A PROVOCATIVE AND INSIGHTFUL EXPLORATION

OF REBUILDING OUR HOMES, COMMUNITIES

AND CITIES AFTER THEIR DEVASTATION.

Where are we? How did we get here?

Where do we go now?

From nineteenth-century attempts to create Utopias to America’s rustbelt, from Darwin’s study of worms to China’s phantom cities, this work ranges widely through history and around the world. It examines the evolution of cities and of Christchurch in particular, looking at its swampy origins and its ongoing reconstruction following the recent destructive earthquakes. And it takes us to L’Aquila in Italy to observe another shaken city.

Farrell writes as a resident caught up in a devastated city in an era when political ideology has transformed the citizen to ‘an asset, the raw material on which … empire makes its profit’. In a hundred tiny pieces, she comments on contentious issues, such as the fate of a cathedral, the closure of schools, the role of insurers, the plans for civic venues. Through personal observation, conversations with friends, and close readings of everything from the daily newspaper to records of other upheavals in Pompeii and Berlin, this dazzling book explores community, the love of place and, ultimately, regeneration and renewal.

For Alseia, Eleni, Huia and Ngaio

And everything was shaken into a

hundred tiny pieces …

Title Page

Dedication

The Map

ONE: THE FLYOVER OF HOPE

TWO: THE BOULEVARD OF SPLENDOURS

THREE: SOME PARTICULARS

FOUR: THE PRESIDENT’S PALACE

FIVE: BRAIDED

SIX: TE MAURU E TAKI NEI

SEVEN: GUNTER’S CHAIN AND THE HEIRESS

EIGHT: THE ART

NINE: THE LUMPER

TEN: LIGHT’S VISION AND SYDNEY SCROGGS

ELEVEN: BUMBLEBEES

TWELVE: THE CALF

THIRTEEN: THE KIWI MINIMAP

FOURTEEN: THE GARDEN CITY

FIFTEEN: FIREWOOD

SIXTEEN: LIKE LAMBS

SEVENTEEN: COLLAPSE

EIGHTEEN: THE CONTEXT

NINETEEN: TIN TOWN

TWENTY: EQC

TWENTY–ONE: UNLESS–JESUS–CHRIST–HAD–DIED

TWENTY–TWO: TWO TOWERS

TWENTY–THREE: RED/GREEN/ORANGE

TWENTY–FOUR: SEVEN SECONDS

TWENTY–FIVE: AN IDEA

TWENTY–SIX: 100 DAYS

TWENTY–SEVEN: MILLY–MOLLY–MANDY

TWENTY–EIGHT: GANGBUSTERS

TWENTY–NINE: POP–UP

THIRTY THE: CATHEDRAL

THIRTY–ONE: THE STADIUM

THIRTY–TWO: THE CITY OF SPORT

THIRTY–THREE: THE PLAYGROUND

THIRTY–FOUR: THE RIVER

THIRTY–FIVE: THE CONVENTION CENTRE

THIRTY–SIX: THE LAST OF ENGLAND

THIRTY–SEVEN: BIG

THIRTY–EIGHT: STORIES

The Loop

THIRTY–NINE: WHIZZ BANG

FORTY: THREE CHEERS

FORTY–ONE: THE PICKLE MANUFACTURER

FORTY–TWO: CHARACTER

FORTY–THREE: THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

FORTY–FOUR: APPLE CRUMBLE

FORTY–FIVE: LEISURE AND BUSINESS

FORTY–SIX: THE LITTLE HOUSE

FORTY–SEVEN: LESSONS

FORTY–EIGHT: CENTRAL CITY SOUTH

FORTY–NINE: FADE

FIFTY: A LOT OF FUN

FIFTY–ONE: TIGHT–KNIT

L’Aquila

FIFTY–TWO: SAME/DIFFERENT

FIFTY–THREE: TRAIN

FIFTY–FOUR: NINETY–NINE

FIFTY–FIVE: PLATES

FIFTY–SIX: LAVORI IN CORSO

FIFTY–SEVEN: IL FORTE SPAGNOLO

FIFTY–EIGHT: TUBES

FIFTY–NINE: ESCHER

SIXTY: THE GRAND PARDON

SIXTY–ONE: GAS

SIXTY–TWO: SOTTO I PORTICI

SIXTY–THREE: ENTERPRISE

SIXTY–FOUR: G8

SIXTY–FIVE: THE MOBILE EARTH

SIXTY–SIX: BREATH

SIXTY–SEVEN: GO BRAVELY

SIXTY–EIGHT: CUPS

SIXTY–NINE: TROUT

The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

SEVENTY: PHANTOMS

SEVENTY–ONE: RIVER ROAD

SEVENTY–TWO: THE SCARF

SEVENTY–THREE: THE HYPOCAUST

SEVENTY–FOUR: EMPIRES

SEVENTY–FIVE: STURDY PEOPLE

SEVENTY–SIX: THE TYPHUS BELT

SEVENTY–SEVEN: FREE MILK

SEVENTY–EIGHT: THE FOX TERRIER

SEVENTY–NINE: GOOD VIBRATIONS

EIGHTY: BUBBLES

EIGHTY–ONE: GRASS

EIGHTY–TWO: UTMOST GOOD FAITH

EIGHTY–THREE: ARGOT

EIGHTY–FOUR: ALL RIGHT

EIGHTY–FIVE: FRESH PAINT

EIGHTY–SIX: RAG RUG

EIGHTY–SEVEN: TERRA NOVA

EIGHTY–EIGHT: WHERE IN MY POLICY …

EIGHTY–NINE: HOME

NINETY: THE PETRI DISH

NINETY–ONE: THE BADGE

NINETY–TWO: THE POT OF GOLD

NINETY–THREE: THE BIOGRAPHY OF AN IDEA

NINETY–FOUR: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

NINETY–FIVE: LULLABY

NINETY–SIX: UNBOXING

NINETY–SEVEN: THE GOOD CITIZEN

NINETY–EIGHT: DECLINE AND FALL

NINETY–NINE: WORMS

ONE HUNDRED: GRAINS

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

Copyright

MIDWINTER, 2012.

The dark heart of the year.

But in the city, a new sun is rising.

There is music, a swelling of violins, a sonorous chorus of male voices. It could be the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings, that moment where Bilbo catches sight of Mordor, when all chaos and pain will pass and order will be restored to Middle Earth.

There is an image of a wide green plain. There’s a ring at its centre. From above it looks a bit like Stonehenge, some ancient site of ritual worship, but is more likely the circle left by an irrigator, rendering the stony soil fit for pasturing a thousand thousand dairy cows. Then there’s a little jetboat racing upstream between beds of shingle, heading somewhere and heading there fast, and the music swells and a voice-over announces ‘an unprecedented opportunity in the South Island of New Zealand’. A couple spin by on a tandem, a white boy on the front, a brown girl behind, both pedalling unsteadily through green trees, both laughing with delight at the prospect of their opportunity. Earthquakes have destroyed their beautiful city, 70 per cent of its major buildings have been or are about to be demolished. But 106,000 of the city’s residents have risen to the call! They have submitted their vision for a new city and here is the synthesis of their dreams, a ‘flyover of their hopes’.

The music changes to something more percussive, the tempo accelerates and we begin to fly. We swoop over the city like supermen, up one street and down another. Over a Green Frame that will sweep away the vestiges of a Victorian mercantile past beneath twenty-first-century grass and trees. Over the blue and yellow rectangles that are to be new precincts. Health will be dispensed from a Medical Precinct around the existing hospital, justice from a Legal Precinct a little further east, just past a Sports Precinct, whose facilities will cater for all ages and levels of ability. We fly north and there’s the Performing Arts Precinct and a Cultural Centre and next to them, dwarfing all else, a Convention Centre, ‘purpose-built’, ‘state of the art’, the city’s throbbing cultural heart.

We fly above it all. It’s so easy. Like those dreams of flight that are supposed to be something to do with sex. Weightless, effortless. The city lies beneath us in its shining geometry. There’s the tiny brown rectangle that will be the new public library, there’s the oval that is to be a new cricket ground, making proper, profitable use of the Victorians’ dull and undeveloped city park.

We wheel unnoticed over the heads of all the people gathered to party in the Entertainment Precinct before a vast screen broadcasting a rugby match. Tracers of light race and dazzle, and what is that, rising in the east? That vast illuminated pleasure dome? Why, it’s a new Rugby Stadium, miraculously teleported here from its previous location on the light industrial periphery and come to rest like some alien spacecraft at the city’s core. And the voice repeats the invitation. Come! Be part of this opportunity! This vision that will inspire the world! It’s achievable! It’s affordable! And it’s ready to fly!

The blueprint flashes across the television screen, three minutes and twenty-two seconds of glittering promise, product of 100 days (well, 103, actually) of frantic planning. It’s a video game with all its glitter and zing. Like some Deus Ex 3 vision of the city as futuristic wonderland, ablaze with light. Some bitchin’ imagery of a home fit for heroes blessed with heavy stubble, curious anatomies that are part flesh, part nano-tech augmentation, and in possession of a wide range of imaginative weaponry.

Except that this is a design for the distinctly unaugmented. It is a plan for a small city on the edge of a narrow island at the foot of the Pacific. A blueprint for concrete, tarmac and cement.

A map to an everyday future.

WHEN WE BEHOLD A MAP we become, for just a second, God, surveying an orderly creation. Here’s a coastline, wriggling through lines of latitude. Here’s the blue squiggle of a river. That black dot is home to millions in a maze of motorway and slum alley, high-rise glitter and cardboard shanty. That red line traces a frontier between bare brown mountains, fiercely contested.

Down there it’s a racket of rifle fire and the tinkling of silver service, the wailing of sirens and the murmur of lullaby, the rush of clear water where salmon leap and the click of keys downloading, deleting. There’s howl and roar and argument, the longing and the losing, the getting and spending and the not caring much one way or the other, frankly. There’s history and manners of speech and ways of being and ways of not being, there’s the skitter of microscopic billions and the roar of engines rising through thin blue air or plunging down to the submarine vent where it all bubbles up. Gas. Life.

And here it is, reduced to dot and line and pastel tint and we have the eye of God. Unchanging. North is at the top, south at the bottom, west to the left, east to the right. The point of view preferred by a Christian God in possession of a compass back when the world was first being mapped, its tiny arrow pointing steadily due north. The Muslims’ God preferred a different angle, placing south at the top, like those tourist-shop mapmakers who design a world where New Zealand flies upside down, like a little errant seabird, above everybody else and all that blue.

Everything on a map is manageable. That mountain pass is no more than a tiny bracket, rather than the heart-stopping barrier encountered in real life. A map can possess a logic that becomes less visible on closer inspection. Of course that city should be located at just that point where a great river empties itself into the sea! It seems obviously placed for trade and navigation and access to the interior, when on the ground it is a miserable morass of mud, mosquitoes and frequent inundation.

Or a map may seem to contradict logic. Why is there a line across that square box of an island floating off the coast of Europe? The great continental bulk has run out, the babble of a thousand tongues faded to wind and wave and the keening of gulls. Nothing ahead but the wash of the Atlantic. The island is as simple as a full stop. So what’s that line from Carlingford Lough to Loch Foyle? The line that has been shorthand for the bomb on the high street and the marches in memory of dead children? The line that is shorthand for the smuggling of cows and each November, of fireworks, for it’s legal to set a match to a skyrocket on one side of the line and illegal on the other.

A map bears little hint of the muddle of emotion down on mucky human ground. But looking down, we presume order. We’re God. We’re omnipotent. We’re Hitler in the photograph contemplating the tabletop model that will transform messy old Berlin into the snowy perfection of Germania, capital of the empire that will rival Rome or Babylon.

Its architect was young — not yet thirty — and very eager. Speer and his assistants took only a little longer than 103 days to plan the re-creation of Berlin. The entire project — design, demolition, reconstruction — was under urgency, for speed, Hitler said, would no longer be the preserve of the Americans. The ‘American tempo’ he so admired, the frenzied rush to construction, would henceforth be the ‘German tempo’.

‘I like to think,’ he said, as despots everywhere, no matter how grand or tinpot, like to think, ‘that I accomplish more than other statesmen in the so-called democracies.’ There would be no place for the cautious experts Hitler dismissed as ‘dusty bureaucrats’. When Berlin’s city government seemed a trifle anxious at the prospect of demolishing large swathes of their city to implement his grand design, he overrode them. ‘There is nothing to be done with the Berlin City Government,’ he said to Speer. ‘From now on, when you have something ready, show it to me.’ The mayor, Julius Lippert, he dismissed as ‘an incompetent, an idiot, a failure, a zero’, and when he continued to be a nuisance, Goebbels was instructed to find a more compliant replacement. (Lippert was lucky, given the management style of the time. He went without fuss and had a comfortable war producing anti-Semitic propaganda in Belgrade, followed by a little post-war hard labour, then a pleasant existence as a university lecturer till his death in 1956.)

So here it is, the vision, laid out upon the table, a thing of orderly geometry. There’s the central avenue, the Boulevard of Splendours, stretching 7 kilometres between the dome of the hall that will be the largest enclosed space in the world, and the triumphal arch that frames the opposite end with the names of the 1,800,000 German dead in what was then called The Great War. Transport will be reconfigured. Railway stations will be re-sited, airports — including one for seaplanes, which at this point in history seem like the future — are placed strategically around the perimeter. Slums have been cleared and their inhabitants moved to suburbs of hygienic housing. The city’s parks have been cleansed of alien plants and reseeded with native species typical of the region in the eighteenth century.

And everything is BIG. Having designed one vast stadium to house the 1936 Olympics, Speer plans another even larger. It will seat 400,000 and be so big that he worries those in the upper levels might not be able to see what is going on in the arena and could experience ‘psychological disturbance’ at their great height.

Also in doubt is the Earth’s capacity to support the city’s new structures. Berlin is built upon a swamp. A test pillar, the Schwerbelastungskörper — the ‘heavy weight-bearing body’ constructed on the site for the triumphal arch — sinks immediately into the sandy soil.

In the calm of Spandau Prison, where Speer spent twenty post-war years so detached from the technology he adored, unable to do so much as turn on a light switch, that the arrival of an electric floor polisher aroused in him intense rapture, the architect had time to think about such things.

‘This love for vast proportions,’ he concluded, ‘was not only tied up with the totalitarian cast of Hitler’s regime.’ It was also the expression of ‘an urge to demonstrate one’s strength on all occasions … characteristic of individuals with recently acquired wealth’. He mentions as an example the architecture of ancient Greece, where the largest buildings were built not in the democratic classical heart but in the newly wealthy satellite states of Sicily and Asia Minor, in cities ‘generally ruled by despots’.

So all this size and grandeur, the piles of rubble through which people scrambled after bombs and mortar had taken on the task of demolishing the city, was in the end a failure of taste.

Speer’s memoir is a curious blend. On the one hand he seems almost embarrassed at having been caught up in some business of nouveau riche self-aggrandisement. But tugging against that is an unmistakable pride and excitement, a barely suppressed longing for the speed, the power, the soul-stirring imagery of the temple of light he created at Nuremberg, where anti-aircraft spotlights sent their beams soaring into the heavens. Ah! The thrill of planning the capital of the empire that would last 1000 years, of giving expression to a political idea through a city’s buildings and the arrangement of its thoroughfares, the abstract speculations of philosophy made manifest at last in concrete, stone and tarmac. Ah! The pleasure at the prospect of the blank canvas, that carte blanche that also entranced Le Corbusier, contemplating the replacement of Haussmann’s Paris with his Radiant City of towers each inhabited by 40,000 people, living radiant and perfect lives above streets devoid of the hotchpotch of clutter and clang.

Ah! The map — as teasing and evanescent as a temple of light.

THE BLUEPRINT ON THE SCREEN is just the latest in the long catalogue of maps that have attempted to draw this country, to reduce its bewildering complexity to something comprehensible. To translate its multi-dimensional reality into something that can be sketched on paper or, via some latest variant of the technology of light, shown on a television screen. To use mathematics and geometry to create an image of where we are and how we yet might be.

In his magisterial A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Jerry Brotton describes a map as ‘an ultimately imaginative representation of an unknowable object’ — this Earth — that ‘offers a spatial understanding of events in the human world’. Maps are products of ideas and beliefs and never purely objective documents, detached from human passions. They are, he argues, driven by impulses that are as much ‘personal, emotional, religious, political and financial, as geographical, technical and mathematical’.

I’ve always loved maps, right from the start, walking my fingers from Milly-Molly-Mandy’s house down the lanes to the village shop, a process that, without my knowing it, was laying down some image of an ideal world where it would be safe for me, small and insignificant, to move about confidently between recognisable landmarks, built to an intimate human scale.

Now, grown up into a world of other, more complicated maps, I eat my breakfast with the Collins World Atlas open on the table. I like toast and marmalade while surveying the Mato Grosso or the Chugoku Mountains, still mentally walking my fingers from Espiritu Santo across the sea to Malekula. I like historical maps, watching my country surface, its broad back rising, glistening, from the depths in that astounding God-like projection as fish and waka, and then as fragments of coastline recorded by Dutch and French and Spanish and English navigators, carefully measuring the indentations of harbour and estuary and filling their waters with dense shoals of numbers.

It feels to me as if there has always been an element of the ‘flyover of hope’ to the mapping of this country. I sit in the National Library, carefully unfolding a map from a huge volume published in 1798. The paper is brittle and crackles in the quiet of the reading room. The book lies open on a little cushion: it contains the observations of a meticulous colonial administrator, David Collins Esq.: An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, … To Which Are Added Some Particulars of New Zealand.

Collins doesn’t miss a thing. He reports on the weather, on arrivals of people and livestock and a furious guerrilla resistance to the settlers, and among the ‘particulars’ he records the abduction of two Maori to Norfolk Island. A British ship, the Daedalus, had been doing a pick-up run down through the Pacific in 1791: some wild cattle from Nootka Sound, 100 hogs from Tahiti, and, along the way, a couple of ‘natives of New Zealand’. The colonial authorities had come up with a plan: plant flax on Norfolk Island, give gainful occupation to the assortment of Irish insurgents, petty thieves and other unfortunate men and women transported to that isolated rock for life, and produce useful items like ropes and rigging for British ships.

The two men chosen to be instructors in this doubtful venture were ‘Hoo-doo-do-do-ty To-wa-ma-how-ey’ (Ngahuruhuru), a man described in the captain’s report as ‘about 24, 5’ 8” tall, of athletic make, his features like those of Europeans and very interesting’, and his friend, ‘Too-gee Titter-a-nu-e Warri-pedo’ (Tukitahua), a ‘young man of the same age as Hoo-doo but about three inches shorter … stout and well-made’. The men had paddled out to view the Daedalus at anchor off the northern coast, ‘drawn by curiosity and the hope of getting some iron’. They were offered a meal below decks, locked in and several days later found themselves ashore in one of the most repressive penal colonies in the world.

They were, reported Captain Hanson, ‘sullen’ on arrival and reluctant to give any information concerning flax, until promised that they would be sent home again, just as soon as they had passed on what they knew. Which turned out to be not very much. The administrators had been unaware that flax was women’s work and the instructors so casually seized were a warrior and a priest.

But they taught what they knew, in the hope of escape. ‘Hoo-doo,’ Hanson records, ‘had two wives and one child about whose safety he seemed very apprehensive and almost every evening at the close of day, he as well as Too-gee lamented their separation in a sort of half-crying, half-singing, expressive of grief which was at times very affecting.’ Both men moreover ‘repeatedly threatened to hang themselves if they were not sent to their own country’ but, says the good captain, ‘they were soon laughed out of’ their despair.

Tukitahua drew a map. He was given chalk and the floor of a hut set apart for the purpose, and later copied the drawing to paper as ‘an object of curiosity’, adding and correcting details over the six months of his enforced restraint.

He depicts his homeland as two large rectangles set alongside each other, with a scattering of smaller offshore islands. EA-HEI-NO-MAUE is drawn larger than its twin, POENAMU, for Tukitahua came from Oruru and knew this region best. He marks on the map the great harbours and rivers and pa sites, noting the numbers of fighting men in each. He draws the ornate frontage of the wharenui that ‘marks the site of his own habitation’ and the deceitful little ship moored offshore where he and his friend were seized. On the other island he draws three lakes and the rivers that drain them and ‘A Tree of which Toogee tells wonderful stories from the authority of the T’fou-duckey people’. He marks in one corner a ‘lake where Stones for Hatchets are got’. But the largest feature by far, running the whole length of EA-HEI-NO-MAUI, is a double dotted line, representing, notes Hanson, not an actual but ‘an imaginary road’ along which the spirits of the dead travel to a tree drawn with twisted branches at a point named ‘TERRY-RINGA’.

A map of longing: half-crying, half-singing …

THEN THERE ARE THOSE MAPS of settlement. In other countries, cities evolve over centuries. Their origins are obscure: a defensive palisade upon a hill, perhaps, or a farm or a temple or a trading place by a shallow crossing on a river. Streets evolve following the dawdling path of cows, or tracing the perimeters of buildings, now long fallen and forgotten. Their original purpose must be guessed at. But in this country, we don’t guess. We have the plan. Cities and towns took shape on paper first. We have the maps and can read their intention.

Some are comic in their unlikelihood. The map for a town in South Westland, for example, with streets and boulevards and space set aside for a university. Now it’s a row of cribs as insubstantial as driftwood tossed on a shingle bar between the wild sea and the luminous acres of a lagoon where kotuku stand motionless on spindly legs, the very image of purity. Or the map for that place on the Canterbury coast where baches knocked together from the remnants of car crates shudder on wonky foundations as the waves rear up, three storeys high, and drop like thunder. And the shingle shelves steeply along the line where some optimistic draughtsman has sketched a curve and labelled it ‘The Esplanade’.

Or there’s that city intended for the Petone foreshore. Britannia. Conjured into existence by Samuel Cobham seated at his desk in Newgate Street, London, in 1839, within the shadow of that gloomy Dickensian prison.

His Britannia is a rectangle within a city wall, each corner manned by a fortified tower. The towers are fanciful things: circular structures surrounded by bartisans arrayed like the petals on a daisy. The inhabitants of Britannia will be safe from attack from without. They will also be safe within. There’s an arsenal and barracks and several police offices and two prisons on the streets of this orderly grid. By each tower, Cobham has made provision for the disposal of the dead with cemeteries. And for the living, around the inside perimeter of the city walls there’s a broad terrace, where on sunny Sunday afternoons the citizens may make their promenade. The streets themselves, prints Mr Cobham in a round and curiously child-like hand, will be 45 feet wide and paved with wood. (Not so unusual: streets in Cork in Ireland were until recently paved with wooden cobbles. A friend of mine recalled, as a child, going with an ancient pram to pick up loads of cobbles when the city council decided to replace them with stone. Everyone was in for their share: the cobbles had soaked in oil and tar for decades and burned a treat in the grate.)

Along these paved streets Cobham makes provision for entertainment: there will be two theatres — Covent Garden and Drury Lane. And for shopping, two fish markets — Billingsgate and Hungerford — as well as markets for produce. (Cobham’s originality did not extend to nomenclature.) A wide river flows through the centre of the city, and little boats unload at its docks: the Government Dock, the Molesworth Dock and the Wellington Dock. There are public baths, a library, post office and Mechanics’ Institute, a hospital, a College of Surgeons and a House of Legislature. One thousand, three hundred and sixty-one acres in all, with 1100 acres set aside for housing. Colonists will also be entitled to farms beyond the walls: 1100 100-acre farms have been carved by the planner’s pen with careless insouciance from bush on steep and slip-prone hills. And overseeing it all, from a site with an uninterrupted view of a wild harbour, is a little rectangle marked ‘President’s Palace’, which immediately lends a somewhat raffish air to the whole enterprise, a whiff of South American Mosquito Coast.

Or there is the equally beguiling Regency confection dreamed up by Felton Mathew for the Waitemata shore. His version of Auckland is his hometown, Brighton, translated as readily as Cobham translated London to an equally unlikely landscape. Here, crescents and wide streets are superimposed upon the ashy slopes of a volcanic cone, one of fifty in the region, each representing the explosive vent of a single vast mass of molten magma around 90 kilometres below. A plume of molten basalt could, at any moment, rise like toffee in a pot. In a matter of hours — experts mention two days to several weeks between detection and surface eruption — the magma could burst from the surface as lava, fiery fountain or in a vast cloud of steam, gas and rock, an explosive style enticingly named ‘wet explosive’. This cloud could rise a kilometre or more into the air before returning to earth and surging over the landscape, consuming everything in its path. It could happen at any time. It is only 600 years since the last eruption.

But here is the planner’s frail geometry laid down over all that probability: decorous Victoria Quadrant, Nelson Quadrant, Adelaide Crescent, Shortland Street and Queen Street. The names suggest Georgian terraces with four storeys of solid brick, and pedestrians going about their business in top hat and frock coat. The quadrants and crescents display equal indifference to the ramparts of the great pa of Te Horotiu, whose inhabitants Mathew casually consigns to an area on the extreme right-hand margin of his map, ‘reserved for the church and the general use of natives’.

You look at that map and behold the man: thirty-nine, out from London, on the make, a man with a plan of divine simplicity. When dispatched from Sydney as Governor Hobson’s acting surveyor-general, Mathew confessed to his diary that his intention was no more than ‘to buy up as much land as I can possibly find enough money to pay for, and if that do not prove a fortune to me in four or five years, I am much mistaken’. And off he went to Waitangi to witness the legal preliminaries to other men’s plans as simple and unashamed as his own. Off to scope the site of ‘the Town of Auckland in the Island of New Ulster (or Northern Island) New Zealand’, a mercenary invader clutching, as his chosen weapon, not a gun but a protractor and set square.

In the end, Mathew’s experience, like Speer’s, is proof that plans and maps do not always translate so readily to reality. He was dismissed before he could realise his fortune. Hobson appointed in his place another surveyor, Charles Ligar, whose style was more to his taste. And Mathew departed the colony for England, but died on the way in Callao, the Peruvian port Kipling was later to identify as one of the planetary dumps chosen by his Broken Men.

Behind was dock and Dartmoor,

Ahead lay Callao.

Callao is not fit for the Empire’s heroes but for men who have failed disastrously in their ambitions or had a brush with the law. It offers them

… diamond weather,

The high, unaltered blue —

The smell of goats and incense

And mule-bells tinkling through.

But at night, the Broken Men long for home. Home with a capital H. The sentimental Home of expats the world over:

Ah God! One sniff of England —

To greet our flesh and blood —

To hear the traffic slurring

Once more through London mud!

Our towns of wasted honour —

Our streets of lost delight!

How stands the old Lord Warden?

Are Dover’s cliffs still white?

Mathew arrived in Callao a little sooner than Kipling’s imperial refugees, but the air of disappointed ambition sounds familiar.

THE MAP OF CHRISTCHURCH was a less fanciful affair than Mathew’s Auckland or Cobham’s Britannia. It was the work of naval surveyors, military men: a serviceable, rational, rectangular grid, set four square on a swamp on the eastern coast of the southern island.

In myth, the narrow island is a waka, come to grief upon a reef in an immense primeval ocean where its crew of demigods froze and turned to stone as the mountains of the Main Divide. The plains that stretch to the east between mountains and sea were the work of another immortal, come to discover the fate of his grandfather. With a great rake, Tuterakiwhanoa drew the wreckage of the great sea-going craft into a pile at the sea edge. The area so cleared formed a wide plain, watered by mighty rivers, a place fit for human habitation.

Or there is the version that eschews gods for geology. By that reckoning the island is land thrust up by the grinding of tectonic plates, the Australian Plate riding up and over the Pacific Plate at a steady, inexorable 40 millimetres per year and in the process forcing these islands, this little rim of continental crust, up into the light. This version of the country’s history is all movement and change. Nothing is steady. Gondwanaland has slid and cracked. Zealandia has drifted from Australia, the east coast of the North Island is rotating slowly in a clockwise direction, the east coast of the South Island is sliding towards the mountains, Christchurch is sinking, as are the Hauraki Plains, Hamilton, the Bay of Plenty and Marlborough. Wellington is rising. Cook Strait is moving south. Millimetre by millimetre the whole place is shifting beneath our feet. But myth and geology concur in this: both describe a twitchy, unstable place.

The geological plains are made up of shingle, greywacke and schist drawn down from the mountains of the Main Divide by the rivers. They cut a direct path from mountain to sea, dividing the plains into roughly rectangular blocks as they surge eastward in broad beds of multiple interconnecting channels. They are called braided, though that always sounds too tame to me. They are beautiful, as a woman’s plaited hair might be beautiful, or a woven silken tassel. They are heart-stopping in their sinuous flow of blue water milky with snowmelt, surging between banks of white silt.

But this is no domestic beauty. They flow with powerful singularity of purpose, shifting about in their restless beds, forming an estuary here, a lagoon, a sand bar, an island, then abruptly changing course, swinging in a single season from south to north or back again. In spring spate they rumble with cargoes of rock and boulder. From above, from the point of view of the map god, they resemble not so much a braid as a flayed limb, all muscle, nerve and twisting sinew. And these are just the visible waterways of the region. Alongside them, but out of sight under the earth’s surface, flow aquifers as powerful as those on the surface, but secretive, elusive, forcing their way through to the sea, down in the dark.

At the northern edge of the plain one of the great rivers nudges the foot of the pile of wreckage that, in the geological version, is the remnant of two volcanoes. Long extinct, they lean companionably back to back, their summits smoothed to hills that rise abruptly from sea level to around 920 metres at their highest point. Their calderas, flooded long since, form two deeply indented harbours on a peninsula that juts into the sea like a fist.

Sometimes, encountering the peninsula’s recalcitrant bulk, the river flows south. Sometimes it takes another tack, and empties into the sea to the north. Back and forth, leaving, between the two alternatives, a wetland made up of gleaming acres of coastal lagoon and estuary, swamps of rustling reed and flax, springs that bubble up in cones of white silt from the aquifers that are the great river’s dark cousins below ground and creeks that dawdle to the sea past muddy islets. The whole land teems with birds and lizards, fish and eel and skittery insects in their uncountable billions.

And they all know their way about.

They learn its map from birth: where to shelter, where to feed, where to nest, how to get there, how to leave. Those eels in their millions drift in each year as tiny glassy creatures, borne south over thousands of kilometres from their breeding place in tropical waters. They come to land, wriggle over the shingle bar, drop into their lives in some shadowy pool, close to the bank. Head on against the current, eating, not breeding, until the time comes for them to leave. For the male longfins this might be after forty years of living. For the females, however, it’s much longer: eighty, maybe 100 years of growing till they are the size of a man’s leg, one glistening, undulating muscle.

Then something changes. They stop eating, their guts shrivel and their ovaries fill with eggs. And one night they turn and swim with the current. They head downstream, out into the ocean they had last known when they were no more than a glassy leaf. They swim north for thousands of kilometres, following a map of stars, some taste, or scent, to the tropic waters, where they release their eggs in one final explosive contraction. And then they die. They are eaten by gulls while sperm wriggles to egg and the whole cycle begins again. Another shoal of tiny glassy creatures drifts south to the creeks and rivers in the wetlands around the stumps of old volcanoes.

So humans are not the first to find their way about this country. It has been mapped for millennia in the cortex of creatures not that far removed in evolutionary terms from ourselves. At the deepest level, a map is not just about naming places, but of knowing where we are on the planet and feeling we belong.

FOR MILLENNIA, THE BIRDS AND FISH have it to themselves. Then people arrive, following maps created from close observation of ocean currents and winds and the trajectory of moon and stars, noting bird flight and the movement of fish, interpreting the luminescence that is visible beneath the water a certain distance from land and the tang of earth on salt air, knowing how to navigate with absolute precision from one calculated point in this universe of scattered islands across water to this point, with its swamps and eroded volcanoes.

The people paddle down the coast and discover its mountains, plains and rivers and their rich resources. Over hundreds of years, the place acquires a dense patina of names and narrative, an unseen layer covering all those layers of shingle. The winds that breathe over the land, investing everything with life and being, are Te Punui o Te Toka, who blows from the south, Puaitaha, who blows from the south-west. Tiu breathes from the north. Uru Te Maha is the source of all winds that blow from the west, including Te Mauru e Taki Nei, the nor’wester, who dominates these plains with such force that he is known by Ngai Tahu as Te Hau Kai Tangata, the wind that devours people.

Water, too, is named. The great river to the north is Waimakariri, the estuary at the foot of the peninsula with its teeming populations of shrimp and flounder is Waipatiki. The two small rivers that drain into it are Otakaro and its southern twin, Opawaho, and their tributaries are Wairarapa, Waimairi, Haere Roa. The springs from which they derive are called puna; plants along their banks are tutu, toetoe, kanuka; the birds that nest and feed are putakitaki, weka, pukeko; the creatures in their waters are kokopu, koura, tuna, inaka. The settlements are Te Kai o Te Karoro on the sandspit at the coast, Te Oranga, Puari and, at the point where the Otakaro ceases to be navigable and waka must be pulled ashore, is the largest, Te Whenua o Te Potiki Tautahi, named for a chiefly man who came here from Koukourarata on the farther side of the volcanic hills to gather kai. Here, where tracks and river meet and the little stream, Maka-iti-iti, rushes to join the main current, Tautahi built a whare for himself and the people who were with him, and near here he died, his bones buried in the sandhills. Every hill, every gully, the rock stacks and bays of the coast, the islets of the wetland, all are named for some distinguishing feature or for something that happened there, or to commemorate a person of note.

On this flat land, amid a dense growth of flax higher than any human, the hills of the peninsula are a constant point of reference. Trees also stand out. The tall columns of a stand of kahikatea and the crowns of ti kouka, with their strappy leaves and heads of white flower, are signposts marking the way through, the way home.

And then other people come with other names.

They stand on the banks of the Waimakariri and call it the Courtenay. The harbour in the flooded caldera is Port Victoria, the Opawaho is the Heathcote, the Otakaro is briefly the Shakespeare then the Avon, though not, it seems, in reference to the Bard, but for a river in Scotland, since ‘Avon’ is one of those names that means exactly what it says: it is ‘river’ in the Brythonic tongue once spoken in the British Isles. There are, as a consequence, several Avons in Britain, including one that rises near Stonehenge and flows to the coast past a town named Christchurch. It’s a name that has also been applied in a fairly random fashion to various waterways in places the British colonised, among them a vast river system in Western Australia that is 280 kilometres long and drains a catchment of 12 million very un-British hectares. In Canada, it was given to a river flowing over ancient glaciated rock through woods of maple and birch, past a town called Stratford, though here the bardic referencing ran out. When it came to naming its tributaries, the planners settled for bare-boned colonial practicality: Hislop Drain, Douglas Drain, Sheerer Drain. There’s only so much poetry you can impose on an appropriated landscape.

A preliminary sketch map prepared in 1849 ‘shewing the Site of the Canterbury Settlement’ has a river that will soon become another in the catalogue of Avons, writhing through an alien landscape to the estuary and the sea. The Canterbury Settlement’s city had been planned originally for the head of the harbour named for a young queen. Christchurch could have developed as did Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin, with suburbs built around volcanic hills, while business became established by the port on land reclaimed from the sea.

But those plains proved irresistible. A surveyor, Edward Jollie, looked down from a path across the hills and saw not wetland but a land of milk and honey, ‘a beautiful agricultural district with a fine stream called the Avon running through it and navigable for boats as far as the lower end of town’. Swamp could be drained. That river would supply the basis for trade and industry, providing a route for goods to and from the port and the wide world. Railways and canals, those modern miracles of engineering, would expand the network and the city could spread unencumbered over flat, accessible land, all of it purchased fair and square from the natives in 1848 in a deal that traded 20 million acres between a line drawn across the island from the Nuggets to Fiordland and from Kaiapoi to the West Coast, for £2000. Which worked out at even less per acre than the French had managed ten years earlier when Captain Langlois bought 300,000 acres of the volcanic peninsula around Akaroa for 1000 francs, a woollen overcoat, six pairs of linen trousers, a dozen waterproof hats, two pairs of shoes, a pistol, two woollen shirts and an oilskin coat.

This was land with a long history of settlement, but like the original land of milk and honey, it was seen by the newcomers as God-given virgin soil. The Black Maps prepared for survey draw a landscape tangled with hundreds of sinuous watery threads. Rivers and creeks wind through ‘Flax Swamp’, ‘Tutu and Fern’ and ‘Broken Ground’ to the sea. An 1849 sketch map shows no buildings except a store and landing place on the shore, linked to the hatched rectangle that is to be the new city by a ‘Road now in Progress’, and on to a ferry over the Courtenay. Another road crosses the hills to the port at Lyttelton and round the harbour, over the hills to the coastal lagoons and Lincoln and the great grassy expanses of plains now named Whately, which stretch to ‘Snow Capped Mountains’.

The roads follow well-used routes along high ground through the swamp. They link settlements, but of Te Kai o Te Karoro, Puari, Te Whenua o Te Potiki Tautahi there is no sign. Instead, scattered about the map are areas marked ‘N.S.’ for ‘Native Settlement’, along with an approximate number of Maori residents: near Akaroa (thirty), Wainui (thirty), Birdlings Flat (ten). The Germans and the French have a hillside at a safe distance from the future city. The Canterbury Association’s chief surveyor, Captain Joseph Thomas, draws contour line and fathom mark, estimates the quantity of available timber (237,000 acres), mentions the presence of an excellent seam of coal by the island called variously Motunau or Cook’s Table. All is well, all is promise, on this plain on this island of New Munster on the coast of the great Southern Ocean.

THE CITY COMES INTO SHARPER focus in a map devised in 1850. It is a grid, laid down upon this landscape of raupo swamp, tutu and fern: 1000 acres will be contained within a rectangle 2 miles wide by 1¼ miles deep, each street exactly 66 feet wide — one unfurling of the standard surveyor’s tool, Gunter’s chain, with its 100 clanking links. A town reserve frames the city and wider terraces line either bank of the river leading to a botanic garden, to permit the healthful circulation of air. At its heart is a cruciform square and, just to the north, a marketplace. The long, straight streets are lined with sections, the land divided as neatly as a large block of butter for ease of purchase. Fifty acres of rural land brings with it a bonus quarter-acre section within the city boundaries. A diagonal road cuts across the grid, joining the city to the port in one direction and to a stand of bush for timber and fuel in the other. Its order is based upon a proper trigonometrical survey, taking as its primary reference point the summit of one of the peninsula hills that for centuries has been called Tauhinu Korokio but is spelled by the newcomers Mt Pleasant.

This map is proof of an hypothesis. In its plainness, in its sheer rationality, it demonstrates a political ideal, a way of thinking developed by the city’s founders, the New Zealand Company and its offshoot, the Canterbury Association. Both were, in their gentlemanly fashion, radical institutions promoting a new approach to the whole business of colonisation, the theoretical basis of which had been devised in Newgate Prison, where Edward Gibbon Wakefield, bounder and cad, was serving a three-year sentence for the abduction of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. The story is recounted in Philip Temple’s biography of the Wakefields, A Sort of Conscience.

Ellen Turner was the only child of a wealthy textile manufacturer from Pott Shrigley in Cheshire. Wakefield was thirty and already a father. He was also short of cash and desperately keen to enter Parliament. Over several months, with the collusion of his younger brother, William, he came up with a plan. Write a letter, purporting to come from the Turners’ doctor, informing Ellen that her mother is seriously ill and that she should come home immediately. ‘Though I do not think Mrs Turner is in immediate danger, it is probable she may soon become incapable of recognizing any one.’

Have your French manservant deliver the letter after midnight to the headmistress of Ellen’s Liverpool boarding school, then carry Ellen off in a carriage to Manchester, where she believes her father is waiting to meet her. Instead, it is Wakefield. He tells her he is one of her father’s business associates, here to accompany her on her journey.

They set off, French manservant and William seated outside on the box, Wakefield himself in the carriage, where he surveys his prize with all the cool disinterest of someone examining a new horse. As he reported later in a statement he hoped might exonerate him, the girl was ‘tall of her age … her countenance pale but … enlivened by two piercing eyes, and a finely shaped mouth, with teeth extremely well formed and white.’ Along the way, as the carriage lurches northward, he informs her that her father is in business difficulties so extreme that it has been agreed her immediate marriage to Wakefield is the only way to avoid ruin.

What option does she have? Fifteen years old, alone in the company of three men who are complete strangers, dragged from her bed into a confusion of lies and deceit, driven off on a journey of 600 bewildering miles? The carriage rattles at haste to Gretna Green where a too-large ring is placed on her finger and she is married to a man she doesn’t know by a seventy-four-year-old parson cum blacksmith, with the innkeeper for witness.

It’s not clear if Wakefield followed up abduction with rape, but he certainly calculated that Ellen’s parents would presume their daughter was no longer a virgin and wish to protect her reputation. They would have no choice but to accept him as their son-in-law, and fund his parliamentary candidacy. It was a plan he had tried once before with great success. At twenty he had abducted another young heiress, Eliza Pattle, whose mother had come up with the cash. She had accepted the marriage as a fait accompli and settled £70,000 on her daughter and her unprepossessing husband. All had gone swimmingly, until Eliza’s death in childbirth at the age of twenty-four.

But Ellen’s parents were made of sterner stuff. They pursued their daughter to Calais where, as Wakefield wrote to his brother, Ellen ‘told all, and was anxious to leave me when she knew all’. He then wrote a ‘Solemn Declaration’ that he had not slept with her, that ‘she and I have been as Brother and Sister … I was bound, and it was wise to give some Comfort to Mr Turner’.

Wise indeed. Wakefield now found himself the monstrous villain in the year’s greatest scandal. The Shrigley Abduction. His trial a year later drew throngs. Abduction was no longer a capital crime, but it carried a possible sentence of transportation or imprisonment with hard labour. When final judgement was made, in London on 14 May 1827, he was sentenced to three years in Newgate.

And Ellen? A year later she married a neighbour and at the age of 19 she died giving birth. Two years after her death, her parents had her portrait painted. It hangs in the museum at Preston. She looks steadily from a gilt frame, plump and pink cheeked, a blooming girl when she was already lifeless and underground.

WAKEFIELD, MEANWHILE, HAD PUT his time in prison to good use, reading copiously and developing theories of colonisation that formed the basis of articles published in the Spectator and elaborated in a book, A View of the Art of Colonization.

Central to this ‘art’ was the concept of sufficient price.

Historically, Wakefield argued, Britain’s attempts at colonisation had failed because the government had given land away, rather than charging a price that would have deterred firstcomers from seizing ownership of enormous tracts. This had the effect of driving later arrivals further and further into the wilderness if they were to be able to purchase their own little piece of land. Population dispersal meant that proprietors of large estates were unable to recruit the labour required to exploit the full economic potential of their holdings, so slave-owning had become a necessity, and where such labour was unavailable, landowners had been forced to work their holdings themselves, leaving neither time nor leisure for ‘taste, science, morals, manners, abstract politics’, the attributes of civilised existence.

The solution? ‘To sell land after survey at a uniform price sufficiently high to raise funds for paying the passages of more immigrants.’ At the correctly gauged price, wealthy colonists could afford to buy land, but not in excessive amounts, while poorer colonists — ideally young married couples — would have to work for three or four years to accumulate the capital required to purchase their own property. This ready supply of eager labour would attract men of substance to the colony, which would become economically vibrant while supplying an expanding market for British goods. Politically, each colony would be self-governing rather than directed by some distant Whitehall bureaucrat, and so, with power and commerce concentrated in cities planned on rational principles, with authority to direct their own affairs and with ample labour to make the wastelands blossom, the colonists could develop a truly civilised society. ‘Concentration,’ Wakefield averred, ‘is Civilisation.’

His examination of earlier colonies also persuaded him of the wisdom of founding colonies around a single faith. The Puritan settlement of New England and the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania had prospered because they possessed ‘moral unity’. Accordingly, when Wakefield turned his attention to the colonisation of New Zealand, he visualised individual settlements for Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics and Zionists.

WAKEFIELD WAS NOT ALONE IN writing about the art of colonisation in the pages of the Spectator. One equally enthusiastic theorist was an Anglo-Irish landowner named John Robert Godley, whose family’s estates spread over several hundred acres of Counties Meath and Leitrim. Seized from the O’Rourkes during the British takeover of the mid-seventeenth century, these lands had proven fertile and highly productive. They also returned a healthy sum in rents from scores of tenants. In the 1840s, however, these two counties were among the worst affected when Ireland’s potatoes — those big floury Lumpers that sustained millions — began to rot.

I know a bit about the Famine. Anyone with Irish ancestry knows a bit about the Famine. What I knew as a child growing up in Oamaru was that a lot of people died. They had been so hungry that a lady had come into a shop and tried to pay for food with a dead baby. ‘Be quiet, Jim,’ said our mother as we sat spooning up our golden syrup pudding, children of milk and honey, inhabitants of the proud province from which the first refrigerated ship had sailed for Britain with its cargo of frozen mutton and pigs and hares and pheasants, not to mention 2226 sheep’s tongues. The wealth of the nation had begun right here, just down the road, where a sign marked the source of all that frozen bounty. How could we imagine hunger, hunger so deep, so dark, that a woman would place that sad little bundle on the counter? ‘Stop it,’ said our mother. ‘You’re frightening the children.’

But the baby was why we were here, wasn’t it? In this town in this country. It was why our dad sang ‘Kelly the Boy From Killane’ when he’d been down at the 2nd NZEF clubrooms and came home roaring. It was why he’d been born in Dundee, why his family had lived there making jute sacks and being soldiers before the big journey to New Zealand. It was why none of us had been born in Ireland. Our father’s ancestors had been driven from County Meath by The Great Hunger, just as our mother’s ancestors had left Speyside, driven out by The Great Disruption, which was a more obscure event altogether, something to do with who got to choose the minister: the landowners or the congregation.

It was only later, in adulthood, that the cartoon outlines of conflict and despair began to fill with detail.

I lived for six months in Ireland in 2007, in the south, in a place called Donoughmore. One afternoon a neighbour showed me a mound, a long embankment reaching from one wall across a couple of fields before coming to an abrupt end in a bog. ‘Do you know what that is?’ he said. I presumed an old fence line maybe? Something to do with drainage?

It was a famine road.

A road from nowhere to nowhere built by men who had to work to earn some paltry relief. (For women, of course, with their trailing children, there was no relief at all, other than the workhouse, if you could make your way to one, if you could gain admission.) But the men must dig. They must lift rocks, the authorities had decided, but their work must not compete with commercial roadbuilding. So these roads don’t have a destination. They don’t link one place to another place. They are that most demoralising of things: pointless labour.

Once you know what a famine road looks like, you see them everywhere. You notice also the rough ground of the burial plot, the acre of anonymous bodies, too many to name or even count. You notice the whitewashed stare of former workhouses where people crowded in until the authorities locked the doors. You notice the two little tickets in the museum at Cork to a regatta, a boat race for the gentry, in 1847 when all around in this beautiful green place with its glossy herds of dairy cows, its Butter Road cutting directly across country to deliver the rich produce of the region to the port — all around, people were crawling under hedges to die.

In 2012, Cork University Press published an Atlas of the Great Irish Famine. It is a massive work of charts and statistics, as a good atlas should be, depicting in careful academic fashion political belief working its inexorable logic on an entire people. It is utterly sickening. I can absorb it only in tiny bites.

Even before the disastrous season, the areas in which the Godleys owned land were noted for their inequality. A government orthographer checking the correct spelling of those awkward Irish place names that persisted in clinging to the country for the new official 6-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey maps, recorded his bewilderment: ‘You see rich meadows and luxuriant fields of potatoes, wheat and oats in every direction, and still the people are starving.’

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 south. 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.

Foreign territory.

It wasn’t a city I knew. I had visited it only twice before, once as a child when my mother brought us to visit one of her cousins, and once to a student arts festival back in 1968. Christchurch was the city on the lid of the biscuit tin where a river flowed between willows and banks of golden daffodils. It was the garden on the cover of the Edmonds Cookery Book, ornamental flowerbeds, afghans and ginger crunch. It was the city of my mother’s Cousin May, who did good works for the diocese, accommodating exprisoners on their release so they could find a job and a place to live. They hung about her cavernous house, big and brooding like dogs you could not entirely trust. May was pale and kind and took us to evensong at the cathedral, where small boys sang difficult arrangements of the Psalms and I longed for ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, something with a bit of a ta-dum while compositional invention echoed in the high rafters of the nave.

In 1968 Christchurch was the city where, for some inexplicable reason, the university was in the process of moving from buildings that looked like a proper university with clocktower and cloisters to a bleak campus miles from downtown and anywhere interesting. Bare-boned concrete blocks stood about in a boring suburban nowhere and I was so pleased I had chosen Otago. There the university still occupied the centre. The streets of Dunedin were lined with flats of student antiquity. Their hallways smelled of fish and chips and mould and I slept with my boyfriend under sleeping bags and army blankets on sheets gritty with coal dust from the ineffectual open fire. We emerged from bed onto damp streets where the air smelled of chocolate and coffee and hops from the brewery. It was infinitely preferable to soulless, Stalinist modernity.

So when I arrived in 1992 it was to a new land. A place glimpsed as square fragments from the windows of a Saab 340 as it bucked in on a pesky nor’wester. It took time to put all those fragments together.

I had a room in a house near the centre of the city, because I don’t see the point of living in a city where you can’t walk to the middle. A four-square Edwardian villa in a cluster of small streets by the river from the biscuit tin, the one with the weeping willows. The woman who owned the house was a photographer. Juliet recorded houses and gardens for lifestyle and gardening magazines. She had her darkroom by the back door and that first night, as I lay to sleep in my new bed, I could hear her moving about, working late. The click of a door. The trickle of water through pipes.

For years I had lived in another house, hearing other sounds: the muffled thump of my daughter coming in late from a party, the man next door who worked shifts roaring down the street on his motorbike, the stereo from the students who flatted over the back fence, the tom-tom beat of youth signalling to youth like kakapo booming on a mountainside for the attention of a mate. Sounds that had become familiar over many years. I could place each of them on that internal map we all carry: the one that answers that fundamental human question.

Where am I?

And then the marriage soured. It wasn’t that my husband was unkind. Far from it. He was a good and decent man, but I had found myself, as I lay in bed, thinking about another house. It existed only in my mind. It was a cottage. It had a living room with bookshelves and an open fire. It had a verandah with roses growing over it and they had beautiful romantic names: Gloire de Dijon, Souvenir de la Malmaison. The house became compelling. I lived there on my own.

And now here I was, and what I had imagined was in the process of becoming real. There was the thrum of traffic on the treed avenue I had glimpsed across the river. The rippling of water under the bridge. At doubtful 1 a.m. Uncertain 2 a.m. Remorseful 3 a.m. Panicky 4 a.m.

When it was light I went out. I got on my bike and went for a ride. I needed to make a new map, to find out where the avenue led, how this street intersected with that and how it all linked to the centre. I need to do that wherever I am: figure out where things are, get my bearings. Know where is east, and where is west, so that when I lie down to sleep I know which way my head is pointing and which way my feet. Without that certainty, I am in freefall. I am nothing, I am nobody, adrift on a directionless current.

Hilly cities are simple to understand. When I lived in Auckland for a few months, I climbed the little volcanic cones, looked across the gullies from roads that followed the crests of ancient lava flows. The gulf lay on one side of the narrow isthmus, the Manukau Harbour on the other, east and west. From a distance, the Sky Tower twinkled like a minaret, calling the faithful downtown. It was not difficult to put together names already familiar form books and magazines and television: North Shore, Titirangi, Grey Lynn, Shortland Street …

Wellington, too, is readily comprehensible from streets that sidle high along the contour lines or flow downhill into the caldera. And Dunedin lays itself out, clear as can be, at a single glance, as you swing around the corner on the hills of the northern motorway.

But Christchurch is flat and tricky. I rode out that morning into puzzlement. Up one flat street, turned into another, across a bridge, through suburbs that changed abruptly from Arts and Crafts two-storey to concrete-block units to post-war state houses to 90s plaster Provençal. Past suburban shopping centres with pharmacy, minimart and video rental. Out to the coast where lolly-coloured houses surveyed the sea beyond the sandhills, and back to the centre through blocks given over to light industry, into a square with cathedral and pedestrian precinct and across a park to that suburban university, which still looked bleak despite the rhododendrons and the landscaping. The kind of place where you emerge after working late at the library, not onto city streets, but to the desolate walk to the carpark and the Red Riding Hood possibility of wolves in the shrubbery. I rode back into town, losing my way on streets of tall fences and leafy gardens, so that I was forced to cast about for a glimpse of the Port Hills, like a calf that had lost its mother’s smooth brown flank in a wide field.

This city took time to assemble.

THERE’S A MAP PINNED BY my desk as I write this. A 2007 Kiwi Minimap that presents the city as a mosaic of tiny interlocking squares, labelled 1 to 12 from west to east and A to T from south to north.

Not a big city, as cities go. In 2007, it was home to around 480,000, spread over 1426 square kilometres. On a global scale it would scarcely register as a village, let alone a market town.

At this point in its history, 150 years after the whare on the riverbank and the gazetteer of Anglican bishoprics, it had lost some of its original concentration, sprawling over flat land and hillside. But the grid was still visible, framed now by the Four Avenues that supplanted Thomas’s town reserves.

The Anglicans’ cathedral was still there, at the centre, though it was no longer the tallest structure. Its steeple was no longer the place from which you could take in the city at a single glance, paying sixpence to climb the stairs for the panorama. It was walled about by office blocks, demonstrating, in their very height, the encroachment of other creeds. The towers housed the local branches of international hotel chains, Australian banks, American-based insurance companies.

Remnants of the Victorian and Edwardian past hung on. On the Square’s south-western corner stood the Renaissance palazzo that once accommodated the chief post office, all decorative red brick and white stone trim. In some awkward 80s compromise between conservation and demolition, it was now pasted as a kind of architectural footnote to one of those towers. Telecom and the post office lurked somewhere behind a tourist information centre and Starbucks.

East of that, at the cathedral’s shoulder, there was another Italianate fantasy, more princely and Palladian. The Old Government Building was erected to house the departments of Public Works, Labour, Stamps, Valuation, Customs, State Fire Insurance, State Coal, the Registrar of Births and Deaths, the Public Trust Office and the office administering State Pensions — the whole panoply of civilisation — back when New Zealand was laying fair claim to being the world’s most progressive social laboratory. In 1913, they were set up in style, in monumental masonry, polished totara and stained glass.

Across the street were the offices of the daily newspaper, The Press: four floors in red-and-white-striped perpendicular Gothic. Elegant windows, a folly of a tower on one corner, a pigeon house on the roof for the birds that flew in before telex and faxes and email, and Cicero quoted above the front door. ‘Nihil utile quod non honestum.’ Nothing useful that is not honest. The phrase had been lifted from a treatise written in great haste in the last year of the philosopher’s life, addressed to a son who was off in Athens studying and no doubt wasting his time, as students do. With the threat of death by assassination or execution looming, Cicero had penned a desperate argument for the concept of a republic against the political forces unleashed by Julius Caesar that would result in imperial autocracy.

The treatise considered the obligations of the citizen in such a state: How does the individual citizen live a decent moral life within a state where political rights are being subverted?

He himself had little time to live, morally or otherwise. A few months later, in December 43 BC, he was murdered on the orders of Antony — yes, that one. The ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ Antony. Cicero met death with dignity, leaning from the litter on which he was being carried to a ship and safety, to give the swordsman a clean blow. His head, and the hand with which he had written his polemics, were then carried to Rome where Antony had them nailed to the rostra in the Forum from which speeches were delivered, as a mild disincentive to dissent. His wife also amused herself by placing the head on the table at dinner and poking pins through the philosopher’s tongue. I wish I had known about the pins when I was plodding through Pro Milone at school.

Next door to all that noble intention stood a bluff old John Bull of a hotel, Warners, now a pub and backpackers, and next to that, until 1993, a cinema, the last of several that had sprung up around the Square as temples of modernity. By the time of the Kiwi Minimap, however, the cinemas had migrated to the multiplexes of the suburban malls. Tourist shops selling merino sweaters and paua keyrings had taken their place, while the Old Government Building offices were being refashioned as apartments. Cafés were springing up in odd corners, including one on the northern flank of the cathedral, the odour of sanctity mingling with cheese muffins. The trams that had once rattled through the Square were long gone, leaving a survivor on a circular track for the tourists, going round and round like some representative of a dying species — a dolphin perhaps — crazily circling some hellish aquarium. Off it went, ringing its little bell, ting ting, down Worcester Street, now retitled Worcester Boulevard, towards the former university, transformed, as Victorian redundancies everywhere were transformed at the close of the twentieth century, into an arts centre: theatre and boutique cinema, Saturday morning market selling soap and pounamu to the tourists, a pleasant bar and cafés. The site where Rutherford had made the preliminary studies that would lead to the splitting of the atom now served as character-filled background to young women in mob caps selling cubes of passionfruit-flavoured fudge.

The retail action of the central city was also migrating to the suburbs and their malls, but Ballantynes, the city’s principal department store, remained at its post on the corner of Cashel Street, now pedestrianised as a mall with trees and planters. By day, there was the pleasant buzz of small businesses — 5710 of them, according to Statistics New Zealand — in the central city: bakeries, clothing shops, gift shops, cafés and bars, supported by the regular daily inflow of the 40,000 or so who came in to work at the hospital, the law courts and central police station, the city council, the polytechnic, the government departments and offices. There were B&Bs and hotels flying the flags of an assortment of international chains, and a convention centre — the country’s largest — with auditorium and theatre and plate-glass façade. At night, the city remained busy with people drawn to a multitude of restaurants, the town hall and its concerts, the bars along The Strip, overlooking twinkly trees by the river. Later in the evening, things got a little rougher. Hookers worked the corners round Manchester Street, boy racers in customised Subarus throbbed around the Four Avenues, the bars revved into raucous life.

AROUND THE CENTRE, THE SUBURBS arranged themselves along those wide flat streets, their invisible borders marked by a row of shops, a mall, a school, and all the endless subtleties of race and class and taste that operate in this intricate little country.

Out on the coast were the Brightons — North, New and South — each at a slightly different point on the income and demographic scales, but all sharing their closeness to the sea and the holiday lightness of being that brings. Surfboards on the deck, the beach fading away into mist where the dog could release its inner wolf, shrug off that urban leash and run like the wind.

A little inland lay Bexley, Avondale, Burwood, suburbs built in the closing decades of the twentieth century when engineers were all-powerful and nothing was impossible. Dams could be built on faultlines, houses could be suspended over cliff edge or ravine, motorways and museums could be constructed on land only recently lifted from the sea, and swamps could be drained for subdivision.

When drainage and subdivision were proposed here in the 80s, it sparked a fight. One of those debates of its era that pitted environmentalist against developer, fought not with the placards and marches of the 60s and 70s but in the new fashion, via close Talmudic reference to the relevant acts and regulations. In 1984, 2044 city residents requested that ‘certain low-lying areas of the area now designated the Bexley Employment Zone … be retained for wildlife, landscape and flood alleviation purposes’. But the city council ruled against it. A tiny portion — 12.5 hectares — was set aside as an ‘Ecological Heritage Site’, while the remainder became subdivisable land where council brochures promised ‘large growth in medium-sized, bungalow-style houses … confidently expected to continue well into the future’.

To the south and west, the medium-sized bungalows shaded into suburbs of houses built square and solid to one of the state’s 300 approved patterns and all that tourist flimflam of ‘the English city’ fell away. Aranui, Wainoni. The streets filled with Maori and Pacific Islanders. This was Aotearoa. It was the Pacific.

Closer to the estuary, the land roughened around shallow waters no longer famed as Waipatiki, for flounder and the little koura that were marketed to near extinction within a couple of decades in the nineteenth century as ‘Redcliff prawns’. Now the estuary contained the oxidation ponds, which were at least an improvement on the raw waste that trickled into its waters, via the pipes and pumping stations of the city, for over 100 years. By the twenty-first century there were swans and ducks.

Across the estuary, tucked in against the old volcanic hills was Sumner — affluent, but outdoor, not stuffy. Mountain bikes in the garage, ski rack on the 4WD. And on the steep hillsides above, there were Redcliffs, Mt Pleasant and other hillside suburbs, with a view of the whole broad sweep of the bay and the snowy tops of the Kaikouras gleaming in the distance.

Around the curve of the hills and across the wide expanse at their foot, the suburbs assembled, block by block. Some were leafier, like Opawa and Shirley, some were unadorned: Woolston, Linwood, Waltham, Sydenham. The differences between them might be accounted for by the presence of a busy road, or because once the railway had its workshops nearby, or because there were eleven tanneries here in the nineteenth century, not to mention a skinnery and factories on the banks of the river producing glue and soap and ink, and the wind blew all that stink over this suburb and not that one, so this suburb is where the poor people went, and where they stayed, more or less, though the factories had gone and their stinks now drifted over suburbs in Guangzhou or Dewas.

The suburbs stepped westward, and north and south, rising barely perceptibly as they moved further from the coast. They became grand abruptly, in Fendalton and Merivale, then modest, then flash, then plain, switching from 60s brick and tile to 70s timber to 90s Hardiplank, from elms and camellias to gravel low maintenance to contemporary subdivision on former orchards and market gardens. And finally the city stuttered to a halt amid paddocks and the 10-acre lifestyle and the mountains of the Main Divide reappeared, bordering the plain with their fretwork of rock and snow.

Not a big city, as cities go. Nor an especially beautiful one, though it fancied itself as the ‘Garden City’, as if it were the only one, as if the world were not in fact, crammed with ‘Garden Cities’. Some were planned as a social ideal, in imitation of Ebenezer Howard’s original, the ‘slumless smokeless city’ with its satellite settlements — Gladstone, Concord, Philadelphia, Justitia and Rurisville — linked by a municipal canal and railway line and its Home for Waifs, its Home for the Insane, its Home for Convalescent Women and an unspecified number of Epileptic Farms set about the perimeter of a city of 58,000 freeholders occupying 12,000 acres of smokeless perfection. There are eighteen Garden Cities in the States alone, not to mention Toowoomba in Australia staging its annual Festival of Flowers or Canada’s St Catherine’s, where the garden has become a little trampled with the death of General Motors. It fights for its Garden City life with a plethora of telephone call centres and a new stadium built to house the local ice hockey team. There’s Cairo’s Garden City, leafy home to diplomats, and Cape Town’s Garden City with its bevy of senior citizens. There’s Vina del Mar on the shaky quake-prone coast of Chile and Georgetown in Guyana, where the statue of Victoria fronts the Halls of Justice with her nose flattened like some tough little scrapper after a few heavy rounds, and its canals are choked by the broad leaves of the plant named for her, Victoria amazonica. A friend who spent five years of her childhood there remembers gardens lush with papaya and mango and the canefields of Demerara stretching to the horizon. Christchurch had its trees and roses, but it did not by any means have exclusive right to being the ‘Garden City’.

Nor did it possess the heart-stopping architectural perfection of one of those Italian hilltop cities — Urbino, for example, or Siena or L’Aquila — where civilisation truly seems to have found expression in a concentration of golden stone. It had none of the profoundly satisfying order of Bath, none of the drama of Sydney or Auckland or Stockholm viewed from across the water, none of the curiosity of New York’s endlessly astonishing streets. Tourist postcards focused on the city’s setting, choosing long views with the city downstage centre and those most photogenic of mountains to the rear. Or some determinedly limited vision of the cathedral or willows weeping into the Avon. There were parks and the tree-lined waywardness of the rivers, but for the most part, the city lay bareheaded to the Canterbury sky and that family of breathing winds. Wide, treeless streets were lined with low-slung houses peeping tiptoe over wooden fences, or cubes of concrete and glass like random dice holding an interchangeable selection of light industry, medical services or farming supplies. The city’s beauty lay in the shining expanse of Pegasus Bay, the lava tips to the peninsula hills, the mountains making an exquisite border to the plains, and the purity of that unsullied east coast light.

BUT CITIES ARE MORE THAN landscape or building. They are people and the routines we create to link us to people. In 1992 I soon felt comfortable in this city. I met good people. The marriage was irretrievably over. One day towards the end of my residency, I walked round the corner and came upon an agent nailing a ‘For Sale’ sign to the fence of a little cottage. The one I had been imagining all those months — with the verandah and the open fire, sash windows either side of a green front door.

Within a week, I owned it, along with a scary mortgage. I moved in my bed and my computer and a painting by Lindsay Crooks. Someone lent me a sofa. I got a job shelving books at a library. I had moved to Christchurch.

A couple of years later, I sold that first house to buy another exactly like it on the peninsula. A man had rung to ask if I would teach at a spring school in Akaroa. He came into town to discuss it, sat on my borrowed sofa in front of my inadequate fire. The dream house was lovely, but those polished floors left gaps under every door through which swept icy draughts. I was systematically burning my way through an old dunny in the backyard. Its timber boards flared in the grate with a brief intensity and were ashes in seconds.

The dunny could not last forever.

The next week, the man returned with my contract and a stack of dry firewood in the back of his 1967 Cortina station wagon. Old pine, manuka. The room filled with their steady, warming glow.

It was the best gift anyone anywhere had ever given me. I married him. I sold the cottage to fund my share of an old farmhouse in a tiny bay between the lava flows of the peninsula. My husband altered the front rooms to become accommodation for walkers on a coastal track. The back we kept for us.

It was beautiful. The hillsides were clothed in regenerating bush. Kereru swooped. Bellbirds chimed. The sea lay only 50 metres away, shallow and swimmable on a sandy beach. But I missed the city. I am at heart a town mouse, bored and lonely away from the busyness of streets, friends dropping in, the ease of popping out to shops and movies. I missed the dropping in, the popping out, and when my mother died and I had some money, I bought a flat.

It was close to the centre of the city, at the corner of two of the avenues. One of a set of four built in 1941: weatherboard, concrete tiled roof, a tiny section where I planted more roses and espaliered a cherry tree because I don’t see the point of planting trees in a garden that don’t bear fruit and the delicate ephemera of blossom. Technically, the flat was intended to be a rental, a sensible investment for two people incapable of saving a penny, something to sustain a probably impecunious old age.

In the event, it was never rented. Friends used it when they were between jobs or visiting the city. My younger daughter and her partner lived there between stints on the offshore islands — Raoul, Maud, Codfish — where they worked with kakapo and other endangered species. The flat filled with crampons and climbing ropes, surfboards and snowboards tumbled from the cupboards. My granddaughters were born in the flat, one in the bedroom as a nor’wester breathed hot and gusty, the other in the still of night, sliding, still packaged in the caul, into a paddling pool in the sitting room. I stayed in the flat whenever I was working late, or when I simply craved the city, the sensation of living in the midst of all those other parallel lives.

WE WERE ASLEEP IN THE FLAT one spring morning when it began to tremble and through the pillow, felt in the bone, rather than heard, rose a roaring as the walls jolted back and forth and the whole building, the street, the entire city was shoved into a new era. Forty kilometres away, on that broad green plain, a gash had ripped across a paddock.

Just a minor tectonic adjustment, an insignificant fault. No one even knew it existed, buried there, more than 10 kilometres down beneath a thick blanket of grey shingle. Only 27 kilometres long. We didn’t suspect it for one moment as we clambered from sleep to the doorway where we had learnt long since that safety lay, though in this instance we were wrong. We had chosen to stand right under the water tank: a few hundred weighty litres slopped back and forth above our heads. But we presumed safety there, as we presumed the Alpine Fault.

This was it. The quake we had been warned about all our lives. The faultline that had forced up the mountains of the Main Divide. Six hundred and fifty kilometres of brooding tension that had hovered forever like some moustachioed villain in the wings, awaiting the moment to make his entrance. When that fault ruptured, we had been told, you will shake. The magnitude of a quake is directly related to the length of its faultline and when the Alpine Fault goes, it will be an 8, maybe bigger. The land will shrug you aside like some annoying little tic.

We hadn’t anticipated a tiny crack opening a few kilometres away on tame, flat dairy land.

But 27 kilometres is long enough; 7.1 will do it in an explosive 40 seconds of release. The city jolted around us in the early morning dark like a baby in big violent hands. Glass broke. Mortar crumbled. Concrete cracked. Friends whose home was almost directly over the fault out at Greendale were tossed straight into the air and came to, spreadeagled on the bedroom carpet. Another woke to himself scrambling over fallen bookshelves down the hallway to his children, who cried in their bedrooms in the dark. One had simply pulled over the quilt, resigned to death. Four hundred and eighty thousand people woke simultaneously to a forceful reality. The land that lay beneath the city was reasserting its primacy. The peninsula hills rose as if they were no more than featherweight. They skipped like lambs, as the psalmist sang, describing just such a momentous and now forgotten event:

The mountains skipped like rams and the little hills like lambs.

What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? …

Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams; and ye little hills, like lambs?

Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob;

Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.

The peninsula skipped all right. The plains rippled as waves of unfettered energy passed through and out into the wide ocean. Springs long hidden burst up into the light once more in those tiny volcanic cones of white silt bubbling with milky water. Roads and buildings burst and buckled and maps with their grids and mathematical presumption proved to be puny things, no more than the scratchings of children on a sandy beach.

The kitchen floor was covered in broken glass. It glittered like unseasonable frost. We swept up what we could. We walked out into the fragile morning. Sunlight dazzled and the very air seemed filled with dancing particles. We were tiny on the shimmering surface of the Earth. We were little creatures emerging after a great storm from our burrows to take a first tentative step into this revised version of our map, where chimneys had torn holes in the roof, cars were buried by bricks and the façade of the bagel shop lay face down across the road, its upstairs flat torn rudely open like some doll’s house to the dancing air. People took photos, they gathered before the evidence of the morning, their voices high pitched and garrulous with relief.

No one had died.

The quake had struck at 4.35 on a Saturday morning. People were not at work but safe at home in houses built to proper regulation. There was to be no hideous urban catastrophe like the ones we witnessed overseas. In Haiti nine months earlier, a quake less powerful than our own, a 7, had resulted in utter devastation and social chaos. A year earlier, in L’Aquila in Italy, a 6.3 quake had tumbled stone and concrete, killing 309 and injuring more than 1500.

But we had escaped. Thanks were given at Sunday services across the city for our escape and the skills of our engineers and the city settled to repair while the aftershocks rattled through. One hundred, 1000, 5000, until no one bothered counting any more. (At the time of writing, four years after that initial shock, the total exceeds 14,000, including fifty measuring more than 5 on the Richter scale. There were a couple of tiny jolts just last week, a discreet little cough from that shadow in the wings.) The children returned to school and The Press published a commemorative book of photographs: The Big One.

THE TITLE PROVED PREMATURE. Five months later, on 22 February 2011, another fault, also previously unsuspected, fractured beneath the city. This truly was a Big One, smaller on the scale than the first — a 6.3 — but it was shallow and fierce and it struck at 12.51 p.m. on a working day. One hundred and eighty-five people died, in hideous circumstances, crushed by concrete, masonry or the rocks that tumbled down from the steep slopes of the Port Hills. One hundred and sixty-four people were seriously injured, losing limbs, losing sensation. Thousands of others were uninjured but suffered other kinds of loss.

An earthquake is the most egalitarian of disasters. It strikes an entire region at one blow. Fires spread, floods rise and surge, landslips take out one valley but, blocked by physical barriers, spare another. An earthquake, however, hits with absolute even-handedness. At a single instant, hill and plain rise as one, and hundreds of thousands of individuals experience the same few seconds of intense release. For that instant, we move in unison, rocking to the west, rocking to the east, raised abruptly up, dropped abruptly down.

As soon as we come back to earth, the temporary unison is shattered. We hit the ground as individuals and from that second, our narratives differ. We hit the ground knowing that we do not exist in a calm or orderly universe.

In this city, buildings that had survived the first quake and were presumed sturdy proved to be frail structures, inadequately engineered. The Pyne Gould Corporation building, designed in 1963, slumped, killing fifteen beneath tonnes of concrete and weakened steel. The CTV building that housed the city’s television station, a language school and counselling services, had been constructed back in 1986 under the guidance of a man whose qualifications proved, in post-quake investigation, to have been completely fraudulent. This building collapsed in a matter of seconds, killing 115 people. They died, some after hours sending texts of unbearable poignancy to those they loved, trapped beneath a great shifting mountain of concrete as fire spread through the ruins.

How will the city recover from death and injury? How does it recover from destruction? One hundred thousand homes have been damaged, 25,000 seriously enough to require total rebuild or major repair. Seven thousand, eight hundred and sixty homes stand on land so damaged that they cannot be rebuilt but are zoned for demolition. Seven hundred and thirteen houses on the Port Hills are declared uninhabitable because of the risk of rock fall from the slopes above, or the collapse of those high cliffs of fragile volcanic ash. Six hundred and forty hectares of riverside land are no longer habitable because of flood risk. Forty of the city’s fifty-one high-rises are no longer safe and must come down. Seven hundred and forty-two commercial buildings — around 70 per cent of the CBD — are to be demolished, some from necessity, some at their owners’ discretion. Eight and a half million tonnes of rubble must be disposed of. Two and a half billion dollars worth of ‘horizontal repairs’ to the basic fabric of the city are required: 25 kilometres of wastewater pipes must be relaid, 18 kilometres must be relined and eight new pumping stations built. Eight kilometres of fresh-water pipes must be repaired, fifteen bridges and 62 kilometres of road, all this if people are to live without digging latrines in their backyards, boiling drinking water or finding raw sewage bubbling up through the bath plug, because the fundamental requirement of civilisation, it seems, is not being able to invest capital or impose the rule of law or go to the symphony, but finding a way to dispose of your own shit. Week by week the pile of figures builds. It is all going to cost $10 billion to repair. Then $30 billion. Then $40 billion.

I am innumerate. I have trouble getting my head around figures. To come even close to imagining these amounts I have to use John Allen Paulos’s trick that replaces dollars with minutes. A million minutes is twelve days. A billion minutes is thirty-two years.

Faced with all those centuries of dollars, how will the city recover, in a small country whose GDP is less than the revenue of a single company? Less than Walmart? Less than General Electric? Less than Exxon Mobil?

AN EARTHQUAKE IS NOT SIMPLY a geological event. It occurs within a specific social and political context.

In 2010, that context was a country that two years earlier had voted in a conservative National government, led by a former Merrill Lynch banker, John Key. His ambition, often repeated, was to create a nation where it would be ‘good to do business’. And earthquakes, as Naomi Klein has pointed out, like wars, can be very good for business.

That context was a city governed by a city council of thirteen elected representatives, two from each of six city wards and one representing the residents of Banks Peninsula, that volcanic mass that now lay within the city’s boundaries following amalgamation in 2006. The city’s mayor was Bob Parker, elegant and eloquent, a former television presenter, born and raised here.

That context was a province, whose environment — air, lands, coasts and waters — was under the administration of a regional council, one of those catch-all entities of the mega-sized, blockbuster 80s. Thirty-three small local bodies had been boiled down to a single entity in 1989 and named, as was the fashion, with a double noun: Environment Canterbury, usually shortened to ECan.

Until early 2010, ECan was directed by fourteen councillors, democratically elected at three-yearly intervals. But in May of that year central government ordered the council’s dissolution. The stated reason was that the council was ‘dysfunctional’, which meant, in essence, that a good proportion of the councillors returned by the elections of 2007 opposed a major irrigation scheme planned for the Canterbury Plains.

The Chinese and other Asian countries had begun consuming New Zealand’s dairy products in increasing quantity. They were buying infant formula as Westernised notions of infant nutrition displaced traditional breastfeeding. They were buying nutriceuticals designed to combat osteoporosis in women not previously considered prone to the disorder. A ‘key success story’ reported by the country’s leading exporter of dairy products, Fonterra, in 2006, was a joint venture with General Electric, which had involved the distribution of thousands of bone-scanning devices to medical clinics throughout Asia. They detected bone-weakness in women and Fonterra found a market for a preventative: a calcium-enriched milk powder, Anlene. The product drew some criticism from medical professionals who objected to scaremongering and pointed out the risks of high calcium intake. But Anlene sold, and in a country that has always based its economy on the production of raw materials like timber, wool and meat that is what mattered. Dairy-based products were now New Zealand’s most valuable commodity.

Cows, as Darwin once observed, need pasture. And growing numbers of cows need more pasture and pasture requires water and on the dry plains around the city that meant irrigators, hundreds of metres of aluminium pipe stretching the width of paddocks cleared of trees and windbreaks and all obstruction. Within the city, average water use is calculated at around 450 litres per person per day, peaking in January and February to 1000 litres per day as people attend to watering their gardens. In those same dry summer months, the province’s largest dairy farm, irrigating approximately 300 hectares at 150 litres per second, uses approximately 12,960 cubic metres of water per day.

In the province as a whole, over a twelve month period the daily average of surface water directed to irrigation is estimated to be around 2,160,000 cubic metres, while a further 6,652,800 cubic metres of water is drawn from the aquifers that flow beneath the plains, those dark sisters of the Waimakariri, the Rakaia and the Rangitata, which are named more prosaically Aquifers A, B, C, D or E. The evidence is clear upon the surface where the rivers of the province are shrinking or have dried completely to dusty channels.

To maintain a steady supply, in 2003 a trust was formed to explore the possibility of constructing a reservoir, along with a 56 kilometre canal, tunnels, headraces and embankments designed to divert the water from the big braided rivers to the dairy farms. The proposal met with opposition from the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, the Fish and Game Council, recreational groups such as kayakers, individual farmers faced with losing their land to development, and some of the fourteen people elected to the council of ECan in 2007.

So four months before the quake, the government simply sacked them. It disestablished the council, replaced it with seven commissioners of its choosing and granted them the power to govern for three years. At that point, the government promised, public elections would be reinstated. (When that deadline arrived in 2013, the government simply waved its autocratic wand and extended the commissioners’ period of direct control for another three years.)

This quake occurred, in other words, in a context where central government had a ready appetite for direct managerial control. This, in a country that was already noted as the most centralised in the OECD, barring city states such as Singapore. In 2010, only around 10 per cent of public expenditure in New Zealand was made by local government. Back in 1931, the figure was very different. Then it was closer to 50 per cent.

CONTEXT IS ALL.

When a quake shook the brick and clay beginnings of Wellington on a stormy night in October 1848, the first response was to declare not a state of civil emergency, but a Day of Humiliation and Public Fasting. Twenty-four hours after a shock assumed to have been around 7.5 — the Richter scale was not invented until 1934 — Christians and Jews joined in fervent supplication before the Almighty, who had of course instigated this event and yet had their welfare in His hands.

Seven years later, in January 1855, an even stronger quake struck the region, probably an 8.2, the largest recorded in this country. Nineteen hundred square miles of land was raised 20 feet vertically and up to 55 feet laterally, and 30-foot-high tsunami waves rushed into Wellington Harbour, ebbing and flowing over the next eight hours so that ships at anchor found themselves grating on the harbour floor, with ‘an uncommon and disagreeable grinding’. The captain of one of those ships reported the local reaction: ‘What a different scene would have occurred in the fatherland! With shops exposed and every temptation to plunder, there seemed to be neither fear nor thought of robbery, but a generous and manly feeling to lessen each other’s burdens pervaded all classes from the Superintendent to the lowest mechanic.’

The narrative of colonial equality, of sturdy interdependence, takes shape here, along with an admirable practicality: the land so raised was instantly put to use as a base for a northern road and a tidy downtown business district. Resilience, practicality and egalitarianism emerge from geological adjustment, as myths always do.

In 1931, Hawke’s Bay was hit by a massive earthquake — a 7.8 — causing the deaths of 256 people and immense destruction in the towns of Napier and Hastings.

The past is a foreign country, as has frequently been observed. Different forces were at work, nationally and internationally. This earthquake happened in another context.

First, there was grassroots mobilisation. Three days after the quake, while the region was still experiencing hundreds of aftershocks, Citizens’ Control Committees were formed, one in Napier and another, led by a First World War veteran, ‘the Diggers’ friend’, Colonel Hildebrand Holderness, in Hastings. Ad hoc battalions cleared rubble and constructed temporary buildings, with priority given to banks and pubs. A makeshift centre sprang up, quickly nicknamed ‘Tin Town’ for its recycling of corrugated iron.

On 16 February, the Hastings volunteers disbanded, handing over control to the borough council, and on 11 March the Napier committee followed suit. The Napier council then delegated special powers to reconstruct their town to two commissioners: a local accountant, barrister and magistrate, John Saxton Marton, and an engineer, Lachlan Bain Campbell. For two years, until 15 May 1933, these men worked in close conjunction with a voluntary committee made up of thirteen people representing local bodies, the professions and business interests, to rebuild the city.

It was not straight sailing, not in the midst of the world’s greatest economic depression. The aftershocks of financial collapse on Wall Street had reached these islands, delivering destitution and the iconic image of the man in the sacking hood navvying for relief payment. Individuals and businesses struggled to meet the cost of rebuilding without the assistance of any government-backed insurance scheme of the kind introduced a decade later in time of war. But reading about the rebuilding of Napier from this perspective, in 2014, in the midst of another post-quake reconstruction, is to be struck most by its incredible speed.

By August 1931 the borough council had begun work on the Market Reserve Building, to a design already in process before the quake. The building was large and central and its rapid rebuilding was understood to have an emotional impact. It would be a ‘statement of faith’, a structure that could be seen and felt as a cause for optimism. Its architect, a local man, René Natusch, even altered the plans to specify a riveted frame rather than a welded one, so that the builders would make as much noise as possible. It would be the sound of progress, of something happening in the dark, dead heart of the city. He well understood the demoralising effect of emptiness, inaction and powerlessness. He and the council understood how architecture, the very presence of a single building, could alter that.

Natusch took the chair of a newly formed consortium, Napier Associated Architects, which brought four practices together to ensure a unified approach to the rebuilding of the town. Finch and Westerholm favoured the Spanish Mission style, E.A. Williams tended toward the more dramatic Art Deco, Louis Hay was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, while Natusch’s designs were distinguished for their contemporary geometric clarity and arched windows. By June 1932, 129 buildings had been completed, 108 were already occupied and Tin Town could begin to come down as businesses returned to the centre. In May 1933, the two commissioners resigned, having completed their task, according to reports, with ‘compassion, efficiency, dedication and vision’. And the borough council resumed its normal role.

The scale of disaster was, of course, much smaller. In 1931, Napier was a town of 16,000, while Christchurch in 2010 was a city of 480,000. Napier’s centre was occupied by buildings of brick and masonry two, three or, at most, four storeys high, while Christchurch’s CBD was a combination of heritage masonry and concrete. Of the fifty-one high-rise towers built since 1970, only ten survived unscathed.

But it is the social context that is most strikingly different. The background of economic depression ensured a modest recovery, constructing buildings that have since become the focus for a lively tourist industry built around Art Deco tours and festivals with pre-war cars and cloche hats. There was the ready collaboration of men for whom war service was not that distant and to whom it must have seemed natural to work together for mutual survival. And, most of all, there was the intense regionality of the reconstruction.

WHEN YOU ARE FLUNG INTO the air by an earthquake, its most unmistakable characteristic is its complete neutrality. You feel yourself shoved about in the dark, the whole structure around you creaking and buckling in the hands of a blind, anonymous force. This is not a political event. No one has planned your annihilation over a few after-dinner whiskies; no one sat in an office and decided to inflict upon you shock and awe. There is no point in anger, or resentment. This is simply how the Earth is.

It is how we adapt to this fact that lends a quake distinction. Each takes on an individual character. In this volatile country, poised as it is upon its shifting plates, we have developed ways of dealing with inevitable, persistent upheaval. In twenty-first-century New Zealand, should your home be damaged by some natural event — tsunami, for example, or flood or quake — the cost of repairs up to a cap of $100,000 plus GST, and for contents up to the value of $20,000 is met by a government entity, the Earthquake Commission — EQC. Beyond that figure, should your home be more severely damaged, you negotiate with your private insurer.

EQC began as a source of reassurance in a very different kind of calamity. Back in 1941, New Zealand was at war. Hundreds of its young men were thousands of miles away, men like my dad in their brown baggy shorts, fighting Hitler in the Egyptian desert. But closer to home, Japan was clearly preparing to join the mêlée. In October, just two months before those Mitsubishi Zeros screamed down on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, Peter Fraser’s wartime government set up an insurance scheme. The War Damage Act established a scheme that would help New Zealanders to repair their homes, should they be damaged by bombing and enemy action. A levy of 5 shillings per £100 would be charged on the value of every residential property in the country based on its existing value for fire insurance. Commercial property would continue to be handled by private insurers.

In this manner, a fund would be established and risk would be shared equally from one end of the country to the other, no matter where the bombs fell. For, as Walter Nash put it in promoting the legislation, ‘The loss is a national loss and those people who might be affected subscribe toward a fund to meet losses that might come to any one of them.’ Any surplus in the fund, he added, could be set aside to meet the cost of other disasters: a quake, for example. Hawke’s Bay was still vivid in the memory.

Pieces of legislation do not usually touch the heart. But there is something so courageous here, so understanding of the power of government to affect the mood of the people, in the suggestion to a nation witnessing the devastation of London on the cinema newsreels, that should something similar happen here — as everyone knew it could — a viable regime would survive. Householders would receive their insurance payout in an orderly, unfussy fashion. Their homes would be rebuilt. They would keep calm and life would carry on.

By 1944, as the threat of war was receding in the Pacific, the brief was formally extended to cover damage consequent on earthquakes, because it was logical to do so. ‘From an insurance point of view, the risk of loss or damage through enemy action in wartime has many aspects in common with the risk of loss through earthquake. Neither the locality where the risk is greatest, nor the extent of loss, can be predicted, and the individual is relatively powerless to protect himself.’ It was a ‘logical development of the principal of collective responsibility for a calamity loss’.

In 1949, other natural disasters made the cut: landslip, tsunami, volcanic explosion, flood, storm, a whole Biblical line-up of potential catastrophe in this jumpy place.

INSURANCE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a strange amalgam of Judeo-Christian philosophy with gambling and taking a chance. When Nicholas Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damn’d Barebon established the first ‘Insurance Office for Houses on the Backside of the Royal Exchange’ in 1681, not long after the Great Fire of London, he was onto a likely winner: a scheme in which individuals recently traumatised by the abrupt destruction of a vast area of the city would contribute to a fund that would pay out a pre-arranged sum in the event of loss by fire.

Barebon, as his second name suggests, was a good Protestant and a clever man. His company lasted thirty years before liquidation, but by then others had seized on his idea. The Sun Fire, the Union, the Royal Exchange and others spotted a chance to do good, while securing from a multitude of small premiums a healthy sum of capital for speculative investment. Thousands of London houses bore the little metal plaques issued by each company, guaranteeing rescue by their individual private troupes of firefighters, like the Sun Fire’s promised ‘30 lusty, able-bodied firemen clothed in blue liveries’, who almost make rescue from a flaming building sound like something to be longed for. Insurance combined the Biblical injunction to be one’s brother’s keeper with the strong probability of a good dividend.

The Earthquake and War Damage Commission was also devised by men who believed in Christian brotherhood, or its secular twin, socialism. Faith and political philosophy found common expression. The premiums were collected, the fund established and the sum invested within New Zealand, generally in Government Stock.

In the 1980s, a new faith and a new philosophy began to gain real momentum. I remember its arrival. A teacher at a high school where I was working returned from a conference in 1987. ‘They were talking about “learning output centres”,’ he said. ‘They meant us! Teachers!’ We laughed at the sheer nonsense of it. Then one of the teachers left to join a new department at the university dedicated to teaching business studies. They had a department with a professorship in real estate. Real estate? What on Earth could you say about selling property that would warrant a professorial chair? Wasn’t it just a matter of asking as much as you could if you were the seller, and paying as little as you could if you were the buyer? It wasn’t exactly nuclear physics.

But the business studies buildings began to swell and a new language began to be spoken. The words took hold like a virus. Sick people used to be called ‘patients’, an old word of great dignity meaning ‘to bear or endure evil with composure’. Now in public documents they were referred to as ‘health consumers’, as if they had a choice, like people shopping for shoes. They could choose to purchase good health, or they could decline to become well. It was all an act of individual will. They would ‘consume’ health services, and in the word alone there is the spark of burning, destroying by fire or decomposition. There is the taint of wastefulness and reckless squandering, of using something up entirely. Buildings are ‘consumed’ by fire. Curled in the word’s DNA lay a rebuke: these people lying in their hospital beds were using up the hard-earned cash of those who had paid for their free healthcare. They were burning their way through the common fund. They were no longer exhibiting dignified composure in the face of ill fortune, but consuming a finite resource.

In the new language, health was referred to as an ‘industry’, as was education. Even the loud girls hailing cars on Manchester Street were now overtly tradeable commodities in something called ‘the sex industry’.

If you would rule a people, first invade their mouths. Teach them a new language.

In 1986, a Labour government, imbued with the new faith, commissioned a review of EQC. Minet, Burn and Roche obliged with the general opinion that ‘the government might be able to withdraw from its earthquake insurance commitments … for fire and special perils we feel that freemarket forces should prevail’. Labour drafted the legislation and a National government completed the process in 1993.

EQC was now a Crown entity, administered by a board of five to nine individuals appointed by the Minister of Finance. They were responsible for the Natural Disaster Fund, to which every householder in the country would automatically contribute a levy of 15 cents per $100 of premium when they paid their fire insurance to a commercial insurer. By 2010, after a relatively quiet time, tectonically speaking, the fund stood at $5.93 billion, an amount the chairman, in his annual report for 2009, considered adequate to meet the cost of the most likely catastrophe — ‘the maximum probable liability’ — a 7.5 earthquake in Wellington.

A 1999 study had suggested a 20–25 per cent chance of such a quake within the next fifty years sparking an estimated 150,000 claims. It seemed prudent, therefore, to plan to outsource the servicing of those claims to more stable Australia. The government had entered into a contract with an international claims management company, Gallagher Bassett Services, head office a shiny tower in Itasca, Illinois. With 100 offices worldwide, their focus, as their own publicity put it, was ‘refreshingly simple’. They managed insurance claims on behalf of insurers, brokers, government bodies and self-insured organisations. They promised such clients to ‘aggressively investigate and manage claims, not just process them; control costs through an experienced adjusting staff and develop risk control programs that will save your organisation money’.

In 2010, their Brisbane office’s focus in Australia was managing workplace injury claims. Their intention was to expand that side of the business in New Zealand, where they had, as one of the managers put it, ‘a strong spiritual if not physical presence’ and many large employers keen to use their services. Since 1974, New Zealand had had a universal no-fault insurance system, the Accident Compensation Commission (ACC), established by the Kirk government and administered directly by the Crown. It provided cover for workplace injury, funded by compulsory levies from employees and employers. It also removed the legal basis for suing, other than exemplary damages, for malpractice.

During the 90s, the system had come under attack, with moves by the National government to open this field of insurance to competition, moves countered by Labour when it held power between 2000 and 2008 and, in another bounce of the seesaw, resurrected in 2008 when National returned to the Beehive. In early 2009, Gallagher Bassett was taking part, at the government’s invitation, in a conference reviewing ACC — in the new language, now the Accident Compensation Corporation. In panel discussion, Gallagher Bassett outlined different approaches to workplace injury insurance and made the case for ‘introducing competition’. (At the time of writing, in spring 2014, they are firmly part of the ACC Partnership Programme, charged with handling injury claims for 40,000 New Zealand employees and undertaking as their leading objective to ‘deliver earlier return-to-work outcomes’. That ‘spiritual presence’ has taken on a definite corporeal reality.)

When it was Christchurch and not Wellington that bucked into life in September 2010, EQC had twenty-two core staff and twenty-seven assessors in New Zealand. Within a few weeks, following two major quakes and thousands of aftershocks, 450,000 insurance claims had been lodged with EQC and those twenty-two staff had expanded to over 1000, including personnel from Gallagher Basset.

It was their staff in Brisbane who most often answered the phones. It was another Queensland company, Verifact, contracted by Gallagher Bassett, who supplied the assessors. Founded by ‘former Wallaby and detective, Dan Crowley’, Verifact specialises in testing claims for Australian workplace injuries. In the spring of 2010, the residential streets of the city began to fill with their personnel. Aussie ex-cops for the most part, armed with clipboards and paper forms, arrived on the doorstep. They took a quick look around, ticked the boxes, and off they went to the next job, in a flurry of mates-across-the-Tasman goodwill, all in the Anzac spirit.

On the residential streets of the city, homeowners were now engaged in individual negotiation. Should the assessors have determined that the damage to your home would cost less than $15,000 to repair, you moved directly to dealing with EQC, who would possibly give you a cash settlement to pay for repairs yourself. Should the damage to your home be assessed to cost between $15,000 and $100,000, you would deal with EQC and the company they had contracted to manage repairs in that bracket: Fletchers EQR, a division of New Zealand’s largest construction company. They would manage your repairs, using their accredited builders and tradespeople. You could choose to opt out of this system and organise repairs yourself: should further damage be discovered in the process of repair, you would have to pay the difference it would cost to make it right.

But should your home have suffered greater damage, in excess of $100,000, the ‘cap’ — and 25,000 houses in Christchurch fell into that category — you would receive the EQC payout and must then negotiate with your own insurer for the additional cost to rebuild or repair.

Out in the suburbs it was, as Gerry Brownlee, the minister responsible for EQC, put it, ‘all over to the insurers’.

FOR A SECOND, AS THE entire city is flung into the air, there is unison. Then we fall back to Earth and the map smashes into a hundred tiny pieces. Lines of fracture, long forgotten or ignored, break open. Stresses and tensions rip across the fabric. Everything collapses like a firewall disintegrating into a mound of bricks.

A major faultline opens between the suburbs and the central city. In the central city, it is not ‘all over to the insurers’. Instead of multiple small negotiations, there is a highly centralised, monolithic approach, directly managed by national government.

In the central city, following that fragile early morning in September 2010, the city council had turned to repair. Buildings were boarded up, cracked windows taped. The assessors made their visits and the CBD patched itself up like someone who has been mugged in a dark alley. Ambitions were modest. That wall could be taken down, that hole in the roof repaired, businesses could file their insurance claims, mend what they could and get back to work.

But after the more devastating and damaging quake in February 2011, central government intervened and the city was driven toward a more dramatic response.

A matter of days after the quake, the government established a new entity, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority — or CERA, with a soft ‘c’ like ‘cereal’ — to oversee recovery. The Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 granted CERA wide-ranging powers, including the ability to suspend existing laws and regulations for the purpose of earthquake recovery. Its minister, Gerry Brownlee, received greater authority than any government minister in New Zealand’s history, including in time of war. The CERA legislation was criticised by constitutional experts as ‘setting a dangerous precedent’ but it came into immediate effect.

In the cast of characters in the drama of this city’s recovery, Gerry Brownlee is the chubby wisecracker: former woodwork teacher at a local high school and, according to the profile published in the daily paper, something of an amateur singer. He once came third in a talent contest at a local hotel singing country and western standards. His duo got beaten by a female band. ‘We were singing in G major,’ cracked Gerry. ‘But they played in G string!’

To act as CEO of CERA, the minister appoints Roger Sutton, former head of an electricity company. CERA takes over a tower block, right next door to the city council offices on Worcester Boulevard. In the newspaper profiles, he is the fit and floppy-haired, bicycle-riding White Knight. He enjoys pointing out, evidently, that his office is the highest in the city. Higher than the mayor’s. Higher than anybody’s.

The two towers stand side by side, the council’s tower exposed to public scrutiny, sometimes fiercely critical, through its glass façade, CERA more secretive. You wouldn’t even know they have arrived in the city. There’s no sign at all at street level. You have to go inside a foyer, past a café to the lifts before they announce their presence, up there overlooking the grid. The two towers divide responsibility for reconstruction between them.

According to the brief outline supplied by CERA to a public who might be a little uncertain of their respective roles, the city council will take the lead in planning reconstruction. It will issue building consents. It will handle repairs to the suburban centres. It will deal with properties affected by the particular geotechnical difficulties of collapse and falling stone on the Port Hills. And it will attend to repairs required for infrastructure — all those kilometres of pipes and roads.

In the anonymous tower next door, CERA’s role is more loosely defined. It will ‘co-ordinate and lead the recovery of greater Christchurch’ and ensure ‘the well-being of its residents’. It will work with a wide range of organisations to ‘help restore its economic, cultural and environmental well-being’.

CERA also has some more specific tasks. It will, for example, assume responsibility for those parts of the city now defined as Red Zones.

THE CITY HAS A NEW MAP. There is another way of understanding its component parts.

Following the quakes, EQC’s rapid assessment teams gathered data concerning land damage throughout the urban area and in the smaller coastal settlements immediately to the north that had also been profoundly shaken. They measured and surveyed and recorded the cracks that had opened along riverbanks, the depth of silt that had bubbled up from below ground, the rock falls on the Port Hills and the sideways spread and slumping of roads.

On the basis of these assessments, the city is divided into four colour-coded residential zones: Green, Orange, Red and White.

In the Green Zone, damage is minimal, the Orange Zone requires further geotechnical assessment, the White Zone is yet to be surveyed, but the Red Zone is in serious trouble. These areas are profoundly damaged. On flat land, there is a high risk of further damage from flooding; on the Port Hills, the risk is rock fall as boulders loosened by thousands of aftershocks threaten to tumble down the steep slopes and cliff faces composed of solidified ash crumble. In the Red Zone, the infrastructure delivering sewage, water or power has been so compromised that it requires rebuilding or prolonged repair, and land remediation is predicted to be difficult to engineer. Demolition and total clearance appear to be the only option.

Seven thousand, eight hundred and thirty-nine homes lie within the Red Zone. The government will make their owners an offer: it will purchase their property — house and land — for a price related to its 2007 government valuation. Or it could agree to purchase just the land, leaving the homeowner to negotiate with their private insurer for the payout for their house. Should the homeowner decline both offers, under section 53 of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act the chief executive of CERA has the power to acquire the property compulsorily in the name of the Crown.

CERA’s major focus, however, does not seem to be suburban, but rather, the central city: the CBD, the grid of streets devised by Joseph Thomas, which, in a completely unanticipated reversal, has become a no-go area cordoned off from the public by wire fences and entry posts manned by army and police. Here, in the central city Red Zone, CERA’s attention is directed to ‘enabling business recovery’ in a ‘sustainable, market-led rebuild’.

And to do this, they need a new map.

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE FEBRUARY quake, Gerry Brownlee announces his priorities in the central city. ‘My absolutely strong position is that the old dungers, no matter what their connection, are going under the hammer … Old stuff, if it’s got any damage at all, needs to be got down and got out, because it’s dangerous and we don’t need it.’

No death is preferable to any other, but the fact is that most of those who were killed — 133 of 185 — died beneath relatively new concrete slab. Nevertheless, with that kind of encouragement, 220 of the central city’s heritage buildings — 40 per cent of the total listed as significant — come down. In total, 900 buildings — 70 per cent of the CBD — fall as 150 or so demolition companies swing into action. Captain Thomas’s grid becomes a percussive place as the drills and excavators, the bulldozers and hydraulic shears, go to work.

CERA has entrusted the management of the ‘getting down and getting out’ of the buildings in the CBD to a former accountant, Warwick Isaacs. In the newspaper profiles, he is ‘the practical Kiwi bloke’, the man who, for relaxation, likes nothing better than to head out to his garage in Rolleston to strip down a Mini. Formerly chief executive of Timaru’s district council, he arrived in the city after the quakes as chair of Canterbury Civil Defence and was then recruited to oversee the government’s ‘deconstruction programme’. His task, as he sees it, is ‘to create empty spaces’.

There’s a peculiar machismo associated with destruction, a kind of swaggering excitement. It’s most evident when, in August 2012, a twenty-five-year-old building on Worcester Street, Radio Network House, is demolished by controlled implosion. It’s a technique never previously employed in New Zealand. The building will be stripped out, its support columns will be filled with explosives and on detonation the whole structure will collapse in on itself.

CERA holds a news conference to announce the event in advance. The building will be demolished by an American company CERA describes as ‘the rockstars of demolition’: a company ‘holding the world record for the tallest and biggest exploding demolitions’. They will pack 60 kilograms of explosives into the fourteen-storey building and it will come down — all 6500 tonnes of it, the weight of six jumbo jets — in just seven seconds. The owner of the building compares himself to Christopher Columbus, wanting to set sail when everyone around is saying it can’t be done.

The event is set for dawn on 5 August. CERA anticipates thousands coming to watch, camped out in Latimer Square for front-row seats. The demolition contractors put the right to press the button up for auction on TradeMe. They hope it will raise $20,000 for charity. The top bid of $26,000 is from a consortium of demolition contractors working in the city who give the right to choose who will push the button to the Child Cancer Foundation. The nominee is a six-year-old cancer survivor from Queenstown.

Meanwhile, the owners of a nearby property are threatening an injunction. Westende House was the first building to be reconstructed in the central city following the quake, the solitary poster child of what might be achieved by an individual company with sufficient determination and optimism about the CBD’s future. It was rebuilt in just twenty-four weeks in 2014 while the land was shaking repeatedly from aftershocks. It was tenanted by an IT company and a sharebroking firm when all around offices and buildings were boarded up and empty. But it was there: an actual, functioning building in the middle of the shaky CBD — and only 80 metres away from the implosion site. Whether it can withstand the impact of 6500 tonnes collapsing in seven seconds is not at all certain.

Nevertheless, the implosion goes ahead, minus the cheering audience. Health authorities, concerned at the risk of dust inhalation from the vast cloud released on impact, have warned people to stay away. The tower comes down, Westende House survives and the proceeds from the auction are donated not to the Child Cancer Foundation but to the reconstruction of the Isaac Theatre Royal on Gloucester Street. It is not a technique tried again.

WHILE CERA WAS TAKING SHAPE in one tower in 2011, in the tower next door the city council was devising a plan for how Mr Isaacs’s empty spaces might be filled.

In November 2011, they canvassed popular opinion. They asked the city’s inhabitants to ‘share an idea’ of how they would like their city to be rebuilt. Sixty thousand people responded, offering 106,000 ideas. They suggested markets, cycle paths, trams, office blocks of fewer storeys to replace the towers from which workers had had to abseil on that grim day a few months earlier when the lifts were inoperable and the stairwells cracked and there was no way out but the open window and a tenuous rope to safety. They suggested low-rise hotels in the central city, and small shops offering an alternative to the chain stores of the suburban malls. They suggested playgrounds for children. They came up with fantasies of rooftop gardens and fountains.

In December 2011, the council produced a large folder influenced by those ideas. The Draft Central City Recovery Plan for Ministerial Approval was distributed to every library in the city. In text and artist’s impressions it mapped a city where transport policies have been revised: light rail would link the centre to the university, a $406 million proposal the mayor hoped could expand to a $4 billion citywide network. The centre of the city would be composed of pedestrian precincts where the river wound through a shadowy grid of streets, linking past to present in the Papawai Otakaro Project. Exotic trees along its banks would be interplanted with indigenous species, ‘providing a haven for the return of native birds and birdsong to the Central City’. Cycleways and footpaths would link familiar landmark buildings: the hospital, in the south-eastern corner, the law courts, the town hall. The Terrace riverside entertainment area would offer its strip of bars and restaurants.

The minister, however, when presented with the draft plan did not approve, not entirely. Mr Brownlee marked it Could Do Better.

A few months later, in April 2012, he announced a new entity within CERA: the Christchurch City Development Unit (CCDU). Its manager would be Warwick Isaacs, the ‘government’s demolition man’ who, having overseen the creation of all those empty spaces, would now oversee their reoccupation. Isaacs described his role as providing a practical, workable ‘roadmap’ for the delivery of the council’s draft. This roadmap would supply clarity for the central city’s owners and developers, by identifying the location of key projects. Once they were certain, they would flock to the area. He would attract overseas investors too, and their very necessary capital. He would develop a plan — but it would not be the council’s to implement. Local government might initiate the plan, but it was central government that would make the final decisions. It was very simple: ‘At the end of the day, the plan was always going to be the minister’s. [The city council] understand now the role for the minister is to decide what he likes and what he doesn’t.’

Those towers, in other words, stood in competition. This was to be a game of dominance, in which the government woud have the upper hand. The highest office in the city was an accurate metaphor for actual power. Down at street level, the citizens heard the ricochet, the distant rattle of sniper fire as national government undermined local authority, overturned a modest proposal for reconstruction and forced another direction. To create this plan, this roadmap, Isaacs called together a consortium of twelve international and local architects and planners — the Blueprint 100 Team — and charged them with developing a definitive plan that would absorb some of the concepts of the council’s original draft, but improve upon them. And they would have 100 days to do it.

‘ONE HUNDRED DAYS.’

That magical phrase, beloved by presidents and autocrats all the way back to Napoleon. That number which emanates decisiveness and resonates with powerful, purposeful leadership. Though it doesn’t always work out very well. For Napoleon, after all, the 100 days ended with Waterloo.

The process in Christchurch, as described to Press reporter John McCrone by a Blueprint team member, Don Miskell, was classically hectic. Only a week between the call for bids to join the Blueprint consortium and final selection. The shortlist compiled on Saturday, interviews on Monday, second interviews on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, CCDU told the individuals selected to form the team, ‘You start tomorrow.’ The team assembled in such haste included representatives from Christchurch architectural practices, project managers RCP from Auckland, and urban planners, Populous and Woods Bagot from Australia. All top people, experts in their fields. Decisions, said Miskell, ‘got made with confidence. There were no disputes at all.’

Decisions about the city’s redesign were made with the aid of ‘little cardboard cutouts of the anchor projects’, which the team ‘shuffled round a big map until we found how the jigsaw might fit together’. The cutouts, Miskell told the reporter, ‘were very useful’, especially with a ‘tactile’ client like Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee, the ‘ultimate boss of the rebuild’.

‘When we met the minister, we could say, “This is how we’re going. Here’s the options. We’ve got four sites for the sports stadium. The stadium could go here, the convention centre maybe over there.”’

So simple. So streamlined. The efficiencies of absolute power and a clear-felled site.

On 30 July 2012 the blueprint flashes onto the television screen with its precincts and its vision that will inspire the world. I watch the launch on a television in Auckland, the congratulatory applause, the camera lights bouncing off the reflected glow of a room full of men, not a woman in sight. The prime minister gives the plan a ringing endorsement. The city is well on its way, he says, to becoming ‘very much like Melbourne’.

Beyond that room, the world doesn’t seem to be taking much notice. I look for the report of the launch in next morning’s Herald. It doesn’t make the front page, which is taken up with a rates rise for wastewater management, a man accused of grooming a young girl for sex and a ‘female screecher’ who had made life difficult for journalists reporting a basketball match at the London Olympics.

It doesn’t make an appearance till page five, under the headline, ‘Christchurch rebuild to feature sports stadium’. A ‘covered 35,000-seat sports stadium is the showpiece of the rebuild plan’, along with a convention centre in a ‘picture postcard location’ by the Avon. It will take only minutes to walk from the Square to the stadium, through a city that will have, according to Mr Brownlee, ‘a light airy college campus-like feel’.

To make the vision reality, the government will be ‘working with’ around 880 city property owners. Their land can, if necessary, be compulsorily purchased to make way for key proposals. One of the owners, with bars and cafés on the riverside strip now zoned as the centre of an entertainment precinct, is enthusiastic. The blueprint shows the way through ‘previously uncharted waters’.

On the screen it is difficult, amid the dazzle and zoom, to make out the details. They are clearer on the paper version distributed to local libraries. At first sight, the plan looks exactly like the council’s preliminary proposals. It has a similar layout, similar graphics, but on closer examination, there are changes, omissions, deletions, shifts in emphasis.

There’s the ‘showpiece’, the new rugby stadium, teleported to the CBD, with its ‘state of the art broadcast facilities’, corporate boxes and seating for 20,000 beneath a vast roof, because sitting in rain or snow or standing on some terrace is not for the contemporary New Zealand rugby fan: not when they can catch every close-up, instant-replay detail from the comfort of the living-room sofa.

Occupying the western edge of the CBD stands its giant twin, the convention centre: $284 million worth of capacity to host 2000 delegates in surroundings the minister promises will be, like everything in his plan, ‘world class’, with ‘state of the art facilities’, not to mention ‘multiple breakout rooms’ and, more mysteriously, ‘opportunities for the health sector and tertiary education’. (Will delegates collapse from all the excitement? Will university students be able to work as waiters at the gala dinners?) Its cost will be met by central government from the public purse.

To the south, there is the Metro Sports Hub, for which the city council is to pay $147 million. And next to it, the Justice Precinct, alongside the Emergency Precinct, which keeps the police and the law courts and the fire brigade all neatly in a row. And then there’s the Green Frame, which will constrict the land area of the CBD from 160 to a more manageable 53 hectares, keeping land prices solid and supplying the potential for expansion should the needs of commerce at some point in the future supersede the need for breathing space. On the largest-scale maps, where the detail is most obvious, the greenness is already studded with the little white rectangles of units and duplexes. The frame will cost $481 million and be paid for by central government.

There are areas set aside for retail development and no longer will they be the usual inner-city selection of businesses ranging from the tiny one-person operation to the international chain store. Under CERA’s regime they will be rationalised, for Mr Brownlee abhors what he calls ‘a hotchpotch’ of use. Instead, the minimum size for retail space will be set at 7000 square metres. Old dunger and hotchpotch have no place on the new map.

And through it all, the river loops on its way to the sea, transformed in CERA’s CBD to another precinct. The Te Papa Otakaro/Avon River Precinct will undergo a ‘revitalisation’ of its waters and banks. It will cost central government $89 million, with an additional $6 million from the city council.

Some things have disappeared. The town hall, for example has simply vanished, to be replaced by a $216 million Performing Arts Precinct, to be paid for largely ($158 million) by the council. All mention of a light rail transport system has also been deleted. The bench of Anglican bishoprics has become pale. They exist as no more than white ghosts, as the background to new ideas, new ideals and priorities in the designing of a city.

IN THIS CITY, IT IS easy to feel lost. Where once were straight lines north, south, east and west, I now drive about the grid in a series of knight moves, two up, one across, skirting roadworks and demolition. I come to an intersection, but I don’t recognise it. I don’t know where I am. Tuam Street perhaps? And Manchester? Or is this Madras? The buildings have come down. There is an expanse of white gravel covered in wild flowers, oxeye daises, purple loosestrife. Pink and white and gold, they wave in the wind. I can see all the way across the city to the Port Hills in one direction. I can see between the empty towers a gap that lets in the view of distant mountains, glossy under snow. The sky feels very wide, the land very flat, without the illusion of height that had been created by buildings.

I approach the centre tentatively. It is like one of those childhood games, creeping up in chicken steps on Wolfie. I join the little knots of people who gather to peer through the cordons as steadily, week by week, the buildings come down and the rubble is carted off to the landfills. A breeze stirs the white dust, covering our shoes with powder. We stand, looking through wire at buildings we hadn’t especially noticed before. They were just the background to a trip to the supermarket or to pick up fish and chips. But now, in their dereliction and abandonment, they take on a greater clarity, in the way of individuals who have become very ill, or suffered some extreme calamity. You see them differently. They’re no longer the good old friend, the mate you’ve hung out with for years. Suddenly, the essential structure is evident. Skull and bone, a manner of standing, of speaking. The person becomes in a strange way isolated, and noble in their isolation. You feel shy before the beauty of their separate individual suffering. You feel awe.

There is some of that feeling in regarding the city. Walls have fallen away, exposing the internal structure. You notice the beauty of their proportion, or some detail of their appearance that seems in this context very valuable. You notice the relationships between them, how that hotel is leaning perceptibly over its neighbours, curtains flapping from broken windows. Coffee cups gather dust on café tables, documents and records remain stored in inaccessible offices, meat rots in the restaurant freezers. Flocks of gulls and magpies screech and squabble. Beside you, on this brilliant morning, a man is kneeling on the footpath dabbing oil paint at a large canvas, capturing the scene before it vanishes. As it will.

It’s easy, in this tumble of feeling and fact, to lose the way. I find myself casting about, standing here at the corner of two streets, for points of reference, as people have always done here, since they made their way home by looking up from the plains to the reassuring bulk of the Port Hills, looking out for the snowy crown of the ti kouka that signified home.

I study the maps. I look at the blueprint that is to show the way forward. I try to understand how it is, and how it came to be as it is. I look at it closely. I walk my fingers down this street, past this building, along this riverbank, trying to find my way through, trying to find my way home.

AND NOW IT’S SPRING AGAIN. 2014. Four years after that initial jolt, two years after the blueprint invited me to be part of the vision to inspire the world, though I doubt the ‘you’ being addressed was in fact me or anyone like me. That ‘you’ was not simply someone who lived here, but a developer, a business owner, an international investor. But here I am and it’s a sunny day and I’m not imagining the map, I’m in it. Right in it, at the centre of the grid. I’m walking towards the bridge on Worcester Boulevard. Above my head there’s the glitter of windows on the upper floors of the two towers: the council offices, now with a new mayor in charge, Lianne Dalziel, a former Labour Party minister, elected in 2013 in a landslide after prolonged criticism of the former council and its overpaid chief executive. And next door, the CERA offices. Their upper floors, the highest in the city, glint above the centre of its own creation as I turn into Cashel Street.

The cordons have come down, the spaces have been cleared and the demolition companies have moved on, having taken around $90 million in government contracts. And now, as one contractor says, ‘The boom is well and truly over.’ The central city is to be known henceforth, says Mr Brownlee, not as the Red Zone but as the ‘Rebuild Zone’, though rebuilding is evidently not proving to be quite as straightforward as demolition. For months it has been oddly quiet, and in The Press there is talk of a ‘doughnut city’, with a hole at its CERA-controlled centre while all the action takes place around the perimeter.

The newspaper reports confusion and changes of plan. Westende House, for example, the first building to be rebuilt in the central city after the quakes — the building that survived the seven-second implosion of a neighbouring tower — is to come down after all. It’s to make way for a six-lane arterial road to be built along Manchester Street as a border to the proposed Green Frame. That frame is also changing, steadily shrinking to become a site for intensive residential development. Amid confusion, The Press reports flights of capital to other centres: to Auckland or Melbourne or anywhere but here, and a general reluctance on the part of former tenants of CBD offices to return from the suburban locations they now occupy, a phenomenon one developer terms ‘a total disaster’.

Other developers are reportedly unhappy with the compulsory government buyouts of commercial properties at their post-rather than pre-quake valuation, one terming it a ‘land grab’ on national television, and CERA ‘a den of thieves’. Another, who owns a nightclub that is to be compulsorily purchased, complains about CERA’s highhandedness: ‘They don’t need to give us a reason for demolition: they’re CERA, they’ve got total power. If you complain about your land being acquired, you’re just carpers and moaners’ — an expression used by Mr Brownlee to describe those who are critical of CERA. The compulsory purchase of 53 hectares of inner-city land for an estimated $636 million is, the Herald reports in September 2012, ‘generating outrage’. Some of the land is required for buildings like the convention centre or sports hub, but the majority — 29.5 hectares — is intended for that already shrunken and not-terribly-Green Frame. The most ideologically free-market government in New Zealand’s history is nationalising land. It is an irony not lost on local business.

Major projects in the city centre have been abandoned: a $350 million precinct on Cashel Street, a $100 million office and shopping centre on Colombo Street, a project on land between Gloucester and Armagh. But the director of the CCDU is unfazed: other projects are taking shape, major commercial and retail tenants have been lining up behind the scenes, and all will be well.

The minister, too, is sanguine. ‘Some developers will find things more difficult than they had hoped but that is not unusual’ and meanwhile, other developers and proposals are ‘going gangbusters’. The schoolboy phrase from the 60s seems to have gained currency among the power elite who, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, adopt a deliberately relaxed demeanour, shirts untucked, hair tousled. The look is fresh and boyish, the language studded with adolescent ‘Yeah, well …’ and ‘Nope!’ When reprimanded for some misdemeanour — lying to Parliament, or concealing political donations — they are ‘told off’ by the prime minister. And when there is criticism of their policies they counter not with examples and figures, but with sunny boyish confidence. Things in Christchurch are ‘going gangbusters’. The pose is all. It calms the populace.

In the absence of private investors, in particular those from overseas with very deep pockets, who exist somewhere over the rainbow like the gods in some variant of a classic South Pacific cargo cult, the government intervenes.

In late 2013, it announces that it will relocate twenty of its own government departments from the temporary premises around the city that they have occupied since the quakes. Their leases will be terminated at a cost of $5.6 million per annum for twenty years, and they will move back into new offices to be constructed within the Retail Precinct in the central city. By 2016, 1100 public servants will be working in the CBD and their presence will be a ‘catalyst’ helping to revitalise the city.

You cannot, it seems, leave everything to the whims and vagaries of the marketplace.

ON THIS SUNNY AFTERNOON IN 2014, there’s a bit of thud and screech to signify that someone is at work somewhere reshaping the core, though at night it reverts to the dark hole that opened in the months following the quakes, when all the lights went out and the centre became that shadowland glimpsed behind the cordons on a winter evening. All the action has been taking place around the edges, where private business has been free to access the insurance payout, repair or rebuild and get on with it, beyond the fiefdom of CERA and its burgeoning bureaucracy — 300 plus and still recruiting.

The surviving buildings of the centre stand lonely in cleared space. Over on High Street, Edwardian shop frontages remain like some old Hollywood western set in the desert, supported by scaffolding and shipping containers stacked four deep. Behind them, nothing. Or just a torn brick and plaster remnant.

But look! There’s Alice’s! A miracle! A big Art Deco cube of a building, still home to the best video store in the country, its shelves crammed with movies and docos and musicals and sci-fi, and the people working there are experts and have seen everything, and there’s a café out front, C1, where the food is delivered in those little overhead canisters that used to carry invoices to department store cashiers. And you can sit outside on a sunny day, with the ruins of a furniture shop across the road and a wide expanse of white gravel where something or other, you can’t quite remember now, used to be, though the horrible little bronze corgis that some befuddled local politician donated to the city in memory of a royal visit are back, welded to the pavement, and the place is filled with people who look like they work across the road in EPIC — young IT types from the black and blue woolshed of a building erected as temporary shared office space by a couple of energetic individuals, Colin Andersen and Wil McLellan, soon after the February quake.

Twenty tech development businesses have been working out of that building. Sharing resources. Sharing ideas. I’ve met people who work there. It has been hugely successful. There were plans for expansion: an innovation village. EPIC Sigma. Permanent buildings, ten times the space, 2000 software developers and entrepreneurs, 100 businesses already lined up and waiting. Small, innovative businesses. The kind of smart, youthful energy this city needs at its centre.

And then the blueprint landed. In August 2012, CCDU designated the area around EPIC as another in its assembly of central city precincts. This one would be an ‘Innovation Precinct’, the catalyst for ‘creativity, increased export and productivity’. From that point on, it seems that things became more complicated.

In May 2014, EPIC’s founders announced that they would be moving out. ‘We have given up on the innovation precinct. We have lost confidence that government processes would lead to land being made available at an acceptable price.’ They are still on site on this sunny afternoon, and have extended their lease for a further seven years. But clearly being a key component of Christchurch’s revival has not proved straightforward.

The city centre has had for months a curious suspended temporary life. Its very evanescence has become an attraction, drawing the tourists to a pop-up mall of shipping containers, painted in primary colours and adapted to sell coffee and shoes and hot dogs. Ballantynes remains on its corner, and once inside on the ground floor you could think all is as it once was: the same tinkly cabinets filled with glass and china, the same sensible menswear section, the same make-up counters and ladies’ handbags, and the echo of the glory days when such department stores anchored every city centre, staging the annual Christmas parade and selling, as the Harrods’ motto goes, ‘Omnia omnibus ubique’. All things to all people everywhere. Or at least a lot of things to a lot of people.

People browse the clothing racks and make-up counters at Ballantynes, where the lights are bright and the windows are shuttered from the exterior reality of demolition. But for the most part, the city’s shoppers are off buying what they need in the suburban malls. And soon the pop-up shops, too, will be carried away and that old inner-city hotchpotch will disappear beneath the 7000 square metre retail outlets as the centre moves ever closer to its objective: to be a bit like Melbourne.

Curiously, the aspect of Melbourne’s central city most often referred to by the CCDU planners is the lanes: the network of alleyways that were once that city’s slums, then became cheap and grimy retail premises, scrawled with graffiti, then funky, desirable, a tourist attraction, its old buildings now ‘heritage buildings’ of increasing value while the graffiti scrawled on the walls is ‘street art’, something the city officially encourages as a ‘tourist attraction’.

British artist Grayson Perry defined this thoroughly predictable process when he called artists in the twenty-first century ‘the shock troops of gentrification’. It is they who recognise beauty or power in something dismissed by the mainstream. They move into a cheap area of town, they mark it, the tourists come, the money men notice, the cheap shops give way to cafés and galleries and that part of town swings steadily upmarket. Then the developers arrive and begin demolishing the buildings that gave the area its style and attraction in the first place. Christchurch is replicating Melbourne’s lanes. But it has demolished the heritage buildings — the ‘old dungers’ that gave the original their identity. New Zealand’s lanes will link glass and steel frame to glass and steel frame.

The ground has been cleared, and what lies all around is ‘opportunity’, that dog-eared mantra of the free-market 90s. One of the central city developers explained his vision for the area in a handout in a weekend Press in September 2014. Around the world, cities were trying to rejuvenate their tired old inner cities. ‘But most of the time when it comes to redevelopment, those cities are lucky if they can knock one whole block over. When you look at Christchurch with its many empty lots around the city, you quickly realise the unique opportunity to create something special.’ He imagined a population of ‘nurses, doctors, police officers and court staff’ who would want to live in the central city, close to work. He envisaged the facilities required by these urban professionals. He envisaged cafés, bars and restaurants in an inner-city network of lanes.

The lanes are still to come, along with their population of happy nurses and police officers. On this sunny afternoon, the tourists have it to themselves. They wander about snapping photographs. They visit Quake City: The Christchurch Earthquakes Experience, with its displays of photographs and its recorded voices, describing how it felt, how it was, the shakiness still audible in a catch in the throat. They buy a keyring or a pen at the gift shop and emerge into the sunlight, and all of us wander together through the centre like children at play among big brightly coloured cubes in a sandpit.

WE WALK THROUGH CORDONS DECORATED in a brilliant woven tekoteko of coloured plastic strips to the Square and the cathedral. It’s still there, behind a protective wall of shipping containers piled three deep, devoid of the spire that had survived earlier brushes with destruction in the quakes of 1881, 1888, 1901 and 1922, but fell before the vertical force released in February 2011. This has always been a jumpy place, unkind to steeples. The nave looms like a grey Leviathan washed up on wind-blown shingle, a gaping hole in its flanks of masonry and scales of ornamental slate.

Argument swirls about its future. Should it be demolished, as the bishop and many of her congregation prefer, and replaced by quake-proof modernity? Should it be repaired, as a vocal group of citizens demand, for this building is not just a church for the faithful, but a civic icon? Should it be built to its original design, as a prominent city architect has suggested, which was not for a church of stone, but for a church of Gothic design rendered in timber, as were many churches in this forested country? To stand in a New Zealand church is most often to be surrounded not by masonry but by the amber gleam of totara. The churches feel flyaway, they creak and shimmy in high winds and when you look up into the rafters it is like looking up into an upturned boat, clinker built. And like a boat, in a quake they ride the wave. They are suited to this country.

The argument over the cathedral has been brutal, culminating in an appeal to the High Court challenging the Anglican Church’s right to demolish and to use an insurance payout to construct a temporary cathedral.

That structure has been built a couple of blocks to the east. It’s the work of Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect who has designed such notable buildings as the Pompidou Centre in Metz. I’ve never visited this, but in the photographs it looks amazing: a curvilinear profile modelled on a mandarin’s hat, its major feature an hypnotic, honeycombed timber ceiling.

Ban has also made something of a specialty of designing temporary, lightweight structures in recyclable materials for areas afflicted by disaster: paper-log houses in Kobe, with beer crate foundations and tented roofs, shelters of locally available compressed earth block in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, a paper concert hall in Italy’s musical and artistic city of L’Aquila.

For Christchurch, Ban designed, pro bono, a cardboard cathedral, using eight of the shipping containers that have become a signature of the post-quake city, recycled as pop-up shops, offices, protective walls stacked three deep before teetering façades, forming a barrier along the foot of a crumbling cliff face, their functional metal covered with art in a bid to lift the spirits.

They make an apt basis for a temporary cathedral, coupled with laminated timber, concrete and 320 cardboard tubes to create a steeply pitched A-frame space. Seven hundred people can be accommodated seated in rows of simple, stackable chairs fashioned to Ban’s own L-unit design.

In the event, the cardboard tubes proved more ornament than function, for it was not possible to source tubes of sufficient size locally. But they are threaded over timber and steel beams to form a ribbed vault. Light filters through the gaps from a polycarbonate roof overhead and there is a cardboard tube cross above the altar and the whole effect is lightweight and airy, like a tent. In fact, in profile, it looks remarkably like Sydney Scroggs’s raupo and canvas whare, which once stood on the riverbank not far away.

So perhaps Ban has caught something of the spirit of this place, with our knock-down, move-along style, and that I suppose is what cathedrals are designed to do: to act as metaphors. They are great lanterns, like Ely glowing above the rushes and reeds of the swamps that first surrounded it. Or ships, or arks, or realisations in stone of celestial harmony.

Even in ruin, they have the power to express some truth, as in that poem we studied at school: the one where the poet is seated on a hillside looking over the remains of a great monastic foundation. For four centuries it had dominated this region until that beefy pragmatist, Henry VIII, handed it to one of his mates, the Earl of Worcester, a thug, indifferent to beauty, who saw simply profit. He tore off the roof for its lead and left it to rot, and centuries later, Wordsworth comes along and sees in the ruins something that prompts him to consider sensations

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart …

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love.

Seated above destruction he thinks about human existence and how it swiftly passes, until with

… an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

There is poetry in ruins, sometimes a greater poetry than a building ever possessed in life. There’s that building at the centre of the Hiroshima Peace Park, for example, that began life as a prefectural trade hall in 1915 designed to display the city’s products: armaments, as it happened, that same weaponry that killed and maimed in Manchuria and Burma and Guadalcanal. In its ruined state, twisted among the flowerbeds, that hall takes on a greater nobility.

Whole and untouched, the cathedral in the Square, the old cathedral, spoke of beauty and the transcendent, but also of racial dispossession, spiritual colonisation, sectarianism and petty provincial snobberies and a whole raft of human shortcomings. In its ruined state, however, it rises above all this. It speaks of Earth’s power and our insecure place in the great scheme of things. A flensed whale, it anchors the centre of the city effortlessly, delivering a sermon in stones.

I would leave it just as it is, as a memorial. Build a new cathedral next door, for there is plenty of room for two in this bare, cleared space. In the meantime, a few hundred metres away to the east, Ban’s structure fills its role blending religious and public function, the buzz of visitors, the click of cameras, the organist trying out something complicated on a temporary keyboard. Not beautiful, exactly — there is something unappealing in those beige drapes over industrial containers, a whiff of the crematorium curtains drawn over the flare of the furnace — but serviceable.

The structure borrows some of its emotional and spiritual power from its proximity to a bare site across the road where 115 people died in circumstances that can barely be contemplated. Their deaths in the collapse of the CTV building render this place tapu. Just as the expanse of bare moorland at Culloden is hallowed ground, or those pitted fields in northern France, the site requires no signage or elaborate explanation to establish that it is separate from the surrounding landscape. Singled out by virtue of the suffering endured there. Instinctively, we know that such places demand reverence.

The CTV site was cleared of rubble, and then for three years, it was abandoned. The blueprint makes no mention whatever of a memorial. CERA has no time for the past, only the glittery future. The site remained a scrubby, untended wasteland of puddled gravel roughly fenced off behind wire cordons. People visited nevertheless. They made their way there, through the ruined city, as soon as it was possible to do so and hung flowers on the wires. They pinned on poems and messages on pieces of torn paper. But the site stayed desolate through two anniversaries, until Lianne Dalziel’s new council was able to persuade Mr Brownlee that something better was required. Under pressure, just before the third anniversary of the February quake, he conceded that ‘visitors might find it disrespectful’ and permitted a tidy-up. Turf was rolled over the gravel, planter boxes placed about the perimeter and the wire cordons removed.

On another bare site across the road stand 185 white chairs lined up in rows — office chairs, kitchen chairs, lounge chairs, a wheelchair, a baby stroller, each seat a memory of someone who died in the city. It’s an installation by a local artist, Peter Majendie, also intended to be temporary when it was installed in 2012, but still here, facing the rear wall of the cathedral and the altar, like an unseen congregation in the open air of the city. The traffic grinds by, heading north on Madras Street. The chairs stay in place, despite occasional vandalism, because we have a collective memory and it demands a focus. In this shifting and temporary universe, we have an urge to pay our respects.

In time, there will be a memorial. CERA plans to erect one, but not here by the site of the CTV building. It will be on the other side of the city, in the Riverbank Precinct, and will remember all those who died throughout the city as well as acknowledging those who took part in the rescue operation. This will happen, but not yet, and while we wait, this area, with its brave marigolds in planters and its temporary cathedral and its chairs, is the quiet centre of a city dedicated to action. For in this revised version of Christchurch, cathedrals, whether temporary or permanent, are not a primary focus. The buildings that will overwhelm them utterly, signalling supremacy in their sheer bulk, are buildings dedicated to other faiths: a convention centre devoted to that cargo cult, tourism, and a stadium for the sacred rituals of rugby.

ON CERA’S PLAN FOR THE CITY the site of Ban’s temporary cathedral is no more than a tiny nick in the north-western corner of a vast rectangle. That rectangle is to be the new rugby stadium, ‘showpiece’ of the entire blueprint, replacement for the stadium that, cracked and quake damaged, had occupied a site on the light-industrial periphery since it began life as a cricket ground, Lancaster Park, in 1881.

Its successor, a temporary stadium across the city in Addington, was the first public building to go up following the February 2011 quake: the priority for recovery, driven on at furious pace, workers toiling night and day in another of those 100-day dashes, in order to provide a venue for the Super Rugby kick-off in 2012.

Using materials recycled from around the country, it took shape while the aftershocks were still rattling through. Turf and AV screens came from the old stadium, temporary seating from Auckland’s Eden Park, lighting towers from Dunedin’s redundant Carisbrook. The budget blew out, despite the economies, to $30 million rather than the original $20 million. Central government gave $28 million, the city council $1 million, plus the land in Addington, and the remainder came from a $5 million loan drawn from the donations of the public to the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal Trust. The dollars stuffed in collecting boxes, the gifts from expats overseas, the moneys gifted to the city by wellwishers around the country, like my daughter in Wellington, who assumed the fund would be going to buy hotties and warm clothing for kids in damaged, damp houses.

The grand and permanent showpiece is to be co-funded by the government, who have promised $37 million from the country’s taxpayers, and by the city council, who have promised $253 million, drawn from insurance payouts, rates and perhaps, as central government repeatedly suggests, from the sale of its assets: the city’s airport, public transport and waste treatment operations, activities best handled, in the government’s opinion, by private enterprise. Leaked estimates put the eventual price of the stadium at more than $509 million.

Its walls will tower over the temporary cathedral and the site of the CTV building. Its lighting towers will flare in the night sky above leafy Latimer Square, now transformed from Victorian open space to contemporary ‘fan zone’. To the south, on Madras Street, stands one of the city’s few undamaged Edwardian buildings, the property of one of New Zealand’s leading fashion designers. It is to be demolished to make way for the stadium, or perhaps it might be incorporated into the façade as a funky entrance to the arena.

There could be no more perfect metaphor for the quiet, unstated conflict that divides this country in two: the one we learned about in the school playground, where the tough kids ganged up to enforce their way and the arty kids had to find smart ways of surviving. It’s the divide that ripped into the open in 1981, when my tribe were wearing motorcycle helmets because the cops went for your head and we were marching around New Zealand cities chanting, ‘One, two, three, four, we don’t want your racist tour!’ and we all knew exactly which side we were on. I’ve asked my daughter, who was eight at the time, if she remembers the Springbok Tour, and she says yes: she remembers ‘those guys outside the RSA spitting at us’. Of such things are lifelong political allegiances made.

A rugby stadium in New Zealand is not neutral. It is a long way from some Platonic ideal of a simple track of 600 running feet. It retains instead some of the political gloss those canny Roman emperors spotted in the potential of the stadium to divert the populace from the facts of their actual disempowerment, until Christian rulers consigned diversion to the suburbs and placed God in his cathedral at the centre. Where they stayed until the stadium returned to entertain the restive masses in grim industrial towns. Now, worldwide, they are huge: North Korea has one that seats 150,000, Salt Lake City, 120,000. And they are expensive. The MetLife in New York opened in 2008 and cost $1.6 billion. Wembley was refitted in 2007 at a cost of $1.25 billion.

New Zealand is a smaller place, but relative to the size of the population we do our best to keep up. In Dunedin, a small cabal has managed to leave its mark on the landscape with a stadium. Built to replace historic Carisbrook, it’s the first thing you notice as you enter the city from the north, rising like a white bubble on the foreshore, larger than the buildings of the university nearby, the hospital, the commercial centre. Its construction made no sense economically; the budget blew out almost immediately from $198 to $224.4 million, and it has registered a loss every year — $4.31 million, for example, in 2012 — starving other civic projects of funding and saddling ratepayers with forty years of debt. And for what? A handful of rugby matches and an Elton John concert for which the city actually footed the bill.

But like its bigger brothers elsewhere, Dunedin’s stadium fills its role perfectly as the architectural demonstration of the power of corporatised sport, that contemporary ‘industry’ where teams are highly paid entertainers wearing uniforms sponsored by multi-national companies with greater turnover than nation states, playing in structures whose names change as rapidly as their owners can trade them.

I don’t trust stadiums. Too big. Too overtly designed to foster tribalism and the loss of any sensation of individual identity. Too perfectly calibrated for howl and roar. They are male places, ideal for marshalling men in a simple substitute for war, win/lose. And readily adapted, as Speer’s Olympic stadium was adapted, for the real thing, those vast rallies where men roared as one before the incantatory oratory of fatherland and blood.

It’s a long stretch from Berlin to Christchurch, but I can’t help feeling that this current enthusiasm for the stadium is not simply because such structures are enormously profitable for their builders and a great means of siphoning money from the public purse. I stand on Madras Street looking at the wide stretch of gravel and wild flowers that is set aside for the city’s new stadium and it seems to me that this is the zeitgeist. This is the expression of the age, where millions of young men worldwide are unemployed, disenfranchised, restless. That is a lot of energy to contain and one way, as the Romans understood so well, is the tribal roar of the stadium.

But perhaps I am being too elaborate here. Perhaps this is no more than the pleasure of the game, the sound from furthest childhood where we half woke in the dead of night to the crowd roaring somewhere very far away, in South Africa or England and Winston McCarthy’s voice is rising to fever pitch and ‘Listen … it’s a goal!’

Perhaps it is no more than that.

CITIES ARE PLANNED AND DEVELOPED in accordance with a vision, and in this city, the vision, as articulated by Mr Brownlee, is that Christchurch is to become ‘the city of sport’.

The rugby stadium is not the only sporting venue to receive funding from the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal Trust. Canterbury Cricket also received $3 million towards the $9 million they required to build a pavilion, embankment and lighting towers in the city’s public park. The Hagley Oval was proposed as a ‘world-leading venue’ for cricket with a capacity for 20,000 spectators, to be built in time to host fixtures for the 2015 Cricket World Cup. In promoting the scheme, the CCDU promised that this ‘iconic facility … set in idyllic Hagley Park’ would be ‘a boost for business’.

Those opposing the scheme argued that the plan would create massive traffic congestion when those 20,000 spectators turned up to watch a cricket match just across the road from the city’s principal hospital at one of Christchurch’s busiest intersections. They said those lighting towers would intrude on a green and open space. But their principal objection was that this proposal was not the sweet village green described by its supporters, some genteel olde worlde vision of gentlemen at play, but a land grab: public space was being seized for private profit.

Other venues were suggested, but the international organisers of the Cup made it clear that they would stage fixtures in the city only if they could be held at Hagley. The other venues required too much work, or they had ‘poor broadcast appeal’. The Hagley Oval, with its rim of oaks and elms, would simply look better on the telly.

The council gave its consent. The Canterbury Earthquake Appeal Trust handed over the money as a loan to be waived in five years, so long as Canterbury Cricket agreed to make some free seats available ‘to people adversely affected by the quakes’. A giant cricket ball popped up on the pop-up mall.

We were ready. We were building it, and they would come.

A block away from the cricket oval is the site of the blueprint’s Metro Sports Facility, also promised, in the language of the overblown 80s, to be ‘world-class and a centre of excellence’. It will include eight indoor courts and a high-performance centre for coaching and a recreation centre and an aquatic centre with a competition pool, dive and leisure pools. It will cost $217 million. And it all sounds good.

And then you talk to a friend who spent months trying to retain a small central city public swimming pool. The Centennial Pool was open-air, buzzy with families at weekends, office workers at lunchtime, kids after school. It had a little gym, the busiest for its size in the country.

In 2011, the pool was damaged and closed till it could be repaired. The cost, it was estimated, would be $9.5 million. But in 2012, it found itself in the way of the Green Frame. Its insurance payout of $7.5 million was redirected by CERA to the Metro Sports Facility and the Centennial Pool was zoned for demolition. Simone was spokesperson for a small group that formed to try to save it, as small groups were forming elsewhere in the city: arguing with planning decisions, writing blogs and letters to the paper, making submissions, trying to influence the shape and style of the city in which they and their families were going to live.

‘Centennial was small,’ she says. ‘It was accessible. People loved it and it would have cost only an additional $2 million to repair.’

The pool has been demolished. It is to be replaced by a playground. CERA ran a competition for children to design their ideal and Simone went to see the resulting exhibition. ‘Most of the children had asked for a pool. Kids love water.’

The architects’ designs include a fountain — a ‘zero-depth water facility’ of squirty jets where children might run about and squeal. But it’s not a pool. You can’t dive in and swim about. It seems a diminution, a poor substitute.

‘They exchanged a small community facility for the Metro Sports Facility and they are completely different things: one was for participation, the other is for spectators and big competitive events. It’s not in the end,’ she says, ‘about sport. It’s about money.’

But then every decision in the redesigning of the city is fundamentally about money. And power, and aesthetic judgements and values and beliefs and all the impulses and personal preferences we bundle together and loosely label ‘politics’.

Those things which are by most men thrown aside as common or unimportant are the very things which are of weightiest import.

— Friedrich Froebel

I WALK PAST THE SITE of Centennial Pool and its replacement playground on my way back into the central city. The playground was announced by CERA in December 2012. It will not be like other playgrounds, those little patches set aside for children in the suburbs of the city with their slides and swings and a bouncy horse on a spring. As the CEO of CERA explained, ‘We want to draw people back into the city centre with an outrageous playground.’ It will be part of a riverside park, but this park will not be like other parks. This park will be ‘grunty’. It will be like the waterfront spaces in Melbourne or Brisbane.

An outrageous playground in a grunty park. In such a playground, no doubt, the swings will swing higher, the slides will be taller, the seesaws will be world beating. It will be the exact juvenile equivalent of the state-of-the-art stadium and the world-class aquatic facility that are taking shape nearby, another expression of the values determining the redevelopment of the entire central city.

But then playgrounds have always expressed the values of their makers. They have been deeply political entities from the start, when they first took shape as outdoor gymnasiums in early nineteenth-century Germany. A philosophy of ‘natural’ child rearing had found ready acceptance among political leaders eager to create a strong citizenry in an era when poverty and overcrowding in industrialised cities were creating just the opposite: children whose constitutions were weak and compromised and vulnerable to tuberculosis and whole batteries of disease.

The future soldiers of the fatherland, the future mothers of a vigorous nation could be created by educators supplying equipment that replicated the forms of nature: the arms and upper body would be strengthened by climbing and swinging as in nature children climbed and swung from the branches of trees. They would learn balance on narrow bars resembling the tree trunk laid down over a running brook. At play in the open air, children could observe the habits of birds and beetles. No longer would they play in crowded and filthy streets but in special areas reserved for their use, under the supervision of trained play leaders.

In the 1880s, great piles of sand were added to playgrounds in Berlin, and soon after in parks across America, where one of their advocates, the psychologist Granville Stanley Hall, hoped that by digging and excavating and constructing, ‘boys up to the age of 15 would accomplish valuable training in industrial and mercantile pursuits, law, environment, topological imagination and civic training’. That’s what a sandpit could achieve. At least according to Stanley Hall, a racial eugenicist, who saw in the sandpit a means of creating a nation whose children would not be frail or sickly.

Sandpits are not neutral artefacts, any more than stadiums or swimming pools. They possess political intention and, like swings and monkey bars and seesaws, a history that leads back to Rousseau and Froebel and the theory that, nurtured like little plants in a garden, children could discover that certainty of self, ‘the pivot point where my inner self awoke’, that Froebel had found when playing freely among rocks and streams and trees.

The playgrounds of this city reflect the era of their construction. There are the swings and slides that date from my post-war childhood and further back to the German gymnasium. There are those 70s timber forts and flying foxes from a time that favoured authenticity and getting back to nature: the granola of playground development. There are the playgrounds of the fast food outlets and city malls with their mass-produced plastic cubes in brilliant primary colours, identical the world over, designed to keep the kids corralled and content while their elders shop.

And then there is an outrageous playground in a grunty park, the ‘attraction’ to which children will be transported from around the city and further afield, bypassing the timorous little suburban seesaws. Perhaps they will have to pay for admittance. It doesn’t sound like the place for the quiet child, swinging dreamily to and fro, finding the pivot point and the awakenings of the inner life. It sounds big. It sounds whizz bang. It sounds like the fitting setting for the little citizens of a new world order. A pleasure dome fit for the children of Brownleegrad, in this, the province of Rugbistan.

I WALK ALONG THE RIVERBANK back into the central city. There’s a couple in a punt on the Avon being propelled by a young man in a straw boater, drifting between the cleared spaces and the snaggletooth remains of the city. A scattering of buildings stand, like isolates, like glacial erratics, left behind after a landscape has been scraped to the essence. The punt drifts past Edwardian brick shored up by scaffolding and the cranes of the building site that will be the Entertainment Precinct.

The river carries them along, though it is no longer simply a river, but a precinct: the Te Papa Otakaro/Avon River Precinct, a $100 million project that will, an engineer in CERA’s shiny tower tells me, ‘revitalise’ its banks and water, returning the whole ‘to how it wants to be’ after years of degradation and silt build-up.

He talks rapidly, his legs jigging, fired up by the future that is also a loop back to the past, to purity and authenticity, to that sunlit vision, that point of perfection that draws us always in our planning of the future, back to Eden, before we fell and mucked things up.

But the River Precinct is planned as more than ecological restoration. It is also to serve a social purpose, as the focus of the ‘fantastic public realm’ that will be the central city, because ‘People don’t come together in the corridors of an office. They come together outside…. The river makes the brand of Christchurch. It’s what people enjoy when they visit.’

So this precinct will be a ‘catalyst’. Its footpaths and cycleways and places to gather will supply the base from which ‘businesses can leverage’. People will be drawn to live here too. Before the quakes, around 7000 people called the central city home, but CERA’s hope is that more than 22,000 might do so.

‘What kind of people?’ I ask and the engineer says, ‘Just people. It’s all about diversity, it’s about having options … some will want to live here because there’s a café on their doorstep. We anticipate the first to move in will be empty nesters and young professionals.’

He cites as models the ‘great urban waterfronts’ of Melbourne, and Brisbane, and London. The area in front of Christchurch’s Entertainment Precinct will be ‘like London’s South Bank, but if you go along between Colombo and Manchester, it will be more like Fulham: lazy pub on the waterfront rather than hard urban bar … while down in the Avon Loop, it’ll be more natural with lots of big trees, away from the hustle and bustle of the central city proper so we’d see that as just a simple, beautiful, ecologically rich area of our city.’

The river is as it always has been, going about its simple business of flowing from springs to the sea. But we understand what it is through the words we use to name it. It has acquired a new language, one that blends ecological restoration with branding and leverage.

Captain Thomas’s map expressed in concrete mathematical form the ambitions and values of colonisation and occupation. This new map is equally expressive. In this city, tourism is a driving force. The river was once conceived of as a way home, a route to the place to gather kai. Then an industrial waterway, a means of transporting goods to and from a port. In this century, however, it is an ‘attraction’, something to draw visitors and their wallets to the centre.

CERA plans to include an Arts Trail as part of the Avon River Precinct. It has called for artists to submit their ideas. Interestingly, the brief for this art makes no mention of a hope that it should express something of the heart of its creator, or display their virtuosity, idiosyncrasy or technical skill. Nor is its primary purpose to lift the spirit of the people who live here. Rather, the plan is ‘to see Christchurch develop as an artistic destination by showing visitors Christchurch’s distinctive character through art’.

So it is to be another ‘attraction’, like the tram circling the centre, going nowhere, ringing its little bell. The masters of the city are calling in the artists, and as masters always do, they are setting the political context. It’s as if a Medici were phoning up Michelangelo to say, ‘Hey Mike, we need some kinda attraction for that dead spot by the Cathedral Precinct, over by the Gelato Precinct. Something to stop the tourists shooting through to Rome. Got any ideas?’

In the meantime, through the cracks, other kinds of art have emerged. The art gallery has been closed, but artists have covered walls newly exposed by demolition with imagery and colour.

The principal auditorium in the town hall has been closed but the city’s symphony orchestra has carried on, performing in the Air Force Museum at Wigram, where for every performance — and there are perhaps a dozen each year — five aged aircraft must be painstakingly wheeled from the restored hangar to make room: Spitfire and Kittyhawk, Iroquois, Avenger and Skyhawk are wedged somewhere else, the hangar doors closed, a cyclorama hung over them and hoopla, a concert venue! And on the night, Borodin, Lilburn and Tchaikovsky echo and swirl about an audience that includes a silent Auster suspended overhead, a Hudson, a DC-3 Dakota. It is an extraordinary conjunction.

A few months after the February quake, with much of the city still in chaos, a group of actors performed Macbeth amid the ruins of a Lyttelton bar, in beanies and thick jackets to keep out the very authentic cold. Skateboarders created a video of themselves leaping half-buried cars, rattling over gashes into a luminous sunset. Gap Filler, a volunteer group founded by Coralie Winn, has peopled demolition sites with improvisation: an outdoor cinema powered by stationary bicycles, a performance venue in a pavilion of recycled wooden pallets, a dance floor laid down on rubble where anyone can dance to music from an adapted coin-operated laundromat machine.

A stand of cabbage trees created entirely from strips of recycled timber by the sculptor Regan Gentry reaches into the sky from dusty gravel, a woven hinaki by Lonnie Hutchinson snakes across the former site of the Crowne Plaza Hotel and behind the carcass of the cathedral rise Julia Morison’s spindly-legged Tree Houses for Swamp Dwellers.

Such things are at their best not on a sunny afternoon, but on some dark winter night, rain seeping, and you’re walking through the empty centre watching your feet as it’s easy to trip on broken pavement and the old city rises as it can do at such moments, a phantom presence, and you’re beginning to feel mournful. But some girls are dancing, giggling and self-conscious on the Dance-O-Mat and there are lights illuminating the wooden cabbage trees. It’s dramatic. It’s different. You feel better. You feel in a weird way lucky to be here, walking through this newness, this difference.

Somehow, art and music and dance break through as they always do, gritty and authentic and sprung not from some banal intention to create a tourist destination, but from the normal human impulse to create a temporary beauty, to play. And ironically, but unsurprisingly, it is this art — temporary, improvised, peripheral, spontaneous — that draws the tourists. Lonely Planet elects Christchurch as one of the top cities to visit worldwide in 2013.

On this spring day, the River Precinct is taking shape. Footpaths and cycleways are being laid, the banks are being landscaped for those lazy Sunday Fulham afternoons and through it all the river sweeps along, though four years out from the quake, its waters are polluted, as are other waterways in the city. Thousands of litres of untreated sewage pour daily from broken pipes into the Avon and the Heathcote. Since 2010, 8 billion litres have entered the city’s rivers and creeks, a situation that officials say will continue for at least another ten years. The cost of repairs to the city’s infrastructure was divided more or less equally between central government and the city council: $1.8 billion from Wellington, $1.4 billion from Christchurch, but it’s a slow process, particularly when the council is faced with multiple commitments, including funding their contribution to CERA’s grand plan. In December 2014, the Medical Officer of Health describes the city’s urban waterways as ‘open sewers’. It is unsafe to fish, to take whitebait, to swim. And no amenity planting can paste over that.

Elsewhere in the city, where the land has sunk and the creeks ride high on silt-laden beds, neighbourhoods have had to deal with the other less tourist-friendly reality of repeated flooding. Flooding has always been a risk in this low-lying place, but drainage and engineering had reduced frequency and intensity. Since the quakes, however, those once-in-twenty-year floods have become a feature of life for some families. Homes have been flooded five times, nine times in the past four years. Each episode another story of gathering tension as the rain falls, then the scramble to lift furniture and valuables to higher ground, the hurried evacuation, temporary relocation, mopping up, repair, lives interrupted. Protest is building, demand that something official should be done for those whose homes have become vulnerable, unsellable, uninsurable, but the government, says Minister Brownlee, remains ‘unsure’ if earthquakes have worsened the flood risk in the city.

I FOLLOW THE RIVER BACK to the point where I began, across streets that will soon vanish beneath the building that will anchor this western edge of the city centre as surely as the rugby stadium anchors the east. The new convention centre will, like its twin, be big. Much bigger than its pre-quake predecessor, whose halls and glass-fronted foyer had before the quakes hosted expos — the Wedding Expo, 50+ Lifestyle Expo, an Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo, an Erotica Expo — and, less frequently, conventions.

A feasibility study prepared in June 2009 for Auckland City Council, who were considering the expansion of their own convention centre, noted that, in 2008, the country as a whole had hosted just 38 conferences, with an average enrolment of only 467 delegates. Christchurch’s convention centre was the largest in the country but it was not large enough to draw the crowds. What was needed, the study argued, was a centre in this country that could host conventions of 1000–2000 delegates. Approximately thirty-five conferences of that size per annum, including twenty-five of international origin, would mean a centre could ‘operate broadly on a break-even cashflow basis’. There could be some problems, in this era of carbon footprints and air miles, in attracting such events to these shores, but such issues would be unlikely to influence the decision-making of ‘most conference organisers’. The crucial factor was that the venue itself should be large and that it should be surrounded by ‘a critical mass of appropriate-standard hotel rooms’.

Post-quake Christchurch looks set to meet that need, with the state-of-the-art facilities and breakout rooms of the new convention centre and associated hotels for which the CBD height limit has been raised from a cautious seven storeys to a more commercial thirteen.

Given the intention to create a city centre that will be ‘very much like Melbourne’, it is hardly surprising that a convention centre would take pride of place.

Melbourne has an enormous convention centre, $1 billion worth of plenary hall, thirty-two meeting rooms, a Hilton hotel, residential and retail space. It was one of Jeff Kennett’s major projects when he was premier of Victoria in the 90s and one of the two architectural practices responsible for its development was the Australian architectural firm Woods Bagot, whose personnel took part in the 100-day dash to redesign Christchurch’s CBD.

Convention centres are another contemporary phenomenon: twenty-first century cathedrals, drawing pilgrims from far and wide with their promise of revitalisation, inspiration and the renewal of faith in one’s chosen life purpose. The problem is that they do not return a profit and must be subsidised by public money or casinos, poker machines and gaming tables.

Another difficulty is competition. Google ‘world-class convention centres’ and Paris comes out top, followed by Singapore, Barcelona, Vienna. Their websites offer the inducements of shopping and theatre, national cuisine and the charms of historic architecture. The Melbourne convention centre promises ‘friendly locals, cultural creativity and fine wine’. Curiously, the site also makes special mention of the city’s ‘outstanding public transport system … that is clean, safe and efficient and rated by delegates a Melbourne highlight’.

Interestingly, none mention ‘multiple breakout rooms’ as a reason to choose their centre above all others. Instead they promise the vibrancy of a city designed for the primary benefit of its own citizens. In Melbourne, a tram is for transporting ordinary citizens to and from work or school or the beach. In Christchurch, trams don’t go anywhere; they don’t convey the citizens from one place to another cheaply and efficiently. They circle the centre as another tourist attraction. In its blueprint adaptation, CERA deleted the light rail system proposed by the city council.

At its launch the estimated cost of Christchurch’s new convention centre was given as $284 million, to be funded by central government. In 2014, the contract has been let and the figure for completion is now more like $500 million. It is to be built by a consortium made up of a local development company, the Carter Group, Ngai Tahu Property and Plenary Conventions New Zealand, which is part of the international Plenary Group. In Australia, that company’s website cites specialised experience in public–private partnerships, creating ‘highly complementary commercial properties that have leveraged private investment to help defray the overall project cost to government’: South Wharf is quoted as an example, which delivered retail, residential and commercial development in conjunction with the Melbourne Convention Centre.

Christchurch’s convention centre is on its way. The BLUEPRINT has landed.

I AM BACK AT THE START. The very start, as I cross Victoria Square. She’s there, on her plinth, the little empress, above a roll call of men killed in South Africa. Today, her presence has taken on another meaning. She is there as one of the signatories to the Treaty of Waitangi, for this area is where Thomas’s map disappears and we go back to a beginning that is also a future: the past bubbles up, sets solid in the sun and the wind, and becomes the substrate for what is to come. This is to be the site of Te Puna Ahurea, the cultural hub that will reassert the presence of Ngai Tahu at the heart of the re-imagined city. There will be a building for the hosting of powhiri, the performing arts, the civic welcome: a dignified building surrounded by flax and native planting.

In 1999, after over a century of persistent negotiation and renegotiation, Ngai Tahu reached a settlement with the Crown and with that settlement came an increase in economic influence, political power and cultural confidence. In 2011, when CERA set the rebuilding in motion, Ngai Tahu was included as one of the parties to be consulted on an equal footing with the Christchurch City Council, the neighbouring Selwyn and Waimakariri district councils and ECan, a development the kaiwhakahaere of Ngai Tahu, Sir Mark Solomon, described as ‘the best expression of the treaty settlement I have ever seen’. In the same article in Ngai Tahu’s magazine, Te Karaka, Howard Keene greeted the rebuilding as ‘a chance to build from scratch a post-colonial city, inclusive of everyone’.

Pre-colonial. Colonial. Post-colonial. I walk through them all, along the riverbank. A cool little easterly is blowing in from the sea and the shops on the pop-up mall are preparing to close. The visitors are being ushered from the building housing the Earthquake Experience.

For some months, part of that experience was viewing Godley, or at least his statue. It had stood for decades in the Square on a plinth made from marble left over from the Auckland War Memorial and moulded from bronze melted down from Russian cannon captured in the Crimea. While successive councils toyed with traffic flow in the Square and paving style and concepts of urban space, Godley had stood calmly facing the cathedral, coat over one arm, hat in hand, a man setting off on a journey. The statue outstayed the original, who returned to England after only a couple of years in the colony.

The man went on to public acclaim, government appointments and an early death. The statue stayed behind, like the shell of a cicada stuck to a fence when the body inside has grown wings and flown. It had been competently executed, the work of Thomas Woolner, whose own emigration to Australia prompted the image of the colonist in the tondo by Ford Madox Brown known as The Last of England.

The man stands at the ship’s railing, coat collar turned up, looking grim and gripping the hand of his wife. She wears a wide-brimmed bonnet and if you look closely enough you can see that her other hand clasps the hand of a tiny baby, barely visible, tucked inside her shawl. To the rear, the cliffs of Dover slide away and off the couple go, to try their luck in the Antipodes. It doesn’t look too hopeful. And in fact, Woolner didn’t stay long, returning with his wife and family to England within a matter of months, where he developed a steady career producing statues like the one outside the cathedral. A whole series of Great Men of the Empire, cast for all eternity in bronze.

Woolner also, incidentally, gave his name to the little bump on the rim of the ear that Darwin identified as the vestige of a primate’s pointed ear. It’s called ‘the Woolnerian tip’. Woolner had pointed out the feature to the scientist on a statue of the god, Pan.

I’d never been able to see if Godley had a Woolnerian tip. The statue had stood high on its plinth in the midst of the city. But when it was brought down to earth with a thump, snapping the neck, and stored for a time at Quake City, I was able to take a closer look. He lay on his back, feet in third position. His neck was ringed with a red solder mark, his arm was snapped at the elbow. It was difficult to examine his ears as his hair was long, but I think it’s there: that little pointy echo of a monkey’s twitchy ear.

All sorts of things have come to earth with a thump. They have snapped and cracked along lines of fracture and we have been able to take a closer look, make out the detail.

THE BLUEPRINT IS A CURIOUS artefact, an expression of its era as surely as any earlier map. In the place of cautious, affordable reconstruction by individual landowners, it proposes precincts and structures for current priorities and preoccupations. It is a grandiose dream. It is Thinking Big.

Maybe the inflated scale reflects the fact that we have been so badly frightened. When small children draw themselves, it is usually an inflated image. They draw themselves in felt tip, a blue line for the sky above, a green line for the grass beneath their feet, as the biggest thing in their projected universe. Their house is small and wobbly, their car is a tiny box, their mum or dad or dog are minuscule compared with this big child. It is not the reality, of course. The child is utterly reliant on that mum and dad, and small enough to need a booster seat if they are to see properly out the windows of that car. But in that suppressed knowledge of their actual powerlessness, they draw themselves big. In the act of drawing, at least, they feel invincible.

An earthquake is awe inspiring and in its grip, we feel fear. Real, gut-wrenching fear. Grown men and women pee themselves. They crouch under tables, refusing to re-emerge for hours. They have bad dreams afterwards. They can sleep only with some talisman on the bedside table: a torch, a phone. And no one is immune, not even the planners or the man vested with absolute power. Perhaps in that state, it feels good to contemplate building something very, very big. Something completely and absolutely quake-proof.

Or perhaps the fear is more generalised, prompted by the sensation that we are vulnerable upon this planet. In his A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright quoted the increasing gigantism of the moai on Rapa Nui/Easter Island as proof of human behaviour in the face of this fear.

As the islanders, a population estimated to have been around 15,000, steadily eroded their own environment, they carved increasingly large images, ‘each generation … bigger than the last, demanding more timber, rope and manpower for hauling to the ahu’ until they were so large that they could no longer be moved from the quarries where they had taken shape. The rice palms that had once clothed the land were all cut down and wars broke out over ‘ancient planks and worm-eaten bits of jetsam’. The people ‘ate all their dogs and nearly all the nesting birds’, wind and rain removed the topsoil and when Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, it was to an island so barren it appeared to be composed entirely of sand where a remnant population ‘eked out a desperate existence in caves, guarding their scant resources’.

It’s a compelling image, and a great metaphor for planetary destruction. But it’s not true.

The log of Jacob Roggeveen, captain of the first European ship to visit the island, tells a very different story. He had been in search of just such a treeless sandy island for one had been recorded at this point on the map by the pirate William Dampier, jaunting about the Pacific in 1687 on the jolly ship, the Bachelor’s Delight. The island the Dutch came to, however, was hilly and what had looked like sand at a distance turned out to be dry grass. Dampier and his mates, fumed Roggeveen, ‘must stand convicted of a whole bundle of lies in their reports’.

The ‘lies’ extend to this century and Wright’s account of a population in terminal decline. On the contrary, Roggeveen encountered a healthy population of people ‘well-proportioned … with large and strong muscles: they are big in stature … and exceptionally provided with snow-white teeth’ strong enough to crack nuts. Far from starving, the Rapa Nui were able to supply his ship with ‘a great abundance of sugar cane, 60 fowls, yams and 30 bunches of bananas’. They occupied large houses, waterproofed with thatch, with ‘stone stoops outside on which they sit and chat in the cool of the evening’.

A young German officer on board confirms in his diary this impression of plenty. The Europeans’ first gesture on coming ashore had been to shoot twelve of the islanders and wound an uncounted number, and in response the islanders brought foodstuffs, ‘in order that we might more readily surrender to them their slain’. He notes even greater bounty: 500 live fowls, many roots and sweet figs, all derived from gardens and plantations that were everywhere ‘neatly cultivated, the fields and trees in full bearing’. The islanders themselves he describes as ‘blithe and merry’, and the women ‘sat down before us and disrobed and were very friendly’.

And there’s the clue.

Within fifty years, Rapa Nui did indeed resemble Wright’s apocalyptic picture, the population dwindled from around 15,000 to thirty-five, not because of some feckless indifference to the destruction of their own environment, but for reasons that are only too painfully familiar in the history of islands across the Pacific: European germs, including syphilis, tuberculosis and measles, had taken their cataclysmic toll, along with violent slave-raiding to serve the mines of Peru.

Wright’s attribution of cause may be faulty, but it is true that the islanders do appear to have carved larger statues as their people died or were taken into servitude, the gardens and plantations of fruit trees went untended and the survivors’ desperation increased.

So maybe the moai do have something to tell us, speaking across the long blue reaches of the Pacific and across centuries as the ancestors do. Maybe in this world, where species extinction is all around and there is a gathering anxiety about our own survival, we also want to carve bigger heads to face out to sea away from the desolation within.

Maybe that is what we do when we plan big buildings.

If buildings are our outer skin, then let us puff ourselves up, inflate ourselves to many times our actual size. Let us, as the realities of overpopulation and dwindling resources become more real and pressing, swell our primate chests and roar and stare the terror of extinction in the eye.

Or perhaps the big structures proposed in the blueprint are simply good business. Critics have questioned their end use: the convention centre will stand empty for much of the year, the stadium also. But perhaps this is missing the point and their primary purpose is not the hosting of conventions or rugby matches or the occasional concert by some elderly rocker having another stab at the hits of his youth in a final, ultimate, definitely-last-chance farewell tour. Maybe they do not represent a civic purpose as much as an opportunity for certain companies to draw down the maximum amount of insurance payout and public money while New Zealand taxpayers are still sufficiently impressed by the needs of quake recovery to tolerate such expenditure. Viewed from this angle, CERA’s bland tower becomes not so much an administrative capital as a funnel for the smooth delivery of funds to the companies and individuals selected to rebuild the centre of the city.

Or maybe it is, as the architect of another man’s grandiose dreams once put it, that large buildings are the expression of recently acquired wealth at the edges of empire.

MAPS TELL A STORY. They do not offer only, as Jerry Brotton says, a ‘spatial understanding of events in the human world’. They are also about time. A map ‘asks the viewer to observe how these events unfold one after another. We … look at maps visually but we can also read them as different stories.’ They are deeply passionate artefacts, driven by impulses that are as much ‘personal, emotional, religious, political and financial, as geographical, technical and mathematical’.

It is easy to feel lost in post-quake Christchurch, fighting for breath amid an avalanche of acronyms and entities, names and roles, claim and counter-claim, policies, decisions, proposals. Numbers and percentages rise and fly about like bubbles, popping at a single touch. How many people worked in the central city before the quakes? Twenty thousand? Fifty thousand? I’ve seen both figures quoted. How many heritage buildings have come down? Two hundred? Five hundred? How many buildings have been repaired? What narrative are we to believe? The one that has it that all is well, we are living in boom times, or the one that takes a more cautious line?

Is the rebuilding of the city, for example, a source of immense profit and well-being, a God-given opportunity? Certainly, there have been winners: Fletchers, of course, and the big companies in receipt of major contracts, but also smaller concerns. The father-and-son plastering business, the architect employing a single draftsman working from an office off the garage, the suburban supplier of firewood or home heating systems or some other trade requisite — you hear that they are busy, they have found themselves taking on more staff, expanding into larger premises. They are doing well.

Other stories lack the glow. There have been many bankruptcies in the city since 2010, people defeated by loss of premises, high rentals, roadworks that have impinged on customer access, a raft of difficulties. Included in that roll has been a number of building-related companies that one would have expected to do well. In May 2014, The Press reported ‘an unprecedented number of building firms … going bust despite the post-quake boom’. Between January and March at least eighteen companies — twice as many as in the same period in 2013 — had gone into liquidation or receivership, owing creditors around $4 million. They were, for the most part, small contractors, many less than five years old, supplying painting, building, insulation and roofing services. Several were among the 1200 contractors accredited by Fletcher EQR, and some directors blamed their failure partly on the ‘inconsistency of contracts coming from EQR’, something the company acknowledged. Opportunity has its risks.

Each morning, beginning on the very morning of the first quake, The Press has published these and other stories of the day. John McCrone, Philip Matthews and their colleagues have filed the city’s narrative in cramped porta-cabins out by the airport and, after many months, in new premises smack dab in the middle of the CBD’s demolition, looking out over the expanse of river silt and gravel where the old Press office once stood.

Nihil utile quod non honestum.

When the building was demolished one of the photographers caught the moment when it was almost gone, just ‘Nihil’ left on the lintel above the remains of the front entrance. And in a way, it is nothing, this cleared space, but it is also intensely populated, covered in thick sedimentary layers of narrative, of stories laid down on this patch of the planet like stones borne down to the plains. The stories of the city tumble into your life with The Press each morning, adding to all the stories you hear from friends or people you meet at parties or at the petrol station or when you’re waiting in line at the supermarket. A great communal narrative of courage, or despair or cynicism or amazing kindness or hilarity, of creativity that lifts the heart and professional negligence that sickens the stomach.

Elsewhere in the country, a different narrative of the city has been created. This is an intensely provincial country. The newspapers of other cities maintain their local focus, while the national magazines seem preoccupied with other matters: How to reach your money goals! Train your brain for lasting weight loss! Is chocolate good for you? Television in this country is completely commercial, with no public service channel. With the honourable exception of a single current affairs programme on TV3, the state of the city goes largely unexamined. There is no Hard Talk cross-questioning of the people responsible for overseeing the recovery from the country’s biggest and most expensive natural disaster. The screens of the nation are filled instead by chefs, cold-case detectives and aspiring models.

When stories located in Christchurch do feature they tend to be of individuals in desperate straits, struggling with intransigent insurers, for example, or repeated flooding. They arouse — and quite rightly so — pity, but not anger. They are not placed in a politically charged context as part of some exposé of the government’s refusal to regulate the insurance industry, or to divert resources from grand designs to fundamental repairs. The narrative of the city is reduced to fragments of human interest in which the family living in the caravan or cleaning up the mud in the living room remain isolates experiencing ‘bad luck’ rather than people experiencing systemic failure. And such fragments are insufficient to counter the dominant narrative as it is told nationally, which is boom times, the rebuild framed as a plus, a major component, along with the dairy industry and a housing boom in Auckland triggered by increased migration, of the country’s GDP, mainstay of the current government’s self-styled ‘rock-star economy’. For private homeowners, insurance companies are stern about the notion of ‘betterment’, but in CERA’s CBD, betterment is a fundamental concept, funded by insurance payouts augmented from the public purse.

So here we stand, in this place of Flax Swamp and Broken Ground, waka and inanga, great famine and the abduction of heiresses, sufficient price and land grab, facts and figures, anecdote and newspaper report, proposal and counter-proposal, hope and cynicism and the flight of capital and the playground seesaw.

And all of it is contained, neatly and precisely, within the borders of a map.

THE CENTRAL CITY, WITH ITS multi-million dollar precincts and its contentious cathedral and the ongoing battle between local and national government, has taken centre stage. It has been the loudest, the most demanding, the most dramatic, with the best pictures and the punchiest sound bites. Elsewhere in the country, when people talk about ‘the rebuilding of Christchurch’, they are usually referring to this, the commercial and retail centre.

But the centre is just one part of a much larger mosaic. Beyond the grid, there are other narratives of rebuilding, and those stories are every bit as powerful, to the individuals involved, as an argument over a stadium or a cathedral.

You have to look closely at the map to see them. In the upper right-hand corner, for example, within the Four Avenues, there is a cluster of streets bordered by the river. It’s the part of the city with which I became familiar when I first arrived in 1992. It’s where I bought my first house in 1993, where I burned down the dunny and was visited by a man who knew to bring a gift of dry firewood. It’s a tiny neighbourhood, one among hundreds in the city, but it’s one I know.

Here’s what happened there following the quake, quietly, and largely unattended, on the edges of the whizz bang and argument at the centre.

This is the story of the Avon Loop.

IT BEGINS AS EVERY STORY of this city begins, with the river. Its waters rise in springs to the west through conical puna among tutu and fern and flow in a tangled yarn eastward to the sea. Midway along its length it jinks slightly to the north, curves for a kilometre or so, then recovers its original intention. At this point within the curve, the waters become tidal and when people arrive it is here that they haul up their waka, and step ashore. The river is shallow enough to cross on foot, so tracks converge on its banks leading on higher ground to the coast and to the path zigzagging over the hills to the settlements around the harbour.

This is where Tautahi comes to gather kai, where Maka-iti-iti rushes to join the main current. It is where one of the men who named the city’s streets occupies the canvas-covered whare of Sydney Scroggs.

The street that rules off the base of the loop in the river from east to west is named Kilmore, for an Irish episcopacy. Within the area confined by that line and the loop in the river, land is set aside for a botanic garden. Below the garden, on the southern side of Kilmore Street, is a cattle market, and across the river to the north, the city’s cemetery. Working out from this point on the river, streets are named and the blocks defined that have been bought at bargain rates and meticulously prepared for sale.

In the event, the soils within the loop of the river prove too patchy for a botanical collection and it is relocated across the city to Hagley Park. In its place a commercial plant nursery is established, part of the 18 acre empire of William ‘Cabbage’ Wilson, where settlers might purchase such horticultural delights as the pines Wilson hopes will someday ‘clothe with luxuriant green the slopes and summits of our dry and ever-shifting sandhills’. And gorse, so very suitable for hedging those same slopes. But within a decade, that, too, has gone and the loop in the river is left more or less to pasture. In an early photograph, a horse grazes the banks. In the background, where Kilmore Street bridges the river, is the blurred brick bulk of Wards Brewery, with its five-storey tower, twin kilns and commodious offices. Other bridges lead north to the cemetery on Barbadoes Street, and west across Madras towards the centre and the Square.

Some things are built, some remain on the map. A canal is proposed to link this reach of the river with the coast and the port in Lyttelton, but a railway line seems a better idea. A tunnel is built beneath the hills, and the canal fades to a tree-lined avenue cutting a diagonal through Linwood.

The waters of the Avon are given over to recreation. Within the loop capacious structures house the city’s rowing clubs: the Union, founded in 1864 by workers on the Christchurch to Lyttelton railway, the Avon Club and, in splendid turreted mock Tudor, the Canterbury. Each year in the first week of October the season opens, with ‘gay flags … strung across the sparkling river bank and above them all from the flagstaff atop Wards Brewery … the national flag, the old Union Jack’. The Garrison Band plays as the boats process in single file downriver from Barbadoes bridge, decorated with lilac and green leaves: whiffs, pairs and fours, Ulysses, Minerva, Electric, Lurline. Three cheers for the Queen! Oars peaked. Three cheers for the new season!

ON THE ROUGH GROUND NEIGHBOURING the rowing clubrooms there is a scattering of houses until the 1880s, when development begins in earnest. Tracks become streets that are channelled, shingled, named. Willow Street is named in 1885 for the weeping willows that have displaced flax and toetoe on this antipodean Avon. Rees Street is named in 1893 for a boatbuilder who lives here. In 1892 there is a Queen Street, but there are two other Queen Streets within this very loyal city, so to avoid confusion, the name is changed to Union Street, after the rowing club, and in 1948, to Bangor Street, making a late entry to the catalogue of bishoprics. At the same time, Avon Street is renamed Hurley Street, while York Street becomes Nova Place, which is ‘Avon’ spelled backwards. Following the banks of the river are twin terraces: Cambridge on the northern bank and Oxford on the southern, both ending at Fitzgerald Avenue.

Elsewhere in this flat city, streets stretch for miles, dead straight, but here, the curve of the river cuts them short. The central stem, Bangor, runs a couple of short blocks between Kilmore and Oxford Terrace on the riverbank. Hurley, Rees, Willow and Nova are tiny branchlets, lined with houses that are not for the wealthy of the city, who prefer to live further west, or on the hillsides above the city smog. They certainly do not want to live in such propinquity to the brewery, breathing hops and malt, or the civic rubbish destructor, smokily putting paid to the city’s detritus only a few blocks away.

The houses built within the loop are intended for working people. Along Queen (Union/Bangor) Street, according to Wise’s Street Directory of 1903, live a fitter, an iron turner, three grooms, a gardener, a pickle manufacturer, a carpenter, a hairdresser and two coopers and a maltster, who were no doubt employed by the brewery across the road. Their homes are cottages of two or three bedrooms, of weatherboard, roofed with corrugated iron, though some try for greater grandeur with a verandah and double sash windows. They stand face-on to the street, fronted by small gardens with room for a few flowers, while around the back there are vegetables and blackcurrants, a plum tree, maybe, or a walnut. Many have their own well, drawing water from the springs and channels that lie not far below the surface. Until the mid-twentieth century, the nightman comes round with his cart to collect the sewage.

This is pretty much how the neighbourhood remains through two world wars and catastrophic depression, through flood and snowstorm and tearing nor’west gale. The houses are home to children who play on the riverbanks and men and women who dig the gardens, bike to work, pop next door for a cup of sugar, join the six o’clock swill at the Star and Garter, the pub on the riverbank by the Barbadoes Street bridge. It’s that sort of area. By 1940, the directory hints that it has, if anything, become a little shabbier. The homeowners on Bangor Street now include a fitter, a dentist, an asphalter and a butcher, but over half the men list their occupation simply as ‘labourer’.

In 1955, the brewery closes. In 1959 the last of the rowing clubs shifts downriver to purpose-built waters at Kerrs Reach, but other clubs take their place. Some of the old cottages are demolished to make way for rugby clubrooms, a smallbore rifle club, the Commercial Club and the city’s bridge club. Just across the river there’s a swimming pool for recreation, originally planned to commemorate the nation’s centennial in 1940 and finally opened after the war in 1950.

A small factory manufactures concrete washtubs at the end of Nova Place, and there is a plumbing warehouse on Bangor Street. But by and large, the area is residential: a little down at heel, unnoticed by the wider city.

IN THE 1960S, HOWEVER, THERE is a change. It is the same change that is taking place in inner-city neighbourhoods around the world. In Gastown in Vancouver, Cabbage Town in Toronto, Camden Town in London, what used to be disregarded as cramped and grim suddenly acquires a new gloss.

As older working-class residents die, their homes are bought up by people born after the war. Blessed by the state with good health, free education and ample opportunity for employment or self-expression, they are convinced of their capacity to create utopia. They will counter the anonymity of spreading suburbia by creating islands of beauty and neighbourliness at the centre between high-rises and motorways. Former tenements become funky flats, their walls crimson with purple trim, and flowers painted on the letterbox. Kitchens that have been the despair of generations of bony women take on Mexican wall hangings and second-hand Windsor chairs stripped to the essence of unadorned timber.

I am of the stripping generation. We spent hours scraping, renovating, restoring, in search of something: the past, perhaps, though not the actual past of typhus, TB, limited education and low-paid toil. We sought a more kindly idyll of authenticity and small-scale neighbourliness within the urban sprawl. We wanted to stage our lives in rooms opened to the sunlight by the removal of walls and the installation of recycled French doors and patios of old bricks. In such neighbourhoods, the derelict factories that had once manufactured the marvels of Victorian and Edwardian engineering were turned to art and theatre and music. Rundown pawn shops became wholefood co-operatives. Wasteland became communal gardens of spray-free broccoli and those inner-city cottages took on something called ‘character’, as if they were living beings with a personality and an authentic story.

In Christchurch, this process takes place within this stretch of the river. For the first time it acquires an identifiable status. It is ‘the Avon Loop’ or more simply, ‘the Loop’.

Why does it happen here?

It’s partly economic. The houses are affordable. But it is also because someone sees them as beautiful. One of Grayson Perry’s artists, perhaps, someone responsive to the way sunlight falls across a verandah. The Loop receives the full blessing of the sun from the north, with no tall commercial blocks to cast a shadow. It has the beauty of the river. The river has always been useful, for kai or for docking goods or for rowing, but now it begins to be valued for the sway of willow branches and the airy quality that water always lends its surroundings. The river also offers, in this city of straight lines and right angles, a break in the dominant pattern. It offers an open vista, a public vista unowned by any individual, rather than the immediate view of a neighbour’s fence. It offers curves and irregularity to those who value such qualities.

The Loop and the interlocking streets within it have the additional effect of creating a sociable place. There is no through traffic. These roads don’t go on forever to somewhere important, but end after no more than 100 metres or so, at the riverbank. The little houses with their small gardens, built before the invention of the motor car, have no garages to block the interaction between home and street. If you want to speak to your neighbours, you need do nothing more than sit on the verandah and sooner or later someone will walk by, pause for a chat.

In official terms, this is a ‘decaying area’, its stock of houses in poor condition. A 1980 city council report describes only fifteen houses as good, forty-five as average and thirty-five as poor or fair. Forty-one houses date from before 1900, and twenty-eight from between 1900 and 1919. But now these houses have ‘character’ and this is a ‘heritage area’. They have taken on a value significant to a number of people.

THE AESTHETICS OF PLACE are personal. Some of us favour order, precision, straight lines and tidy measurement, some prefer the random curve, and the two modes of being are as mutually incomprehensible as if their proponents came from opposite ends of the Earth and spoke different languages. But as Shulamith Firestone or Robin Morgan, or whoever it was among the feminist theorists of the 70s, pointed out, the personal is political.

Politically the Avon Loop was leftward leaning, as such areas of a city tend to be — like the Aro Valley in Wellington, or as Auckland’s Ponsonby used to be — areas that were routinely described in newspapers for over a century as ‘hotbeds of radical socialism’. It is not universal, of course, but by and large the residents of the Avon Loop also favoured parties of the left, from the mildest forms of socialism or environmentalism to communism. When the Values Party was formed in the 70s, it found a strong following in the Loop, as did its descendant, the Green Party, whose first co-leader, Rod Donald, lived here for several years.

Back in 1944, two of the Loop’s most notable residents had moved into a house at 362 Oxford Terrace. Jack Locke was a freezing worker, Elsie Locke a feminist and writer, and both were passionate communists, at least until 1956, when the painful realisations consequent on the Hungarian Revolution caused Elsie to leave the party. Jack remained a member till his death, standing regularly as a communist candidate in national elections. Their son Keith tells me how Elsie bought the house on Oxford Terrace with a small legacy from a brother killed during the war. The house was old, built in the 1880s, with just two bedrooms and in poor shape, but she had stood on the step and looked across to the river and decided, ‘This is the place I want to be.’ Soon after they moved in, Elsie and Jack took down the front fence. ‘They didn’t believe in fences. They wanted interaction. Our front step was only two or three metres from the street.’

Keith recalls an intimate post-war childhood, playing on the riverbank, swinging from the willows, running messages at threepence a time for neighbours to the butcher, the grocer, the fruiterer, who had shops around the corner on Kilmore Street. A modest family existence without telephones, a fridge, a washing machine or a car. School was within walking or cycling distance, as was the Centennial Pool, where Elsie swam daily until the end of her life.

He also recalls tuberculosis: his mother spent two years in a sanatorium when he was a toddler and he himself suffered from chronic bronchitis in a house uninsulated and heated by a coal fire. And he recalls how it was to be associated with the politics of the left back in that era of the Communist threat and the domino theory, even when you were a child.

He has in his possession a copy of his own security file, begun when he was eleven years old ‘because I was clearly a dangerous person’. The first entry records his attendance at a meeting of the William Morris Group, ‘a progressive cultural group my mother had set up with singing and dancing and so on’, named for the man who had not only designed those familiar textile patterns of daisies and pomegranates, but was also a dedicated and highly articulate communist and social commentator.

Keith’s name appears on a list of fifty attendees at a meeting on 12 December 1955, along with helpful notes by the distinctly creepy agent, ‘George’, working undercover for the New Zealand Police Force Special Branch, predecessor of the New Zealand Security Service, which was founded less than a year later by the National government to keep an eye on such subversives. (The names are, of course, given in full on the original.)

Mrs A— of Bangor Street is friendly with Elsie

LOCKE and is about 48 years of age, about

5’ 5” in height, stout build, long dark hair,

dark eyes. She has been twice married, has one

son … by the second marriage.

Mrs B— is about 49 years of age, about 5’ 2”

in height, brown hair greying, sharp features

and wears spectacles.

The evening’s activities are equally detailed. ‘Elsie LOCKE presented Mrs C— with a crystal vase. Mrs D— was overheard inviting Doris E— to a party at the D—s’ home during Christmas.’ Some of the attendees are also, notes George, members of that other highly subversive organisation, the Housewives’ Union, including, perhaps, Mrs B— in her spectacles and Mrs A— of Bangor Street.

Keith Locke’s file records other suspect activities, such as a cycling trip with his mother in 1956, and later, a showing of a Russian movie, a comedy, on a wet night to twenty members of a film society.

Surveillance and ill health are also part of the story of the Avon Loop, as is prolonged contention that tangles place with politics.

IN 1965 A HOTEL ARRIVED in the Loop. The Avon Motor Lodge appeared like a big white egg on the riverbank among the willows and settled to expansion. Its owners were a Christchurch family, the Carters, who began steadily buying up the old cottages as they came on the market. Within a few years they owned a third of the neighbourhood’s housing stock, which they demolished or rented until, in 1972, they announced a plan to increase the hotel’s existing eighty-eight units to 138, with the building of a six-storey extension. The city was about to host the 1974 Commonwealth Games and the hotel intended to be ready to meet the need for accommodation.

The Lockes swung into action. They prepared and circulated a petition which 90 per cent of their neighbours signed. They organised a meeting in one of the old rowing club sheds, where a residents’ association was established, the Avon Loop Protection Association or ALPA, and they prepared an appeal to the Town and Country Planning Board: the hotel extension would dominate the area, bringing shade, increased traffic, litter, food smells, flies. They presented their appeal. The magistrate turned it down. The Lockes, he said, did not live close enough to the hotel to be seriously affected. But the Lockes appealed that decision to the Supreme Court in Wellington, and their appeal was upheld. The hotel abandoned its plans for extension.

‘CELEBRATIONS!!!’ wrote Elsie Locke in the minutes for the next meeting of ALPA. ‘Carter withdrawn, circular to residents, inform of success!’

The paper is yellow and frail, number four in a thick pile of records and minutes stored among twenty boxes of Elsie Locke’s papers in the Canterbury Museum. It’s all there: democracy at work in a grey box. The threat, the petition, the meeting, the bruising encounter with the law, the rapid acquaintance by volunteers and laypeople with the process and language of legal dispute, the victory that in time proves to be not the end but the beginning of a long campaign, a Thirty Years’ War of inconclusive skirmishing, internal dissent, interruption, change, alliances made and broken.

It’s there in the records of bring and buy sales and the raffle of three cooked hams to raise funds for legal expenses. It’s there in the letters to and from other groups in the city fighting similar encroachment by expressway or high-rise. It’s there in the records of working bees to clear the river of broken bottles and the undertaking by a committee member, Janet Moss, ‘to record all the notable trees within the Loop’. In the letters of contact with the city council as the Avon Loop morphs over the next couple of decades from a CURA (Comprehensive Urban Renewal Area), to a NIM (Neighbourhood Improvement Area) to a SAM (Special Amenity Area). In the bunch of flowers presented to the parents of Baby Tutty and the minutes of hope and plans: that ‘cheap housing for young people’ might be built in the Loop. Or that a park might be created on the site of the old plumbing warehouse on Bangor Street, ‘an open space in the heart of the block’. It’s there in the planning for riverside carnivals that take place every summer during the 80s, with canoe races and food stalls and decorated bicycle competitions to raise funds to purchase a community cottage for ‘women’s group meetings, playgroup, drama group meetings and Community Crumbles’, the last an event where the residents of the Loop have taken to gathering on a Sunday evening for talk and bowls of stewed apple topped with organic oats and brown sugar.

The minutes record it all: the realisation of plans or their failure. The open space comes into being as Walnut Tree Park with its swings and slides, though successive tribes of children prefer the patch of weedy poplars by the fence that they call The Forest, and a heap of spoil — The Bumps — left behind by the builders, perfect for forts and bike jumps. The community cottage is bought and does indeed house a playgroup, and meetings and parties at Christmas, while the housing project dwindles from an ideal of communal garden and pooled resources to a standard block of Housing Corporation flats, and meeting by meeting, year after year, there’s debate, there’s disappointment, there’s delight, there’s the echo of tension between individuals. Democracy can be a painful business, betraying its Greek origins in passionate argument. As the chair reported in 1978, ‘The 138 households in the Loop have nothing in common — except that we live here.’

It’s a neighbourhood.

THE INNER-CITY WARD OF WHICH the Loop forms a part has always been one of the city’s lowest income areas. In 1996, the census records its median income as $25,295, well below the city median of $32,913. It also has near double the unemployment rate (8.6 per cent to Christchurch’s average 4.8 per cent). But at the time of that census, the population of the Avon Loop is more diverse than that broad-brush statistic might suggest. In the 90s, the inhabitants of Bangor and neighbouring streets include, alongside students, retirees and the unemployed, teachers, artists, lawyers, a Jungian analyst, a television cameraman, an IT specialist and café workers.

People want to live here. They want the river, the walk into town, the manageable human scale, the playground for their children, the unhurried streets, this intangible quality of beauty.

The hotel, too, is changing. In 1995, it acquires the old Star and Garter hotel, which it pulls down to leave a blank slate, a stretch of ground quickly dubbed ‘the Star-and-Garter-Carter-Park’. The hotel’s incinerator smoke stack marks the flagpole on the redoubt, its pennant of smoke waving constantly over the surrounding streets, as the hotel itself switches name and franchise from the Avon Motor Lodge to the Christchurch City Travelodge to, in 1998, the Avon River Centra, promising ‘mid-market leisure and business travellers’ the comforts of one of its 131 rooms, ‘a well-balanced fat-free breakfast’, the Chatz Bar and the Willows restaurants, all in ‘an extremely picturesque tranquil setting’ just ten minutes’ walk from the Square.

The riverbank along Oxford Terrace is gaining a premium in this era when developers are seeking out riverside and coastal frontages and their uninterrupted views. A property developer opening a riverside bar and restaurant on the fringes of the Loop in 2003 calls the site ‘a prime location’. It’s ‘the only small strip of the Avon that faces north, and it has been neglected and forgotten’.

River view.

North-facing.

These have become a most desirable asset.

In April 1997, residents along Oxford Terrace and the adjoining streets find in their letterboxes plans for a townhouse development on land they presently own and occupy. ‘Avon Loop 4D, a Proposed Development Style’ reads the brief.

In the architect’s drawings all their homes have disappeared. They have been replaced by a mass of townhouses adjoining the hotel. The blocks are densely massed four-storey units with quirky rooflines, built with fortress-like intensity right to the pavement and backing onto inner courtyards. From their rooftops, as from a battlement, there will be, the brief promises, ‘a rooftop view of the Port Hills’. The plans, thorough and professional, arouse in many of the recipients great suspicion concerning the hotel and its owners’ intentions. Houses are continuing to be bought up by the hotel, which is now a Holiday Inn, one of two in the city owned by the Carter family, and cottages on the adjacent streets are becoming the property of some Carter-connected entity: Cavelico No. 5 Limited, Maurice R. Carter Limited.

‘Never trust a Carter!’ Elsie Locke used to say, so often that friends proposed printing it on a T-shirt.

At the opposite end of the Loop, across from the former brewery that now houses a second-hand shop, a boys’ club and a brothel, a new kind of house is rising on the banks of the Avon, endorsing, in its scale and grandeur, the value of that river view. It is a rich man’s house, built by a British businessman, one of a collection of houses worldwide. It is very big, twice as big as anything in the vicinity. It is white. It is double-storeyed. A mansion with a vaguely antebellum air, as if Tara had landed on the riverbank among the dwellings of the field workers.

But it is an exception. At the close of the twentieth century the Loop remains a neighbourhood of small houses, the place I encountered on that day in 1992 when I biked out into confusion, my inner map in pieces.

I returned to the Loop with something like relief. In this little corner of the city at least, things seemed contained. There were shops at an intersection: a wholefoods place with beans and lentils in barrels and brown paper bags, a hairdresser, a dairy for the morning paper and the milk. I biked along the riverbank past houses and gardens, some old, some modern, set companionably side by side. Past the sweep of the willows and a little brick building that stood among them like a Japanese tea house with a scooped tile roof and ornamental ribbons of brickwork. (I found out later that it was a transfer station, built in 1907 to pump the sluggish waste of this flat city through the intestinal pipes to the settling ponds in Bexley. Pumping stations and electrical substations are one of this city’s peculiar little delights: tiny cubes of Art Deco fancy, miniature Egyptian temples or Spanish colonial angularity housing the engineering required for efficient twentieth-century living. One even became the subject of one of the country’s best-known paintings, Doris Lusk’s The Pumping Station, which in 1958 made a stunningly angular Greek temple out of sewage treatment.)

There was a cottage at the end of my new street, some kind of community place with notices pinned to the door advertising a playgroup and yoga classes. Maybe I’d take up yoga, in this new phase. I’d become lean and fit and healthy with magnificent inner core strength. There was a little park in the heart of the block, shaded by an immense walnut tree where some children were playing on the swings and a couple of mums chatted in that way mothers have, absentmindedly, one hand jiggling the buggy, one eye on the three-year-old.

This place felt kindly disposed. It felt manageable. Small-scale in a wider and more confusing world. It felt comfortable. I knew I could live here. I stayed that year in Juliet’s house by the river and one afternoon in December, when my residency at the university was coming to an end and it was clear the marriage, too, was over, I found the cottage with the verandah and the plum tree and I bought it on the spot.

I DON’T KNOW WHY SOME parts of a city feel right while others feel wrong. Why we slip on one house as easily as if it were a comfortable coat, while another leaves us chilly and feeling deeply alone.

The reasons why I chose this house and this neighbourhood took shape long ago, in distant childhood. One source was a book: a children’s book, the first I borrowed from a public library. My father had taken me there when I was four and beginning to read. We had walked into town one Friday night and entered the hushed immensity of a room lined with shelves lined with books. Just the rustling of pages from a long table where people sat reading the evening paper, the muted voices of people by the front desk. ‘There,’ said my father, waving towards the shelves. ‘You can take two books with numbers on their covers’, which meant they were true and about real things like animals and planets. ‘And two from here.’ Those books did not have numbers. They were not real. They had pictures instead. I could take out four books, half real, half pretence, and I could do that every week, for as long as I lived.

The Little House was one of the books I took home that evening. It was written by Virginia Lee Burton and published in 1942. It was about a little house that was built by a man on a hill in the country. It had a door in the middle like a nose and windows either side, like eyes. It was built in the olden days, when horses and carriages went by on the road to the city over the hills. The little house stood among apple trees where children played. It could see the sun and the moon. As the seasons passed, the trees turned from fresh green leaf, to autumnal gold, to the snowy twigs of winter and back to spring once more. The city over the hills drew nearer, until the little house found itself surrounded by tall buildings, and then taller ones still, until it could no longer see the sun or the moon. It was sad. Its windows cried. Then a woman found it. She loaded the little house onto a truck and carried it away, far into the country where she placed it on another hill among apple trees where once more it could see the moon and stars and watch the seasons pass. It was happy.

It’s a simple story. A story for little children. But like all good children’s stories it had a profound effect.

What did I learn from it? First, I suppose, was a notion of beauty. I loved the pictures, and in particular the picture of the house amid apple blossom. It remains an ideal of perfection to this day: that particular shade of palest pink, leaf green and white. I learned that there was a relationship between house and trees and hills. The house was small. It did not seek to dominate its surroundings. It was an artefact, crafted by an individual for a purpose as well as beauty. The narrative of the little house also laid down a sense of history, teaching in its effortless and poetic fashion that time passes, things happen, some good, some bad, but there is an overarching seasonal rhythm to our lives, year by year, season by season and over the longer span. It taught a sense of circularity, something that seems more evident the older I become, and it also reinforced optimism: what is wrong or barely tolerable can be put right. Beauty can be tarnished, but it will win in the end.

THE LESSONS OF THE LITTLE HOUSE were reinforced by other things. My own home, for example: the cavernous Edwardian villa which my mother loathed for its inconvenience and its immovable chill, even on the hottest day. But for a child it held such treasure. There were the coloured glass panels around the front door that turned the garden pink and gold and green. There were the fireplaces in the bedroom occupied by my parents and in the room we simply called ‘the front room’, the special place that held the china cabinet and the piano. The fireplaces had tiled surrounds, one a wreath of blue roses, the other a little man in a smoking cap and slippers reading the newspaper.

Some things were concealed. The wallpaper, if picked at, revealed layer upon layer beneath. There was a daisy pattern, then scarlet, then mossy green, all the way down to yellowing newspaper next to the sarking, with pictures, if you picked away enough, of women in big puffy dresses. Under the floorboards, in the kingdom occupied by the glittering eyes of half-wild kittens, lay bottles with marbles in their necks and jawbones and bits of metal and the sound of our mother’s feet clattering over the linoleum of the kitchen above our heads. And in winter, when we woke it was to whole forests of frost on the inside of our bedroom windows: great swathes of icy fern that melted at the touch of a finger. There were layers all around us, visible and invisible. Others had been here in this house before us, we were living on the surface of the past.

When our chimney caught fire I remember the sense of panic, the fear that everything could suddenly disappear, as my grandmother’s house had disappeared, bearing with it the tangible setting for all the stories, the prompt for their repeated retelling. Gone was the bedroom where our uncle had lain for months when he had polio. Gone was the kitchen where my mother’s sisters had cut off her plait. Gone was the smell that belongs to specific places. My grandmother’s house smelled of fresh milk, whereas our house smelled of coal fires and golden syrup pudding and my father’s pipe tobacco.

I learned about buildings, too, from the huts I made myself: endless huts, everywhere, constructed from boxes and branches and random bits of timber, where I discovered not just what makes things stay up but, more fundamentally, the pleasure in creating a space for yourself, a purpose-built place beyond the reach of grown-ups where you could be truly, freely, uncritically yourself.

More formally, I was educated, I suppose, by the buildings in the town where I was raised: the stone banks on Oamaru’s Thames Street putting on a bold Doric face, all columns and porticos, the Victorian frontages of council offices, the dome and chandeliers of the Opera House. I felt smaller in relation to these public buildings. Unlike a house or a hut, they intended to impress, rather than embrace. They taught me about the impact of scale and architectural fashion, as every place I have ever visited since has taught me.

Some buildings I have loved on sight. That little oratory on the coast of Dingle, for example, like an upturned boat on stony ground. Or the hall where Louis XIV preened before ranks of mirrors, the imagery of power reflected, refracted, to infinity. Or the towers of New York driving all that human energy down, as rivers are channelled through grand canyons of generative swirl and eddy. Or a house glimpsed in some hillside village growing from the parent rock, the initials of its first owners carved above the lintel. Small buildings like that Nissen hut on Orkney where prisoners of war painted Italy and faith over the bones of bare military necessity, or big buildings like those amazing towers at La Défense, arching over infinity.

I have learnt, too, from buildings I have loathed, with a cramping of the gut that is part revulsion, part fear at their owner’s intention. Bleak hotels where the rooms with their glossy veneer and thin coverlets and those internationally uniform black padded chairs force such adamant anonymity that I am overwhelmed by the certainty of my own non-existence. Those towering columns in buildings designed to intimidate, their massive feet way above my head, disappearing into darkness. The indifferent sprawl of some American roadside clutter. Eighties high-rises with those tricksy embellishments that look like the architectural equivalent of big hair and shoulderpads. Twenty-first-century dream houses that co-opt the view for all who walk the edge of the ocean or look up to the summit ridge. A lifetime of neighbourhoods. A lifetime of houses.

So when I came to this city, to this neighbourhood, to this house, I was predisposed to fall in love, as surely as my life’s experience had predisposed me to choose one man instead of another. I moved my desk into the sunniest room and replaced the burnt-out brick fireplace with a tiled surround from my childhood home. Despite having loathed it all her life, when the moment came to move after my father died, my mother suddenly decided to keep something. The house had been purchased by the school over the back fence and was to be demolished to make way for a playing field. She had been packed for weeks, eager for the move to warmth and more modern convenience in Dunedin. But the day before she finally left, she called in a builder, had him remove both the front-room mantels with their tiled surrounds and then she sent them to me. ‘Just in case,’ she said. ‘They might come in handy one day.’

They leaned against the wall in the garage in Palmerston North for years but when I came down here, to this cottage in the Loop, they did indeed come in handy. I brought them to Christchurch, back to the South Island, and installed the wreath of roses in my new home. And when I moved again to the valley on the peninsula, I brought the other — the little man in his slippers and smoking cap — out here. He’s here right now, as I write this, peering through his spectacles. The roses remained in the Loop when I sold and others moved in and all our lives carried on until that spring morning when the city shook.

All across the city, the region’s underlying identity was reasserted. Within the Loop, where there was a bank of shingle offering firmer footing, houses built on the surface remained relatively undamaged. Where there was the bed of some primeval forgotten creek, silt turned to liquid and oozed to the surface. Where houses had been built on sandhills, the frame shimmied and sometimes slipped from its piling. The subterranean springs that had once fed backyard wells bubbled up as liquefied silt. Along the banks of the river cracks opened. There was ‘lateral spread’ and that unlovely word, ‘slumpage’. The riverbed filled with silt and the water level rose, threatening flood.

The map changed.

ON THE COUNCIL’S Draft Central City Recovery Plan, presented to the public in December 2011, the Avon Loop had appeared as a special feature in a proposed riverside park. With a modest budget of $40.5 million, the Papawai Otakaro/Avon River Project would ‘bring life and health to the waters of Christchurch and Otakaro’, with flood mitigation, improved water quality, riparian plantings and cycle paths along the banks. Arrows on the graphic illustrating the proposal pointed out the town hall, the central library and there, in the top north-east corner, linked to the city centre by a cycleway and footpath, was ‘The Avon Loop. Area of character housing defined by small scale cottage style.’

That picture changed after February’s quake.

In June 2011, Cabinet granted a power to act to a group of ministers who would then ‘take decisions on matters relating to Canterbury land damage and remediation issues’. It was those ministers — Gerry Brownlee (earthquake recovery), Bill English (finance) and Simon Power (associate finance) — who would write the next chapter in the story of the Avon Loop.

In the newly colour-coded city, of Red, Green, Orange and White, on 23 June the Loop was zoned Orange. Further geotechnical work would be required before a final zoning could be decided. The area could eventually be zoned Green, which would mean that homes could be repaired by their owners and life could continue more or less as before. Or it might be zoned Red, meaning purchase by the government, demolition, land clearance, a new home elsewhere.

Some people had already left, their houses too damaged, their nerves too shattered to remain. On Bangor Street a firewall had collapsed, burying a child’s bed in bricks. The family packed what they could retrieve and departed for the safety of Timaru. Some houses remained empty, still with cups on a table, beds unmade, their gardens reverting to a tangle of overgrown roses and long grass.

But not all houses in the Loop had suffered extensive damage. Only 54 per cent were officially considered in need of a total rebuild. Some had cracks or a broken chimney or a wobbly place on the floor where the piles had sunk, but remained habitable. One house, in fact, was brand new. Its owners, Elsie Locke’s daughter Alison and her partner Mike Moss, were in the process of building a new home on the footprint of the old cottage when the September quake struck. Since it sustained no damage, they went on and completed it in the months that followed. February’s shock left it largely unscathed. They remained living in the Loop.

Others stayed because rentals in the city were rocketing or because they wished to protect their homes from looting. There was a lot of that in red-zoned areas. One friend found her front gate — a wrought-iron gate made for their driveway, one she would know anywhere from years of going in and going out — in a salvage yard in Dallington. Another came across her French doors on TradeMe. One glanced out his window to see men in orange vests busily loading his rockery onto a ute. Some stayed because they had a dog and it was hard to find a rental that would accept pets. And others simply because the sun still shines onto the verandah and it might all work out: the neighbourhood might yet be zoned Green.

By 29 February 2012 there is another map of the Avon Loop. It has been prepared for EQC by environmental and engineering company Tonkin and Taylor to depict land damage across the city, based on observations made by EQC’s rapid assessment teams after the 22 February quake. This map uses another palette: some parts are blue, signifying that the teams could see ‘no observable ground cracking or ejected liquefied material’. Green signifies minor cracking, two shades of mustard yellow minor or major ‘quantities of ejected material but no lateral spreading’. A lighter shade of crimson means ‘moderate to major lateral spreading or large quantities of ejected material’, while the deepest crimson is reserved for ‘severe lateral spreading’ and a lot of ejected silt.

On this new map washes of blue and mustard cover most of the city, through which the river winds like a punctured artery, bleeding crimson over residential areas in Aranui, Bexley, Avonside and the manicured lawns of Fendalton. Factsheets give a more detailed picture, suburb by suburb.

Factsheet 7 shows the Avon Loop. A crimson strip runs along the riverbank from the bridge on Kilmore Street. It has a neat edge, following precisely the lines of existing streets and individual property boundaries. It stops abruptly at Willow Street. None of the properties here, it seems, are as badly damaged as the properties across the back fence that face onto Oxford Terrace and the river. The little cottages lining Rees Street are tinted mustard yellow. The rich man’s house on Bangor Street stands alongside its neighbours on land tinted crimson.

There are white spaces, too, that the engineers have not mapped, for they are commercial premises and therefore beyond the scope of EQC regulation. The clubrooms, the Holiday Inn hotel, the whole length of the riverbank leading from the Loop into the central city are blank. The land there might conceivably be as damaged by lateral spread, slumpage or liquefaction. Certainly the road outside the hotel is as creviced as anywhere beneath that crimson stain. Its fine big picture windows are as cracked, its walls as skewed, the plaster Doric columns along its frontage tilting at wonky, drunken angles. But this is not translated to Factsheet 7, which is designed not for commercial owners but to ‘communicate information that may be relevant to residential landclaims under the Earthquake Commission Act of 1993’.

This map forms the basis on which the three ministers will make their final zoning decisions. On 21 March 2012, they meet to decide the fate of orange-zoned sections of Richmond South, Linwood and the area, including the Loop, which is now referred to, somewhat confusingly, as Central City South. Their decisions will affect 252 homes, seventy-nine of which stand in the Loop.

It all comes down to a simple formula recorded in the documents used at the meeting:

Add together the cost of land reinstatement to

its pre-September 2010 condition, plus the

cost of betterment — strengthening the land

or raising it above flood levels. Add the cost

of infrastructure replacement.

Subtract the cost of decommissioning

infrastructure and grassing the resulting site.

If the cost of the above exceeds the improve-

ment in the value of the damaged land,

remediation is not cost-effective. But if the cost

of the above is less than the improvement in

the value of the damaged land, remediation

may be cost-effective.

The problem for the Loop, as for other houses along the leafy riverside to the east, is that premium placed on riverfront property. The houses of the Loop are less valuable than the land they stand on.

The proposal is presented to the ministers in a simple yes/no format. Circle one. Do the ministers agree ‘that 78 properties in the Central City South as indicated in the map attached to Appendix 2 be rezoned Red’?

Yes, says the minister of earthquake recovery. Yes, says the minister of finance. Yes, says the associate minister of finance.

Then follows a curious little anomaly. Do the ministers agree ‘that 1 residential property in Central City South should be rezoned Green?’ Yes, say the ministers once more. The rich man’s house on Bangor Street is not to suffer the same fate as its neighbours. Tonkin and Taylor personnel have advised that this house has ‘experienced significantly less damage than the remainder of the Central City South Orange Zone’ and can be repaired ‘on an individual basis following normal insurance process’.

Red zoning, despite its hard and fast exterior, turns out to be a discretionary process, perhaps as legally unstable as the land it attempts to define. It is challenged through the courts, in 2013 for example, by a group calling themselves the Quake Outcasts, owners of undeveloped land that could not be insured pre-quake and was therefore unqualified to receive the government’s payout when it was zoned Red. They argue that the zoning was not implemented in accordance with the CERA Act and was therefore unlawful, and the judge at the High Court largely agreed.

The prime minister is unimpressed with the decision. ‘One option is the government says, “Thanks very much. It’s been a lot of fun. If you don’t like the offer, that’s where it’s at.”’ And CERA plans to challenge the decision.

Nevertheless, a crack has opened. The zoning decisions may not be as solid as they first appeared.

An independent review of EQC’s performance published in October 2013 casts further doubt. The ministers’ decisions were based on the findings of ‘EQC rapid assessments completed after the 22 February 2011 earthquakes’.

The business of assessment had proven highly profitable, especially for EQC’s contracted company, Gallagher Bassett Services, and its associate, another Queensland-based company, Verifact. These two companies were the rebuild’s ‘biggest winners’, according to a Press article that analysed figures supplied by EQC to Parliament’s finance and expenditure select committee in August 2013. In the two years ending June 2011 and 2012, EQC paid the companies a combined total of $90, 339, 468. GBS was paid $41,145,343 for claims-processing and loss-adjusting services, while Verifact received $49,194,125 for loss-adjusting and estimating services. Verifact was the largest supplier of field inspectors, providing 210 staff to EQC between October 2010 and December 2011, at an average cost of $234,257 per person, including disbursements. By contrast, Tonkin and Taylor, who prepared the geotechnical maps on which the zoning decisions were based, was paid a mere $23.3 million for the same period.

But the October review reported in the The Press criticises some of those assessment teams. ‘A number of assessors provided by Verifact … were either physically unsuitable for the job or lacked the necessary skills, including those of basic numeracy. Many assessors and estimators appear to lack knowledge of EQC cover, the 1993 Act, building code or repair strategies even after induction and training … Effective performance management did not appear to be part of EQC culture, with the focus on quantity rather than quality.’

So that 54 per cent figure might represent a sound and skilled assessment of the damage sustained to land and homes in the Avon Loop.

On the other hand, it might not.

THE AVON LOOP IS ZONED RED. Just over 100 days later, CERA and the CCDU produce their blueprint. A bound and illustrated paper plan fills in detail not visible on the screen. ‘Listen to the people,’ reads the title page. ‘Whakarongo ki te Tangata … with strong hearts and strong minds, we can build a better city for us and our children after us.’

At first glance the new plan looks exactly like the council’s draft, but on closer inspection there are differences. In the upper north-eastern corner, where there had been the ‘Area of character housing’ as a special feature on a bike ride along the riverside park, there is a blank: a pallid square intersected by the phantoms of Bangor Street and Oxford Terrace. White rectangles mark the presence of the clubrooms, the Holiday Inn and the houses on the streets immediately adjacent and the rich man’s house by the river. Otherwise, a blank, marked with an ‘H’ for ‘Possible Future Park’.

CERA spells out what the zoning means to those whose homes are to be erased. At meetings, the CEO Roger Sutton explains that red zoning is necessary because of significant area-wide land damage, the uncertainty of engineering solutions to remedy that damage, and the fact that repair will be protracted and disruptive. Eighteen months or more. Your house may have suffered little damage but the land beneath it is frail. There is risk of serious harm in future quakes. Your health and well-being are CERA’s priority.

‘But what if we don’t mind waiting another eighteen months?’ asks a homeowner. ‘We’ve already waited that long. We can wait a little longer.’ If you wait, says the CEO, you will likely find yourself without sewerage, water or postal delivery. They will be disconnected. And should you change your mind in the future and decide to sell, you will have to sell at the current market value, which will be less than the government’s offer.

‘And what if my land is remediated and it becomes possible to build on it once more?’ asks a landowner. ‘Could we have first right of purchase at a reasonable price?’ No, says Mr Sutton. You can’t.

The zoning documents supply further detail. Land repairs in the Avon Loop are ‘expected to be required under parts of Oxford Terrace and Fitzgerald Avenue’, along the banks of the river. They are ‘estimated to take 18 months to complete, but once completed the land would be classified as TC3’, meaning that it will then be strong enough that ‘property owners [can then] work through the normal insurance process for repairs and rebuilding’.

But not the property owners who have until now made the Loop their home. They will have moved elsewhere, to a house or unit in another suburb, to Nelson and Timaru and Otaki and Rangiora. Some will have taken a souvenir: a lemon tree, some spring bulbs, the letterbox, a strip of verandah lace. Their houses stay on for a while among buddleia and long grass, the walls are tagged.

Elsewhere in the city, such residential Red Zone areas are used by the police for exercises in tactical training. Those empty homes, the force’s tactical commander says, ‘provide a fantastic opportunity’ for training in a ‘realistic environment’, using ‘everything but real bullets and real blood’. In the Loop it is not the police who make use of the environment but the girls from Manchester Street, whose brothels and former haunts have been placed off limits. They turn up after dark with their clients. Condoms like limp white worms lie discarded in courtyards. A family returning to visit their former home find the windows gaping and a pink dildo on the living room floor. The gap between the River Carnivals and Community Crumbles, and raw brutality, seems very slight.

And one morning, the wire cordons go up, the trucks and diggers arrive, the roof of the house is lifted away, the walls are consumed and sometimes the people who used to live there come to watch, as if this place of wood and corrugate were a relative, someone they loved. Then the trees are torn up, the driveway and all trace of habitation.

Bizarrely, at this stage, while the Red Zone houses are falling like ninepins, CERA’s Roger Sutton suggests that some might be preserved.

On 25 August 2013, after touring the Red Zone with some visiting officials, he announces a new plan to The Press. ‘We have to tell these people’s stories,’ he says. ‘One house we went into, there was not a photo of Betty [the presumed homeowner], there was no telling of her story. We have to make sure we keep some of those houses and tell some of those stories. What happened to Betty on that day? How long was it before someone came along and took her somewhere else to sleep? Where is she living now? How hard was it to find another place? Is she happy? We have to tell those stories.’

Evidently, CERA is looking for homes with some damage that can be made stable and preserved. ‘We’re onto that at the moment. Which houses will we save, and which stories will we tell?’

A CERA staff officer immediately signals caution and that the idea ‘is purely a concept and Roger has had only a very preliminary discussion with CERA staff’.

It’s unsettling. Homes are like babies: everyone believes theirs to be the most beautiful. It’s natural to want your home to be the one chosen for preservation, but the idea seems to fade, along with the verandahs and lemon trees.

THROUGH ALL THIS, some people cling on. Donna, for instance, who until October 2013 remains in her house on the corner of Bangor Street and Oxford Terrace with her husband Lex and their two dogs, Niko and Zeus. A white-painted, double-bay villa, verandah, spacious hallway hung with paintings. One is a large oil, dating from before the quakes, in which the city’s old buildings hover like something dreamt. Donna loves old buildings, their story and their form. She is an artist, trained originally as a ticket writer but now working in many mediums. No. 406 Oxford Terrace has been their home for twenty-four years, since the day she spotted the place in a real estate magazine.

She was pregnant and they were looking for a house, ‘a cute house somewhere’, not necessarily in the Loop. ‘We didn’t know anything then about the Loop. It was 1989. It wasn’t specially trendy to live in the central city.’ But that day, they walked in and fell in love. They bought it that afternoon.

They raised two sons there. ‘Quite soon after we got here, Jack Locke came over and said, “When you have the baby, come to playgroup.” That’s where I met the other mothers.’ She reels off a long list of their names, and those of others she came to know within the Loop: Jenny and Mervyn, Michelle, Cathleen, Doug and Barbara, Siobhan, Alison and Mike and Robin. She mentions midwinter dinners at the Community Cottage, markets in Walnut Tree Park, Christmas parties for the kids at the playgroup. ‘Elsie said, “When you live here you can have as much or as little to do with the community as you like.” After the quake it was common to hear people say that they had finally met their neighbours, but we already knew each other.’

At the time of the first quake, Donna and Lex were renovating the kitchen and in the midst of painting. The instant is marked by a kind of inadvertent timeline above the kitchen door, where sisal brown gives way to white undercoat. ‘I stopped because there were cracks everywhere.’

The February quake caused further damage. It struck with force, buckling floors and walls and sending Niko off, barking, out the door. She ran after him. The dog raced along Oxford Terrace and into a house where she found him beside one of their neighbours, who lay dying and being revived as his pacemaker switched into action, over and over, while the ceiling overhead flexed dangerously, threatening total collapse. Donna dragged two chairs to form a hasty shelter where she and Niko, with his big husky body and brown eyes, protected their neighbour until someone knocked on the door and they were able to carry him out onto a mattress on the deck. There’s a medal awarded by the mayor and council for bravery. Donna’s name is on it, and though dogs were not given such awards, she had the engraver add Niko’s name beneath her own.

Their house remained liveable, though there was liquefaction in the garage. ‘It filled up with about half a metre and it set like concrete. We’d stored some stuff out there and I spotted the toaster. The plug and cord were poking out but I couldn’t pull it out. It took ten people two and half hours’ hard digging to clear the garage.’

For several months, they lived within the security cordon erected round the central city. A weird time.

‘One day, early on, Lex came in and said, “There’s a tank. They’ve got a tank!” I said, “Don’t be silly.” But then I looked out the window and there was this tank, gun and all, coming down Oxford Terrace. I mean, I know they had to protect property, but who were they going to blast away with that big gun?’

There was the curfew. The Loop was for a time without sewerage, water or electricity. Without street lights, the nights were dark, and they had to be home by six o’clock.

‘They never issued IDs so it was awful trying to get in or out. Every time we went to the dairy for the milk we had to go through the routine with the soldiers at the entry point on Kilmore Bridge. They could be really tough. Lex’s brother and niece died just a few weeks after the quake and a friend who had moved from the Loop to a house outside the cordon tried to bring a sympathy card. She was seventy-eight, but they refused to let her through. We wanted to bring in a builder to check that our house was safe but we couldn’t do that either, until after weeks of this, I went out one morning with the dogs. They had begun to recognise the dogs, so I gave the builder one of the dogs and Lex’s hat to wear and the guards let us both through and he was able to reassure us that the house was fine.’

Once the cordon was lifted, life became simpler, but there was the new tension of waiting for almost a year to hear the final zoning decision. They coped by having a Red Plan and a Green Plan. The Green Plan was stay where they were. The Red Plan was move away entirely, 400 kilometres to Nelson.

The Red Plan it is. Today, as we sit talking in the incomplete kitchen, the boxes stand packed in the living room. They are the last of their neighbours to go. ‘We thought we’d be the first, but we’re the last.’ Their home is surrounded by cleared sections and abandoned houses. Alison and Mike have deconstructed the brand-new home they built just along the street. It is stored, undamaged, in a container and maybe, some day, it will be rebuilt somewhere. But for now, it waits and the section is gravel where some of Elsie’s garden plants push through for a final blooming. Doug has gone, and Siobhan and Jen and Merv and all the others. They have left small pieces of their homes with Donna. A number from a letterbox, a little metal sculpture that once hung on an exterior wall, some fence pickets. She is creating a collage for the wall of the Community Cottage, which has escaped red zoning by a few metres, along with all the houses on that side of Hurley Street. The wash of crimson on the assessors’ map did not reach that side of the road.

Donna and Lex have stayed on, having filled in the five-page application required by CERA for those in the Red Zone who need to remain in their homes a little longer than the deadline for removal.

The Chief Executive of CERA may consider

short extensions to agreed settlement dates on

a case-by-case basis, based on vulnerability

and individual circumstances …

Section 5. Please describe the barriers and

obstacles you are facing in vacating your

residential Red Zone property by your agreed

settlement date. Please attach copies of

supporting documentation.

Section 6. Please outline the steps you

have taken to try and address the barriers

and obstacles you are facing in vacating

your residential Red Zone property by the

agreed settlement date, including temporary

accommodation if permanent accommodation

is not available.

Section 7. Please detail any particular vulner-

ability which may affect you or members

of your household. Please include copies of

supporting documentation, such as from

your GP …

Please note that while your request is being

processed you will need to continue to

progress towards your agreed settlement

dates as per your Agreement for Sale and

Purchase with the Crown. If your extension

is not granted you will still need to vacate

your property and settle on the agreed

settlement date …

Donna shows me her application. It’s a little crumpled, having spent a short spell in the rubbish bin. But of course it had to be retrieved and smoothed out and filled in. There was no alternative. They applied along with 344 other red-zoned property owners and received their extension.

We sit in her half-renovated kitchen two weeks before they leave for good. As we talk, a massive shadow crosses the window. It’s a tourist bus. CERA have granted a concession to a company to run tours through the Loop. It lurches off down Oxford Terrace as the dogs bark wildly and scratch at the front window, over cracks and potholes left exactly as they were after the earthquake all those months before, past the cottages and cleared sections, tourist cameras snapping.

Donna has made a sign for the front fence.

THANKS JOHN. IT’S BEEN A WHOLE LOT

OF FUN. YEAH. RIGHT …

And on the kitchen wall she has written over the interrupted undercoat: lists and phone numbers in one-stroke lettering in her assured signwriter’s hand.

RING FN INSURANCE

RING FN EQC

AVON LOOP — PARK OR DEVELOPER’S

FODDER?

DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GET YOU

DOWN

And at the top, over them all:

BROWNLEE SUCKS

Before they leave she plans to cover the entire wall. It’s an ephemeral protest, lasting just as long as it takes the bulldozers to arrive, and of no significance whatsoever to the forces driving the city’s reconstruction. But for now, it’s there.

A YEAR LATER, IN SPRING 2014, Donna’s house has gone. And so have the houses of her neighbours, Siobhan and Alison and Mike and Doug and Robin and Jenny and Mervyn. Juliet’s house, the one in which I slept that first night in the city, is about to go, and all the cottages along Rees Street. The house I bought that afternoon will go, with all the houses along that stretch of Bangor Street and all the houses along Oxford Terrace facing the river.

Juliet has been photographing their disappearance. She is an expert at photographing houses and gardens for the magazines, framing images of pergolas draped in Madame Alfred Carrière or finding an interesting angle on designer interiors, but for months now, she has been coming to photograph these houses, these gardens. Hundreds of images of overgrown backyards, smashed doors dangling from their hinges, a teacup on a dusty windowsill, and sometimes I’ve come with her. We’ve walked around. We’ve talked to people.

Flurries of dust rise from cleared sections and it feels like erasure. Elsie, too, has gone. A small park by the Centennial Pool was named for her in 1997 after she campaigned to save the complex when it was threatened with closure and redevelopment. Pool and park and name have been rubbed out by the blueprint’s ‘grunty’ playground.

Trees stand on bare shingle, some tied about with yellow ribbons, for people have been told they can identify trees they would like preserved from their former gardens. I stand by the little Japanese teahouse that ornamented waste disposal with architectural fancy. It perches awkwardly on broken concrete on the riverbank like some wading bird on its rough nest. I look down the length of Bangor Street. Walnut Tree Park is still there, facing cleared space. And behind it is the Community Cottage. The breezeblock units belonging to the hotel remain, and the rich man’s house on the corner.

Through the broken window of her former home, Juliet photographs the curtains she made for the sitting room as they billow up in the draught. There are charred bricks and a gap in the chimney breast of the cottage where I installed my fire surround with its wreaths of blue roses. I find myself hoping that it has gone on, in another stage of its peripatetic existence, to a nice home. I hope it has found another Little House. I hope that all the fire surrounds and timber fittings and insignificant beloved details in all the houses in the Loop have found good homes. I hope all their former inhabitants have found places and neighbourhoods that make them happy.

The wind blows white dust over this small corner of the city, just another in its catalogue of cleared spaces.

Evidently, such Red Zone clearances have not been easy to achieve. Demolition has been piecemeal, according to Roger Sutton, because too many people were hanging on, but now ‘all areas targeted are free of residents’ and work can proceed apace.

‘Free’.

The word betrays the man. It’s the word used of vermin and pests and noxious weeds. An island rid of rats is ‘pest-free’. Those houses will no longer be, as the Insurance Council chief executive Tim Grafton puts it with equal eloquence, ‘a blight on the landscape’, but can become ‘a legacy for the community’.

If the Avon Loop does indeed become a ‘legacy for the community’, that ‘Possible Future Park’ of the blueprint plan, Donna and others to whom I have spoken who have lost their homes do not mind so much. But if the area is developed and built over, they are less resigned to their loss.

There have been suggestions in The Press of a tourist attraction in the Loop, an ‘Eden Project’ that, like the English original, would blend voguish environmental sustainability with a café and retail outlet to attract the visitors. Residential units might also be the future. Intensive housing developments are part of CERA’s plan for this eastern side of the city, part of the vision of 22,000 urban professionals strolling to the bars that are a bit like Fulham, dining in the lanes that are a bit like Melbourne, in the revitalised central city. New housing rules have been approved by the council and will form part of the government’s Land Use Recovery Plan or LURP — another acronym to add to the post-quake lexicon. The owners of between 1500 square metres and 1 hectare of land will be able to build up to sixty-five dwellings on their property.

Already, at the end of Bangor Street, an Auckland developer is building Origin: twenty-two two-bedroom units in a gated community of three parallel blocks, each promising a high-quality kitchen and a private deck. In form, they are like barracks, a simple cellular structure of repeatable units, designed to be efficient: efficient to build, efficient to inhabit. The perfect housing for that itinerant population of young urban professionals who are to inherit the centre of the city. No one will bother to inscribe their initials above these lintels for future generations of the family. Rather, these are places to ‘lock up and leave’, as if going away from your home, not actually living in it, were something to be desired.

The language of the promotional brochure, however, strikes a retro note.

‘BE CENTRED,’ it says. ‘BE SURROUNDED BY LIFE …’

‘Origin is situated on the Avon Loop, an area of natural beauty and historical significance, a quiet riverside retreat from the hustle and bustle of the CBD Rebuild Zone just a block away. You’ll be part of a friendly and tight-knit community centred around the Avon Loop Community Cottage, a historic house and garden where the neighbourhood gets together for events and a weekly playgroup …’

And so the Avon Loop enters another era.

IN THE ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND, sometimes it is useful to peer closely, and sometimes it is useful to step back: to try to take the broad view, to hold something else up by way of comparison: like with like. Like with unlike. Better? Or worse? Same? Different?

L’Aquila in central Italy is similar in some ways to Christchurch. Both are planned cities, taking shape first on paper, one in the thirteenth century, the other in the nineteenth. Both have their backs to a mountain range, and are the centres of rural regions, dependent traditionally on sheep. Historically, wool and mutton have sustained both cities and provided the basis for their wealth. Perhaps because of that rugged rural backdrop, both cities have a strong rugby tradition: since its founding during the Fascist era in 1936, L’Aquila’s team has won numerous championships and supplied many players for national sides. And now both cities share another, less happy link: both have been hit by earthquakes, L’Aquila in 2009, a year before Christchurch was jolted into the present era.

Those things are the same. Other things are very different.

In winter 2014, I went to L’Aquila. I have a friend who lives in Prato, my oldest friend, Kathryn, born a few days before me. We occupied adjoining cots in the Oamaru Maternity Annexe while our mothers, Vi and Gracie, became acquainted. I imagine that Kathryn’s voice, raised in infant protest at this strange, new, unconfined, unwatery, unmodulated existence, was among the first sounds I heard on the planet. Our lives diverged soon after, she in her bassinet to the north of town, me in mine to the South Hill. We met again when we were eleven, paired for cooking classes at our new junior high school. Our scone dough glued itself to the benchtop and it was so funny, we were so hopeless and anyway we were never going to make scones again ever in our lives, we were silly little girls, we were being immature and inconsiderate and we would have to stay behind to tidy properly, scrape and scrub.

So we did, and it turned out we both wanted a pony. And we both loved Nigel Molesworth, a grotesque little cartoon figure by Ronald Searle. We formed a Nigel Molesworth Society. We read a scuffed copy of Peyton Place behind the toilets at lunchtime. We both played the piano but she was much better than me. She went on to study music at university and got a scholarship to study in Florence, where she met an Italian architect and now she lives in Prato and they have a son, the handsome politician, Gabriele. She works at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, near Florence. I love the breathy sound of her voice and the way she purses her lips when she is telling a joke. I wish I saw her more often.

When I was wondering about visiting L’Aquila, I rang Kathryn and asked if she knew anyone from the city. I speak rudimentary Italian — I can ask for a meal, or the way to the station — but I knew that to even begin to understand an Italian city, I’d need a guide. Someone who knew the place with all the little crevices and secrets concealed in those centuries of golden stone. Who knew it the way a child born and raised knows a city.

Kathryn did know someone: Francesco, a musicologist whose family has lived in L’Aquila for centuries. He would be happy to show me his city.

So I went.

THE SIX O’CLOCK TRAIN FROM Terni is a local commuter train, like so many subway carriages making a break for it into the mountains. It rattles slowly along the sides of hills covered in the vivid green of early summer, walnuts with their big generous leaves, acacias heavy with the white blossom Italians eat at this season in perfumed, deep-fried frittelle.

To the west lies a wide valley, sprinkled with houses, and beyond them the foothills and then the distant peaks of the Apennines, still tipped with snow. The train clatters over deep gullies, stops briefly at the foot of hillside towns in those paintbox colours: faded ochre, burnt sienna. Above them loom crags of limestone, some gashed by quarrying. We are cutting across the centre of this narrow country on a rough diagonal from north to south, following the old route to Naples, the Via degli Abruzzi. Today, the traffic hugs the coast, roaring down the autostrada, but not that long ago, the coast was cloaked in malarial marshes and their deadly mosquitoes, and an eleven-day journey by horseback or on foot through the centre was preferable to that.

The land is intensively cultivated, the gardens alongside the railway flourishing. Each little plot has its orderly rows of potatoes, corn and broad beans. There are vines, too, and figs and olive trees, a blend of hotter and cooler climes. Everything is lush and green this early in the season before the desiccating summer heat leaches colour and coats everything in a fine dust.

Chattering groups of teenagers climb on to travel a few stations up the line before straggling off to do whatever it is the children of such villages do, in the years before they fledge. It’s a holiday weekend, the Festa della Repubblica, anniversary of a significant moment in the country’s history, when Italy declared itself a republic in 1946. I’m vague about the details, but then my knowledge of Italian history is some fifth-form memory of bearded men in red shirts, Garibaldi pointing the way north — another of those tales we were told of hopeful little bands fighting desperately against great odds for a noble cause, for words like freedom, equality, justice.

I saw him just yesterday, aloft on a plinth on the Janiculum hill surveying Rome and lauded with laurel wreaths. A few metres away down the hill his young wife is galloping wildly on her bronze steed, side saddle, with her newborn baby clasped in one arm while the other is raised aloft, brandishing a gun. Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro di Garibaldi. Anita. Mother of four children, fiery comrade in the struggle against oppression, first in Brazil and later in Italy in the miraculous year, 1848. There she is, one of the few public statues of a woman I’ve ever seen, and certainly the only one on horseback. She flees from her captors, leaping toward the future, hair flying. In her studio portrait she’s dressed in a sharp white suit with practical trousers, jacket and slouch hat. She looks young and pretty and tough. She is buried here, beneath the plinth, dead of malaria in the swamps of Ravenna in a low point in that struggle for the big words: unification, freedom, independence. Dead at only twenty-eight.

Her inheritors cluster by the doors of the train, teasing, giggling, consulting their phones. The train slows, comes to a halt at Greccio, Contigliano, Cittaducale. The doors slide open. They sling their bags over their shoulders and saunter off into their lives. The train moves on, into one tunnel, then out, into another, then out, threading its way through the hills.

And suddenly, there it is: L’Aquila. The eagle. Though the name is as likely to refer not to the noble bird but to the multitude of springs and creeks, the acculae, that flowed down from the hills to join the Aterno River on its way to the Adriatic. The city passes in and out of view as the train rattles down from the pass, built upon a hilltop and spreading around its base. The landscape is dotted in an apparently random fashion with apartment blocks and those anonymous white concrete buildings that could house light industry or medical care or shelves full of merchandise of some kind. I had read that the town was sited on a former lakebed and was prepared for a smooth saucer-shaped profile, but this is rockier stuff. More up and down. Foothills curve back towards the Gran Sasso — the Big Rock — d’Italia, the highest peak in the Appenines. The train accelerates across a plain, then slows, and we draw into a station. Above us stands the town, its skyline punctuated by the giraffe heads of cranes.

I walk along the road to my hotel, which is only 100 metres or so away. There’s no traffic and the footpath hugs the base of a city wall, propped up by wooden scaffolding where it sags and threatens to fall. After a bit there’s an archway, a gate just large enough to admit a single car. I walk through into a tiny square cobbled in those small stones the Italians call sanpietrini, little St Peters, for the saint who was the rock on which Jesus planned to build his church. Small cubes of volcanic basalt, laid in swirling feathery patterns. They are tough, they permit water to drain away between the cracks, they adapt to irregularities in the surface and to the movement of the ground should it decide to move. They are also fiendishly slippery after rain and lethal in high heels, so not universally admired. But here, in early evening, carpeting the square and swirling ahead up a steep road, curving for the corners, they shine and are beautiful.

On one side of the square there is a chapel, plain faced, of white stone: an arched door at the centre, a roundel above and on either side beneath a frieze of small carved pennants, two sundials, sketched in long, diagonal criss-crossed lines with astrological signs: Capricorn, Libra … The church is dedicated to San Vito, patron saint of dancers, comedians and epileptics.

It’s a curious place, mysterious and austere, but it’s not what first catches the eye. Across the square, broad, shallow steps of those slippery sanpietrini lead down to a fountain, an enormous declivity surrounded on three sides by high walls of pink and white chequerboard marble. All around the base of these walls runs a double tier of stone troughs, surmounted by a frieze of ninety-nine carved heads: horses, lions, knights, ladies, monsters, each with a pipe clamped between its teeth from which flows a steady stream of ice-cold water. The air is sweet and cool and loud with the splash of it.

The Fontana delle 99 Cannelle. One of the principal glories of this city.

L’AQUILA WAS A PLANNED CITY. It traces its origin not to some Victorian colonial theorist, but to a Holy Roman emperor, marking a corner of his territory. The Hohenstaufen monarch Frederick II, Emperor and King of Sicily, not to mention large areas of Germany, northern Italy, Burgundy and Jerusalem, founded the city in 1240 as a bastion on the border with the Papal States, with whom he was in more or less constant conflict. The popes fought back with the weapons at their disposal, excommunicating him four times, to no apparent detriment. One pope sneered that Frederick was a man who ‘wished to rule the world while remaining seated’, but a brief examination of his relatively short career — he died at fifty-five — does not bear it out. It was a life crammed with war and crusade, and here in the region of Abruzzo, the establishment of a city.

Tradition has it that he selected a fine defensive site on a promontory and then peopled it with the inhabitants of ninetynine surrounding villages. The exact number has been disputed — maybe it was more like seventy-five — but ninety-nine sounded better to the medieval ear, being one of those mystical numbers: thirty-three times three, a symbolic figure. However many there may have been, the process is clear: a number of villages took possession of areas within the new city, each gathered around its own church, piazza and fountain, making of the city as a whole a federation of fractions. The frazioni have endured in an intense, localised neighbourhood loyalty that runs deep.

Frederick planned his city as such frontier cities have been planned for centuries, on that Hippodamian grid of streets meeting at right angles. A wide central avenue runs along the crest of the hill at a gentle slope across a central square for worship, markets and public life. Narrow streets cross the avenue at right angles, lined with stone buildings — shops on the ground floor and living upstairs for the resettled villagers.

The city thrived. It had a strong religious presence, drawing pilgrims to large and beautiful churches dedicated to charismatic men. It also functioned as a market town for an agricultural region famed for its sheep, who dawdled in flocks of thousands from the valleys each summer up into cool mountain pastures and returned each autumn before the snows came. The region bred cattle too, big silvery grey beasts with harp-shaped horns. And horses. Crops of fiendishly fiery red peppers and saffron flourished, each purple flower bearing its precious, fiddly scarlet stamens. On the export of these crops, and the crafts that developed around raw materials like leather, wool and silk, the city became wealthy. Its craft guilds were powerful and part of an unusually broad-based governing council.

The arts of civilisation were cultivated here. L’Aquila was quick to seize upon that dazzling new technology, the printing press, introduced by one of Gutenberg’s assistants, and rapidly became a centre attracting highly skilled specialists in the dissemination of knowledge from all over Europe. Merchants and religious orders built fine churches, nobles built their palaces as a scrummage of rulers of French, German, Austrian, Spanish and English origin vied for control of the region. The evidence of conflict lies outside the city in the countryside, where, unusually for Italy, hilltops are held by castles. Despite repeated invasion and plague, the city prospered, poised on that trade route between north and south.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century L’Aquila was a small city of around 72,000, augmented by a large student population of 20,000 enrolled in a university that had been founded in 1952. Departments of biotechnology, science, engineering, humanities, economics, medicine and sports science occupied abandoned palaces. After the war, the city had been shrinking for several decades as nearby villages emptied and rural people sought a less picturesque but easier life in New York or Sydney. The university was part of L’Aquila’s revival. It helped to sustain a vibrant musical and artistic life. It is a small city, only a sixth the size of Christchurch, but it possesses a symphony orchestra, a fine arts academy, a music conservatory, several choirs, a film institute and a nationally respected theatre, the Teatro Stabili di Abruzzo.

L’Aquila was also sustained by its role as the administrative capital of its region. In Abruzzo, farming now mingled with light industry specialising in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and components for the aerospace industry. Tourism, too, played a part. L’Aquila has never been, perhaps mercifully, on the international tourist map, unlike the Tuscan stars to the north. But it has a quiet beauty. This is a region where Italians come to hike in the summer in the national parks that, since 1922, have spread over mountain slopes and abandoned pasture. In the winter, Romans come here to ski.

THE FONTANA DELLE 99 CANNELLE, which remembers the founding of this city, had a practical as well as a symbolic purpose. It was a place to fill a bucket, to do the laundry. There are photos taken only a few decades ago of women scrubbing at the long troughs, their sheets laid out to dry on the broad steps. This evening as I cross the square it’s to a fading echo of women’s voices, the smack of wet linen, red arms scalded with cold, the squeal of children playing on the slippery cobbles.

Tonight there is only the sound of water. No mopeds grinding gears to climb the road leading to the centre of town. No television chatter from the houses up the street, no clatter and hum. The fountain is deserted, and it is not just because of the passing of history and the advent of the washing machine. The whole town is silent. On 9 April 2009, on just such a night, at 3.32 a.m. the city was jolted from sleep.

Two great tectonic plates underlie this region. It is another thing L’Aquila shares with Christchurch. Both are cities on narrow stretches of land thrust up by planetary movement. Beneath Abruzzo lies the junction of the European and African plates, and for twenty-two seconds they exploded into action. A 6.3 quake took the city in its grasp. Three hundred and nine people were killed, including eight students crushed in a modern concrete-slab dormitory at the university. More than 1500 in the city were injured and by morning 65,000 people from a total population of 72,000 had been rendered homeless.

That quake was not unexpected. Italy is the most seismically volatile region in Europe, with four active volcanoes and numerous earthquakes. They have been recorded over thousands of years, so much part of life that classical writers developed words to define specific characteristics, just as Inuit were reputed to have 41 words to express the nuances of omnipresent snow. ‘Ostes’ were quakes that manifested with a single violent shock, ‘palmatias’ produced a slight shaking, ‘rhectae’ were quakes that left fissures in the earth, while ‘chasmatios’ created chasms. ‘Epiclintae’ were quakes with a marked horizontal motion, ‘concussio’ shook violently, and the defining feature of quakes called ‘mycemetias’ was their rumbling. The Eternal City itself has been shaken repeatedly. That’s why there is that big bite out of one wall of the Colosseum. It collapsed during a quake in the fourteenth century, depositing a handy load of worked stone that resourceful Romans carted off and reused in surrounding buildings.

L’Aquila has been devastated several times since historical recordkeeping began: in 1315, 1349, 1461, when an eyewitness reported ‘all the houses and many fine churches fell to the ground’, in 1646 and overwhelmingly in 1703, when perhaps 5000 people died and the city was reduced to rubble. Its modern appearance owes much to the style of rebuilding following that quake, in Baroque fashion blending classical columns and architectural detail with a certain cool austerity. More recently, in 1915, the region was shaken by a quake that killed 30,000 people, 12,000 of them in Avezzano only 50 kilometres south of L’Aquila. Avezzano was at the epicentre and lost 96 per cent of its total population.

L’Aquila, therefore, is a city where the people, like New Zealanders, live intimately with earthquakes. They, like us, know that they stand on shaky ground.

IN THE MORNING, I WALK up the road into the city. The little lava cobbles feather round the zigzag turns like something fluid, like water. Not a single car passes. Houses stand empty-eyed behind wire cordons, their gardens dry grass and weed. I cross a ring road beneath a high viaduct sagging at one end around cracked concrete. Up here, the street is lined with post-war blocks of three or four storeys, some with small business premises on the ground floor. The signs remain: a hairdresser, electrical repairs. Windows are boarded up or broken as if there were nothing inside worthy of protection, just as at home cups remained unwashed on café tables, papers lay scattered on office desks, a mattress lay gutted in the garden of an abandoned flat. What once had value, no longer has value. It is all just stuff. Walls here are marked with the same enigmatic civil defence signs — 1.v.24 — you see at home. Signs rapidly scrawled in yellow or red, like those the Hebrews drew hastily in blood upon their walls, willing a vengeful God to pass over.

The cranes rise overhead, slender and motionless on this holiday weekend. The city is so unnervingly silent. Narrow alleys run at right angles to this street, still piled high with rubble and the random objects of twenty-first-century abandonment — a plastic dish rack, a CD, a shopping bag stuffed with mildewed clothing — and there is that scent of damp stone and decay that feels like the essence of tears. Many of the alleys have a kind of makeshift verandah of wooden scaffolding at second-floor level, forming a trough to protect those passing beneath from falling stones or tiles. They meet in the middle and make the streets into dark tunnels leading to a distant patch of light.

The city has been vacated. When the quake destroyed their homes, 65,000 people were forced to move wherever they could. The government arranged for temporary accommodation in hotels on the Adriatic coast. Some people moved in with relatives or to holiday homes. Wherever there was level ground — in city squares, in parks or surrounding fields — 171 tent settlements, the ‘tendopoli’, arose, to house some 20,000 people while the government hastily set about providing something more substantial.

You cannot get private insurance for earthquake damage in Italy. Instead, responsibility for rebuilding homes falls squarely on the shoulders of central government. In L’Aquila, the government’s first move was to construct apartment blocks in the surrounding countryside: MAP (Moduli Abitativi Provvisori) buildings, made of cheap materials, intended to act as a temporary solution, lasting only until homes had been repaired or rebuilt. And 185 CASE (Complessi Antisismici Sostenibili ed Ecocompatibili) buildings providing 4600 quake-proof apartments for 15,000 people on nineteen different sites around the city, which Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi hoped would form the basis of permanent settlements.

Both schemes have since come under fire: MAP houses for being so shoddily built of inferior materials that some have proved uninhabitable, the CASE settlements for being constructed in haste on sites chosen simply because they were available at the time. Tenders were awarded for CASE construction on the basis of quake resistance and strength but insufficient attention was paid to the provision of services like shops or health centres or access to public transport or premises for the re-establishment of those same small businesses — the hairdressers, the electrical repairs — that had sustained the urban community. Some complexes have had to be vacated, their roofs split open, rain pouring in. Builders have been taken to court, accused of price gouging and poor workmanship.

But the schemes have supplied a need: rent-free, fully furnished interim accommodation, while homes in the city await repair. The CASE may be cramped or inconvenient but they are a home, in a country accustomed to private home ownership. Unlike New Zealand, where only 49 per cent of us now own some version of the quarter acre pavlova paradise, 80 per cent of Italians own their own home. Five years on from the quake, the neighbourhood communities of L’Aquila remain dispersed while the centre stands empty. People live on in their temporary homes, still paying mortgages on ruined properties, while the notion of what ‘temporary’ might mean extends into the future, just as it does in Christchurch. This year, next year, sometime, never … No one knows when the people of L’Aquila might return. Some reports mention thirty years.

I walk uphill through abandonment, the same gritty dust crunching underfoot that feels exactly like home and the wire cordons and the signs prohibiting entry, the signs naming the companies who are at work on this site, the signs labelling this the Zona Rossa, the Red Zone, the signs reading ‘Lavori in Corso’, work in progress. Larger buildings are sheathed entirely in plastic as if they have been wrapped for safekeeping on a shelf, which is precisely how it is, for nothing in this city is to be demolished. The entire place is to be rebuilt, stone by stone. On some, the image of the façade that lies beneath has been screenprinted to actual size. A little breeze drags at the wrapping, and the plastic bellies in and out as if breathing.

A man is walking downhill towards me with a terrier on a leash. We stop to talk, the only people on the street. He was born here, he says, gesturing toward one of the side streets, but now he has a new apartment in Onna. It’s a village nearby. I have seen it on the map. Forty people died in the quake in Onna. His apartment there is comfortable but he comes back every week just to walk about here, in his old neighbourhood. ‘It’s so quiet,’ I say. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The silence of the tomb. Brutto. Molto brutto.’ It means ugly, but it sounds worse in Italian. Thuggish, aggressive, an assault on the senses.

Up ahead at an intersection there is some movement. People are strolling up and down, there’s a café open. The Corso is a pedestrian boulevard along the crest of the hill, lined on either side by public buildings of dignified eighteenth-century demeanour, their ground floors recessed for several blocks to form a continuous arched porchway. The street has that theatrical air you sense often in Italian towns. It feels like a stage set, with its centralised perspective bordered by structures of uniform style and dimension. This is a place awaiting the entry of a cast of characters: a figure in velvet coat and knee breeches emerging from the wings that are the side streets to stride purposefully towards the Piazza Duomo. A group of women in long skirts and white aprons bearing their washing in baskets back from the fountain down the hill. Or some ragamuffin children, barefoot, racing from downstage left, in pursuit of a cat. The Corso was planned before the car, for people and conversation. I am at the heart of the city.

FRANCESCO AND I WALK THE length of the Corso. We join the Sunday crowds strolling between empty buildings, boarded up or protected by cordons. From time to time, we pause when he meets an old school friend or someone wishing to enquire after the health of his father. The Corso has always been a meeting place. ‘When I was a boy,’ Francesco says, ‘we always used to meet here “sotto i portici”, under the arches.’ It has always been the setting for the essential Italian ritual of the evening passeggiata, the leisurely walk, stopping to chat with friends and neighbours as the sun sets and the business of the day is over. People still come here from the CASE and the suburbs to wander, to reconnect, but in circumstances that have altered radically since 2009. The fabric of the city has changed and with it the routines of urban existence, those little patterns of human behaviour we bag together and call civilisation. They have changed here, just as they have changed in Christchurch.

For two days, we walk about the city. We hold our respective homes up to the light. Same? Different? Better? Or worse?

Francesco is an expert in sacre rappresentazioni, those early forms of drama developed by the medieval and Renaissance church to convey the stories of the Bible to people unable to read them for themselves. He was born in L’Aquila, where his grandfather worked as an architect in an office in one of the buildings along the Corso. ‘Up there,’ he says, waving toward a second-floor window above the portici.

Among his ancestors were people who lived in the region so long ago that the time of their arrival is unknown. This is an ancient place of human habitation, home to a pre-Roman succession of tribes who have left behind house sites and grave mounds and the weirdly inexplicable objects of the unrecorded past — notably a life-sized figure with fat hips and muscled legs wearing an enormous broad-brimmed hat. The warrior of Capestrano, symbol of the region.

Other ancestors arrived more recently. There was an Austrian courtier who perhaps came to the city in 1570 as part of the entourage of Margaret of Austria, illegitimate daughter of the Habsburg Charles V and a powerful woman who became for a time governor of the city. There was a young and wilful Spaniard who came when the city was under fiercely repressive Spanish rule in the early sixteenth century. This is a frontier city with a swirling history of governance that is printed in the DNA of its inhabitants.

I walk with Francesco up to the highest point where the Spaniards built their castle. The walls of the Forte Spagnolo are 14 metres thick at the base in a deep dry moat. The fort sits heavily on the peak, like a heavy fist expressing iron rule and imprisonment without hope. There is a park around it, with gravel paths and pine trees. Francesco tells me that traditionally this was an area avoided by Aquilani until the 1930s, when the city’s Fascist administration set to landscaping this corner of the city. They created the park and, in the valley below, a sports complex. Ski fields were opened in the mountains to attract tourists wishing to try the new elite sport. In a square adjoining the park the authorities erected a fine statue of two women bearing aloft a water vessel. Their bodies are lean and muscled, perfectly framing the mountains in the distance, emblems of the fit and healthy New Italy.

In 2009, the castle housed the city’s museum and a concert hall, but in the quake those massive walls split and the building was closed. The park fell into disrepair when the city was so abruptly abandoned in April 2009, but a year later, the people returned to the squares and public spaces of the city, to clear rubble and mess. It was a gesture of protest at official inaction within the Zona Rossa, and triggered by a media report of a conversation recorded just after the earthquake between two Roman businessmen expressing their pleasure at the prospect of the profits to be made. ‘You don’t get an earthquake every day,’ said one. ‘I was laughing in my bed at 3.30 a.m.,’ said the other.

On 1 February 2010, hundreds of Aquilani forced open the cordons around the Zona Rossa and entered the rubble-strewn Piazza Palazzo fronting the town hall which they had not been able to access for the past ten months. They hung the keys to their former homes on the cordons in protest. They bore signs. ‘Io non ridevo’ — I wasn’t laughing. And ‘Le macerie sono nostre’— It’s our rubble.

A week later, alerted by Facebook and Twitter, an even larger crowd gathered: 6000 students and citizens, armed with a few wheelbarrows, buckets and shovels, began to clear the mess themselves, forming long bucket lines. ‘Il Popolo della Cariole’ the media dubbed them, the People of the Wheelbarrow.

From then on, each week they returned to the centre to remove the mess from their streets and squares, and on Sunday evenings they gathered in the central Piazza Duomo to discuss ideas, for online contact is one thing, but the piazza, like the marae, cannot be bettered as the place for proper debate. And in doing so, the citizens of L’Aquila signalled with absolute clarity their intention and their right to be part of the planning process within their own city.

It sounds familiar. Like the Student Volunteer Army that assembled, also via Facebook, to dig out liquefaction in Christchurch in the days following the September and then the February quakes. And the farmers who brought water when supplies in the city were contaminated. And all those groups that formed to help their neighbours or to query the machinations of the insurance industry and its role in the rebuilding of their homes.

Up here around the Spanish fort, the Aquilani clipped and tidied and planted flowers, as guerrilla gardeners in Christchurch have greened the rubble with patches of marigolds and daisies.

On this sunny morning the people of L’Aquila have fully reclaimed their park. They jog about the perimeter, sit on the benches to talk or watch their children kicking a soccer ball in a mini-pitch among the pines.

Off to the left, at the edge of the trees, there is a strange building of wooden slats striped pink, blue and yellow. It looks like three cubes that have tumbled from a great height and come to rest, one tipped up onto one corner, the two others placed against it at odd angles. It looks in this city of old stone immensely frail, but to my eye also weirdly joyous, like a striped circus tent.

It’s the work of Renzo Piano, the Italian architect who also created the Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its startling inside-out playfulness of ducts and pipes and technology fully exposed, and more recently, the even more amazing spike that has risen in London, the one that people have immediately named ‘The Shard’. The Shard is immense: seventy-two floors, 244 metres high, the tallest structure in Western Europe, a vertical city of commercial, hotel and residential space that punctures London’s skyline, like a sliver of clear glass among all that brown brick and concrete. It is one of Ken Livingstone’s bequests to the city, along with the free bikes.

Here by the Forte Spagnolo, Piano worked in miniature, creating a little 238-seat auditorium for a city that had lost its concert venues. (The cube on end supplies the raked auditorium, the other cubes its ancillary services.) It was a gentle gift from another Italian city, Trento, which supplied the larch for its construction from the same forests that produced the fine timber for the violins of Cremona. It was designed to be as acoustically alive as one of those violins, a playful little Stradivarius of a building, set down on the hilltop, at least for now, for it is built on metal brackets and can be lifted up and transported as necessary. Ninety sapling larches surround it, to replace the trees that have supplied its timber.

It looks odd and incongruous and it is not to Francesco’s taste, but I like it. Those striped cubes possess a kind of Harlequin exuberance that feels Italian, another expression of that spirit that covers the façades of great cathedrals in marble stripes and patchworks of green and pink and white.

Maybe it is because I am a New Zealander and timber seems natural to me as a building material. This architectural inventiveness seems like the kind of thing disaster should call forth, like the Pallet Pavilion in Christchurch created by Gap Filler from stacks of builders’ wooden pallets destined otherwise for landfill. For a couple of summers it functioned as an open-topped café and performance venue. Piano’s auditorium is a more sophisticated creation, the work of architectural genius, but the wood and the striped effect of lathes remind me of home.

PIANO WAS NOT THE ONLY architect to contribute to the cityscape following the quake. In June 2009, only a few weeks after the event, Shigeru Ban proposed a building to house the music conservatory and a 600-seat auditorium on a site occupied by a half-completed steel-frame building. Before the quake the city possessed a wide range of performance venues, ranging from intimate auditoria, like the one in the castle, to the full-blown red velvet and gilt splendour of the Teatro Municipale.

Ban proposed building a structure using sandbags filled with clay for acoustic purposes, along with the cardboard tubes that have become his signature since Kobe, where he improvised temporary housing around local architectural traditions of building with lightweight timber and paper. In an Italian context, his plans were less at home and provoked opposition, just as they did when the cathedral chapter proposed demolishing the remains of Christchurch’s cathedral and using the insurance money to meet the $5.9 million cost of building a temporary cathedral to Ban’s design. In Christchurch, the result was a High Court appeal that found in favour of the objectors and though Ban’s ‘cardboard cathedral’ has been built and is fully functional, the argument it aroused remains bitter.

In L’Aquila, the government intervened, splitting Ban’s proposal in two. The conservatory on the half-built site was completed by the Italian Civil Protection Agency, which has much wider responsibilities than New Zealand’s Civil Defence. An abbreviated version of Ban’s auditorium, seating only 300, was constructed for €750,000 by the Japanese government on a neighbouring site.

A square enclosing a circular auditorium, it has the same simple angularity as Christchurch’s cathedral. The signature cardboard tubes have been used here to create a colonnade around the perimeter, a nod to classical Roman buildings, just as the tubes in the cathedral ceiling nod to the Victorian Gothic arches of its predecessor. In neither case are the tubes load-bearing: they conceal the steel beams of conventional commercial design.

I wasn’t able to look inside Ban’s auditorium for L’Aquila because it was closed for maintenance, but the exterior has the same temporary air as Christchurch’s cathedral. It is hard to be critical of a gift to a damaged city. Such buildings are the unadorned boxes of international aid, delivered to a desperate people. They are cultural or spiritual triage centres. L’Aquila’s two gifts serve a function, though Francesco and others are not completely convinced. They find them acoustically excellent and that, of course, is the primary purpose of a concert venue, but each is too small to accommodate the local audience for classical music. Far better, they think, to have directed money towards the restoration of one of the city’s larger permanent concert halls.

I WALK WITH FRANCESCO THROUGH the narrow streets of his city, where a scattering of shops announce ‘APERTO!’, as shops and businesses in Christchurch have announced their continued presence with ‘OPEN! Yes We Are OPEN!’ and arrows pointing the way across cleared ground. ‘We Are Still HERE!’ The letters shout at passers-by like someone paddling desperately in deep water. In L’Aquila’s centre we pass a boutique selling women’s clothing, a solitary pastry shop with elaborately iced cakes, a café that used to be a perfumery but now serves multiple roles: café in the morning, pizzeria at midday, bar for the workers on the construction sites and for the city’s students in the evenings.

We pass the city theatre, where the Teatro Stabile is advertising auditions and workshops for a production of Odysseus later in the summer. The performance will take place not in the theatre, with its fallen plaster, dusty velvet and damaged gilding, but in the courtyard of the Fontana delle 99 Cannelle, for earthquakes here, as at home, jolt people into improvisation and novelty. We pass the great basilica of San Bernardino, built to house the remains of a fierce Franciscan who won an immense following with fiery rhetoric blaming the ills of the world — plague and discord and the rest — on the machinations of the Jews and the sin of sodomy. He drew immense crowds in life, with his sweeping rhetoric and spectacular bonfires onto which the citizens tossed their vanities — paintings, cosmetics, books. In death, his remains continued to draw thousands. He became the patron saint of speechmaking. Today his sphere has expanded to encompass public relations and advertising.

We stand outside his immense basilica at the top of the broad stairs built to accommodate the faithful. Today the building is shrouded in plastic, its façade supported by a dense web of scaffolding, as are all the major buildings in the city. These are the most elegant scaffolding pipes I have ever seen. They are not plain old steel grey but black or dark green, with brass joints that glint in the sun. The city’s Baroque buildings are creations of order and symmetry, their porticoes of exactly the right proportions, height to width, their window embrasures lined along a precise horizon. The scaffolding is another dimension of order, a kind of architectural sketching of narrow lines fanning out to fill the curve of an archway, reaching the full height across the façades of palaces and churches. It amplifies what lies beneath and I find it oddly beautiful, though I know that the scaffolding, too, has been the object of criticism.

Scaffolding companies have been accused of creating over-elaborate systems, sopping up funds intended for rebuilding. An urban planner, Antonio Perrotti, complained publicly that contracts for demolition, rubble clearance and the excessive reinforcement of buildings had been subject to wheeling and dealing and handed out to favoured companies. This he labelled ‘corruption’. An EU report claimed that €494 million allocated from a solidarity fund to which various European governments had contributed to assist building emergency housing, had gone to companies linked with ‘organised crime’. Apartments had been built for 158 per cent above market value. Businessmen engaged in the restoration of two churches were arrested in June 2014, charged with bid-rigging and fraudulently influencing public officials. Officials in the city’s administration have come under investigation for falsifying accounts and receiving bribes from building and scaffolding companies. The deputy mayor was accused of taking kickbacks, and though he was acquitted, there is a swirl of mistrust in the process.

In New Zealand, of course, we don’t countenance corruption. We shrug when we read about such things in Italy and nod wisely: Ah yes, organised crime. Of course. The Mafia. It’s Italy. What do you expect? In New Zealand we are above corruption. We are pure. When tenders are handed to contractors without competitive tendering or thorough scrutiny in the media, when we hear that contractors are skimping on materials, executing quick once-over repair jobs on quake-damaged homes, registering increased profit while people live on in leaking houses, we call it ‘jobs for the boys’. We call it ‘living in a country where it is good to do business’. The effect, however, if you live in that leaking home, is just the same.

We pass doorways with signs for university departments now displaced to the perimeter. We walk through a city where only a handful of buildings have been cleared away completely. The hospital, council offices, that fragile student dormitory, industrial buildings around the city recently built of pre-cast and non-ductile concrete proved startlingly vulnerable to seismic shock. Concrete, Francesco says, is no more to be trusted than ancient masonry and he points to the walls of fifteenth-century churches and seventeenth-century palazzi to prove it.

The city retains its ancient layout. Official signs read ‘L’Aquila Rinasce’, L’Aquila Reborn, on the oldest of old dungers. There is no talk here of replacing the past with something contemporary, something ‘world class’.

We turn this way and that through an intricate map of narrow streets, breaking open at intervals into squares with fountains and palaces and churches, then back to the narrow alley. It is like moving through a living organism, with a rhythmic pulse of alternating open and closed.

It’s confusing. I’m lost in seconds. Francesco says that I’m not alone in this. Maurits Escher knew this city and the region around it well and you can sense it in those drawings he made of surreal architecture where people walk up and down and round and round in an endless geometrical loop. The artist lived near L’Aquila until his son was required to wear a mini version of a Blackshirt uniform to school and vow to defend Il Duce with his blood, when the family decided to move north to calmer climes.

We turn left and right, walk up and down, are pumped out into the glare of the Piazza Duomo, the area cleared by the People of the Wheelbarrow, reclaiming what was theirs. Not the property of the government. Not a zone controlled by the military. But theirs. The people of the city. When the authorities came up with a plan to excavate beneath the square during the rebuilding to create additional parking, the people objected so strenuously that the plan was shelved. This is their centre. They have a vigorous say in what happens here.

Today, its silvery stones are empty, except for a few market stalls selling T-shirts, CDs and cakes. It’s a tiny remnant of the market that covered the whole expanse on such days before the quake. The Duomo walls off one end, staring blank eyed over the square, having seen it all before. Its cracked Baroque façade dates to 1703, replacing the medieval original that collapsed when the plates made their last major adjustment. It was not completely rebuilt until the 1920s. But across the square another magnificent church, Santa Maria del Suffragio, is open. People pass in and out under a great web of scaffolding to an interior where the Virgin and Child in their gilded crowns glint in the light of candles and there are altars and pews before the whole is cut off abruptly by a plywood wall concealing the hole at its heart where the cupola collapsed. A metal frame like an opened umbrella rises over the broken roof, ready to support the new structure.

THE BUILDING FRANCESCO MOST WANTS to show me is also dedicated to the Virgin but its chief association is with a gentle soul, a hermit who came to this remote mountainous area to live simply among trees and streams.

The Basilica Santa Maria di Collemaggio is a short distance from the centre on a hillside where once the great flocks of the transhumance grazed on their way to and from mountain pastures. It is an extraordinary place, a vast rectangular hall fronted by a façade of the same red and white marble patchwork as the fountain with the ninety-nine spouts, only here the patchwork is even more elaborate, made up of four-sided crosses and on such a scale that the effect is hypnotic. Part of the façade is in fact a false front, standing clear of the roof like the frontages of Victorian commercial buildings back home, to permit the development of architectural ornament and to impress the viewer. It certainly succeeds. We stand at the centre of a huge grassy square to view it properly. Inside, there is damage and fallen stone and scaffolding holding the whole place steady, but the façade remains intact, interrupted by an arched central doorway flanked by two smaller ones. Above it is a circular window of that symmetrical tracery and stained glass that always reminds me not so much of roses as the amazing geometry of pompom dahlias. But it is not the façade Francesco wants me to see but a door on one side, the Porta Santa. This unassuming door forms the focus of L’Aquila’s most significant annual event, the celebration of the Perdonanza, the Pardon.

The church was founded by Pietro del Morrone, a hermit who, at the age of eighty-five, was chosen by a curia of calculating cardinals to become Pope Celestine V. He was crowned not in Rome, but here at L’Aquila in this new church, consecrated in 1288 on the spot where he had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. After just five months in the role, enduring contention and manipulation, Celestine abdicated, the only pope to do so until Benedict XVI in 2013, and returned to his previous quiet existence. But during his term he instituted a Feast of Forgiveness modelled on the Old Testament notion of the Jubilee: every twenty-five or fifty years, a year was set aside during which all sins were pardoned, prisoners and slaves freed, debts were forgiven, peace was declared between warring nations and everything could begin again from a fresh, untainted start. It’s from Leviticus: ‘And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land.’

In L’Aquila, the pope decreed that for 24 hours from the 28th to the 29th of August each year all who wished to be freed of sin should repent and confess before making their way to this church on Collemaggio, singing and dancing, where they would be granted complete absolution.

They still process each year, as the culmination to a week of festivity. In August 2014, for example, the week of the Pardon will see the centre of the city ‘joyously invaded’ by buskers from the Ferrara Buskers Festival, concerts both outdoor and indoor in Piano’s auditorium. There is ZULU Fashion, a hip-hop competition and aerosol art with DJ KONE, literary readings, photography and art exhibitions, and a rugby match in the Tommasso Fattori stadium. And finally, mayor and civic and clerical dignitaries, townspeople, representatives of L’Aquila Rugby in their team colours, and a young woman who carries the cylinder in which the papal document is sealed, process to this door. They knock on it with an olive branch, and the service of forgiveness begins.

A year after the quake, Francesco himself staged one of his sacre rappresentazioni in the basilica, which had been stabilised sufficiently to permit entry. He staged a work dating from the thirteenth century, in which the three Maries come to the tomb where Jesus has been buried and find him risen. The role of the Virgin Mary was taken by a young Italian pop singer, for that is how these things were done before music split into those deadly categories of highbrow and lowbrow. Now, once more in an inclusive era, a young woman sang the words and notes of lamentation in a thirteenth-century church and the statue that is the risen Christ was carried down the aisle with the Maries following after as the great finale. The voices sang, asking a benevolent God for protection, from plague and war and in a moment my friend Kathryn tells me took on a special power, from ‘terremoto’, the moving earth, the quake that had destroyed the homes and businesses and daily routines of the people standing within this damaged church. And as one, they rose: the hairdressers and electrical repairers, the hotel receptionists and students and academics, the people of the wheelbarrow, the café waiters and council staff, the nurses and carpenters and reconstruction workers, and they followed the singers around the church. It wasn’t planned. It simply happened because it felt like the right thing to do.

I knew nothing about Celestine V, or any other popes for that matter. Their names appeared on the Vincentian calendar that hung above our dining table but I took little of that in and by the time I was fifteen I had decided it was all nonsense anyway: medieval fantasy that could not compete with the power of scientific fact. I was just waiting for Richard Dawkins to come along and spell it out. And that is pretty much how I remain. So when Francesco showed me the Porta Santa I could only nod. Yes, it was old. Yes, it was beautiful. But yes, this notion of simply ruling a line under human failings and declaring forgiveness for oneself and everyone else sounds like a wonderful idea. It still does.

Forgiveness and retribution are a theme in L’Aquila, as they are in Christchurch. L’Aquila has become identified internationally with post-quake retribution. We talked about this, Francesco and I, as we walked about the city.

IN VOLATILE REGIONS, PEOPLE LEARN to adapt. When seismic swarms begin to gather in strength and frequency it has been habitual in Abruzzo to move outdoors to sleep, in parks or city squares, or in more recent times, in cars or campervans. Long experience renders people sensitive to signs that may or may not prove to be scientifically sound. When I was growing up we paid attention to hedgehogs. If they stopped their customary snuffling in the dry leaves outside our windows, particularly after a period of sustained sultry weather, our mother anticipated the worst. ‘Earthquake weather,’ she called it. I can’t recall if she was ever proved right.

In L’Aquila, an English biologist reported that the toads she had been studying in a local lake had completely disappeared five days before the quake. Five days later, they returned. They were sensitive, she postulated, to the presence of charged particles and gases.

She reported her findings after the quake had struck. But well before the quakes, a local laboratory technician, Giampaolo Giuliani, had also been studying gas emissions. For many years he had been measuring emissions of radon gases in a self-made network of monitors set about the perimeter of the city. In the months preceding the quake when the region was experiencing swarms of small tremors, he began to detect increasing amounts of radon emission and on 27 March 2009 he took his findings to the authorities.

The mayor of one neighbouring town, Sulmona, was sufficiently impressed to dispatch public address vans warning residents of an impending quake. The panic that ensued was such that, on 30 March, scientists persuaded the local authorities to issue a legal injunction forbidding Giuliani, as an untrained amateur rather than a professional seismologist, to issue any further warnings.

On 31 March, after a 4.1 quake had shaken the city, the government’s Civil Protection Agency called a meeting at which scientists emphasised their opinion: that such swarms were not necessarily the precursors of major quakes, but acted instead as a discharge of energy, actually reducing the likelihood of catastrophe. On the basis of that opinion, the authorities called a press conference and issued a media statement, reassuring the city’s residents. As a result, many Aquilani, against prior training and instinct, remained indoors through the minor shocks — a 3, a 3.7 — that occurred in the evening a few hours before the quake struck.

Scientists have disputed the reliability of Giuliani’s findings, notably scientists from another seismically active area, California. They have also objected to the way in which Italian justice dealt with the exercise of professional expertise. In Italy, four scientists, two engineers and a government official were brought to trial, accused of issuing unsound advice in L’Aquila that led to the deaths of at least thirty individuals, and sentenced to four years in prison. (In a recent appeal trial, they have since been acquitted.) Also taken to court were the technicians who in 2000 had renovated the fatally fragile university dormitory constructed in the 1960s, possibly of inferior concrete. They also received a four-year prison sentence.

In Christchurch, professional responsibility and retribution have been handled differently. In 2012, a Royal Commission into the collapse of the CTV building found that the tower had been constructed initially to a ‘pioneering design’ with inadequate reinforcing, designed by an engineer inexperienced with structures of more than two storeys. He was working ‘beyond his competence’, without proper direction by the consulting company’s boss, Alan Reay.

Investigation by a determined journalist, Martin van Beynen, also revealed that the man who had supervised the building’s construction, Gerald Shirtcliff, was not a professionally qualified engineer but a fraud. He had assumed the identity of an English engineer named Will Fisher, whom he had met in South Africa in the 1960s. In this guise he gained graduate engineering qualifications before working on numerous major projects in Australia and New Zealand, including the CTV building. In 2005, he was convicted of fraud after falsifying GST returns to sell a business and served twenty months in prison. At the end of his sentence he returned to Australia, resumed his false identity and continued working there as an engineer. He ‘declined to appear’ before the commission, though he has since appeared before the court in Queensland, pleading guilty to 146 charges relating to his false qualifications for which he received a fine of $500,000, plus $20,000 professional costs.

Following the September quake, the CTV building was twice inspected by engineers and judged to be safe before its fatal collapse in February 2011, but clearly there are doubts over its construction. Four years after the February quake, Shirtcliff and others connected to the construction of the building have yet to appear before a court in New Zealand, though a police spokesman has announced that charges of manslaughter and criminal nuisance are likely.

I listen to Francesco, who is certain his father remained in his home because of baseless reassurance. He stayed too, sleeping downstairs, and was saved only because two wardrobes fell at the same instant and formed an arch over his bed through which he was able to crawl. I think of the overgrown mess that for years covered the CTV site. I read the reports and watch the slow process of the law attending to responsibility and I am not sure which approach — draconian enforcement, grinding caution — is to be preferred.

ON THE CORSO, SOTTO I PORTICI, the council has erected a photographic display of the city’s major restoration projects, with black and white images of notable buildings and estimated costs of repair. One structure has already been repaired: the fontana with the ninety-nine spouts, the spring that symbolises the founding of the city. It suffered little damage and was the first structure to be restored, a priority within a few weeks of the quake, functioning once again as a symbol, this time of the city’s rebirth.

Here also is Santa Maria del Suffragio with her damaged cupola. It is to be restored in a style ‘compatible with historic tradition’ to ‘dimensions analogous to the original’. The cost for this work is projected to be €6,500,000, €3,250,000 of it donated by the government of France.

Here is the pilgrimage church of San Bernardino with its ruined belfry, cracked dome and fallen apse. Its repair is estimated at €36,000,000 and will take ten years.

Here is the Palazzo del Governo, which collapsed utterly and must be rebuilt at a cost of €45,000,000.

Here is the Teatro Comunale, a glorious confection dating from 1854, and base since 1963 for the Teatro Stabile. It is to be restored at a cost of €2,400,000.

The Ministry of Culture is undertaking to spend €150 million in the city. It will cost €50,000,000 to restore the castle, estimated completion time: eight years. €14,500,000 for the Duomo in the central square: to be finished in eleven years. €5,500,000 to repair the basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio. €25,000,000 to restore the provincial library. Some of the funding will come from the state, some from regional government, some from foreign governments and some from individual donation.

The photos stand under the arches. Forty notable buildings scheduled to be restored to their former glory. In all, around the city, 485 sites require repair, 10,000 buildings across the region. The total cost to restore L’Aquila — its homes and small businesses as well as its notable buildings — has been estimated to be around €12 billion. Around €8 billion has already been spent.

I stand making rough calculations. How does this bill stack up against Christchurch’s anchor projects, the $500 million convention centre, the $509 million rugby stadium, the $217 million sports hub, the $100 million river precinct with its London-style bars? Christchurch’s rebuild is slated to cost $40 billion. This little Italian city proposes restoring itself for the equivalent of $19 billion. What are we all getting for our money?

We meet up on the Corso with some of Francesco’s friends: Silvia who, like Francesco, was born and bred here, and her husband and two teenage daughters. They have recently returned to the city after four years in exile on the coast at Pescara, first in a hotel, then in a house belonging to relations. Silvia is an historian. For her, this has meant a 100 kilometre daily commute to teach at L’Aquila’s university. Her husband, too, has faced a long commute, while for her daughters, there have been new schools and all the challenges faced when you are eleven or thirteen and have had to move away abruptly from a place they describe, without any prompting whatever, as ‘the perfect city’.

And why was it perfect? Emily is the more talkative of the two. She describes a Sunday morning: church, then ice cream in the square, then walking to their grandmother’s for lunch. ‘You could walk everywhere and there was so much to do.’ She reaches for the perfection of simple routine and the possibilities for a child free to roam about in a compact, walkable city.

And now they are back, living in Silvia’s mother’s home, they are rehearsing a show at the youth theatre, they have met up again with all their friends. There’s a lot of drinking here, they say, and drugs and the daily reminder of destruction, but they are happy to be home again in their city, back at their old school.

It’s the same school Francesco attended, and Silvia too, though it has moved from its former inner-city site to the perimeter. It is, in the Italian system, a liceo classico.

ITALIAN HIGH SCHOOLS, IT SEEMS, have a very different format from the New Zealand equivalent. At fourteen, children choose a high school depending on their general aptitude and intentions in life: for the next five years, until graduation at nineteen, children with a scientific bent can choose to attend a liceo scientifico; if artistically inclined, a liceo where the curriculum is centred on art and design. If their intentions are law, technology or tourism, they can opt for an istituto tecnico. If engineering, agriculture, gastronomy or handicrafts, an istituto professionale. The oldest, the most traditional school, however, is the liceo classico, which has as its curriculum focus the humanities. Literature is at its core, along with philosophy, history and languages. Latin and Greek are compulsory subjects. These are all state schools. (Fewer than 10 per cent of Italian children attend private schools and those are generally run by religious organisations or international schools for the children of expats. Boarding schools are also rare: why would you send your children into the care of strangers?) All the different kinds of high school offer the final examination that permits entry to university.

It seems a million miles away from New Zealand where, since 2008, children in primary and secondary state and private schools can now be ‘Educated for Enterprise’, for example, via a programme sponsored by the Tindall Foundation, established by a man who made a fortune importing mass-produced goods and selling them in large warehouses across the country. According to the ‘E4E’ website, he had decided that a ‘new approach to learning was necessary’, because of ‘changes in society and the economy’, including the development of ‘fast capitalism — niche markets and the ability to rapidly change to meet/drive changing consumer needs and values.’ His solution was to introduce a programme for use in New Zealand schools. ‘An enterprising spirit’ would be incorporated into the standard curriculum. Resource lists supplied for teachers’ use on the website include units in which children can become ‘Bargain Hunters … Go on a class trip to a local second-hand clothing shop and purchase clothing for a themed party’. Or ‘Watch Horror Movie 101 and explore how characters demonstrate enterprising attributes’.

I wonder about the influence of a very different kind of education on the present situation in L’Aquila. The past shapes our conversation as we walk about the city. Francesco and Silvia refer to Celestine V and Margaret of Austria with the same easy familiarity that they mention contemporary politicians and filmmakers and artists or writers. Educated in the same system, the two teenagers accept without demur that the city must be restored. ‘We’re the generation who are going to have to restore it all,’ says Emily, and I wonder, listening to that, about those nebulous things, values and culture, and how they might condition us to respond when the walls cave in and the ceiling falls.

We pass the building that once housed the liceo classico on our way to visit the Palazzetto dei Nobili, one of the few buildings in the city to have been completely restored. Their former school is sheathed in a web of scaffolding supporting every arch and architrave. In one archway a bunch of fresh flowers glows in the dark, alongside a photograph of a young man smiling, just as, at home, bunches of flowers were tied to those makeshift wire cordons round the CTV site. Sites are not easily cleared of those who have died. They stay on, and the flowers that remember them.

The Palazzetto is an exquisite little box of a building dating from the seventeenth century. It was where the men who ruled this city met and planned, beneath the carved wooden wings of a massive Habsburg eagle and surrounded by gilt-framed paintings of ecstatic humanity floating toward heaven.

The Habsburgs are long gone, victims of political change and the insistent cousin-to-cousin, uncle-to-niece inbreeding that left the last Spanish emperor, Charles III, unable to talk till he was four and unable to walk till he was eight. El Hechizado, the Bewitched, drooled constantly, failed to produce an heir and died at thirty-nine with, his doctor reported, ‘a heart the size of a peppercorn, corroded lungs, a gangrenous digestive tract and a single testicle black as coal’.

His statue stands outside the Palazzetto. The poor wee man has been transformed. He strikes an heroic pose, in armour, no trace of drool, a lion curled like a tame mastiff at his mighty feet. Silvia has made an intensive study of such art: the art of manipulating reality to create and maintain the illusions of power. This artist has done a fine job. Today, he’d be snapped up by some political PR department, framing the imagery of the kindly leader, only today he would dispense with the armour for something more casual: shirt loose perhaps, beer can in hand, a man of the people. This is an artist fit for the protection of San Bernardino, patron saint of PR.

AS WE PART, FRANCESCO HANDS me a book. It’s a beautifully produced text in Italian and English recording an exhibition of paintings, statues, rare texts, ancient maps and valuable letters rescued from the rubble of the city. People had stood by and watched as the fire department using cranes entered dangerous buildings to rescue a fifteenth-century edition of Plutarch’s Lives, or applauding the reappearance of a rosy-cheeked Madonna and her plump baby, as if someone alive after long incarceration was being rescued and raised up into the light.

In 2009, there was an exhibition. In a truly dramatic gesture, the Italian government had shifted that year’s G8 conference from the security of Sardinia, where planning was already well under way, to this city, L’Aquila. Three hundred million euros had already been spent creating a fit setting for the meeting of the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, the United States, Britain, Japan, Russia and Italy, but suddenly all that was set aside. A military barracks in L’Aquila for the non-commissioned officers of the Guardia di Finanaza was hastily reconfigured, 1000 rooms were created for the attendees and their monarchic retinues, security systems were put in place and a conference room was designed. In July, only three months after the disaster, the leaders gathered around the table. And maybe it was a talk fest, pointless window-dressing, and nothing would be changed as a result of all this activity, but here they were: the heads of powerful states, seated round a big circular table, surrounded by a photographic montage of the region’s snow-capped mountains screening the exterior reality of a city in ruins.

I am no fan of Berlusconi: too sleek, too rich, with the television stations at his fingertips and the bunga bunga parties, another of these comic-book leaders of the twenty-first century, another Mr Burns, minus the acne, his skin as smooth as highly polished veneer. His administration did not always get it right. Francesco gives me other publications relating to L’Aquila that record disaster, scandals, torch-lit processions of commemoration, vehement and repeated protests at governmental ineptitude, the people of the wheelbarrows clearing rubble, impatient at endless delay …

But in relocating the G8 conference, the Berlusconi administration made the perfect gesture: world leaders seated centimetres from chaos. I look at their photograph and find myself liking them the better for being there, for surely each of them, Obama and Merkel and the rest, must have felt a tiny flicker of anxiety at the thought of coming to L’Aquila. Earthquakes are so very indifferent to status. We are all equally vulnerable before their power, yet here they are: a group of people gathered in a room. It is a new and more kindly imagery of power.

Francesco contributed an essay to the book about the city’s musical history, for a city is not simply a visual artefact but a palimpsest of sound. He begins with the crowning of the hermit Pietro and the about-to-be-pardoned singing and dancing on their way to Collemaggio. Then proceeds century by century to the present day, to Rubinstein and Rostropovich and the founding of the sinfonia and the conservatory and the sounds that continue to fill the air of the city.

The flap of plastic. The creaking of a crane. The sound of water flowing from ninety-nine pipes …

Among the other contributions is one from the under-secretary of state at the Department of Civil Protection. He mentions an earlier disaster, at Vajont. As I read this I suddenly remember the image: a savage sliver of concrete driven down between two vertiginous mountain slopes. In 1963, it was the tallest dam in the world, built to supply hydro-electric power to the industries of the Northern Italian plain, part of the post-war dream of unbridled economic growth.

As it was being built local people warned of risk. The land was unstable, prone to slip and earthquake. Already the construction was triggering minor tremors. But the dam went ahead, just as the Clyde Dam went ahead in New Zealand a few years later on unstable country, over a known faultline lying only 15 kilometres below ground, built by Rob Muldoon and a gaggle of politicians in a mood to Think Big, rather than Think Wisely.

One evening in Vajont, after heavy rain, there was a landslip. Forty-five seconds later a 250-metre-high tsunami surged over the dam and down the valley, sweeping away the villages in its path. The air pocket that preceded the surge was so strong that it stripped the clothes from its victims. Two thousand people died.

It was a childhood image of horror to match Tangiwai and the railway carriages with their passengers and Christmas parcels toppling into the swollen river. I’ve never forgotten it. But in this context, prefacing a book about L’Aquila and its restoration, the under-secretary wants readers to remember not the disaster itself, but the subsequent response. The government of that time had moved survivors to new settlements and actively discouraged people wanting to return to mountain villages that had survived unscathed. Tragedy in that instance was ‘tackled by staking everything on the future without a thought for the past … communities were scattered and historical links and bonds that asked only the chance to continue were severed.’ In L’Aquila, officialdom would take greater care to preserve continuity.

That’s why this city will be restored. They are planning for the future with reference to the past. Restoration makes sense to people in a country where hundreds of thousands of children are educated each year to see themselves as part of a tradition, rather than as individualists or entrepreneurs.

I walk around this city in the company of people for whom such thinking is so engrained as to be automatic. When I try to describe the clearance of central Christchurch, they are bemused: Silvia’s husband says it sounds like Stalinism, like North Korea. When I try in a fumble of Italian and English to describe the complexities of dealing with EQC and household insurance, Silvia says it sounds very complicated. Are there not protests? Yes, I say, but they are not directed at the government, but at the insurers who operate within the jurisdiction of the government.

In both Abruzzo and Canterbury the people have a reputation for being strong, not given to garrulousness. Francesco speaks of the ‘dignity of shepherds’ and he is proud of it, this restraint acquired by people living in a tough environment. In New Zealand, too, garrulousness is discouraged. We like our heroes to be understated: to come down from the mountain saying no more than ‘We knocked the bastard off’. Other people may have revered that mountain, calling it Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the World, or Sagarmatha, Mother of Oceans, but we preferred that masculine, unemotive ‘bastard’. Over the past four years it has become common for government and politicians to congratulate Cantabrians on their ‘resilience’. We are ‘stoical’. We are ‘strong’ and ‘southern’. To complain is to be a ‘carper’ or a ‘moaner’. It is a sign of weakness. Viewed from another city in another country, however, this resilience can also be seen as a weird suppressed passivity.

ONE CITY REBUILDS, ONE CITY tears down and in both cases it is with the absolute certainty that this will all happen again. We live in restless places.

A flick of the tail of Maui’s fish and we are lost. This island, this waka come to wreck on the primeval reef, could broach and sink and all of us, her passengers, could find ourselves thrashing about in a depthless ocean. Our settlements with their houses and CBDs are no more substantial than the nests of shorebirds: those irritable oystercatchers who scoop a nest in the sand, ignoring the evidence of high tide and its flotsam of branches and broken shell. Like them, we take a chance on getting through. The faults must shift, the volcano must blow. But we take reassurance from the talk of 600-year cycles, 1800-year cycles. They seem like good odds. We make the calculation: maybe not in our lifetime, maybe not in our children’s lifetime. Or then again, maybe tomorrow. In forty-five seconds everything could be tossed into the air.

In Italy, too, they have learnt over millennia to live with low-burning uncertainty. And there, too, stoicism has been a recommended response.

In the first century AD, a couple of hundred kilometres south of L’Aquila, the citizens of Pompeii also took their chances, building their villas with the bulk of Vesuvius at their shoulders. The volcanic soils were rich, the port was deep and convenient for trade. Twenty thousand people lived in the region, prepared to take the risk not so much of volcanic eruption, for Vesuvius had not exploded in over 1800 years, but of earthquakes.

‘Campania had always been nervous of this threat but had remained unharmed and had many times got over its fears,’ as the stoic philosopher Seneca put it, introducing a treatise on the subject of earthquakes. The portrait busts show a man with a rather worried brow, full lips and a dimple on his fleshy chin. In AD 65, he was sixty-nine, no longer young. ‘Old age is at my back and accuses me of having used up my years in fruitless pursuits.’ He now wished to ‘traverse the world, to seek out its causes and secrets’. He wished to write about the phenomena of nature: rivers and lakes, hail and snow, wind and comets and thunder and lightning. And earthquakes. ‘De Terrae Motu (Concerning the Mobile Earth)’ is one of the studies that form part of his Naturales Quaestiones.

Natural Questions is an extraordinary book. My father had a copy, one of that row of second-hand volumes in their faded grey jackets that occupied the bookshelf behind the sofa. Throughout my childhood it stood — with its brothers Livy, Catullus, Xenophon and the rest — alongside the history of the 19th Battalion, Kiwis with Gloves On and some skinny red volumes of the pre-war Thinker’s Library. Not a book I ever read. I remember those little grey volumes more for the smell of their foxed paper, the ornate font of their title pages. They were simply part of my home, like the citation from the king thanking my grandfather for making the ultimate sacrifice which hung above the dining table. I read Seneca briefly at university — a verbose and grotesque tragedy with an absurd pile-up of corpses by way of finale — and loathed it for its extremity, its bloody unlikelihood. This quieter man, this philosopher, took longer to find. It was only after I’d been shaken out of bed one spring morning that he came back, as such books do: the quieter man, thinking about earthquakes and how we might respond to them.

He is writing about an event that had taken place only three years earlier. In AD 62, the citizens of Campania were living as we live, who build our largest city on an active volcanic field, store our nation’s greatest treasures in a museum on a waterfront that rose from beneath the sea a little over a century ago, and holiday on the shores of the caldera left by one of the greatest volcanic explosions in history, an explosion so massive that it was noted by commentators in both Rome and China. We sit on the deck, admire the view, forget the volcanic cloud that rose and fell, billowing out in a pyroclastic flow that buried all the surrounding land beneath hundreds of metres of ash, overtopping the summit of Tongariro. We pour a drink. It is so beautiful, this lake, and it has not exploded, not seriously, since AD 282 …

The coast round Pompeii was equally charming, ringed with the holiday homes of the wealthiest of Rome’s citizens. On 5 February 62 BC, its citizens were calm, soothed by current belief that quakes were unlikely to happen in winter. When the city began to jolt in a quake estimated by modern analysts to have been a 7.5, it caused panic. Villas collapsed, statues split apart, a flock of hundreds of sheep died in an instant — probably from the inhalation of noxious gases — and afterwards, records Seneca, ‘people wandered about in a state of shock and deranged’. Which sounds familiar. Like the unreality of standing with our neighbours in our pyjamas as the early morning dark filled with the shrilling of car alarms. Like the hypnotic pit-pat of tramping feet on that February afternoon as people crossed the city on foot, to find their children lined up in their classes in the school playgrounds, to find the people they loved most who might also be safe and also walking towards home, or appallingly, might be one of those trapped beneath the concrete slabs, the tumbled masonry, the fallen boulder.

The quake that struck Pompeii is now largely forgotten, eclipsed so definitively by the explosion of Vesuvius seventeen years later. But at the time of that explosion, the citizens of Pompeii were busy repairing quake damage. They were mending infrastructure, dealing with cracked sewers and broken water conduits. They were rebuilding the civic centre, and it was proving a slow process. Only one temple, dedicated to Isis, guardian of the city and prototype of the Madonna, had been completely rebuilt. The forum’s major temple dedicated to the three civic deities, Juno, Minerva and Jupiter, was still undergoing repairs when it was buried beneath 30 metres of ash.

AS A PHILOSOPHER, SENECA’S PRIMARY purpose in writing about the earthquake in Pompeii was to define a mode of thinking that might ‘comfort the fearful’, for that is the instinctive reaction: fear. ‘For what can anyone regard as sufficiently secure if the world itself is shaken, if the one thing that is immovable and fixed so that it supports everything that converges on it, starts to waver: if the earth has lost its characteristic property of standing still? Wherever will our fears find rest?’

Other kinds of disaster are mitigated by leaving some means of escape. A fortress will protect us from enemy forces, a harbour wall from storm, and during plague we can move away to a safe distance from contagion. Disasters are normally particular in their impact, but earthquakes, Seneca says, are ‘greedy’. ‘They overwhelm entire regions, sometimes covering them in ruins, sometimes burying them in deep chasms. They do not even leave evidence to show that what exists no more did once exist, for ‘the soil spreads over the noblest cities without any trace of their former site’.

Unsurprisingly, they arouse fear, but that fear can be moderated by the exercise of reason. The consolations offered by the philosopher are rational, though not especially cheering to my mind. Death, he says, is inevitable, and when it comes, it will make little difference ‘whether a single stone crushes me or I am buried by an entire mountain’.

Why fear cataclysm when the cause of our death can be trivial? Why, a cut on a finger can kill us. ‘Should I panic at the sea emerging from the sea bed … overwhelming me, when some people have been choked by a drink that went down the wrong way? How foolish to tremble at the sea when you know you could be killed by a drop of water.’ Be brave, counsels the philosopher. Do not follow the example of those who have fled Campania, for who can promise that the place to which they have fled will be any more secure? Earthquakes are universal. ‘It is a defect of every piece of ground that it holds together only loosely; it is weakened by many causes and while the whole endures, parts collapse.’ It is wise counsel, though it lends poignancy to those pots of paint and plaster that were discovered, along with the bodies of their owners, buried beneath the ash and debris of Vesuvius’s pyroclastic flow. Fear and flight may, in this instance, have been the more rational response.

Nor should people blame the gods for disaster. The Earth, like our own bodies, is upset by certain defects. Fear can be assuaged by attempting to understand its primal nature, for the ‘chief cause of fear is ignorance’. The philosopher, therefore, will inform the fearful of current theories concerning the origins of earthquakes, just as in other essays he explains contemporary thinking concerning lightning, thunder and other awe-inspiring phenomena, for

is it not worth acquiring knowledge in order

to remove your fear? So let us investigate

what it is that moves the earth deep beneath

the surface … why the earth sometimes

shakes … sometimes splits apart and gapes

open … sometimes diverts into itself rivers

known for their great size … at times opens

up veins of hot water. And at times makes

them grow cold … It produces thousands of

marvels. It alters the shape of the terrain, it

brings down mountains, lifts up plains, makes

valleys swell up and raises new islands from

the deep. The investigation of this subject

has many benefits, but none is finer than the

fact that it captivates people with its own

magnificence and their motives for studying it

are not gain, but wonder …

What follows is the most wonderful catalogue of speculation, from the very earliest theories to the most recent, supported by copious reference to events around the Mediterranean.

Some have supposed the cause lies in water. They have suggested that the Earth floats upon a primal ocean like a ship, and the proof of this is that, in major quakes, springs burst forth like the leaks through planking in a hold. Seneca dismisses this theory because, if it rested upon water, the Earth would be in constant movement. He does allow that there might be a vast reservoir beneath the surface of the Earth from which all rivers flow and as proof quotes two centurions dispatched by Nero to discover the source of the Nile who, having crossed interminable marshlands in a small craft, came upon ‘two crags from which a huge volume of river water cascaded down’, presumably from this subterranean sea. Should such reservoirs be moved by slips or flooding, or be whipped up by winds penetrating through gaps in the Earth, perhaps, postulates Seneca, they would cause a quake.

Or perhaps the cause lies in air: dense clouds form like thunder clouds below ground from which fire bursts forth, shattering everything in its path. Or maybe fire burning deep within the earth consumes everything about it and when the ground is ‘robbed of its underlying supports’ it crumbles, just as a building, ‘when its joists are burnt through, or what was supporting the upper storeys is damaged … sways for a while before collapsing and continues to remain unstable until it has come to rest on something solid’.

Or perhaps the Earth simply ages and erodes, causing tremors when falling material encounters something solid, just as a ball does, bouncing off a hard surface on unexpected trajectories or, if landing in water, sending out waves on impact.

Perhaps the Earth is like a human body, in which water functions like blood and wind functions like breath. When we are well, the body is tranquil. When we become unwell, we pant and gasp, our pulse rate increases, and in just that fashion does the Earth also become agitated.

Seneca is most convinced by the theory of breath, of which there is ‘nothing more powerful in nature’. This breath nourishes all life: trees from below, and the sun and moon and stars above for whom the Earth’s exhalations are food. It gathers in ‘roomy caves’ below ground. Provided it meets no underground obstacle, it remains tranquil, but should it be blocked in any fashion, ‘it roars around its prison walls — when it has gone round examining every bit of its prison and been unable to get out, it rebounds from the place that it has dashed against with greatest force and bursts forth.’

Aftershocks he attributes to the continued but dwindling exhalation of breath, quoting the observations of ‘a very distinguished man’ who was in the bath at the time of the Pompeiian quake and noticed the mosaic on the floor of the bathroom move apart and come together and how the water that was drawn down into the cracks was forced back up again. And that, too, sounds familiar: the weird detail that people I have met mention when they recall the experience of being caught up in an earthquake. One recalls the flexing of the deck railing out at Sumner, another the tiny silt cone that exploded among the silverbeet in Halswell, another the sight of cars riding up and over a wave as it rolled the length of the main street in Akaroa. Great forces are experienced in such close focus, in the detail of a man in his bath, watching the tesserae in motion on breath or water or fire.

WITH A MIND MADE STRONG by the study of nature, comprehending why natural events like earthquakes occur, Seneca proposes that we will be equipped to live without fear and face death with courage.

What else do I need to do but encourage my

soul on its way out and send it off with good

omens? Go bravely, go with good fortune! Do

not hesitate. You are being given back. There

is no question about the fact, only about the

timing … nature that gave birth to you, is

waiting for you …

He had not long to wait to live up to this ideal. A few months after completing Natural Questions, he killed himself on the emperor’s orders. Nero had been an attentive student of the philosopher in his youth, but in maturity, he proved slightly less than the ideal proponent of stoic rationality. When a group of senators led by Piso was detected planning his assassination, Nero’s revenge was swift. Seneca was implicated, on the basis of an ambiguous comment to a secret imperial informer that his ‘life depended on Piso’s safety’. That was enough for Nero. He sent an order that Seneca was to commit suicide, which the philosopher proceeded to do, calmly and rationally, first drawing up a will, then cutting the veins in his arms and legs, talking to his friends all the while, as Socrates had done while he waited for the hemlock chill to rise from feet to thighs to abdomen. Seneca’s wife, Pompeia Paulina, followed suit, going off into another room so that they would not cause each other to lose courage. Nero somehow had word of this, Tacitus records, and ordered her not to kill herself, so she was bandaged up and survived her husband but ‘with a countenance and frame white to a degree of pallor which denoted a loss of much vital energy’.

The Questions, however, survived, with their engaging speculation, their thoughts about how we might respond to the overwhelming expression of planetary power. I have lost my father’s copy. Only Xenophon survived the cuts of shifting house and illness, old age, death, a lifetime of packing and repacking. I have another copy here on the shelf beside me as I write. It is much smarter, translated by Harry M. Hine, but still sporting a grey jacket. I like such texts. I like the creative speculation of Seneca’s questions, working out from the observation of a bouncing ball to a theory explaining seismic upheaval. I prefer them in some way to scientific certainty, for the same reason that I like the cartoons of paintings rather than the glossy result, the charcoal sketch of a Madonna where the artist’s hand seems to be moving at speed over paper or fresh plaster. You can see him thinking. I like the inventions that precede success: those images of swan’s wings and little boats to be paddled through the air or machines of paper and bamboo. They crash and kill and, of course, should I be embarking on a journey, I’d prefer to be seated in Row 66B on a jumbo jet, inflight entertainment console to hand and tonnes of complex engineering steering me heavenward, but there is something so warmly human in the hopeful optimism of the paddles and the wire.

I take a kind of deep comfort in reading thoughts prompted by an earthquake 2000 years ago and thousands of kilometres away. I like the vision of the world as a squirming thing filled with breath, not so far from the Polynesian vision of the great woman lying on her back with us all, naked as newborn kits, upon her belly. And to be honest, as I was flung from bed while the roaring grew and the walls jolted, it did indeed feel as if something live had me in its grip. That felt as true as the science of plates and vertical forces and gravity.

There is a gap between the felt experience and its written description. I have read one scientific site trying to explain that the February damage in central Christchurch was because a ‘previously unknown fault that ruptured under the northern edge of the Port Hills was sloping back like the back of a south-east facing lounge suite pointing straight at the city’. Another tries to explain the motion of horizontal layers of earth rising under immense force, the upper layers weaker, so travelling upward faster than the denser lower layers, then falling back and bouncing, as a process comparable to a ‘slap-down’ and ‘like a trampoline’. An immense physical force is difficult to convey in either figures or words.

Seneca, of course, was writing from a distance. He had not actually been in Campania, sitting in his bath watching the tiles move. Had that been the case, he might have reached a different conclusion. In that instant, some of us do indeed react with startling calm. I have a friend, a man who, in 2011, was the arts editor of the local newspaper. He was in his office in the Square when a force rose vertically beneath his feet at a peak acceleration 1.8 to 2.2 times gravity, among the highest ever recorded in an urban environment. He found himself in a building that was flung into the air, then bounced back, and around him floors collapsed and dust rose in choking clouds.

I have asked Chris what he did and he says that, as a fire warden on that floor, he and the other warden had set about finding a way out for their colleagues, pausing to rescue the cartoonist, who lay trapped in foetal position beneath fallen bookshelves. Once outside, he had walked through the city to Hagley Park, where he hoped to find his wife

On the way he had passed a fallen verandah. A man’s feet protruded from beneath its wreckage. His shoes, says Chris, were so very brightly polished.

He walked through this juddering city. In Victoria Square he was flung face down by an aftershock and lay watching as a cone rose a few centimetres from his head, bubbling water and white silt. It felt strange, unreal.

He walked past a van. He doesn’t tell me about this part of the journey until just before we go: we have been talking in a crowded café against a background rattle of cups and chatter. He had walked past a van on his way to the park, and a man had been trapped inside. When the door was levered open, the man had fallen into his arms and he had died there. How very quiet it was, Chris says, this death, in the midst of chaos. And I look at him, this kind and cultivated man, recounting a journey through a strange yet deeply familiar city, and see an aspect to him I’d never noticed before. Strength. Calm. They are indeed admirable qualities.

It is like seeing the structure of a building, the wooden arches that are revealed when the walls of a church are stripped away, the brick walls that lie beneath pseudo-classical shop frontages. Ah, you think, walking about a damaged city. So that’s what it’s made of! You see the nobility of people, the psychic structure that has been there all along, unremarked.

There’s a teacher who, like dozens of her colleagues, sat with children in the playground, keeping them calm and singing songs while they waited for their parents to arrive on foot, sometimes after hours of walking across the city, while her own family waited somewhere for her to return.

There’s the theatre nurse who, like her colleagues, carried on operating as the broken and injured flooded in and the power sources surged and faltered and who knew what lay outside the closed world of that windowless room.

There’s the young woman who knelt beneath a table over her little son, hoping only that someone good would find him and take care of him should she be killed.

There’s the woman who lay with her dog over her neighbour, keeping him safe.

There’s the young man who sat with a workmate and held his broken ribs in place so he could breathe.

Such quiet stories, and there are hundreds of them, are not told with any desire to impress but simply as an aside, mentioned almost casually during a longer conversation. And they completely alter your perception of humanity. We are not after all, it seems, horrible predatory creatures, interested only in perpetuating our own genetic code, indifferent to the suffering of others, but, in extremis, capable of extraordinary courage.

There are others, of course, who fly apart. They fail to protect or act altruistically, but attend to their own survival or panic or run about, as someone said of one of the men fully trained and charged with overseeing the emergency response in February, ‘like a headless chook’. Training is no defence. You cannot tell until that instant of peak acceleration exactly what kind of person you will be. You cannot necessarily choose to be calm.

YOU CAN, HOWEVER, CHOOSE HOW you will respond in the aftermath of disaster.

Seneca is writing about the adrenaline-charged moment of catastrophe. An earthquake is indeed spectacular. It arouses a range of extraordinary responses. But what follows an earthquake is equally demanding. Those long-drawn-out months of readjustment arouse other emotions and over these we have complete control.

Take, for example, the loss of things.

In this city, a lot of things have been lost: large things, like buildings and homes and routines and schools. And small things.

Another stoic philosopher, Epictetus, had advice for those who lose things. ‘With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific cup, remind yourself that it is only cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed.’

A lot of people lost cups in the quakes, not to mention bowls and plates and glasses. They shuffled to the edges of shelves and leapt off, smashing to the floor. People mention such losses, if they bother mentioning them at all, as trivial. ‘It’s just stuff,’ they say. Some say it has been good to free themselves of clutter, opening the way to what is new. They feel as if they have been released from the tyranny of things, of the need to maintain, keep, store, preserve.

But for others, the loss of the cup is not quite so simple. That cup might have been the perfect cup, the one that sat just so in the hand, not too heavy, not too flimsy, the one with that Goldilocks quality of being ‘just right’. That’s why that fairy story remains in circulation: because like all the long-lasting stories it tells a fundamental truth about us, that we recognise and value the thing that suits us perfectly. I have a friend who likes one cup because every morning he drinks precisely one and one half shots of coffee and that cup holds the correct amount.

Or perhaps we love a cup because it delivers a little jolt of pleasure for its shape, the curve of its handle. We leave it out on a shelf, rather than in a cupboard, for just that reason: the pleasure it gives when we enter a room and see it there. Surrounded by cups of indifferent quality, whole warehouses full of mugs and cups, whole container loads of cups and mugs, avalanches of them rattling off the assembly lines and crossing the world in their millions, billions, we choose that cup.

I have a cup the colour of fresh spring leaf that my daughter gave me one year for Christmas. It was made by a woman in Dunedin to be deliberately a little wonky, as if a sheet of clay has been furled into a tube, but it is perfectly balanced. I love it for its wonkiness and its leaf green and the way tea looks in its white interior. Our lives are made up of tiny instants of such ordinary perfection, and when such objects are destroyed, there is loss. We keep the broken pieces in a box in a cupboard. They cannot be mended, but we hang onto them, at least for a while.

So, Epictetus, it is not always so easy to dispense with cups, to say that we like only cups in general. And when you go on to counsel calm in the face of other deeper losses, I lose faith in you entirely.

If you kiss your child or your wife, say that

you only kiss things which are human, and

then you will not be disturbed if either of

them dies.

Epictetus has had a revival over the past twenty years, picked up by men of a tough military disposition. He makes an appearance, for example, in James Stockdale’s Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behaviour, an account of his seven years of imprisonment in North Vietnam. The philosopher is also echoed for popular consumption when Russell Crowe slips into the short leather skirt and goes forth to meet his death with dignity before the Roman crowd. Such masculine restraint can be noble but it can also shade rapidly into a psychopathic indifference that decides there are plenty of other wives and children to kiss.

When things are broken, large or small, they leave a wound. We can choose indifference, or we can choose remembrance or regret. I remember years ago talking to a Polish woman who, as a child, had watched as her mother farewelled their home. The trains were waiting, the ones with little chimneys on each wagon that had a special name I’ve forgotten now, but which her parents knew meant Siberia. A couple of foreign ministers — Von Ribbentrop on the German side, Molotov on the Russian — had drawn a line on a map. An empty space would be created between their two nations, a buffer zone: those living west of the line would move to Germany, those to the east, to Russia. The trains waited, the soldiers were impatient, the family’s suitcases had been hastily packed.

But as they were chivvied from their door by men just doing their job, her mother turned. She knelt and kissed the step. It was a customary thing, a peasant’s gesture of farewell. Then the trains moved on, life moved on, the mother died in Russia, the father and brothers disappeared, until only the child was left, along with a little boy who might have been her brother, or maybe not. They were found wandering together along a road near Isfahan. A truck driver rescued them. He gave them each a boiled egg. Then the New Zealand government offered asylum. They came to Pahiatua. And here she was, in her cosy flat in Palmerston North, photos of her own children on the mantelpiece, remembering her mother and how she had knelt to kiss the step of a building that remained, even then, thousands of kilometres away and many years in the past, a beloved home.

Not all houses are created equal. Not all cities are spaces and opportunity, and when they are broken, we can choose, as they have in L’Aquila, to retain.

Or we can choose, as we have in Christchurch, to start again from the scratchings of bulldozers in that silty soil.

ON MY LAST AFTERNOON in L’Aquila, Francesco drives me a little way out of the city to lunch. We will go, he says, to Assunta’s. As if we are going to the house of a friend, which is in a way true. He has known Assunta for years. She is a strong and formidable woman and, judging from the laughter around her, a very funny one. And all this goodwill is tucked away behind a farmyard, at the end of a narrow winding lane. There are no signs at all. You have to know how to get there. When we step from the car the air is fresh and cool and filled with the rushing of water. A mountain torrent splashes downhill, past rough wooden shelters with tables and benches. It forms a pool where trout flicker and gleam. They’re the menu. Trout with pasta or whole trout, a good Abruzzo wine, and when the dishes are ready, they are placed on a table by the kitchen door where only the men are permitted to collect them. The women are to sit and be waited on. That’s Assunta’s rule, and it’s her restaurant, so there. The food is delicious. We sit in this pleasant convivial place and I think that this is possibly the best restaurant I’ve ever been to. And partly that’s because of where it is, here in an eternal countryside, at the edges of disruption.

I love it as I love the café at Tai Tapu that stayed open right through the quake and the thousands of aftershocks, being ordinary with its lattes and bread rolls when nothing else was ordinary. Or Venuti, with its neon sign gleaming at the point where Colombo Street slammed into the cordons and the deep dead dark of the central city. Or Smash Palace improvising a bar from plastic sheeting and scaffolding on the corner of Victoria Street. And all those places that reasserted the primal pleasures of being with friends and talking and eating and drinking.

We eat and drink and talk, finding common ground in our shaky territories. And next morning, I leave. The holiday weekend is over and work has begun again. Builders are busy on the roof of the building next to the Hotel 99 Cannelle. There is the sound of drills and hammers and men’s voices — and not a hard hat in sight, incidentally, nor a high-vis vest. I walk back along the road skirting the city wall to catch the 9.45 a.m. train to Rome and the long flight home. Above me, the cranes have swung back into action and the sun is shining on the wide valley, as L’Aquila, yet again, puts itself back together, hoping that this time, it will all last a couple of hundred years, maybe more.

And beneath our feet, the plates grind on.

I AM DRIVING ALONG RIVER ROAD. A fresh green afternoon, the river running on my left in full spate, sweeping along with powerful singleness of purpose between cracked and slumping banks, dragging at the roots of willows, puddling in billows of cappuccino froth.

Not a deep river, nor a wide one, though deep enough. More than 200 have died in its waters since European recordkeeping, and countless others no doubt before them. Matthew Hamilton staggered in drunk in September 1851, and six months later a little girl who had been playing on the bank fell in. Robert Shanly missed his footing looking for a boat; Margaret Owens was despondent when she jumped in near the Barbadoes Street cemetery wearing, The Press reported, a dress of ‘a yellow shaded print with black spots, trimmed with black braid and velvet buttons of the same colour … a white Tuscan hat with white trimmings and a pink ribbon round her neck.’ The couture for despair. George Smith fell in because he was blind, and Arthur Watts was just trying to retrieve his hat. Several children have died navigating makeshift boats, cars have swerved and sunk, and then there have been all those babies, weighted down with stones …

This river is not all daffodils and punt trips past the cherry blossoms. It rushes past me, tangled in twigs and broken branches like some image for time and the swift current of human affairs, and here I am, in my Subaru, heading up its left bank, against the current.

I hadn’t planned on taking this route. I was on my way back into the city after picking up my sewing machine from the repairer who lives by the coast at New Brighton. He works from home, as many do these days, on a wide, flat street set down between former sandhills. On one side there is a golf course where magpies were nesting, staging Stuka attacks on the men in caps attending to the serious business of knocking a ball into a hole. On the other side were bungalows set low in the New Zealand fashion and between them, today, roared diggers and trucks. The pipes beneath the roads out here by the coast had buckled and cracked with particular intensity and now the council was at work on their repair. The street had narrowed to a single lane lined with orange cones and their festive stripes and the streamers of yellow plastic slung between made a little party of the day, out here in the spring sunshine. They garlanded a deep trench where there was a glimpse of pipes and ducting, the bones and sinews of the city rudely exposed, and the air bore that sour whiff of mould and things long buried.

I bumped between the cones to the corner where the signs nudged me away from my usual route and I found myself on a street I had never driven down before. Before the quakes and cones I’d have accelerated across the bridge onto three lanes and 60 kilometres per hour, back in time to fit in a trip to the supermarket before heading home. But today, I was nudged aside. I was off my usual map.

It happens often. For a while after the quakes, there was the phantom city. It rose whole and entire in the early morning when I lay half waking, planning the day: pick up a printer cartridge, drop off a library book, then down to C1 for 500 grams of coffee beans. Along Gloucester, down Dundas, over Moorhouse … And then I’d wake up properly. I didn’t know where anything was any more: not the cartridges nor the library nor the beans. Streets were cordoned off, then one way, then the other. Businesses relocated, friends moved, then moved again while they awaited zoning decisions or the insurance assessors or a payout or a builder. The whole city seemed to be in motion. My daughter’s friend moved so often — fifteen times in two and a half years — that her children took to asking, ‘Is this our new house?’ whenever they went visiting, and they stored their toys in the car.

The telephone directory was little help in locating the beans. It retained the addresses of the phantom city for months before revision. Driving about the city became a kind of game, a lucky dip where you came upon signs or drew a complete blank. I’m stopped at some traffic lights when I see a sign tacked to the wall: Ah ha! It’s our lawyers! So this is where they are! And is that the stationery shop newly risen across a forecourt on Blenheim Road? When you talk to friends it is often to exchange directions: this is how you get to that café, this is how you get to their street along the one-way maze, this is where they live now, in that motel.

You are denied your customary course, as I am today. And once diverted, it is easy to decide to take another road. I’ll take the slow road home. I’ll follow the river.

I’d done this before: biked the length of River Road on pre-quake Sunday afternoons, walked a stretch before work in the mornings. It was peaceful, shaded by tall trees. Men lounged on the banks in season, nets out waiting for whitebait to make their fatal mistake. Scaup dived, held their breaths and popped up at unexpected angles. Children came with bread for the ducks and dogs crashed in for the glorious splash of it all. I liked River Road.

I DRIVE AWAY FROM THE COAST, past the subdivisions of medium-sized bungalow-style houses, built, despite opposition, on wetlands at the close of the twentieth century. Past newer neighbourhoods, with grey houses of Hardiplank and tile and ornamental gas lamps lining a curving avenue. They slump, their windows boarded with plywood. Between floodbanks the river rides high, for its bed has risen while the surrounding land has fallen by up to a metre, and those houses that have escaped demolition will have to be lifted onto higher foundations if they are to avoid repeated flooding.

On this spring day, they all seem so very vulnerable. Frail shells where people have invested their savings, liking the closeness to the beach, perhaps, where they can walk the dog, or because there’s a neighbourhood school, or it’s an easy commute to work and there’s a deck for barbecues and a good-sized garage, and it’s what they want. They’ve made an offer, moved in, hung the wedding photos on walls you can paint any colour you like with no landlord to stop you. You can own your own home. It’s a common aspiration in this country, though ownership rates are falling fast. In the 2006 census, 53.2 per cent of New Zealanders owned their own home. By 2013, the percentage had fallen to 49.8. On the Wikipedia list of international home ownership rates, we come in at thirty-six, right behind the US.

I pass them now, the homes, settling into the earth among overgrown shrubs. By Kerrs Reach they look out with empty eyes at a couple of lads rowing desultorily in unison downstream. I pass a school where children hang about the war memorial commemorating other children who had grown up here, the ‘Burwood Boys who fell in The Great War’ and in the Second World War and, in one final panel, ‘all post-World War II conflicts’, just to be sure that no one will be forgotten. The girls and boys perch on the memorial benches, teasing in loud voices, young and in perfect sunlight.

Then the riverside road narrows and there are trees and people jogging and on both banks, abrupt pockets of habitation, tended gardens, cars parked in driveways, interspersed with cleared sections, patched houses, a rim of plants marking the borders of a former garden. The road becomes rough, no longer smooth black tarmac but that fine tilth that underlies the city and braids the great rivers of the region, and the road has reverted in an eyeblink to a track between ridges of shingle where the mains covers have ridden up clear of the surface and stand like little conning towers hinting at some unseen subterranean existence. The car bounces and the chassis scrapes and I take it slowly.

As I drive closer to the centre, there are Victorian and Edwardian villas built to a colonial fusion of designs: with verandahs from the Raj, for shade, ornamented with bracket and wrought lace, and corrugated iron roofs, steeply pitched to enable the circulation of air overhead. And a central hallway, borrowed from the Queensland breezeway, permitting a cooling draught from front to rear. And weatherboards that are part practical waterproof cladding, part clinker-built dinghy, yet in their detailing retain the memory of the stone of some English cottage original, with the carved flutes and planes around the window frames and the knucklebone scroll of astragals at each corner for a dignified classical finish.

There are inter-war bungalows, and they, too, have their parentage, tracing a genealogy to that Indian roadside hostel, the bangalo, the Gujerati meaning simply ‘of Bengal’. Simple in layout, cooled by low eaves, with vents beneath the gables and a verandah for shade. And here it is, transported from the Raj, refined and extended and passed on in American and British architectural publications to this riverside, in this city in the South Pacific.

Here they are with their porches and leadlights and, under the gable end, the little vent that permits air into the attic as a tiny reference to the distant Punjab, though its purpose is less necessary here, where the temperature rarely rises above 35 degrees Celsius. It remains, though, like some residual thing: like the human coccyx that hints at our long discarded, lovely waggly primeval tails. The bungalows line the riverbank, compact and scientifically designed for comfortable modern twentieth-century living. As one of their most enthusiastic proponents, the British architect R.A. ‘Bungalow’ Briggs, wrote, the bungalow was intended to be ‘an artistic little dwelling … popped down in some pretty little spot with just sufficient accommodation for our particular needs’. A spot exactly like this, where a metal footbridge links bank to bank over a river lined by elm and willow. Except that today the bridge is twisted tightly, as if wrung by great hands, and signs prohibit access.

There are larger houses, too, where borders of camellias and rhododendrons surround two storeys of gabled roof and weatherboard, bay windows and casements and Greene and Greene shingles. Their doors once opened onto the art and craft of panelled timber and inglenooks juxtaposed with tiled bathrooms and kitchens designed in accordance with the latest principles of home science. And all the subsequent adaptation: the tiled patio at the back out of reach of the easterly, the ‘beastly east’ly’ that chills the warmest of days, the French doors installed in the 80s to permit that highly desirable indoor–outdoor flow, the enlarged kitchen with Velux skylight and the ensuite cunningly installed in a former box room.

There are also state houses along the riverbank, dating from the era when the government undertook to house the working man and his dependants in the aftermath of the Great Depression. They stand, square and sturdy, built to one of the 300 government-approved patterns, designed by architects who were resolute modernists engaged on a great experiment in healthy living. Their designs had none of the medievalish flimflam of stained glass, leadlights and porches. These were insistently contemporary homes, blending the proportions of the bungalow with Corbusier’s unadorned ‘factory for living’, the primal cube, and a good dash of New Zealand, no-fuss practicality.

There are 60s houses of brick and tile and 70s timber and 90s stone and floor-to-ceiling glazing and I drive past them, these houses that bear on their faces all the history of everyone who has ever lived in them, all the history of their origins in the wild fusion of their design, and the river rushes away on my left in the opposite direction, bearing broken stuff to the sea. The houses along this stretch stand empty. They lean at odd angles, porch and pergola splaylegged as midnight drunks trying to find their feet after a heavy session. And around them on this warm spring day the gardens riot. Camellias are all tutu pink, roses send out unpruned skinny canes bearing tiny bunches of young leaf, tulips and snowdrops are making another appearance around unmown lawns and the air smells like growth itself. It is beautiful: the poignant beauty for which we need that Japanese word wabi, the beauty of a cracked cup.

Until recently, some still had a rubbish bin on the verge, or a portaloo leaning a little ominously off centre, or there was a car drawn up in the driveway hinting at continued habitation. Rentals since the quakes have been uncontrolled in a city that has always had high levels of rental tenancy: before 2010, some 74,000 homes were owner-occupied, while 42,000 were rentals. Now, 5 per cent of the housing stock has been abruptly rendered uninhabitable and the new pressure is driving rents to record levels. Maybe that is why people stayed. Or maybe they stayed, as friends have done, simply because this is home.

This is the kitchen with the tiles you chose one Saturday morning years ago, deliberating between vinyl and ceramic, ivory or anthracite. This is your bedroom, where you have always slept better than anywhere else, with the faint background rippling of water late at night when the city’s traffic quietens. And really, it’s not so bad: you nail plywood over the gap on the wall where the chimney fell in, you ignore the hillocks on the floor where the house has slid from its foundations, you use the portaloo on the verge. And on a sunny afternoon you can still sit on the step and look out at your own garden where the forget-me-nots are a blue cloud round the plum tree and you can call a halt to the onward rush of time, you can pretend for just a moment that all is as it has been, on this quiet riverside street a couple of kilometres from Cathedral Square. You can pot up plants to carry with you when you must go. You can say goodbye in your own time, to a house. A home.

I BOUNCE ALONG RIVER ROAD past houses and sections already cleared and there it is: the patch that used to belong to friends. It was one of those ample dwellings built around the turn of the nineteenth century for a city optometrist. Two storeys, volutes round wide windows, high ceilings, room for a Victorian family or its modern blended equivalent. It rocked mightily in the first quake and our friends moved downstairs, sleeping on sofas in the living room with cats and dog, all scrambling madly for the doorways as the aftershocks rattled through, threatening to dislodge heavy plaster ceilings.

In February 2011, when the plaster was an avalanche and walls and staircase fell away, our friends were unable to re-enter to retrieve anything from chaos. They moved first to a tent on their back lawn and then to a rental on the other side of the city while they waited for the insurers to act.

The last time I came to this gate it was to witness the old house’s demolition. Vandals had set fire to it, and one Saturday morning, I stood here on the footpath with my friends and a small crowd of onlookers — a couple of kids on bikes, some passers-by, an elderly man who had grown up in the house and come to see its end after hearing of the blaze from his son, who was in the fire brigade.

A crane’s yellow head swayed above the camellias as he told us about living here, about the Dutch lads who had boarded with the family back in the 50s so they could learn English, and how in return the lads had taught him to swear, grandly, in Dutch. Jij dent een typhusleider! Sodemeiter op! Snertverderrie!

The crane and dozers roared, swamp things circling a burnt-out carcass. They tore at soffit and window frame. From time to time one of the crew brought something our friends might want to keep. A sideboard, for example. It contained circles of glass it took a moment to recognise as the rims of martini glasses, melted by fire. A scrap of crimson waved from a blackened beam on the second floor. ‘That’s my scarf!’ said my friend. You could look straight up through burnt and broken timber and there were her clothes still hanging in the wardrobe. The scarf floated this way and that, like a pennant in an ancient hall. It was too sad to watch any longer. ‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’ So we left, while behind us the crane’s head reared up, a triple sash window, fluted frame and astragal, dangling from its jaws.

I drive past the empty space — an expanse of gravel, a single camellia. I drive past all the empty spaces along River Road and suddenly I find myself thinking about the villa.

IT WAS A ROMAN VILLA in the corner of an English field. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but that’s what happens now. Memory and thought and fact and image are jolted into consciousness at odd conjunctions. My mind works differently since the quakes, as if it had been shaken up along with the city. Reality has become a thing of multitudinous pieces. So here I am, driving along with my sewing machine on the back seat on a spring afternoon and I am looking out the window of my car at a street by the river and I find myself thinking about the villa.

I visited it back in 1969 in the company of a young man who was studying archaeology. I liked archaeology. As a child I had read books about Tutankhamun, and Schliemann digging up Troy. I’d looked at photos of that golden sarcophagus, at Schliemann’s wife wearing the jewellery of Helen of Troy, and spent hours digging in our garden, in Oamaru, without quite the same wonderful result: a sheep’s jaw bone, a black Victorian penny, the tops of bottles with marbles trapped in the neck. At university I’d given it a try on an excavation at Purakanui Beach, where archaeology turned out to be hours of grubbing bracken, then scraping in the mud for a few postholes that could be read, if you knew what you were reading, as evidence of lives lived here. A shelter. A home.

I’d given up archaeology for less strenuous pursuits — I found it easier to read books on a sofa — but this boy hadn’t. He liked digging things up, grubby as a pup, delighting in finding old bones, broken stuff, always with a rim of dirt under his nails. He had been excavating a field, one of those English fields with cows and buttercups and, by the hedge, a low roof that kept the rain from a mosaic. He and the other pups had been peeling away the earth from a pattern made up of hundreds of tiny tiles of limestone in several colours — cream and brown and a dull red — that had been quarried from the hills a kilometre or so away.

Only a corner had been exposed so far. A chain of interlocking links formed the frame to a pattern of geometric shapes and the curling tail of some creature yet to emerge fully from the rich, dark earth: a dolphin, perhaps, or some creature from mythology. Something southern, at any rate; of the Mediterranean. I looked round at the cows and the grass as the pup pointed out the slight awkwardness in the execution that suggested colonial workmanship, perhaps a late date as the machinery of Roman hegemony crumbled in the fifth century in this corner of a beleaguered empire. A domestic site, he said, for mosaics like this with all their little tesserae, each cube no more than 4 millimetres square, a size more or less standard over the entire empire for several centuries, were designed for small spaces. Public buildings like temples or law courts were floored with harder-wearing opus sectile: large pieces of marble or granite purpose-cut to make a jigsaw of an artist’s design.

This was most probably the site of a villa, perhaps the property of a native Briton who had adopted the style and manners of the distant capital. See? They’ve used the standard technique: there’s the base, the statumen, where they laid down rubble and sometimes a wooden floor, and they’d cover that with ferns or chaff to stop the lime in the concrete layer that overlaid it from damaging the timber: that’s what Pliny the Elder recommended. And on top of that there’s the nucleus — the kernel of a nut, the necessary bit — the bedding layer of mortar made from lime and smashed tiles, and then there are the tiles, laid to an individual pattern or maybe a pattern they’d bought ready-made, traced on a big sheet of linen. And see? Over there? That gap: that’s the hypocaust.

I stood there with cold seeping in through inadequate leather shoes and thought, Yes, they’d definitely need that: underfloor heating, not to mention fur-lined boots. Mosaics of dolphins and cherubs belonged in warmer climes, places where the temperature reaches 35 degrees and climbing, and tiles are cool under bare feet. They belonged there, at the heart of the empire, not out here where cows breathed small individual clouds into the chill spring air and the pups climbed from their trenches at regular intervals to warm mud-caked hands on cups of caramel-coloured English tea. I looked down at the pattern that had lain under this field and thought how odd it was, this scrap of Rome in the midst of an English field.

Someone had laid all those tiles of cream and brown to form a pattern. Someone’s fingers had arranged them to form an indestructible carpet in the rooms where guests would be received. People had walked back and forth across these tiles, children had run about and spilled stuff, and how inconceivable it must have seemed to all of them that the floor might disappear. The walls, too, the stones carried off to build other things. Weeds would take hold and worms would burrow and bury and soon no one would recall that this house had ever existed.

That’s what I find myself thinking about as I drive along River Road one spring afternoon, the river rushing by in spring spate, the car scraping on gravel, past homes and the spaces that had been homes.

I think about that villa at the edge of an empire.

THERE WAS AN EMPIRE HERE TOO. Or, rather, there were several empires, sliding over and under one another in constant grinding movement beneath our feet, shaping the way we have lived on the surface.

There was first the vast sphere of scattered island states separated by the blue plains of the Pacific, explored and colonised over millennia, linked by culture and race but adapting as colonies do, in their individual fashion, to the exigencies of new landscapes. We lived on its edge, at its southernmost limit.

Then there was the empire for which the map of this city could be read as a flag, set down with its Union Jack verticals, horizontals and criss-cross diagonal as a marker on a new frontier. That empire rephrased invasion and land seizure into a genteel evolution of governance in which New Zealand began as a Crown colony in 1841, before evolving into a dominion in 1907 with a governor-general and partial autonomy that left the big decisions concerning defence, foreign affairs or constitutional amendment to be made 12,000 miles away in London. It was a momentous event, nevertheless, commemorated in the name of a road in Auckland, the capital city’s daily newspaper and a brewery.

It was celebrated, too, in an exhibition, a great exhibition to rival those of larger cities: the New Zealand International Exhibition. In 1906, on the banks of this river, ‘in the cool green parklands of Hagley Park’, rose the largest building ever erected in the country. A palace ‘in the French Renaissance style’, made of glass and steel and the somewhat dubious-sounding ‘stuccoline’ glittered above the oak trees and flowerbeds. Its ‘snowy towers and glowing dome of white and gold’, its 14 acres of display area were, the official record has it, a demonstration of ‘British pluck’. At the top of one of the towers of this Palace of Arts and Industries, 160 feet up, from a viewing platform reached by an electric elevator, the visitor could gaze down upon this city, the ‘capital of the Prairie Province’, the most fertile, the most orderly of all the cities in the land, developed without the restraints of difficult terrain or the land disputes that had interrupted steady progress elsewhere. (The snub was registered: neither Otago nor Wellington contributed a stand to the exhibition, preferring to leave the Prairie Province to crow alone.)

Over the entrance to the palace in letters 5 feet high, ‘HAERE-MAI’ blazed by night, outlined in electric bulbs. New technologies, 60 miles of electrical wiring supplemented by a system dependent on gas, rendered all within the palace as clear as the day outside its walls.

When proposing the exhibition to Parliament, the Premier Richard Seddon had promised proof that ‘the forest, the plain and the swamp have been subdued, and industry and thrift prevail’. The artefacts of science, art, industry, education and what he termed ‘an improved higher civilisation’ would be tangible evidence of progress in this, the country that had become the world’s social laboratory, darling of nineteenth-century European and American political theorists. Men like Albert Métin, who visited New Zealand in 1899 to see for himself the results of the social legislation that had introduced, for the first time in the world, universal suffrage for women, old-age pensions, a minimum working wage, maximum working hours, compensation for work injuries and compulsory arbitration of labour disputes. This ‘paradis des ouvriers’ had divided the country’s large estates into smaller landholdings: 176 South Island runs had been bought and repackaged as 3500 farms. And all, as he wrote in a book reporting his observations here and in South Australia, without paying much heed to a basis in theory. This was ‘le socialisme sans doctrines’, minus the intellectual discourse he was familiar with in his own country — a fact he ascribed to English influence.

Here, ordinary workers could read, but they were above all devoted to sports, especially the sports of the English bourgeoisie: cricket and football and horse racing. Unlike French workers, they were not interested in going to the theatre. Many were supporters of temperance in the English style, wishing to ban the sale or production of all fermented drinks, and, to the astonishment of this Frenchman, happy to live in a country that did not produce wine. Nor were these workers pacifists, like European workers. In fact, in Australia and New Zealand he detected a enthusiasm for the British Empire, the proof being statues of General Gordon and other military heroes. Nor were New Zealand’s workers especially conscious of international solidarity, for which the country’s isolation from other centres was no doubt to blame.

Instead, this country had embarked on a spontaneous experiment. New Zealand was a place where ‘toute experience nouvelle trouve un terrain favorable’ — where every new experience finds favourable ground. Here he discovered a readiness to experiment with such things as state farms for unemployed workers. In Christchurch, he visited the homes of working people. ‘Ce que desire l’ouvrier anglais c’est une maisonette à lui, un home séparé, et non point un logement dans une immense batisse.’ What the English worker wants is his own separate home and not an apartment in an immense building. This home was designed to improve the conditions of the city worker. In hamlets around Christchurch — Pawaho near Heathcote and Tamai in Woolston — he saw homes of several rooms, gardens with potatoes and a few flowers, and a general air of satisfaction.

In its impulsive fashion, New Zealand had chosen to follow this liberal path, creating a country where the state was the greatest landowner in the colony, the owner of three-quarters of the primary schools instructing 90 per cent of the children, owner of the railway network and a national bank and directly employing almost half the country’s workers.

Without theoretical debate, the country has come up with ‘le socialisme d’état’ — state-sponsored socialism.

Le Socialisme sans Doctrines is an engaging book, filled with a kind of happy excitement. Métin writes well and vividly. He describes, for example, standing on the plains near Christchurch, newly refashioned into a patchwork of farms.

Ce sont d’immenses espaces ondules couverts

d’herbe: la forêt primitive y a été incendiée au

temps des grand proprietaires pour faire place

aux moutons; l’oeil est a peine arrête de loin

au loin par le long glaives verts du phormium

tenax et par la chevelure flottante au vent du

cabbage tree.

The plains are immense undulating spaces

covered with grass: the primeval forest was

burned during the time of the big landowners

to make way for sheep; the eye moves freely,

unimpeded by the long green blades of flax

and the wind-tossed hairdos of cabbage trees.

I like those ‘hairdos’: they’re what make Métin more than a dry theorist. He surveys this vision of the new order in the worker’s paradise.

The rivers descend from the high mountains

that close off the horizon, running to the sea

in big stony beds where their waters divide

in shallow branches, swelling suddenly with

snowmelt. One or two little stations rise along

the railway line from Christchurch to Dunedin,

some churches, weatherboard stores that

mark the centre of newly created villages …

the ploughs are beginning for the first time to

turn the soil … the whole, under a grey sky

at the close of winter, is hazy like an imperfect

lithograph. The work of colonisation has

scarcely begun but the houses, the ploughing,

lend life to these immense solitudes …

It is this same vision of the wide plains that introduces the blueprint a little over 100 years later, the plain that Métin described as ‘le grand champ des expériences de legislation foncière’, ‘champ’ meaning both a field of corn and the grand parade ground for display — the great field of experiment in land-based legislation.

IN THIS INSTANCE, THE PLAIN of experiment did indeed form the setting for a vision that ‘inspired the world’. Métin was only one of many keeping a careful eye on what was happening here. It was a British politician, Herbert Asquith, who described the country as ‘a laboratory in which political and social experiments are every day made for the information and instruction of the older countries of the world’.

This was the experiment celebrated in the airy domes in Hagley Park, when the exhibition opened with a specially commissioned ‘Exhibition Ode’, composed by Johannes Andersen, Alexander Turnbull librarian and prolific writer on such subjects as New Zealand birds and place names.

‘Hail! Hail! From the isles of the uttermost sea!’ sang a 300-voice choir accompanied by an orchestra made up of fifty of the finest musicians that could be recruited in New Zealand and Australia, along with the Woolston Brass Band.

Wide and wider fling the gate,

Who will aid may enter.

Teacher, artist, man of state,

Artisan, inventor.

Here a sturdy people heeds

Social laws and labour’s needs.

It won a standing ovation, and for five months, from November to April, the elation continued. Thousands made the journey to Christchurch, from around the country and from Australia, after a four-day journey across the Tasman. They came to view the marvels of Empire. The Canadian court, where wilderness had been tamed and turned to profit. The Fijian firewalkers. An axeman’s carnival. An exhibition of British art. And a sea lion that found itself, somewhat disconcerted no doubt, splashing about in Victoria Lake.

The organisers look pleased in the official photographs. All those rows of men in their many and varied committees, with that fine Edwardian embonpoint, tubby tummies under waistcoats strung with the chains of fob watches, their woollen trousers looking rumpled and a bit scratchy, their hats set plumb over beards and moustaches. The struggle for women’s franchise had taken shape in this city, led by the fiercely determined Kate Sheppard. For over seven years she and a committee of dedicated women had overseen the gathering of a nationwide petition of 31,872 signatures, so large it had to be taken into Parliament on a wheelbarrow, where it was unrolled the length of the floor of the debating chamber. The vote was granted in 1893 to both European and Maori: a first, a notable moment when the country ‘instructed the older countries of the world’. Despite their recently acquired voting rights, only four women appear in the photographs, seated beneath enormous hats as members of the Home Industries Committee.

It had all gone so well. It had demonstrated, as Seddon had hoped, the thorough good sense of a decade of Liberal policies that had seen ‘the State furthering development … assisted by the people’. The British representative at the opening, Sir John Gorst, endorsed this approach. The ‘greatest nations of antiquity,’ he said, ‘had been agricultural cultures and comparatively small countries.’ Egypt, for example had produced its greatest art in its early days when its people were peaceful and pastoral. Later, when it became a great conqueror, its internal culture declined. Greece, too, had been at its noblest when young, with no pretensions to power. Like these predecessors, New Zealand, by focusing its energies on raising a ‘healthy race of boys and girls’ with the ambition of creating ‘the healthiest and most intelligent population’, was set upon the right path.

At the end of the summer, the demonstration disappeared. The snowy palace lasted its allotted time, then vanished.

EIGHT YEARS LATER, THOSE HEALTHY boys were off to war, once more to the accompaniment of one of Johannes Andersen’s poetic efforts.

Rose then the mother, the mother of the wandered ones,

Girdled with young nations, circled by the sun.

She hearkened to the crying of the homeless and the dying

With sword opposed defying the Prussian-hearted Hun!

That poem appeared in The Countess of Liverpool’s Gift Book, an anthology of verse and prose endorsed by the wife of New Zealand’s first governor-general, Annette Louise Foljambe. She produced a couple of books during the war. One was a book of knitting patterns for balaclavas, socks and ‘typhus belts’, strips of woollen cloth like a scarf that could be wound around the torso to ward off disease.

For the Empire and for Freedom

We all must do our bit

read the jingle on the cover.

The men go forth to battle.

The women wait — and knit.

The gift book was published in Christchurch in late 1915 to raise funds for wounded soldiers. In that whole sticky banquet of sentiment and jingoism, Andersen’s work is among the stickiest, notable for its rabid patriotism and peculiar Longfellow tub thump.

The hectoring was necessary if men were to be persuaded to enlist, for by mid-1915, the number of men volunteering was not matching the number of men wounded and killed overseas. In August of that year, the dominant Liberal and Reform parties combined to form a new entity, the National coalition government — later, in 1936, to be called the National Party. Among its first acts was the compilation of a register of all men between the ages of seventeen and sixty. The government denied that this was a prelude to conscription, but a few months later, in 1916, the machinery was in place: the ballot box with its little rolling marbles that meant service overseas. Of 187,593 men eligible for conscription for military service, 77,811 stated that they did not wish to fight. Their reasons were listed by Harry Holland, who had been one of four MPs representing another new political entity, the Labour Party, who had argued fiercely against conscription and been jailed for sedition as a result. In Armageddon or Calvary, a book published in 1920, Holland listed four kinds of objector:

One was ‘the Christian objector’ who based his refusal on the Biblical injunction, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The second was ‘the Socialist objector’ and there were thousands of these, for Métin’s New Zealand workers were no longer indifferent to the plight of workers worldwide, but deeply persuaded of the solidarity and brotherhood of man, and that ‘the interests of the workers of all nations are identical’. Third were the Irish objectors, like the five Cody brothers, who refused to fight while Ireland was not free. And fourth were the Maori objectors, mostly Tainui from the Waikato, who refused to go to war for an imperial power that had confiscated their lands.

Those whose appeals were dismissed were summarily dispatched to join the 30,000 men who were eventually conscripted. Those men whose appeals were upheld were subject to fierce military discipline of the kind described so graphically by Archibald Baxter and echoed by his son, the poet James K. Baxter, when he visualised his father ‘hung / From a torture post at Mud Farm / Because he would not kill’.

Empires are not benevolent forces. They can demand a savage price of their subjects.

NEEDLESS TO SAY, I LEARNED little of all this when I was a child. I was born in 1947, in the year that the Statute of Westminster was ratified, which finally gave my country full autonomy and a new status. It was now a ‘realm’, which sounded noble and Shakespearean in an era when the empire of which it had formed a part was becoming that egalitarian post-war thing, a commonwealth, the very name redolent with Puritan austerity.

Rows of leaders lined up like school prefects in suit, sherwani or brilliant African cotton with their hands clasped and their hair neatly combed. All the histories of invasion, massacre, displacement of peoples, plague, impoverishment and famine, if not exactly forgotten, had been laid aside. The red stain that had spread over the globe was displaced by a patchwork of independent states with their own anthems, all trumpet and drum roll, and their own flags — except for us and Australia, who insisted upon loyalty by flying a British naval ensign with a few southern stars, four for us, five for them, so you always have to count to be certain.

Where there had been divisiveness and war there was now civilised discourse. The leaders lined up around the solitary woman whose ancestress stands at the heart of cities across the world. Beneath the wings of a golden eagle in London, bird spattered in Kolkata, guarded by a lion in Ottawa, minus her nose and far too heavily draped for the climate in the middle of Georgetown, Guyana, and here, in this city until the quakes, on the plinth in Victoria Square, usually sporting a jaunty little seagull hat. Regina Imperatrix.

As a child of that realm, I learned a rosy history of that empire and my country’s role within it, for empires colonise not just landscapes but the minds and imaginations of their inhabitants.

That history began with Kupe and the pa we built from sticky papier mâché with a palisade of burnt matches. (All the fathers and some mothers smoked: rollies and ready-mades and pipes. There was no shortage of matches.) We looked at the picture of the great waka where people lifted their desperate arms towards the long white cloud, the first to find refuge in these islands.

Then Europeans sailed down here looking for a great continent that did not exist and banged into the west coast more or less by accident and some of them were eaten though they were Dutch so didn’t really count any more than the French or the Spanish except as a footnote. The main story was Captain Cook, who mapped the place properly, apart from Stewart Island which he drew as a peninsula and Banks Peninsula which he made into an island. And then the sealers came, and the whalers and some of them married Maori women, which was why we were so racially harmonious, unlike the Australians who were less enlightened. We had a treaty ensuring equality for all. A pallid reproduction of the signing hung on the classroom wall: the Englishmen looking uncomfortable in their scratchy collars and the Maori chiefs in cloaks bending to make the marks that would make this country one under the rule of the woman in the seagull hat. And soon after that the settlers came, those Noble Pioneers in sturdy boots and sunbonnets depicted on commemorative roadside sculptures up and down the country.

There followed a brief period of unpleasantness when it turned out that Maori were not that satisfied after all with their deal under the treaty and that went on for ages under various premiers whose names no one could remember until you got to Seddon. And that was when the country really came into its own as the world’s social laboratory, giving women the vote and ensuring we became the most decent little country on Earth. Other countries might have possessed great composers, or massive wealth, but New Zealand led the world in being fair.

Then there was a world war where we learned the hard way that it was not a good idea to leave decisions regarding defence and foreign affairs to England, for English generals with their posh accents sent New Zealand troops to certain death on the cliffs of Gallipoli, an act of negligence we remembered each year as we tied to the school gates wreaths of chrysanthemums the exact colour of dried blood, pinned to a circle of cardboard cut from the Kornies packet. We remembered them when we drove past some memorial at a country crossroads, the sun going down on the lists of names, where we checked for double-ups, men from the same family who had given their lives so that we might be free. We looked around at the pub with the faded DB sign, the boarded up butcher’s shop, the paddocks and macrocarpas and sheep nibbling all the way to the horizon. So this was freedom.

There was a Depression when men wore sugarbags instead of proper coats, but the Labour government sorted that out and there was the picture of Michael Joseph Savage carrying the dining table into the first state house in Miramar, and then the other war, the one in which my father had fought the Germans in Egypt for reasons that were never quite clear but was presumably because it was flat and there was all that desert for the tanks to run about. The Maori Battalion marched to victory, then a new queen was crowned and Ed Hillary climbed the world’s highest mountain to celebrate, and history began to race toward the present where we sat drinking our free milk, fortunate citizens of the most beautiful, the most decent, country on Earth.

I GREW UP IN THIS grassy realm in the immediate aftermath of a hideous global war. Its artefacts were all around: in the brass dagger from Egypt that hung on the living room wall with its beautifully engraved, vicious little blade, and in the songs we sang in the car as we drove to the view the Parade of Homes, where my mother looked out the window yearning for brick and tile, picture windows and a breakfast nook rather than verandah lace, double sash, coal stove and washhouse. ‘Happy is the day when a soldier gets his pay,’ we sang. ‘And we all go rolling home!’

I was the child of a benevolent state. The euphoric idealisation of the world’s social laboratory had soured by 1935, and economic disaster had led to poverty, rioting and an unemployment level officially registered as 15 per cent (though as Maori and women were unlisted, it’s safe to double that). But the country had switched political allegiance and a newly elected Labour government saw to it that my generation would be blessed with mouthfuls of free amalgam and free milk — a little warm, it had to be admitted, after its spell at the school gate, but free nevertheless. Our parents received an allowance for our welfare reckoned at 8.8 per cent of the average adult male wage, rather than the niggardly 2 shillings awarded by the previous administration — ‘Not enough,’ Peter Fraser had said, ‘to feed a well-developed fowl.’

Prices for domestic produce were fixed: an egg or an orange would cost the same, whether purchased in Auckland or Invercargill. We would receive free medical and hospital care and an education by teachers whose salaries were the same as those awarded Members of Parliament. We were educated, from the moment we encountered the dress-up box at kindergarten to the graduation in cap and gown, via a system that followed the great reformist principles laid down by Peter Fraser and the educator Clarence Beeby in 1939. A system that insisted that ‘All persons, whatever their ability, rich or poor, whether they live in town or country’ would receive the benefit of ‘a free education, of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers’.

Throughout my childhood, until 1967, there was full employment. In 1944, workers were guaranteed two weeks’ annual leave; in 1945, a minimum wage. The war had created factories manufacturing Bren guns, barbed wire, canned foods and radio transmitters for use in the Pacific, and these formed the basis of post-war industries.

Our country may have been small, with a timid anthem that pleaded for defence from the vaguely articulated terrors of dissension, envy and hate, but it was fair. It was leading the way, like the fox terrier cockily leading the army column. We lived on the edge of an empire whose centre was far away, but we had improved upon the dingy two-up two-down original.

THERE WAS ANOTHER EMPIRE TOO, its centres equally remote in Washington, New York and San Francisco. It demanded less overt obeisance. At a political level there were treaties and alliances, and there had been the shared experience of war in the Pacific when GIs foxtrotted round Wellington, but there were none of those rituals of empire. No royal visits, no anthems. Membership of the American empire seemed optional. It simply seduced with colour and sheer energy, so enchanting that you wanted to be part of it.

To begin with, there were comics, those hypnotically alluring narratives featuring creatures half-animal, half-human, a duck with fingers, a mouse in high heels. Later there was Jughead and Veronica and an exotic universe of dating and college and cars. There were movies with surfers and bikinis and beach parties and motorbikes and everyone looked cool and both empires broadcast their music at us in relentless contest for allegiance: would our hearts belong to The Beatles and The Stones, or The Beach Boys and The Dixie Cups?

In true colonial fashion, we formed our own synthesis. Our mouths were colonised, words sliding up and over: ‘the movies’ replaced ‘the pictures’, though ‘cars’ never became ‘automobiles’ or ‘footpaths’ ‘sidewalks’. We lived within the synthesis, in houses that owed their design to British and American architects, houses like those riverside bungalows with their leadlights and cooling airy ceiling vents. As the century wore on, we shifted our allegiance to California, to glass and light and open plan. We wore the synthesis in the most intimate fashion upon our bodies. On schooldays we slipped on England, wearing uniforms with ties and shirts, but at weekends we slipped with relief into America. We wore jeans and sneakers. By the 1960s the allure of the Queen and her golden coach had evaporated. She looked like our mothers with her perm, shaking hands with sick people, while across the Atlantic, America was in the ascendant, the dreary white-jowled presidents of the 1950s giving way to someone who looked like a film star. His hair was wavy, his jaw was lean and his wife was beautiful, with her bouffant flipped up under smart little pillbox hats.

And then appallingly, unbelievably, he was shot and she was trying and trying to climb over the seat to protect him and there was blood all over her pink suit and all was confusion, the car jerking forward, slowing. If you listened carefully you could hear the snap. So little to unleash such chaos, such sadness, the little boy raising his hand in salute, the mother in her black veil like stone, the very image of grief.

From then on, we were caught up in America, in its sheer extremity. We were caught by treaty in the same horrific war. Some of our young men volunteered to go and fight while the rest of us fought to stop them and Holyoake primped on the steps of Parliament in his pointed shoes and we chanted, ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’ And then there were the sleek dark flanks of the nuclear subs sliding into the harbours, tossing aside the fizzboats and kayaks that hoped to bar their way and the young man who clambered from the water somehow up onto the blunt nose of leviathan and danced there, like Zorba, arms outstretched, Stephen Sherry, our man before the tanks, our man placing the flower in the barrel of the gun. And every time the country split into the two halves that have always existed here, as if we lived either side of a massive divide: left/right, Labour/National, stay/go, pro/anti, yes/no. Stop/start.

It is not always easy living on the edges of empires, experiencing the tremors set off by distant detonations.

Boom/crash.

EMPIRES RISE. EMPIRES FALL.

That American empire now has its dystopian face. Wordsworth may have penetrated to the ‘life of things’ in the ruined masonry of a ransacked abbey. It’s harder to make out such wisdom in the abandoned concrete of the Rust Belt, the cities visited and videoed by young men delirious with delight in decay. Their voices are squeaky with excitement as they pan round Gary, Indiana, taking in the Palace Theatre that only a few seconds ago hosted women in furs, there to listen to Rachmaninov before driving home in a Chrysler the size of a billiard table to a house with a kitchen crammed with appliances. The America I’d marvelled at from here, at the periphery, that National Geographic, Hollywood centre of gleaming perfection.

Yet here it is, the Palace Theatre, crumbling as surely as Babylon or Petra, festooned with weed and cat reek and an avalanche of broken seating, though Donald Trump gave it a brief reprieve back in 2002, when he used the façade as a background for a Miss USA pageant, pasting plywood over broken windows and erecting a marquee over the pavement bearing the sign ‘Jackson Five Tonite!’ for a concert that never happened, not in that theatre, not in that town. Michael Jackson was born in Gary, maybe in a hospital like the one the young men are videoing, with its bare corridors awash from broken pipes. The voyeurs paddle about, opening cupboards and calling, ‘Hey! Look at this shit! Medicines and stuff! Looks like they left in a hurry!’ And in the school, lockers gape like dead mouths, though Frank Sinatra did in fact sing here, and not that long ago. In 1945. An eyeblink. To counter a boycott of white students opposing racial integration he sang about a town and its people and how they were, for him, the image of America.

The cameras zoom in on a new angle to America: on a flooded corridor, a stained sink, the special desolation of concrete. The city has tried to halt decline: in the 80s Gary tried a convention centre — the Genesis Centre — and a sports stadium for basketball, both of which proved to be unslakeable drains on funding for maintenance. Planners tried the waterfront development, picking up on that contemporary fixation with views of sea, lake or river. They have tried art, and a museum, seeking the Bilbao effect that brought an international superstar architect and a stunning building to reinvigorate a Spanish port town in its decline. They have tried abandoning the big civic project for cautious baby steps toward recovery, with civic clean-ups and modest programmes of repair to central city housing.

They patch and make do, they reuse what can be reused, like those post-Roman citizens carrying off the stones of a fallen villa to build a barn. Empires rise and fall and the speed of it is breathless. From shingle to concrete to shingle in a single lifetime.

And on the horizon, the new empire rises, the one centred in Beijing, with its multiplicity of manufacture, its industry and spectacle. The empire I am wearing as I drive along River Road, as I once wore Britain and America, next my skin: knickers, socks, bra, jeans, T-shirt, all flicked among billions from those busy machines.

Its new cities rise in an instant. Places like Kangabashi, $160 billion worth of brand-new civic entity, planned to house 300,000, but before it can be inhabited, it is already falling into ruin, cavernous, unoccupied home to a mere 30,000. Or Jing Jin, an eco-city of 104 square kilometres. Empty too. And those strange concrete imitations of Europe: Florentia in Tianjin, with its green canal and pastel concrete frontages, or Little Paris near Shanghai, which was planned to offer gated security to 100,000 beneath the shadow of a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, or the half-timbered village of Thames Town. All of them empty, echoing, crumbling, a single street sweeper desultorily pushing a broom across an empty set.

The cities swell like bubbles, built to sustain that greater bubble, GDP. And pop. Sixty-four million empty apartments, empty malls, the green canal.

I have lived my life under the hegemony of all these empires. And then there have been those other realms, the ones whose borders have been less clearly defined: the empires of business.

UNDERLYING ALL THAT HISTORY of waka, war memorials, free milk, foxtrots and jeans lay a solid bedrock of economic ownership, for like all the colonies whose newly independent representatives lined up for their photo with the Queen, this country was planned primarily to return a healthy profit to head office. It was a plantation, a monoculture like Malaya with its ranks of rubber trees or Ceylon with its tea plantations or Nigeria and Ghana where cacao from South America took root, finding its perfect mate in the sugar cane harvested across the Atlantic in other colonies in the Caribbean.

New Zealand, as W.B. Sutch so perfectly observed in 1972 in Take Over New Zealand, was a colony given over to grass. When I first read that, I was startled. I had lived all my life surrounded by paddocks of nibbled ryegrass and browntop and never thought of it as monoculture, but of course it was. The bush had been cleared to make way for those tiny green leaves just as forcibly as jungle had been forced to give ground to rubber trees or Camellia sinensis.

I was born in a country that depended upon those leaves of grass as the source for its economic well-being. We had a long history of manufacture, beginning with soap and woollen cloth in Nelson in the 1840s, steel in Taranaki in the 1850s. By the 1880s, New Zealand was exporting ploughs, refrigeration machinery and gold dredges in a curious BRIC-state reversal, to Brazil, Russia, India and China. But it was the land itself that was the bedrock: its mines and forests and fisheries and those plantations of grass and the creatures that grazed upon them. In the 1960s, when I was growing up, mining, forestry and quarrying employed over a third of the labour force in companies owned by British, American and Australian interests. The freezing works, too, were owned overseas, along with the dairy processing factories and the ships that transported their products to markets abroad.

So this afternoon as I drive down River Road it is as the citizen of a country that is unlike other OECD countries in that the majority of its largest companies are foreign owned. One hundred and two of the Top 200 companies listed on the 2012 Deloitte/Management list are at least 50 per cent overseas owned. The financial institutions that underpin this entire landscape are not constitutionally eligible to feature in the Top 200, but they too — the ANZ, Westpac, ASB, BNZ — are Australian owned and, between them, have greater wealth than the top fifteen companies on the list combined.

When Sutch wrote his book, Japan seemed set to be the new global empire, and he noted a new phenomenon: the company that no longer professed any national allegiance whatever, insisting instead on a supra-national identity to which its employees owed a kind of salary-man allegiance. He quoted Max Gloor, then director of Nestlé Alimentaria: ‘We cannot be considered either as pure Swiss, or purely multinational — we are something in-between, a breed of our own … we have the particular Nestlé citizenship.’ And he quoted it with surprise.

It no longer seems surprising. The river has flowed on, Japan has sunk as China has surged to the surface as the global powerhouse, the new capital of empire, and the notion of company citizenship is unremarkable. I drive along the road as a citizen, to use Gloor’s terminology, of a mass of such empires. I am a citizen of Subaru at the edge of the empire of Fuji Heavy Industries. I am a citizen of BNZ which, since 1992, has been a self-governing province in the empire of National Australia Bank.

And most pressingly, at this moment in my country’s history, I am a citizen, like thousands of others in this city, of the empires of insurance. I am a citizen of State, and along with my fellow citizens of Tower and AMI and NZI, I am part of the prefectures of IAG and Suncorp within the far-flung empires of MunichRe and the reinsurers.

Out here on the perimeter, this colony does indeed return a profit. The Australian companies who insure the houses in which we live our lives are reporting massive gains in the aftermath of the quakes. As those Roman businessmen said, anticipating profit in L’Aquila, ‘You don’t get an earthquake every day.’

In April 2013, the chief executive of IAG told shareholders to expect ‘strong profitability’ in New Zealand, while the other major Australian insurer, Suncorp, told its investors to expect growth of 7 to 9 per cent in the next two years, when GDP would likely struggle to exceed 3 per cent. Between them, the two companies, described by equity analyst Morningstar as a ‘profitable duopoly’, own 65 per cent of this country’s general insurance market. And both, according to a Sunday Star-Times article published in August 2013, recorded share price increases following the quakes: IAG from A$3.75 in late 2010 to around A$5.80, and Suncorp from around A$7 to over A$12. The article quoted a prominent fund manager with investments in insurance companies: ‘the best time to own a general insurer is after a catastrophe.’

The houses along the riverbank, the houses in the suburbs that stretch across the plains and out to the coast and up the slopes of the Port Hills exist on the edges of the empire of international insurance and reinsurance. Except, of course, Gloor got it wrong. We are not ‘citizens’ in such an empire. A citizen is part of a civis, the collective endeavour of a mass of individuals engaged in mutual betterment. A citizen within that civis possesses both the rights of civilisation and obligations within that collective. The citizen agrees to its laws and in return is protected by them. The citizen has the right to vote, to debate, to disagree. The citizen is one small part of the greatest of human artefacts, a city, whereas the citizens of Nestlé, Subaru and State remain mere consumers. They are figures not on a census but on a yearly return. My only role in these sterile empires is to choose whether or not to buy. There are fleeting collegialities of shared brand recognition: my daughter as a teenager insisted upon the shibboleths of her peers, Levi 501s and Bata Bullets, just as I recognise the same Le Creuset casserole on the kitchen shelves of friends in New Zealand and Canada and France. It’s amusing, but it’s not the basis for true citizenship.

SO, HOW HAS IT BEEN to live out there in the suburbs where, as Mr Brownlee said immediately following the quakes, with all the grandeur of some Roman general dispensing with responsibility for some troublesome frontier, ‘It’s all over to the insurers’?

How has it been to live in one of the 100,000 houses damaged by the quakes? To live in one of the 25,000 houses so badly damaged that they exceed EQC’s $100,000 cap? To deal with private insurance companies, whether they are the local branches of international companies like State and NZI and their Australian owners, IAG, or Southern Response, the insurance company that is 100 per cent owned by the New Zealand government, its six board members appointed by the Crown as sole shareholder?

Southern Response was born out of dire necessity following the quakes when a New Zealand-based company, AMI, threatened to collapse under the pressure of claims, and default on payouts. The company had a strong local presence, having begun life in this city in 1926 as the South Island Motor Union. It had grown to become the largest New Zealand-owned fire and domestic insurer, with half a million customers, many of them local people. In 2008, it had purchased naming rights to the city’s rugby stadium. After decades as Lancaster Park, and a brief spell in the 90s as Jade Stadium for an international software corporation, the stadium became known as AMI Stadium, or more correctly, since the turf was not technically part of the purchase, ‘The AMI Stadium at Lancaster Park’, which may have been accurate but was a bit of a mouthful. Everyone just said, ‘AMI Stadium’. It was the concrete colosseum with its towers and floodlights down behind the car yards on the edge of the central city.

That stadium suffered damage in the quakes, as did the homes of thousands of AMI’s customers. Six thousand, six hundred and seventy of them were over the EQC cap and so dependent on the insurer for repair or rebuild. Throughout 2011, AMI’s managers made reassuring noises. In September 2011, its director said that AMI had ‘more than sufficient funds to pay all earthquake and non-earthquake claims … it is a robust and successful company’.

By early 2012, that certainty had evaporated. AMI, it seemed, was running close to empty. Thousands of people could be left with damaged homes and meaningless insurance policies. So the government stepped in. It sold AMI’s ‘good book’, those half million customers, to IAG, meaning that company now owned around 57 per cent of the New Zealand market. The government, however, retained the arm of AMI that was handling quake-related claims: the 11,000 claims from 6670 properties that exceeded EQC’s $100,000 cap, the 3000 claims for temporary accommodation while repairs or rebuilding were carried out, and the 1500 other claims relating to items such as cars that had been damaged in the quakes. This new government-owned entity, Southern Response, has been handling around $1.5 billion worth of claims.

The manner in which Southern Response and the other insurance companies have been doing business in post-quake Christchurch has been immaculately recorded by a Christchurch writer, Sarah Miles, an investment banking lawyer with experience in the insurance sector. The Christchurch Fiasco: The Insurance Aftershock and its Implications for New Zealand and Beyond steadily and with enormous skill assembles the evidence of insurance manipulation and governmental failure to control the workings of the industry.

What is repeatedly happening in Christchurch

is many insurers denying and reducing policy-

holders’ claims, routinely refusing to pay

market prices for homes and replacement

of contents, use of ‘low-pitched’ computer

programmes to cut payouts, changes of policy

coverage with no clear explanation, ignoring

or altering engineering reports, and sometimes

asking their adjusters to slow down claim

progress or lie to customers. Then the insurers

make low offers or refuse to pay at all. They

stall until claimants are so desperate that they

are then prepared or forced by circumstances

to accept what the insurer offers them.

Such techniques have been employed before to profitable purpose. In America, for example, following the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, property-casualty insurers reported record profits, up 49 per cent from US$49 billion in 2005 to US$73 billion in 2007. Translated to Christchurch, the delaying techniques that help to create such profits — the repeated visits from assessors, the sudden introduction of new ‘surprise’ conditions such as the notion of ‘betterment’, the arguments over whether damage to foundations was caused by this or that quake or shock or pre-dates the quakes altogether — the whole panoply of procrastination — is, writes Miles, an abuse of that ‘utmost good faith’ that underpins all insurance contracts, the agreement by both parties to act with honesty and openness. By way of illustration of that abuse and its deliberate cynicism, Miles mentions a logo that featured on the internal documents of an American insurance company, Allstate: it was an alligator, captioned simply ‘Sit and Wait’.

IN LATE 2013, THREE YEARS after the initial early morning shake, the Press reports an address by the chief executive of the Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce, Peter Townsend, in which he stated that only 700 of the 25,000 homes in the city that sustained over $100,000 worth of damage have been repaired. A few months later, in early 2014, the Insurance Council of New Zealand issues different figures: in the three and a half years following the quakes, Southern Response, State, Tower and the rest have between them rebuilt 725 of 4731 houses that required total rebuilding, and repaired 769 of 7079 houses that received damage beyond the EQC $100,000 cap. Figures in this city are frequently contradictory things, slippery and hard to hold, but Townsend insists upon his assessment in his blog:

There are around 145,000 houses with damage

under cap (below $100,000). Of these, just

under 90,000 have damage between $10,000

and $100,000 and are being repaired under the

Fletcher/EQC contract (or increasingly cashed

up). That $3 billion contract is just over half

complete.

There are approximately 25,000 houses with

over $100,000 worth of damage. Of these

between 1000 and 2000 have been repaired or

are under repair.

There are somewhere around 2000 houses that

have yet to be determined whether they are

under or over cap.

There are also just under 8000 homes that

have been completely destroyed or written off.

Mr Brownlee is ‘surprised’ by the figures and also refutes a comparison with Queensland where, following the disastrous floods of 2010–11, laggardly insurers came under fire by stroppier Australians and their media. Their outrage triggered an immediate federal review of the industry that called for, among other things, a four-month limit to process claims. Within weeks, the Gillard government was writing changes into the relevant legislation and by January 2012, insurance industry figures showed that 85 per cent of claims had been processed, leaving just 15 per cent, 4078 claims, still ‘open’. For Australians that figure, which sounds quite delightful to New Zealand ears, caused continued indignation and vigorous headlines. ‘Insurance Settlements in Limbo!’ But Mr Brownlee rejects any comparison with the Australian experience: because they are multiple events, quakes are more complex than floods, and besides, settlement would require ‘leverage’ on the insurers. Leverage beyond the scope, it seems, of New Zealand’s government.

So, how has it felt living here at the edge of the insurance empire in this city, among the crossfire of figures and statistics and claim and counter-claim? How has it felt in this place with its colonial argot of Red Zone and Green Zone, assessors and loss adjustors? Like those Inuit with the forty-one words for snow, the inhabitants of this city have had to learn a new lexicon to describe the environment in which they have found themselves living.

A house that is not within a Red Zone but has nevertheless been damaged so badly as to be uninhabitable is said to be ‘red stickered’.

In a calamity that is not a single event, but made up of many thousands of events, claims must each be attributed to a specific episode and the precise cost of that damage calculated: this is called ‘apportionment’. Apportionment takes a very long time. It requires a delicate scalpel.

The process by which the land around your house is tested for life risk — a falling boulder, perhaps, a sudden slump — is called ‘ground truthing’.

If the land beneath your home is safe enough for rebuilding, it is ‘TC2’. If doubtful, ‘TC3’.

If, with your cash payout, you wish to buy a house that has an extra bedroom or some feature not present in your previous quake-damaged home, it is called ‘betterment’. You cannot contemplate betterment. Betterment is not permitted.

You have to learn this new language if you are to stand a chance of understanding and communicating with the people who have power over what will happen to your home. It is as necessary as if you were the indigenous inhabitant of some small island taken over by alien invaders.

So how does it feel to be that inhabitant, in spring 2014, four years after the initial jolt?

FOR SOME, ALL IS WELL. Their home may have suffered little damage; it stands perhaps in a suburb where roads remain intact and there is little evidence of disorder. If the home did have damage, it may have been repaired quickly and expertly by competent contractors. EQC and the private insurers acted fairly, courteously and in a reasonable timeframe. Sometimes the result is a home that is even tidier and stronger than it was before. If the damage to the home was so great that it required demolition, it may have been rebuilt, perhaps elsewhere, and the owners are delighted with the move. Such people sometimes write letters to the paper, thanking their insurers, their builders, the entire, thoroughly professional team. They are delighted with their new home.

And then there are the others.

Here is a woman who is living with her husband in her old childhood home in Shirley. Her parents have moved to a retirement home, leaving a house that was damaged but still habitable. She has lived there for more than three years, after they ‘burned through’ their insurer’s accommodation allowance in a single year when their own home on Huntsbury Hill was red stickered in September 2010 and declared uninhabitable.

Since that day, they have accumulated a file of hundreds of phone calls to their insurers and dealt with nine loss adjustors, the ninth of whom finally produced a scope of works in February 2014. Six months later, they still have no idea when those works might begin, no idea when they might be able to move back into their own home.

So, how does it feel being back in the house she lived in as a teenager fifty years ago?

‘Weird,’ she says. ‘I chose the orange carpet in the bedroom. It’s still there. They made things to last in the 70s. It feels unreal to be here, as if I’ve gone back, as if I’ve never been anywhere.’

To begin with, she visited her own home on the hill, but no longer. ‘Every time I went back it was worse. At Christmas a plumber had turned the water on so the ceilings had collapsed.’ Going home now makes her feel ‘sick and depressed — just a big bad feeling’. That ‘bad feeling’ expands to a general conviction that a kind of contract has been broken. ‘I’d lived a nice middle-class life. I wasn’t used to being treated rudely or put off when I phoned for information or whatever. I wasn’t prepared for that.’

She finds herself yelling at the television reports of progress and opportunity within the city. ‘I sit there thinking, “How can you sit there lying like that?”’ She feels also ‘irrational anger’ at things like All Right?, a social marketing campaign funded by the Mental Health Foundation and the Canterbury District Health Board and supported by CERA along with the Ministries of Health and Social Development.

In early 2013, posters had appeared around the city:

‘IT’S ALL RIGHT IF YOU FEEL FRUSTRATED AT TIMES’ on one side, and ‘IT’S ALL RIGHT IF YOU’RE FEELING PRETTY STOKED’ on the other.

Or ‘IT’S ALL RIGHT IF YOU FEEL A LITTLE BLUE NOW AND THEN’ on one side, and ‘IT’S ALL RIGHT TO FEEL LUCKY’ on the other.

The campaign had been sparked by a medical survey that discovered that ‘stress and anxiety caused by dealing with insurance repairs and the agencies involved in the recovery has created a double blow that for many was more debilitating than the earthquakes’. Linked to the posters were morale-boosting events. People with large puppet heads gave out free petrol to random commuters. They picked up people waiting for buses in limos to take them wherever they wanted to go.

‘There is absolutely nothing,’ she says, ‘about this situation that is “all right”.’

Early in the morning when she wakes, it is to fret that she may never live in her home again.

‘The sensation of being trapped is awful, not being able to move forward.’ She tries to focus on the positive. She knows she is lucky to have a house where she can stay, and she enjoys watching life here in a little cul de sac of twenty-six houses, all now flats apart from her parents’ home, but she feels that her life has changed, and not for the better.

HERE IS A YOUNG FAMILY. They are seated in their home, and it looks lovely: freshly renovated with big, sunny windows, new kitchen, new carpet, crisp paint on the walls. It could feature in the pages of some lifestyle magazine: a makeover story, except this makeover has not been achieved in the standard magazine fashion but has taken years of negotiation with niggardly insurers, unqualified assessors, poorly skilled tradesmen or, worse, tradesmen’s ‘hands’, uncertificated and inexperienced, and their slipshod, once-over-lightly workmanship. Foundations have been quickly jacked and packed, doors and windows no longer close, leaks and cracks hint at future failings.

Such families become locked in argument over the detail of repairs — who or what caused damage, who should pay, how much should be paid — a catalogue of detail that is exhausting to enumerate and to debate, and overwhelming in its effect on those involved. There are the endless emails, the time spent on hold as someone plays soothing piano medleys, the meetings, the late-night talk in the kitchen before retiring to bed about what to do next, how to proceed.

Add to this the difficulties of moving while repairs are being effected, the packing and unpacking, the difficulty of finding an affordable flat in an area that will not mean the children must change schools, the sheer cost of such accommodation in an unregulated market: $1000 a week for a two-bedroom unit, $1200, $1500 …

Add to this the normal upheavals of life: the partner who becomes ill, the elderly parent who must be found residential care. The things that happen.

Add to this the new fears consequent on land movement: the fear of bad air, the toxic sludge that has pooled beneath the house and the dust that blows everywhere on a warm nor’west day, carrying its uncertain particles. Or flooding. A nearby creek has silted up. Now it floods not just the lawn as it has done in the past, but laps at the back step. It rises beneath the floorboards, soaks the carpet, seeps into the joists beneath the gib, leaves that pervasive taint of damp and raw sewage in the very framework of the home.

And add to this the official denial that such flooding has been caused by the quakes, at least, as Mr Brownlee put it in May 2014, ‘not entirely’, so relieving his department of responsibility and handing the problem neatly on to the city council.

This is the world surrounding such rooms and the people for whom they are home.

HERE IS ANOTHER WOMAN. She is seated in the garage of her home. When the house was dangerously damaged in February 2011, she moved out here. The insurer’s accommodation allowance of $20,000 disappeared rapidly, but she was not concerned to begin with. She moved into the garage, assuming that this would be temporary. She would camp out until her home was repaired.

Four years later, the house stands behind wire cordons. It is white weatherboard, two-storey with several bedrooms, ideal for the international language students who used to board with Jen. For months it has tilted wonkily to one side, its walls supported by wooden struts, with a sign prohibiting entry tacked to the gate. This year, it was raised onto an ingenious frame and after a few weeks in mid-air while new foundations were laid, it was lowered back. It’s now out of plumb but liveable and the contractor is promising her that the crooked can be made straight and she will be back in her home by Christmas.

In the meantime, Jen continues to live in the garage among her stuff. Back in 2012, she had spread a blue tarpaulin over the floor and, with the help of friends and neighbours, moved her furniture across the yard. The place is crammed: a kauri clothes press stands against one wall, a sofa and dog basket against the front tilt doors, raised to let in the afternoon sun. There’s a bench with a tiny one-plate stove and a plastic bowl for washing up, a fridge with magnets holding the confident daubs of grandchildren, ‘I love you as much as I can/Because you are my favourite nan’, in big uneven letters. There’s a TV on the sideboard where a lean and hairless sphynx, Mondrian, prowls, and a golden Bengal yowls to be let down from the top of the garage door, where it is warm and good for sleeping. There’s a miniature terrier too, Ruby, on guard by the wire cordon blocking access across the drive. The air smells sweetly of turmeric and chilli: warming spices. Jen likes to get the dinner on early before the sun goes down and the uninsulated garage becomes icy.

A temporary camp. Fourteen engineers have made fourteen separate visits to assess damage. The cost of repairs to her home is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

‘Friends say, “Why don’t you rent a nice little flat?” But they don’t understand that the temporary accommodation money runs out. And it’s easier here with the animals.’

Her presence here has prevented attempted break-ins, the last only a few months ago, when she woke to find a man in her makeshift bedroom.

‘He’d jumped the French doors off their runners. I think he was as startled to see me as I was to see him.’ He ran, but she didn’t feel as safe afterwards and had a friend sleep over till her confidence returned.

She doesn’t in fact mind living in her garage. ‘It’s easy. It’s very simple when you live out of a bag. And I’m not a victim here. It’s very, very important to say that: I am not a victim. I hate the way Christchurch people are described as victims on TV.’

Childhood prepared her well for this life. She was raised on Inch Clutha, the little island that exists somewhat precariously between the serpentine coils of the Koau and the Matau, where the Clutha splits on nearing the sea. The island is dead flat, 11 kilometres long by 3 kilometres wide and prone to flooding. She remembers water lapping at the step and her mother putting sandbags down.

‘My father raised me to be tough, to kill a sheep for meat, to drown my own kittens, break up dog fights. He used to say to me, “Look after yourself! Don’t come crying to me with your troubles.” It felt horrible as a child but now I’m glad for it.’

She waits for her house to be mended, looks after her animals, goes for a swim every morning. ‘And this,’ she says. ‘I do this in the evenings.’

She reaches under her chair and brings out a box filled with strips of cloth. I recognise it: a rag rug, one of those things the frugal housewives of New Zealand used to make from clothes and old sheets so that nothing would go to waste. Jen lays the strips on the floor.

This, she says, is her earthquake. There’s a strip that used to be a curtain in her home, an old skirt, a piece of fine fabric she had kept for ages, not knowing what to do with it.

‘It keeps me occupied,’ she says, when the feeling that this is the end of the world threatens to rise and must be instantly suppressed. She thinks of people she has read about or seen on television who are living elsewhere in the city in caravans or in garages like this one, with small children to care for. She recalls a moment in the Himalaya years ago when she witnessed a landslide: all this mud and rock flowed down a hillside and swept homes and people away. She thinks of her daughter-in-law’s parents who live in Sendai, and how the Fukushima tsunami stopped only 100 metres from their door.

She pushes it all down and concentrates on her rug, knitting the scraps together, and when she has a home again with a proper floor, she’ll put it down in the kitchen.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO TELL how many people are living versions of this: lives of discrete diminution, unadmitted, unreported.

A rag rug. An orange carpet. They are not the stuff of TV specials or features in The Press. Why, they are so minor! So trivial! The people who tell you about such things shrug. They echo Epictetus, saying it’s ‘just stuff’. They say, ‘There are so many others worse off than me.’ The insurance companies themselves use the line to deflect persistent enquiry. And of course it’s true. But small things pile up, like the bricks from a fallen wall. They are hard and real and confided only to friends and the doctors who issue the prescriptions for chronic anxiety and exhaustion, both of which have reached record levels since the quakes.

You can be buried by such bricks.

You certainly do not have to go far to hear the stories. I am at a birthday lunch, a long table at a bach in Akaroa, family and friends assembled to celebrate seventy years of living. It’s another image for the lifestyle magazines. But beside me is a couple who are still living in their damaged home, though they have no idea just how seriously it has been damaged, under or over that $100,000 cap, for the assessors have yet, four years on from the quake, to pay them a visit. Two thousand, six hundred and thirty people share their nebulous situation.

Across the table sits a man whose home in Heathcote now has standing water lapping beneath the floorboards. The insurers deny this is a result of the quake.

Next to him sits a woman who is living in her own repaired home but is working on a project to build units to house homeless men: the cheap inner-city flats they used to rent are gone. It is estimated that around 7000 people are sleeping rough, or in cars, or on sofas.

The woman whose birthday we are celebrating is at her bach in Akaroa because her home on Clifton hangs, broken-backed, at the lip of 100 metres of rock fall. The grief and shock she has felt at its loss have been directed into trying to find a home for a little shed that stood in their garden. Of teak and Baltic pine, it had been taken, in flatpack, to the Antarctic on the Terra Nova in 1911, back in that age of heroic Britons testing their mettle against ice. It was intended for scientific use but was not required and returned unopened from the south. The man who had acted as agent for Scott and Shackleton erected it in his garden on the cliff edge. There is a small balcony on its roof for meteorological observations. It resembles one of those structures that in New England would be called a ‘widow’s walk’, which is indeed what it became. Valerie has a photograph of the shed in which a woman in a black skirt and white blouse stands on the balcony, and something about the photograph seems to render her weightless, as if she is hovering in mid-air. It is presumed to be Oriana Wilson, who lived there for a year, awaiting news of her husband, Edward, the expedition’s genial ‘Uncle Bill’. She is looking out to the wide sweep of the bay while he lies dying, ‘a brave true man’ in that terrible, hopeless tent. ‘If this letter reaches you, Bill and I will have gone out together,’ writes Scott, as the men about him become still.

It has felt necessary to preserve that.

Our own flat, the one I bought when my mother died, the one where my granddaughters were born, is boarded over, surrounded by wire cordons, ivy in long white tendrils feeling their way in through gaps into the kitchen across the bench, the oven, the fallen rangehood. The living room floor bellies up beneath the carpet like a blister about to burst over solidified liquefaction, and a forest of seedlings sprouts in the gutters. Squatters pull away the ply and sleep here and in the flats of our neighbours. They leave behind beer cans, a sofa in an overgrown yard, and one night set fire to a mattress, black smoke billowing so that a friend phones to say, ‘Is that your flat on the six o’clock news?’

When I stay in town now, it is with a friend whose home was designed by her husband who was an architect. It is light and airy with something of the quality of a yacht moored among gum trees overlooking Lyttelton Harbour. When it rains, the room in which I sleep floods a few millimetres deep from a source yet to be discovered. She has become used to it, jokes that she should build a pool, but the fact is there is a flaw where there wasn’t a flaw. There is a crack, some uncertainty beneath her home.

And there are of course, so many others worse off …

IN THE EMPIRE OF THE INSURED, every man or woman is an island. You are alone on the phone, talking to the person who manages your difficult, exceptional case. And perhaps it is true, too, that your home is especially tricky to repair, the land beneath it exceptionally compromised. How would you know? How do you discover that you are not alone in being irritated at the ninth visit from assessors, casting the little red laser eye across your carpet, jotting down a few measurements, then driving away into the silence? Back to the hum of the commercial cul de sac where the fountains play in the plaza before the towers of State and Tower and Southern Response, with their ground-floor bar/restaurant and the corporate gym and health centre?

You come to understanding in small ways. You talk to the neighbours. You read letters to the editor in the daily paper. You read Sarah Miles’s book. If you are another Christchurch woman, Sarah Marsh, you set up a Facebook page titled SouthernNOResponse, and in December 2013 you paint the phrase in big black capitals on the roof of your home on St Andrews Hill. If you are Ali Jones, a city councillor and Southern Response claimant, you pick up that phrase and organise a SouthernNOResponse protest in the plaza among the fountains. One hundred Southern Response claimants turn up, and two months later, over 300 fill the auditorium at the teachers’ college to listen to a panel of experts.

One, who has worked in insurance for twenty-seven years, explains the claims process from the industry’s point of view. A chartered accountant who is also a claimant questions the figures quoted by Southern Response who say they have fully settled 2783 claims — 40 per cent of the 6765 originally registered — but that number, he says, includes homes within the Red Zone which have been written off automatically as not eligible for repair. His calculations are that Southern Response has actually repaired or rebuilt 316 homes of roughly 3000 on the flat, and 64 of 475 homes on the Port Hills, while 638 remain on TC3 land, awaiting geotechnical assessment. An experienced professional surveyor questions the assessment done by unqualified assessors, showing as evidence a series of floor plans for damaged houses covered in scribbled figures of dubious use or accuracy.

An engineer and a quantity surveyor explain their roles in assessing quake damage to a room full of homeowners who have had repeated visits from such people — some of whom have turned out to lack professional qualifications — whose advice has been instrumental in estimating the extent and cost of repairs.

A city lawyer, Duncan Webb, who writes a regular column in The Press advising insurance claimants, issues legal advice to the audience. Stick to your policy! Know it inside out! Refer to it! Preface every question to your insurer with, ‘Where in my policy does it say that …?’ Don’t automatically accept a cash settlement, no matter how tempting it might be to take the money and get out of the whole exhausting process …

The people in the audience take notes, scribbling in folders thick with accumulated documentation, they ask questions until Ali says it’s nine o’clock and ‘we all have homes to go to’. Which earns the biggest laugh of the evening.

A few months after that meeting, on 14 March 2014, a group of 189 Southern Response claimants announces a class action suit against the insurer. A group of EQC claimants has also engaged the services of a lawyer and is proceeding with litigation. Such large-scale actions are rare in this country. What must be unique, however, is that in both cases, the insurer being targeted is a government-linked entity. EQC, for example, the system established during time of war as a ‘logical development of the principle of collective responsibility for a calamity loss’, has morphed into a business behaving exactly like a business in defending its profit margins against unhappy consumers, and it is doing so with the compliance of a government that has morphed into something like its board of directors. The people engaged in these suits are brave. It could take five years. Five years of argument over foundations and retaining walls and cracks in the fabric of their damaged homes.

The Canterbury Communities Earthquake Recovery Network (CanCERN), another of the groups formed to assist people trapped in the insurance swamp, estimates that four years out from the quakes, as many as 6000 insurance cases remain unresolved.

Gloor got it wrong.

As a citizen of the British empire, my childhood was cushioned by a protected market for my country’s meat and butter.

As a citizen of the American empire I had been first entertained, then drawn into conflicts as treaties sought to protect me from attack by various shades of pinko communism and black-flagged Islam.

As a citizen of that new empire centred on Beijing, I have access to endless supplies of cheap socks funded by the export of the dried secretions of seven million dairy cows.

But as the citizen of the empire of insurance I have the words of my policy upon which I can insist, as the dispossessed have always insisted upon the exact words of a treaty. In fact, I am not really a citizen here at all. The real citizens of that empire are the shareholders whose well-being takes precedence over my own. I am an asset, the raw material on which that empire makes its profit.

SO HERE I AM, the insignificant asset, driving along River Road in spring past homes and the spaces where homes used to be, and around me stretch dozens of suburbs filled with other homes and I’m trying to understand. I am trying to figure out exactly where I am.

Along here, awaiting demolition, is the house of a friend. She had stayed on there with her husband as long as she could, potting up the plants in her garden for eventual removal, determined to say goodbye to a place she had loved for many years in her own good time. There was plywood over the chimney breast, and hillocks in the floor, a portaloo on the verge at the gate, but they would not be rushed. She wanted to think about what had happened. She said to me one morning as we talked in the sun at her back door, that she thought the principal effect of the quake was that it had delivered ‘uncovering’. She had felt, in driving about the city, the sensation that her inner self was being uncovered, and the nature of her relationships, with her mother, for example, and her father.

Diana is a very perceptive woman. She put her finger on the sensation I have felt here, and not just about myself. The nature of people I know seems to have been uncovered: people I had thought of as kindly and decent but not especially heroic turned out to be just that at the moment of catastrophe. In the months since, other qualities have become uncovered: generosity, pettiness, aggression, great patience, strength, altruism. A whole range of previously unsuspected characteristics.

Other things, too, have been uncovered.

When Witold Rybczynski wrote his history of the Western home, he focused on the notion of comfort, a word that was not applied to the sensation of contentment experienced in a domestic interior until the late eighteenth century. He traces the notions of privacy and intimacy as the home evolved from a busy medieval workplace crammed with people in a structure that could be readily adapted for sleep, commerce or eating, to the calm retreat from the pressures of work and trade beyond the doors in seventeenth-century Holland. He charts the history of purpose-built furniture from eighteenth-century France and the scientifically efficient arrangement of the functions of a home in nineteenth-century America and England. He describes the interplay between artistic theory in the twentieth century and the business of creating habitations for actual, messy people.

But what happens when the home is not the calm retreat, not the refuge, not the place that becomes scuffed by family living, nor the place where you gather all your treasures? What happens when the home cracks like an egg, or threatens to collapse? When you cannot trust its very structure, when its framework might in fact harm you should it be shaken again? That chimney might fall, that staircase might tear from the wall. What happens when a crack opens on your front path, as it opened in the path of a house belonging to friends in Avonside, and they poked a broom handle into the crack and it disappeared, all the way down, waggling in nothing?

What happens when you doubt the ground on which your home has been built, when you have no faith in solid foundations?

What happens when you buy a new house, but with that slight misgiving that it might not have been properly repaired? What is going on in there, behind the gib with its skimming of freshly applied paint?

What happens when your home abruptly loses its desirability, no longer the great investment in the perfect location but now a house in an area that could be prone to flooding, or rock fall, or, God forbid, tsunami?

What happens when your home becomes a trap: unnerving to live in, but difficult to sell, impossible to leave?

What happens when your home no longer offers that fundamental sensation of comfort? When a crack opens along the length of the hall and who knows what might lie beneath?

Our homes are a protective shell and when that shell cracks, we are born into another kind of being. It is not just glass and masonry that require repair but our whole sense of who we are. It is not just the structure of the home that is shaken into view, but the entire structure within which we live our lives.

THE CHRISTCHURCH QUAKES have taken place in a political context. They have happened at a particular point in this country’s history when, for around thirty years, the world’s social laboratory has been engaged in another of its experiments, this time with policies of the right rather than the left. Under successive administrations, the country has been experimenting with creating a society based on theories developed by academics in America and Europe.

We’ve been thinking — but not too much, for we don’t like thinking too much, as Métin once observed. We like to get on and do.

In our impulsive, puppyish fashion we have been busily engaged in creating a society in which the role of the state is minimised and its functions passed into private hands. Over the past thirty years, the systems that nurtured me have been unpicked, quietly and systematically, by people with a simple faith in the supremacy of the market as the greatest good. We’ve laid aside all talk of moral unity, the good and right state of society or collective responsibility for a more bare-knuckled ambition to become a country where it is good to do business. We have been living through a revolution, but a quiet one, a sneaky one.

So, off we go! The laboratory is humming, and in the great experiment, Christchurch, shaken to its core, stripped back to bare essentials, lies cracked and open in the petri dish beneath the wide arc of the Canterbury sky.

Once more, this city — its centre, its river, its suburbs — has become the site of a great exhibition demonstrating the efficacy or otherwise of political ideas.

HERE IS AN EXHIBIT. It is a building, but not a house.

It’s a school.

It is Thursday morning, iron-grey in winter 2013. A group of people are marching along one of the city’s busiest streets. They carry banners. They wave placards at the commuters in the stop/start early morning traffic. ‘WE ARE PHILLIPSTOWN.’

They are the parents, children and teachers from a school and they are walking 2.5 kilometres along this busy road to another school with which theirs is likely to be merged in the new year. The minister of education, Hekia Parata, has decided that changes must be made to the state schools of this city and here is one result: people walking along a street, trying to save their neighbourhood school. Expressing an idea.

How have they arrived here? The process has been curious and unsettling. There was an earthquake, but that did no more than provide an additional incentive for a process that had already been taking shape within the ministry. The first the school knew of it, however, was in September 2012 when, with a few days’ notice, the city’s 215 state school principals were called to a meeting at a sports arena.

On arrival, they were issued with information packs and badges of different colours. It was only as they opened their packs that they realised the colours denoted proposals for the future of their schools.

If your badge was green, your school was destined for ‘restoration’, meaning it would be repaired and remain open and operating as usual.

If your badge was orange, your school was destined for ‘consolidation’: it would undergo moderate change, which could include structural repairs, but might also extend to full closure, merging with another school or relocation to a totally different campus.

But if your badge was purple, your school was headed for ‘rejuvenation’: a kindly ministerial word for definite closure, merging or relocation.

This entire process was called ‘Shaping Education: Opportunity plus innovation to enhance education outcomes across greater Christchurch’. Mr Brownlee greeted it as ‘education renewal’ and an ‘opportunity to realign services’ across the city. Thirteen schools were proposed for closure, while eighteen were to merge or undergo significant relocation and change.

The reaction, unsurprisingly, was furious and within hours the ‘proposals’ had been renamed ‘options’. Five months later, the options became ‘interim proposals’ under which nineteen schools faced major change: closure, relocation or merger. Change was necessary, said the minister. It was not a cost-cutting measure. It was simply that rolls had dropped, families had moved because of the quakes, school buildings had been irretrievably damaged.

Her findings were immediately questioned. Schools argued that rolls were flexible things that might as easily rise as fall in this highly volatile city. The ‘liquefaction’ in the playground that sealed the doom of one school was revealed to be the school’s sandpit, photographed from the air by Google before the quakes. But, most importantly, children in the city’s schools had been exhibiting higher than national average levels of stress and disturbance and major change was neither necessary nor desirable. The Press published letters from parents and photographs of weeping children.

A school, it turns out, is not simply a business marketing literacy and numeracy to so many empty little bottles lined up to be filled and tested at regular intervals to see if they need topping up. A school is not some modern variant of a grim Dickensian academy teaching Gradgrind’s facts. A school is much more than that.

This school, for example: Phillipstown. One hundred and sixty-three pupils, over 50 per cent Maori or Pasifika, most of them living within walking distance on a small grid of streets on the eastern rim of the central city. The school is the centre of a neighbourhood of 1500 houses, 4000 residents, light industry along the margins where some of the parents are employed. There are classroom blocks around a playground of tarmac and grass scuffed by many small running feet, a hall, a brightly coloured mural, a community centre in the school’s expansive 2.2 hectare grounds where children can have breakfast before school and lunch too, if they arrive without anything from home. This is more than a school offering literacy and numeracy. It offers wraparound, whanau-style care for its pupils. Here’s a kohanga reo, an after-school programme, a holiday programme. There is also the largest concentration of workshops teaching technology in New Zealand. Children travel to Phillipstown from thirty different schools around the city to study metalwork, cookery, sewing, woodwork.

The other school in Woolston is not by any means better resourced, or more modern — in fact it’s older — nor does it have more spacious grounds. It occupies only 1.5 hectares of land that was deemed, by a Tonkin and Taylor geotechnical survey in November 2013, to be one of the areas in the city prone to flooding should sea levels rise. Their report advised against development of this site.

Yet the principal of Phillipstown received a purple badge at the meeting in September. He kept it on the shelf behind his desk as a memento. Though there was little chance of forgetting the months that followed: the submissions, the meetings, the phone calls, the discussions with insurers and loss adjustors. When I spoke to him on the day of the march, he rattled off dates effortlessly: 13 September, 7 December, 18 February, 29 May, 13 June — each a deadline, an announcement, a decision. He recalled every switch in ministerial advice.

‘To begin with they were congratulating us. After the September quake we were closed for only seventeen days and they were telling us how well we were doing. And then everything slowed down. They said they were working on repairs. They reassured us. So we waited. We were patient. Naïve, as it turned out. We were living with an illusion.’

The illusion was sustained by persistent vagueness and lack of information and by a false faith in the cohesiveness of the city’s schools. ‘Immediately after the quake,’ he says, ‘we were like this.’ He links his fingers together the way we used to for ‘Here is the church, here is the steeple’. ‘But now we are like this.’ His fingers tug apart. The people stand alone.

This is what the philosophy of ‘learning output centres’ and the consequent educational reforms of the 80s had delivered. Instead of a monolithic and powerful network of regional education boards, schools became autonomous, governed by individual boards of trustees, vying with one another for students and resources.

For a brief period following the quakes, competitiveness was forgotten and schools banded together as they had done before, to provide secure routine for children in traumatic times. But the minister’s proposals, brutal and ill timed, put an end to that. In the scramble for survival they triggered, a neighbouring school suggested in its submission that Phillipstown could close and its pupils could walk the extra 2.5 kilometres down that busy road, across multiple-lane intersections at peak hour, to re-enrol with them. Which is how we arrive at the early morning march, the balloons pinned to the school fence, the sausage sizzle and ‘WE ARE PHILLIPSTOWN’.

IT FELT BRAVE, THIS MARCH, and heartfelt. A distant echo of those marches of thousands to end a war or save a lake or stop a rugby tour. But this time, though cars tooted and people waved, the whole world was not watching. Certainly the minister was looking the other way.

A week later, she announced her decision. Thirteen schools were to close or merge, including Phillipstown. Two thousand children across the city would face major change in the new year: new schools, new routines, new playgrounds shared with new children. Two hundred and sixty teachers and staff would be affected or could lose their jobs. The Press ran a headline, ‘Tears flow as axe falls’, above a photo of a Phillipstown child, crying.

The Press, as usual, was alone in its concern. The Dominion led with a story about puppy farming, the Otago Daily Times featured an exciting fossilised whale bone and the Herald headlined a loans bonanza. ‘Short-term mortgage rates are at their lowest in New Zealand’s history’! Christchurch did appear in its main section with an article about Chu-an Tang, a Christchurch handyman who had been in Melbourne exploring work opportunities but decided to remain in the quake-ravaged city after all. ‘The quakes have given him opportunities Australia never could.’ There was a photo of Mr Tang standing by a little pile of rubble. ‘He says the Christchurch rebuild is a “pot of gold” and believes it will give him work till he decides to retire.’ School closures and weeping children were not to be part of that fairy story.

Phillipstown fought back with a request for a judicial review which, in November 2013, found that the consultation process that formed the basis of the minister’s decision had failed to meet the requirements of the Education Act. The ministry was ordered to pay the school’s court costs and for a brief spell this felt like victory. But in April 2014, the minister reiterated her decision: Phillipstown would close and merge with Woolston in the new year. The city council labelled the decision ‘daft’, given that Phillipstown was part of the city zoned for residential intensification, and attempted to intervene. The councillors, often divided, presented a unanimous request to the minister for a two-year reprieve, at least until ‘things settle down’.

In August 2014, they received her reply. There would be no reprieve. ‘When the future of a school is uncertain,’ wrote the minister, ‘there can be detrimental effects on its operations and its ability to provide high quality education.’ She was concerned for the emotional state of students and families, not wishing ‘to prolong the uncertainty that the communities of the two schools have already faced for more than 18 months’. Further delay ‘could simply create further inequities and uncertainty for students and their families’. Having created that ‘uncertainty’ in the first place, the minister supplied the cure. She was ‘focused on giving the children of Phillipstown and Woolston the very best possible educational opportunities’. The school would close.

The ministry’s plans for the site remain vague. What is certain is that the children will walk the extra kilometres to the prefabs awaiting them at their new 400-pupil school on the flood-prone site. Their teachers will look for other jobs.

And an idea shakes apart.

WHEN I ARRIVED AT TORONTO UNIVERSITY as a graduate student back in 1971, the head of department scanned my documents with approval.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘A New Zealander! Good. You’ll have had a proper education.’

And he was right. I had. From that kindergarten dress-up box to the graduate photo on the TV among the plastic gladioli, I had received the best my county could offer. Anglocentric, perhaps, but solid. And free.

At no cost, I had been granted what my parents referred to as ‘The Opportunity’, which meant that, unlike them or any of my ancestors, I would go to university. My father had not had The Opportunity. He had left school at fourteen, mother dead from emphysema, father killed in the last months of the war in France. He took jobs where he could, at the freezing works, on railway gangs, scrub cutting, till the war took him to Egypt, the wound at Alamein and the long post-war slog with ill health and a desk job at the Power Board. If he had had The Opportunity, he said, he would have gone to university. He would have done arts, which were the only true education, all else being mere technical training. He would have studied the classics: Xenophon, Seneca, Catullus and their brothers who stood shoulder to shoulder in their faded grey fatigues on the shelves behind the sofa.

My mother had not had The Opportunity either. She had become a nurse, and a good one too, by all accounts, with a fierce belief in its nobility as a vocation, a calling, rather than a mere job. But it was not The Opportunity. When I announced as a twenty-year-old that I planned to marry and head off to England with this young man I’d met, she was mystified. ‘But why?’ she said. ‘When you’ve got The Opportunity to study law and stand for Parliament?’ Her secret career, not mine.

There would be no such failing for me or my sister. We had The Opportunity, the way up via education to lives of learning and fulfilment. Exactly as Clarence Beeby and Peter Fraser planned, when they initiated the reform of the country’s education system back in 1939.

Fifty-three years later, in 1992, as other educational ideas were gaining ground, Beeby published an account of his life. In The Biography of an Idea, he traced the origins of his notion of education to a childhood in Christchurch where, as a pupil of New Brighton School, he received a blue tin train. He had arrived at school as a six-year-old with one ambition: to be able to read Grimms’ Fairy Tales himself, without having to wait for his mother to read to him. It was ‘the only time in my life when I have been completely sure of the purpose of education’.

He learned to read. He also received the train purportedly for good conduct which, so far as he could see, meant because he had sat still and said absolutely nothing. But the train and his mother’s pleasure in its award taught a lasting lesson: ‘I discovered that education was also about beating other people and “coming top”.’

It was a lesson he applied with great success for many years until a more generous vision took its place: the one that formed the basis of his work as director of education between 1940 and 1960. Among the first things abolished in the reforms he created with Peter Fraser was the Proficiency examination, which had straitjacketed teaching in primary schools to a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy and barred the way to secondary schooling for thousands of children each year. Before 1936 only 63 per cent of the country’s children went to high school. The role of education had been selection: who would go on to high school. Who would receive tertiary education. In its place, Beeby and Fraser proposed another idea: ‘equality of opportunity’.

Their reforms introduced a curriculum that would be more responsive to the needs of the individual child. They established free kindergartens to prepare children for school, universalised the teaching of art and music, set up training programmes for teachers, created schools within country districts and neighbourhoods so that education would be within easy reach of every child. Technical high schools were opened, and special education units for the disabled. Specialist units — School Publications and a National Film Library — were developed to supply materials for the classroom.

A free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers …

And what did I learn as a result of the implementation of this idea, running about in a New Zealand state school playground in the post-war glow? The usual lessons, I suppose. Who to avoid, who to trust, how you could be surprised by people. The kid, scaly with eczema, knew the names of all the dinosaurs and could write them on the board when we were still struggling with ‘See John run’. The girl who looked sweet in frills took over the jungle gym with ruthless efficiency, creating a loyal band of goons who warded off all intruders. The big, slow kid knew how to make us laugh, master of the stertorous underarm fart. Some were rich, living in the houses we called ‘doctors’ houses’, some were poor with tangled hair and scuffed shoes, but we were all in this together.

It was the same lesson Katherine Mansfield had also learnt in a New Zealand playground, the one that permeates her best story, about the dolls’ house and the little girls admitted one by one to see its wonders until only the Kelveys are left, and Kezia can bear it no longer, that exquisite pain of exclusion, and, in her first act of moral independence, lets them in to see the little lamp. The power of that story lies in its minute observation, the tiny detail that derives from first-hand experience of democratic rough and tumble.

That lesson was invisible to us, playing tiggy touchwood in the sun, as was the other lesson: the one about our value to the nation. The expansive grounds, the swimming pool, the big airy classrooms, the paints and School Journals and warm milk in little bottles were proof of our centrality in the scheme of things. We were healthier, better educated, stronger than any generation before. And our entire nation wanted us to be so.

THAT IDEA FA DED, AS IDEAS tend to do, and other ideas have taken its place. In the 80s, Treasury briefing papers argued that ‘families and tribes are not organic entities with morality, rationality, and senses’. Society was not made up of such groups, but, rather, ‘rational individual beings seeking to maximise their productive capacities’. In such a world, education was a ‘private commodity’ not a ‘common good’ and its purpose was ‘to prepare the individual for his or her economic role’.

We have had thirty years of that and now, perhaps as a natural outcome, we are trying another idea: the charter or public–private partnership (PPP) school, which draws its funding from the same tax base as the state system while being operated by a private business for its own profit.

Such schools have a history of development in the aftermath of natural disaster. In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina the public school system was largely replaced in a matter of months by charter schools. They bore aspirational names — Success Academy, Excel Academy, Arise Academy — and included several KIPP schools, as in ‘Knowledge is Power Programme’, and today they market education to around 90 per cent of the city’s school children.

The way this happened is described in Naomi Klein’s powerful analysis of disaster and corporate coup, The Shock Doctrine. When those Roman businessmen were laughing at the opportunity opened up in L’Aquila, they were doing no more than echoing Milton Friedman writing for the Wall Street Journal after Katrina: ‘Most of New Orleans’ schools are in ruins … this is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity.’

The word that so dominated my childhood, ‘Opportunity’, translated to a setting ravaged by disaster, takes on a whole new meaning. Klein describes with great clarity how crises, natural and manmade, provide the ‘clean sheet’ required by right-wing ideologues ‘to sell off pieces of the state to private players while citizens are still reeling from the shock’. In disaster, ‘people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands are blasted out of the way … democracy seems a practical impossibility’ and the way is open to profit.

Today, in the US, more than 6000 charter schools educate one in twenty American children in schools owned by companies like the Entertainment Properties Trust, which lists, in its $3 billion portfolio, ‘multiplex movie theatres and adjacent retail, public and charter schools’. The syllabus in schools like the KIPP academies is tightly focused on literacy and numeracy with frequent testing. Teachers are trained in intensive courses such as the Julian Robertson Teach for America programme, in which young graduates attend a five-week summer school by way of preparation, teach for a couple of years then go on, with the assistance of donor foundations like the Robertson Foundation, to find career employment elsewhere.

Proponents quote improved reading averages and college admission rates. Critics mention high drop-out rates, the rapid turnaround of inexperienced teachers and, most of all, the way in which charter schools drain funding from the public system. In an interview in Philanthropy New Digest, the CEO of KIPP, Richard Barth, nominated the number one challenge for his company as ‘securing government money’. In 2012, it cost $18,491 to educate a student in the KIPP programme, but $11,991 in the public system, and corporate donors could only go so far. Donors like Bill Gates, or, for that matter, New Zealand’s first honorary knight, the American billionaire Julian Robertson.

He was knighted at New Year 2009 for his gifts to the country: golf courses, luxury lodges, wineries and, in 2011, The Promised Gift, a donation of fifteen works by Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse and Dali to the Auckland Art Gallery. They are beautiful, these images of a woman and her children, of a French road with blue hills and orange-roofed houses, and since the paint first touched the canvas they have acquired, like stamps or diamonds, immense value: $150 million in one report, $250 million in another. It was a generous gift by any measure and enthusiastically received. Sir Julian described it as ‘the most appreciated thing’ he and his wife had ever done.

He also donated $5 million to the Christchurch Earthquake Relief Fund and sponsored a countrywide lecture tour by the co-founder of KIPP in support of the charter school system. In the States, his Robertson Foundation aspires ‘to utilise a proactive disciplined grant-making approach to measurably effect social change’ in four principal areas: medical research, the environment, religion and education. ‘The public school system is failing’ and reform is required, by supporting existing schools of which it approves, but also by ‘driving change by generating external pressure, encouraging competition by supporting the development of charter schools, voucher programmes and resources that enable informed parent choice’.

In conjunction with the Tindall Foundation, Sir Julian supports Teach First New Zealand, a programme modelled on Teach for America, which in six weeks prepares New Zealand graduates for the classroom. The charter school classroom, that is, for state schools in this country must employ qualified professionals, trained for one or more years in specialised colleges.

The charter schools planned by the government are exempted from this requirement. Nor do they have to adhere to a nationally agreed curriculum, nor be subject to the scrutiny of the auditor general or the ombudsman.

In Christchurch there will be no more marching down Ferry Road with placards and banners. One year after that cold morning, to the east in Aranui, the city’s first ‘superschool’ is already taking shape. It will merge Aranui High School with three separate primary schools on one campus accommodating 1800 students. It will be the New Zealand version of the charter school, a PPP, built by the same company developing a new high school with capacity for 2400 students at Rolleston, among the rapidly expanding subdivisions on the western fringes of the city, along with schools in Queenstown and Auckland.

The detail of the system is unclear, at least to someone like me, an interested citizen watching from the sidelines. How will these schools operate? Who will teach? What will be the lessons learned by the children? How will lessons learned in such a school shape their notions of themselves, their country, their role in the world? What might they learn, running about the playground, the little citizens on the edges of the empires of the education industry, the little citizens who are not really citizens at all but assets on a company spreadsheet?

The future of education in this city emerges from the rubble. Back in 1982, Friedman wrote in his influential Capitalism and Freedom, ‘When [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.’ The ideas lying around in this city in the first decade of the twenty-first century are being taken up, dusted off and put in place in the Rebuild City.

And maybe, just maybe, they will take shape on the site of Phillipstown School.

SWAMPS ARE GENERATIVE PLACES. ALL that plop and suck nurtures new life. In the horror movies, it’s distorted, grotesque, the stuff of nightmares. In actuality, it’s a multitude of the creatures with whom we share this planet. Nothing to be afraid of at all.

This city, too, is a generative place. It has given birth to new ideas and good ones too: votes for women, free and universal education. In its current state, other ideas are being tried and I am less sure of their efficacy, but I am enough of a New Zealander to be curious about the outcome.

We are, I think, tolerant of change. Perhaps it is a result of living in this landscape, with the awareness that it could so readily toss us aside. We have built our homes light and flyaway: whare of raupo, shelters of ponga logs with sail cloth for a roof, homes of Hardiplank and picture window or wooden weatherboard that can, if necessary, be sawn in half and lifted from the foundations and transported, like the little house, to some other site. We are accustomed to meeting our homes on the road, late at night when the traffic is lightest and the move can be made with least disruption. Lights approach and then the wide load sails toward us out of the dark: a whole house, or a slice of it, the patterns of private living exposed for all to see. Our houses burn readily, leaving chimney stacks like ancient temple columns in cow-pocked paddocks. We perch on this jumpy place, ready to up sticks and go in an instant, knowing it is not wise to set down roots too deeply for it is almost inevitable that they will not last.

Landscapes like ours demand adaptation. A few months ago I was talking to a friend from Iceland, a country even more restless, if anything, than our own. After the quakes we became accustomed to consulting the Geonet map where the shocks registered like bubbles popping on a pond. Iceland’s Geonet equivalent is similarly animated, with the addition of occasional starbursts that are volcanic explosions. This is a country where a plume of smoke rises one morning from the ocean and when a trawler ventures close, presuming a fishing boat on fire, it is to find churning waters and a whole new volcano taking shape just beneath the surface. In a matter of months it’s an island, and there are insects and lichens and birds and seeds and all manner of creeping things …

In Iceland, the friend said, babies are rocked to sleep with a lullaby: ‘Sofdu unga asta min …’

Sleep my darling.

Outside the rain cries

But Mummy keeps your treasure

Of old bones and a chest of stones.

Bones and stones are the baby’s toys, as New Zealand children, pre-Fisher Price, played knucklebones with bones collected from the amazing skeletons of dead sheep and made dishes for their playhouses from paua shells. ‘Oft eg svartan sandinn leit,’ sings the mother.

Often the black sand

Destroys the green fields.

In the glacier are deep and deadly cracks.

Maedan kenna mun per fljott,

Medan hallar degi skjott.

Ad mennirnir elska, missa, grata oc sakna …

But till the sun reaches the horizon

Mummy will teach you

What it is that men love, lose, cry and long for …

The landscape surrounds the baby from birth, and it is not an easy one. Like the bough breaking and the baby falling with which New Zealand children are soothed to sleep, birth and death are in close conjunction.

On either side of the planet, where the crust cracks and life bubbles up, we live in landscapes in evident evolution. Beautiful, awe-inspiring landscapes. They shape the way we are at the most intimate level.

AS I MOVE AROUND THIS CITY in the process of another adaptation, I am aware of three contradictory emotions. One is a feeling identified for me by an environmental scientist I met at a reading in Wanaka.

She called it ‘solastalgia’. It’s a neologism invented by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, to describe the psychic disturbance experienced by humans when their landscape has been destroyed or altered radically by manmade or natural causes. He used it for people in the Hunter Valley whose landscape had been altered by open-cast mining and dam construction, but it is also used to define the feelings of people whose islands are being destroyed by rising sea levels and climate change: feelings of loss, powerlessness, grief and anger. It sounds like the disease for this era, just as other eras have spawned their particular maladies. Homesickness, for example, which in contemporary New Zealand is regarded as no more than a minor discomfort, was, in Napoleonic times, regarded as a serious disorder, affecting particularly Swiss army recruits sent to serve in flat countries. The symptoms included fainting, fever and death and to prevent its contagious spread, soldiers were forbidden to sing the simple melodies, the Kuhreihen, the cow-herding songs, that were thought to trigger an outbreak. In the Second World War, American army doctors took homesickness equally seriously as intensely disabling, especially among country boys. A longing for home, for what is familiar, for the past, has not always been seen as carping and moaning, but as a real and powerful sense of displacement and loss.

I know people in this city who I believe suffer from homesickness, and from its modern derivative, solastalgia. I know people who have refused to visit the central city since the demolitions began, people who feel intense grief for the loss of their homes, people who long for their former neighbourhood and the lives they lived there. Not everyone can simply lock up and leave. Not everyone sees the destruction of familiar streets and buildings as a pot of gold and a marvellous opportunity.

Part of what I feel in this city is solastalgia, not so much for buildings as for the routines I established around those buildings: the walk to visit friends in the CBD, the stroll to the cinema. It is also the loss of the narrative prompts that vanished buildings contained. This was the place where we sat on the deck overlooking the sea and the surfers bobbing about like seals, before the sad time and a friend’s lonely leap from Whitewash Head. This was the place where my daughter had her flat in full, feral student exuberance. This was the upstairs room where a granddaughter slipped into the world while the nor’wester tore at the trees.

But this is small stuff compared with the homesickness of people I know who were born here, who learned this city the way that only a child can learn a place, from the ground up, knowing all its nuances, its little hidden places. People for whom streets and buildings became crammed in early adulthood with love and sex and dispute and parties and family and all that dense accretion of personal narrative. For me, that intensity lies south of the Waitaki. When I cross that river, braided and blue between willows and broom, even though I have not lived in Otago for fifty years, there is still a visceral tug, the sensation of coming home.

Perhaps because this city is not quite my home, solastalgia is only part of my reaction. The other part is a feeling I think of as a New Zealand fondness for what is new. I drive about the city as the product of the social laboratory, insistently curious about this new experiment taking shape around me. I want to see what happens now. It’s possibly a trivial emotion, akin to that contemporary fad for unboxing in which millions upon millions of people watch online, mesmerised, as someone else’s hands unwrap a cheap toy or shopping bag, simply for the pleasure of seeing something new emerge. But I cannot help liking the way the city’s current configuration springs surprises. I like stumbling upon the lawyer’s office, the stationery shop. I like being nudged away from my usual route, driving down this road on a spring afternoon, thinking something I hadn’t thought before. I like being here.

Away from the city I find myself wanting to be back, reading the local paper, hearing the stories people tell me. I like the feeling of coming to know this place, trying to figure out what is happening here and how it has come to be the way it is. It is not easy to do when everything has fallen in pieces, fact on fact, like a pile of bricks. Day by day, other bricks dislodge and fall. To switch metaphor again, my inner map has broken into small component parts, difficult to reassemble.

And then there is the third part of that mash of feeling, and that is a kind of love. I’ve come to love this city. I didn’t think about it before the quakes: it was simply somewhere I lived. I had friends here, a house. The city contained the things I need: movies, shops, music, cafés. But in its beaten state, knocked around, I have taken a closer look and now it’s love. It’s not a feeling I’ve had before. Loving your city was for other more emotional places: places in the US where they put little red hearts on the tourist T-shirts and sing about San Francisco and go all dewy eyed over New York New York. No one in this understated country was going to sing about Palmerston North in the spring. No one was going to drift off to Invercargill with flowers in their hair.

And Christchurch, Christchurch, what the hell rhymes with Christchurch?

But now it seems fragile, vulnerable and precious in that vulnerability, as do other cities in this country, no matter how cocky they may have tried to be with their slogans and PR projection as absolutely positively the place where the show never stops … Wellington with its lovely unlikely houses tacked to steep hillsides among bush and the Ministry of Importance at its heart and the CBD on shaky former seabed. And Auckland, gleaming after rain and smelling of damp and growth and all that money and you are without a doubt in the South Pacific and all those people are coming in and coming in and everyone is making the most of it between the volcanic cones. And Dunedin, where youth keeps the heart beating within the skin of old houses and the former structures of power and there is the wild beauty of harbour and hinterland. And all the other settlements of this country with their homes and businesses and little human routines. ‘Make the most of it,’ you want to say. ‘Enjoy your streets, however cluttered, enjoy your shops and cafés and bars, enjoy your corner dairy and the parking building and the bus stop and the walk to work and the beach. Be happy in your city.’

And I want this city, Christchurch, to go through this makeover and emerge to gasps of astonishment. Why, you’re beautiful! You’re perfect!

DURING THE TIME OF THE thousands upon thousands of aftershocks, the bench shaking as you peeled the potatoes, the office desk jolting, the bed shuddering, people began to report a new syndrome: ‘quake brain’. You were vague, forgetful. You left the car keys in the fridge. You forgot where you had parked the car. Dealing with everyday life, in addition to dealing with the requirements of insurers, repair, simply finding your way about the city, was simply too much. Your mind, it seemed, too, had broken into 100 tiny pieces.

Everything felt tenuous. Structures in which I had put my faith were stripped of their cladding and revealed to be hollow things. A democratic election could simply be overturned. An education system could be reconfigured without objection or much in the way of comment. The centre of a city could be demolished with no viable opposition.

It had been an insecure era. Financially, for example, the turn of the millennium in this country has been characterised by the serial collapse of finance companies — sixty-five of them since 2006 — taking with them the savings of hundreds of people. When I was a child, we were encouraged to open savings accounts. Each week we brought our sixpences to school where an officer of the Post Office Savings Bank received them with due solemnity and entered the deposit in a little book. It had a squirrel on the cover. ‘A squirrel saves for winter.’ That sixpence could have bought a dozen pineapple chunks, but we were being educated in the benefits of planning ahead. The cover also had pictures of what we were saving for: an academic cap with a tassel, a plane for travel, a car. I was also educated in frugality by my parents. My mother kept her post office savings book in her handbag and each night throughout her whole long life, she looked it over before bed. It was part of her routine. She examined her savings, read that day’s passage from the Bible and turned to sleep, secure in the knowledge that all was well.

Today, that frugal squirrel is quite likely to have discovered that all his nuts have been nicked by some dodgy finance company and transferred to some tax-free, tree-trunk haven on the Gold Coast.

Even before the quakes, we had lost faith in our homes, or at least those homes built since the deregulation of the building industry in the neo-liberal revolution of the 1990s. Builders, some qualified, some not, promptly set about erecting houses using untreated pine for framing, made permissible by a legislation change in 1995, and then they clad that vulnerable frame in fibre cement panels which cracked, permitting moisture in, then trapping it in a near airless, warm environment perfect for the growing of mould. Combined with a vogue for ‘Mediterranean-style’ housing, aping, in rainy New Zealand, the flat roofs and minimal eaves of stone housing designed for a drier climate, the result was inevitable: a plague of ‘leaky homes’, houses rotten to the core, 89,000 of them around the country, not to mention 157 schools, and a bill estimated to be as much as $23 billion for repair over which government, city councils and insurers have been arguing for years.

In spring 2014, there is an election in progress. A book has been published recording a sustained campaign of dirty tricks orchestrated from the office of the prime minister himself. He is a PR construct, product of the same company, Crosby Textor, which delivered the ruffled and roguish Boris Johnson to be lord mayor of London. For months now the media of this country have joined in the sales pitch with photographs of John Key holding someone’s baby, or lined up with All Blacks, and in one especially memorable piece of product placement, sharing the cover of the Woman’s Weekly with Kate and William and their adorable Labrador. John and Bronagh pick up on the feel-good factor with an armful of guide-dog puppies.

But Nicky Hager’s book, in meticulous detail, exposes the mould that has lain beneath the veneer. Hager is, without a doubt, this country’s most courageous and articulate political commentator. New Zealand’s Woodward, New Zealand’s Bernstein, except that their revelations so shocked a nation that they brought down a president. My nation is less concerned. Lulled by the hypnotic mantra of being relaxed, being comfortable, diverted by the sexual peccadilloes of prominent people and a globalised goody-bag of bloody crimes, all we do is shrug. Ah well. That’s politicians for you. What do you expect?

I drive through Avonside where deep holes opened up in the road into which cars nose-dived on that afternoon in February 2011, and friends poked a broom handle into a crack in the ground where it waggled about not finding solid ground, and it feels like metaphor.

It feels to me as if we are poised upon a void. The finance company with the solid Doric columns and the robust prospectus is thin air, your home can rot about you unseen, the politician is just a brand of puff and nothing. This is a city, this is a whole country, filled with good and creative and decent people, but right now I feel that there is a hollow — ‘Nihil’ as the Press photographer recorded it — at the heart.

That word was taken from a text in which a man was trying to come to terms with living in a difficult political environment. We are a long way here from sticking pins in tongues, but there remains the business of deciding how to live in a country in which I feel increasingly alien. How can I be a good citizen? In that same treatise, De Officiis, Cicero advised thinking of ourselves as belonging to a wide world.

We are not born for ourselves alone, but our

country claims a share of our being, and our

friends a share … We ought to follow Nature

as our guide, to contribute to the general

good by an interchange of acts of kindness,

by giving and receiving, and thus by our skill,

our industry and our talent cementing human

society more closely, man to man.

And, I add, as I always have to — because it is only in my own infinitesimally minute lifespan that people like Cicero have counted people like me — ‘woman to woman, and woman to man’. I can try to be a good citizen not just of the city state, but as kosmopolites, a citizen of the whole expansive world inhabited by gods and humans, united in rationality.

I AM NOT ALWAYS VERY RATIONAL. In fact, I am more often markedly irrational. I am not a philosopher. Nor am I an economist, a historian or a journalist. I am a novelist. I like stories. I like devising patterns from random human experience. And I am a citizen. Not a client. Not a consumer. Not an asset. I am a citizen. I am driving through my city, looking out the window and trying to understand how it came to be as it is, what happened when it was destroyed and how it is currently being reconfigured. I am trying to think it through, using just those things available to any citizen: a chat with neighbours on a city street, talking with friends over a dinner table, the books I borrow from a library, the magazines I buy at a newsagent, a daily newspaper, the internet, my own experience.

I am following the river because the map isn’t much use right now. The grid laid down on swamp and rough ground 150 years ago has broken in pieces like the tiles on a bathroom floor. It was devised by people with flaws and shortcomings, because that is how people are. They expressed land grab, invasion and political theory in a geometric little Utopia, for as the seventeenth-century painter Samuel van Hoogstraten wrote, and is quoted in Brotton’s study of maps, ‘a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail.’

And now another map is taking shape, also the work of flawed humanity, and I’m in it. I am trying to figure out, as Brotton says anyone looking at a map tries to do, whether they are surveying a Babylonian clay tablet of the known world or the little blue circle inching from A to B on Google Maps, ‘an answer to that enduring existential question, “Where am I?”’

I drive across the city trying to compose a narrative out of bits and pieces. It has been common here to make things out of broken pieces. Soon after the quakes, a friend set up a little business making wall mosaics from broken cups and plates for people who wanted to keep the pieces. Another business creates tables and other furniture from timber from demolished houses. Across the road from Alice in Videoland, with its stock of movies, and C1 where the EPIC innovators gather, at the corner of Tuam and High streets, where the old façades stand supported by scaffolding and walls of shipping containers, there is that grove of cabbage trees, ti kouka, created from dado and trim. They stand tall on cleared space, marking, as all great art does, a way home.

I feel minuscule on the face of this map. I feel temporary driving along River Road. Just a twig caught up in a surge of history that is fast sweeping me and all this broken stuff down to the sea. It would be easier, I’m sure, to contemplate decline and fall and the advent of new theories of social organisation from the quiet of a book-lined study, centuries distant from the mess and upheaval. Then perhaps I could get my head above water and perceive a pattern. But for now, I flail and look around.

In cleared spaces I try to make out the patterns left by postholes. I try to understand this place. I think for the first time in forty years about a villa and its buried mosaic.

I AM NOT THE FIRST to be prompted into thinking about evanescence. Darwin, for example, was prompted by the sight of just such a mosaic pavement to consider worms.

In 1881, twenty-two years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, he published his last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Actions of Worms, with Observations on their Habits. It’s a wonderful book, miles more accessible than the great opus, and filled with a kind of whimsy blended with rock-solid, tabulated science. The first book had followed an extensive voyage to exotic isles. The second was written when Darwin was old and suffering from an agoraphobic unwillingness to venture from home. Travel induced such episodes of panic that he insisted on blacking out the windows of his carriage. More comfortable was the intense observation of his immediate environment. He took to gathering data in the gardens and fields around his home. Accompanied by his sons, he made his observations beneath the shrubberies of Down House, and along a sand walk he had created as a place to stroll up and down and think away from the clatter of a house filled by his children. (He had fathered ten little Darwins so there was a lot of clatter.)

He observed the habits of worms, watching how they emerged after dark waving about like little fingers testing the air while keeping their tails firmly planted in the entrances to their burrows. He excavated those burrows, finding them lined with torn leaves leading to a chamber lined with pear pips or ‘little pebbles about as large as mustard seeds’, where the worm curled up for the winter. In his laboratory he conducted experiments, testing their hearing by playing a penny whistle, followed by the deepest and loudest notes of a bassoon. He shouted at them and concluded they must be deaf. He fed them cabbage, which they liked, and sage and meat and thyme, which they didn’t. He dissected them, examining their gizzards and the tiny stones they swallowed as birds do, to triturate their food. He drew detailed images of the Baroque buckled castings they left upon the surface of the ground. He concluded that they possessed a kind of intelligence.

And he devoted an entire section of his book to their role ‘in the Burial of Ancient Buildings’. His thinking was prompted by observations in a neighbouring field where, twenty-nine years earlier, a layer of white chalk had been laid down as fertiliser on the surface. He noted that the chalk was now a discernible white layer, 7 inches down. It had been carried there in the gizzards of worms, millions of them, in a constant cycle of digestion and excretion. On a single acre of land, Darwin calculated that a weight of more than 10 tons of dry earth would pass annually through the bodies of worms before being deposited on the surface in those ornate castings from which, eventually, rich vegetable mould was created.

This process was universal. Among other experts, Darwin quotes Julius von Haast, then director of the Canterbury Museum, who had made a similar study of an area on the New Zealand coast that consisted of mica-schist covered in 5 or 6 feet of loess above which 12 inches of vegetable soil had accumulated. Between the loess and the mould there was a layer from 3 to 6 inches in thickness, consisting of ‘cores, implements, flakes and chips, all manufactured from hard basaltic rock. It is therefore probable that the aborigines at some former period had left these objects on the surface, and that they had afterwards been slowly covered up by the castings of worms.’

Darwin himself had been present when the floor of a Roman villa had first been excavated at Abinger in Surrey in 1876. It was an era of increasingly intense cultivation, and deeper ploughshares were turning up previously unsuspected remains. Darwin was fascinated. He examined the tiled floors, not so much for their imagery or manufacture as for the manner in which worms had managed to find their way through the gaps between the tesserae, leaving ‘little cakes’ overnight. He dispatched his sons to sites further afield, where they recorded the actions of worms penetrating Roman concrete, brick and tile and, at Wroxeter, the evidence of a massacre: in the chaos that followed the break-up of the Roman Empire, the prosperous city of Uriconium had been sacked. The skeletons of women were discovered, dumped in the hypocausts where worms had set about concealing the evidence, century after century, in the great cycle of rebuilding the earth.

There he is: the old man, the scientist, looking out at an English field, considering all those ‘small fragments of tiles or bricks or concrete in the castings thrown up where ancient buildings once stood’. He surveys the green expanse and sees it not as still and unchanging, but in perpetual motion: ‘all the mould covering a field passes through the bodies of worms’ and in this process, inevitably, ‘the same small fragments will probably be swallowed and brought to the surface many times in this course of centuries’.

It’s an extraordinary vision. When I first came upon it back in 1999, it took my breath away. That was the year I had decided to read the Big Books, the ones I’d known about all my life but never got round to reading. I might know the title, I might even be able to quote a line or two, but I’d never read them right through. The turn of the millennium seemed like the time to attend to that. So I read the Bible cover to cover, placing all those familiar stories in their correct context: who knew that Adam and Eve and Noah and the rest sat alongside rules about what to do when you come upon a nest with a sitting bird (take the eggs, but let the mother go) and dealing with a bride who pretends to be a virgin (bring her to the door of her father’s house and the men of the city shall stone her with stones that she die). I read Das Kapital in lumbering translation, or at least the parts without too many numbers, and On the Origin of Species, which was a very solid meal indeed of beaks and claws, culminating in that wonderful visionary amazement at the leafy bank teeming with life:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled

bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds,

with birds singing on the bushes, with various

insects flitting about, and with worms crawling

through the damp earth, and to reflect that

these elaborately constructed forms, so different

from each other, and dependent on each other

in so complex a manner, have all been produced

by laws acting around us … Thus, from the

war of nature, from famine and death, the

most exalted object which we are capable of

conceiving, namely, the production of the higher

animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in

this view of life, with its several powers, having

been originally breathed into a few forms or

into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone

cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,

from so simple a beginning endless forms most

beautiful and most wonderful have been, and

are being, evolved.

And then I turned to the worms. That book was shorter and less demanding. It was slim, an elegant first edition from the stacks in the Christchurch Public Library, with Darwin’s beautifully executed engravings of guts and nerves. I haven’t consulted it while writing this book: it had vanished into a container or storage facility while the library moved about the city, from its original premises on Gloucester Street, to a double site, one next a bathroom shop on Peterborough Street and one by the bus exchange on Tuam Street, until that site was required to make way for the Justice and Emergency Precinct and it had to move once more a few hundred metres down the road to Manchester Street. Books packed, reshelved, packed again.

I bought a copy instead, published by a company that advertises its General Knowledge series as ‘one of the most admired book for the improvement and learning purpose’ and sold by an online billion-dollar empire of round-the-clock sweated labour and low, low wages. My copy has a shiny cover and the paper is white, though clearly copied from a library edition as the underlinings of a former reader are still visible, and Darwin’s drawings have disappeared, along with the foxing and that delicious old-paper smell. I could have read about the worms online, I suppose, but I like paper and adding my own underlinings and folding down the edges to mark my place and jotting down phone numbers and recipes on the end papers. I’m too old for the shiny screen.

But the writing still astonishes me as it did when I first came upon it as the millennium clicked over and the spectre of Y2K and digital meltdown threatened to plunge the world into babble. It triggered the complicated mix of feelings great books always release: amusement, at the old man playing the piccolo to a worm, fascination at the habits of scientific inquiry, delight in the warm breadth of observations conducted before the divorce of arts and science and the dreadful narrowing of focus that leads to autistic analysis devoid of whimsy, of empathy. I liked the artistry of Darwin’s worms, decorating their burrows with pear pips. I liked the curiosity that shifted so readily from the detail of a gut to a Roman villa. And most of all I liked the way Darwin altered my own view. I looked up from his book to the view of a Canterbury paddock, tawny brown at the end of a dry summer, and saw it afresh: this was no static pastoral idyll, but an endlessly shifting, repeating cycle of burial and renewal.

AND NOW HERE HE IS AGAIN, returning as great writers do at intervals throughout a life, offering another point of view as I drive along River Road and across Fitzgerald Avenue past the Avon Loop and with turns and diversions through the central city to the flat with its boarded-up windows and smoke stain and the little forest of seedlings in its spouting.

I am going to dig up the roses and take them home for safekeeping. The flat is to be demolished. It will be rebuilt. I’ve seen the plans. It is to be constructed ‘on a like for like basis’ to the original dimensions and on its original footprint, but it will have different foundations. The engineers have drilled and it’s a long way down — thirty metres or so — to solid ground, so the new flat is to be built upon a raft. A ‘concrete rib raft’, with a frame of steel reinforcing rods containing concrete poured about a sandwich filling of polystyrene pods that look exactly like the stuff used for boogie boards.

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.

VINTAGE

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Vintage is an imprint of the Penguin random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

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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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.

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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.

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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.