A Maverick New Zealand Way by Mary Jane Walker

Author:Mary Jane Walker [Walker, Mary Jane]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780473408084
Publisher: A Maverick Traveller Ltd
Published: 2017-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Crescent, Invercargill, from Tay Street circa 1905, by Muir & Moodie Studio. The internationally popular Invercargill March was composed around this time by local boy Alex Lithgow. Soutce: Te Papa (C.012926). http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/Object/19511. Empty sky cropped.

Another writer with an architectural bent, Walter Benjamin, famously described Paris as “the capital of the nineteenth century.” Behind Benjamin’s quip lay the fact that much of what we consider to be distinctive about Paris is the product of nineteenth-century rebuilding efforts, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Champs-Elysee to the Eiffel Tower to the distinctive form of Second Empire architecture with its mansard roofs.

If the observations of Pevsner and Benjamin are read one after the other, it becomes clear that if the nineteenth century gave us Paris, it also laid a heavy imprint upon Christchurch and Dunedin and the lesser centres of the South Island, which were indeed contemporary with Paris. In his 2008 book The Life and Times of Auckland, Gordon McLauchlan wrote that Auckland should not be looked down on as a young city, “because almost all cities are young.”58 In other words our urban heritage is just as significant as that of Europe and comes from the same culture, admittedly at a distance. We can’t just say, ‘oh that’s all just colonial stuff, let’s bowl it and move on’. Touring Europe before the 2011 earthquake I would pass through the sorts of old European Cities that André Siegfried described Christchurch as resembling, and I would think, ‘gosh, this place is just like Christchurch’.

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