Ear to the ground
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Nicolas Low
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Nic Low’s biography and other articles by this writer
‘If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?'
- Erich Fromm
‘He aha te mea nui? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.'
- traditional Maori proverb
CHRISTCHURCH. I grew up in Christchurch. It was a quiet, peaceful place. Most nights I'd finish work round twelve, drop my skateboard to the cobbles and clatter home. My wheels were often the loudest sound. I'd roll down Columbo Street, past the straggle of hoodie kids awaiting the last bus, then cut through the bleak granite expanse of Cathedral Square. I could hear street-sweeper trucks, and the murmur of the last-drinks crowd at Warner's, and something else too, just on the edge of my hearing. From the eastern corner of the square rose a shrill electronic whine. It was like having a mosquito trapped inside your skull. It was maddening.
The sound was produced by a device attached to the offices of the local newspaper. People over the age of twenty-five couldn't hear it. Only young people could hear it. It was designed to stop us loitering and drive us away. And it wasn't just The Press broadcasting that needling drone. It felt like the whole city. The sound was the suburban status quo running smoothly in its tracks, and the tiny wheels of petty bureaucracies, and the antique machinery of monocultural privilege. Once you hit your later twenties and began thinking respectable thoughts, you'd gain immunity. But it was getting to everyone I grew up with. Change felt impossible. The rest of the country thought us stiff and stuck-up and white. The tiny, vibrant subcultures that grew in the cracks felt under permanent siege. No matter how we'd enjoyed childhood, no matter the family ties and lovers and landscapes, that sound drove us to leave.
I moved to France, then Australia. I remained proudly Kiwi, yet at odds with the city that formed me. Each time I returned to see family and friends, Christchurch felt a little more empty. There were flashes of colour, but the stern stone facades and endless one-way streets dominated. People and energy seemed to drain away like so much rain from the city's slate roofs. On one visit I published an overheated opinion piece in The Press about the city's out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to youth and change. I was politely told to piss off back to Australia. It seems the feeling was mutual.
Then, early on a cold spring morning in September 2010, I was holidaying with my parents in Tasmania. We stopped at a church fair. A man sold us a jar of honey. He asked where our accent was from.
Christchurch, he repeated, looking concerned. Is your house okay?
The question made no sense. Everything was always okay in Christchurch.
And so, a radical thing has happened to a conservative place. The city I grew up in, the city much of my family and many of our ancestors grew up in, has been largely destroyed. I have been back twice since the earthquakes began, full of love and trepidation, like visiting an estranged family member on their deathbed. I can no longer hear that whining sound coming from the square. Partly because I am a bit older, and I can see that plenty of the whining was my own restless impatience. But mostly because it has been drowned out by something much deeper, something much older. It is the sound of the earth, and the feelings the earth awakens in people. It is partly fear and it is partly strength. I am trying to understand the ruined city's new resonance.
When the first quake struck, the heavy bronze bells in the cathedral swayed and rang a ghostly warning across the city. My younger brother woke to the jolt and his first thought was Shit, that must have been Wellington, and it must have been catastrophic. Luckily, it was neither. The sleeping city woke in panic but the bricks and stones and concrete and glass fell into empty streets. It was the first time in modern history a 7-plus quake had hit an urban centre with no deaths. The quake was an ocean swell, a great rolling wave that rose and fell but left things much as they were. The quake scared the hell out of people, and houses cracked and the ground flooded with a fine mud, but it did not truly destroy the city's sense of safety.
I remember my Standard Two teacher, Mr Ellis, explaining why we were so safe. He drew a wonky map on the blackboard. He tapped the bottom corner. ‘This,' he said, ‘is New Zealand. Imagine someone wanted to attack us.'
He drew a dotted line heading our way, an attack force from Nauru, perhaps. Halfway across the blackboard Pacific it turned back. ‘See, they come to attack but it's too far. They run out of petrol, and they have to turn round and go home.'
Christchurch really did feel that far from the pain of the world. We had no idea there were fault lines under the city, that earthquakes ran in the family. Nothing much happened and we were grateful. The reasons parents wanted to raise kids there - the relaxed pace, the near-totalitarian stability - were the same reasons those kids wanted to get the hell out. The 7.0 quake in Haiti razed Port Au Prince, killed a hundred thousand and left more than a million homeless. Christchurch lost power, water and sewage, but often only for days or weeks. We treated crush injuries and concussions in our first-world hospitals and pulled down the damaged buildings. We had building codes, by god. Building codes and insurance. We had our deeply ingrained sense of luck. Even our earthquakes fit the pattern.
When I visited in December 2010 the main evidence of the quake was a rash of blue tarps over the city's roofs. The streets were lined with piles of fallen chimney bricks, like little altars. There were a few cleared sites and some older buildings were fenced off, pending repairs or demolition. Everyone I met was compelled to share their stories, and those of their neighbours, all of whom they now knew. It was as if the quake had been a synchronising of watches, a zeroing of disparate lives that gave everyone a common origin: We survived the quake. We were scared shitless, and it's been a drag boiling the drinking water, but we all survived. The gratitude was palpable. It felt like the city was a bit more willing to smile, even if its front teeth had been knocked out.
When I boarded a plane for Melbourne, the narrative was clear. You have a crisis, you respond, things get fixed up and life returns to normal. The Press published a letter to the editor claiming damage to the red-light district was a warning from God. Those little wheels began to turn. Things were going to be okay.
SOMEWHERE DOWN BY the hospital, in the crook of the river, is the site of a disaster, perhaps the area's first. The place was called Puahi Pa, a settlement of the old Waitaha people. Our ancestors lived here, going back seven hundred years, then Ngai Tahu after them, moving across the landscape on foot, to the swamps and marshes, the grasslands and podocarp forests beside the river, hunting and gathering food, listening for the whoop of kereru. They used the long, hollow bones of bird wings as koauau flutes, and made putorino trumpets from hardwood. Visitors were welcomed with the high and lonely cry of the karanga, and challenged with haka. The language itself that filled the landscape is deep and round. To my ear, the Maori word for ‘world' sums this up: ao.
European whalers came in the 1830s, and European interest in settlement grew throughout the 1840s. For the people at Puahi and the other Ngai Tahu settlements, here was the first great rupture, the break point between one society and the next. It was a slow-motion disaster; it was catastrophic, and it was not. It was the founding of the city - land for my first European ancestor, William Newnham, in 1850. It meant the ring of picks on rock as foundation stones went down, and the nasal stammering of Maori spoken with a common cold; the sound of corks worked out of bottles, fence posts hammered in, the sudden thunder of horses and guns. Demand for land was fierce. Kemp's Deed was inked in 1848 by the chiefs of Ngai Tahu and the land passed over. Ten per cent was to be held aside for the tribe, written into the deed of sale. The land was not held aside. The land was cleared and planted with oaks and willows. Christchurch would be an idyllic, pre-industrial revolution English town.
Ngai Tahu were moved out to reserves. When visiting they camped near Puahi at Little Hagley Park, squatters on their own land. The sound of their presence in the landscape was silenced, and this silence became the true marker of the disaster. Children were forbidden to speak Maori at school; the later Suppression of Tohunga Act attempted to stop priests from practising their chants and prayers. Ngai Tahu presence in the city was reduced to the cry of a produce seller in Market Square.
In Christchurch, perhaps more than any other sizeable New Zealand city, there has been almost no Maori presence. But even if a disaster is not named, or addressed, it doesn't go away. The social damage of that forced displacement was felt through the whole of the nation's society. The tribe did not stop fighting for redress for one day. And the geography of the ancestors - the pa and kainga sites, the trails, the swamps, rivers and marshes - were still there, just beneath the surface.