New Zealand, 2015
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Text copyright © Fiona Farrell, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Design and illustrations by Carla Sy © Penguin random House New Zealand
Author photograph by Inez Grim
Page 283, lines from James K. Baxter’s ‘Pig Island Letters’,
permission courtesy James K. Baxter Trust
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press,
an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001 environmental
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
ISBN 978 177553 751 9
eISBN 978 177553 752 6
The assistance of Creative New Zealand is gratefully acknowledged by the publisher.
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Book Book
An evocative and moving mix of memoir and fiction from an award-winning novelist.
As war is waged in the Middle East, a woman in New Zealand has her nose in a book. Kate is immersed in other battles, engrossed in eyewitness accounts of an earlier war in ancient Persia. She has grown up, left her Otago home and returned, and in all these years books have shaped her life and made sense of the world — offering mystery and solace, entertainment and enlightenment.
From The Little Red Hen to Owls Do Cry, from T.S. Eliot to Aphra Behn, this frequently funny, always original novel is another extraordinary offering from Fiona Farrell.
The Hopeful Traveller
A fascinating novel of hope, love, idealism and human progress, made up of two separate stories, which can be read in isolation and yet reverberate against each other.
Sometime in the 1860s, in an isolated valley on Banks Peninsula, Harry Head, ‘the Hermit of Hickory Bay’, experimented unsuccessfully with flight. His story forms part of the exuberant blend of fact and fiction which constitutes this tale. The author takes us back to the beginnings of novel-writing, as philosophical play and serious entertainment. Think Crusoe’s island, think Utopia.
Light Readings
A superb collection of short stories that celebrate the power of the written word, giving an innovative take on the many forms of reading that bombard us in our everyday lives.
From email to junk-mail, gardening to cookbooks, tourist guides to romance novels, these stories play with them all. They illuminate the gap between living and reading, that moment when words become light. These stories are funny, wise, moving and compulsive. They are examples of ‘light reading’ in their accessibility, but there is also depth and a beautiful style, offering the very best in literary reading.
Limestone
A fabulous multi-levelled novel, shortlisted for the Montana NZ Book Awards.
Clare Lacey is on a quest. In Ireland to attend an art history conference, she sets out to find her father who walked out one day to buy a packet of cigarettes when she was a child, and disappeared. She is urged on her way by chance encounters: with a woman in a high tower, a blind man at a crossroads, a singer whose song she does not understand … Clues lie all around on a labyrinth of walls — but the final clue lies deep within.
With Irish roots and a nod to the Irish classic, The Year of the Hiker by John B. Keane, this is a contemporary novel about inheritance, belief, art, love … and limestone.
Mr Allbones’ Ferrets
An historical, pastoral, satirical, scientifical romance, with mustelids!
A young man out poaching. A beautiful maiden in a mysterious house. A perilous voyage to distant islands. All the ingredients of a highly coloured Victorian romance are played out in the context of the great colonial experiment. Exotic species travelled back to stock the collections of Europe while useful species were dispatched to found new colonies in the antipodes. Walter Allbones really existed. So did his ferrets. From these facts, Fiona Farrell has spun a delicate, satirical fantasy about human folly and the perils attendant on disturbing the subtle balance of nature.
Six Clever Girls Who Became Famous Women
On 22 September 1960, six girls gather behind the school toilets to read Peyton Place.
Caroline the leader, Heather the caregiver, Kathy the actress, Raeleen the explorer, Greer the mystic and Margie the rebel. Like the historical heroines whose stories are repeatedly held up to them as models, these girls confront in their various ways the uncertainty and fears of adolescence.
On 22 September 1995 we meet them again, confronting the issues of middle age. Caroline’s on the way up, Raeleen’s now Ra, Margie climbs higher and higher. They’re all relearning in the process the joy of making that vital, terrifying, thrilling leap ‘out into the sun’…
The Strange Case of the Disappearing Body
An astute short story that challenges the formulaic and inhumane murder mysteries of television.
A body is found floating in the bottom of a swimming pool. The police have no leads. Might the nosy cleaner have a theory about this strange case? After all, she is well used to reading the mess that people leave lying all around.
Award-winning writer Fiona Farrell offers a refreshing take on death and justice in this intriguing mystery.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 30