discoveries

You will probably remember how much I loved this angel tombstone in a cemetery near my father's house:


And you will probably remember that I was sad to discover that she had sustained quite some damage in the Christchurch earthquakes.

Today I started browsing the Christchurch Art Gallery's online galleries, and particularly their large collection of William (Bill) A. Sutton's work, which can be found here. He was an artist from Christchurch, born 1917, died 2000, and I've always had a thing for his work.

I was SO EXCITED to find among his sketches that he too liked the angel tombstone!

Here she is. Taken from this page on the gallery website.

It's a little hard to see, so I sharpened the picture here:


I admit I do wish he had been able to do something more with the sketch, but the fact that one of my favourite artists wandered round my city too, and liked the same things I like - that's cool enough as it is.

aftershock

I'm staying with my grandmother at the moment, while my aunt and uncle are away on holiday. She lives close to my old home where my father still lives and where I lived for about four years. One of my favourite spots in the area was the old church cemetery on the other side of the park. You may remember, if you followed my old blog, that I used to photograph one particular angel rather often:

I really loved that angel. She even inspired a story I wrote and published on Halfway Down the Stairs, a rather overwrought story in which I wish I had been slightly less melodramatic, but which still has a few elements I really like.

I went out for a walk this afternoon - it's a beautiful, beautiful autumn day - and found myself approaching my old haunt, the cemetery (gosh, I really did intend no pun there). Imagine my shock and feeling of sadness to be greeted by this:

Silt that has seeped up through the ground during the quakes in the process of liquefaction

It's a bit of a shock, actually. I had heard that a few cemeteries around the city looked quite different, since the September and February earthquakes. But it's always a surprise to actually see these spots for yourself.

mental health weekend

Escaping to Dunedin for the weekend was a really good decision, it turns out.

I bused down on Friday.

It's a five hour trip which only becomes interesting in the last hour or so when you get to the coastline. This was a very wobbly photo I took.
Got into Dunedin at about 2pm and hung around at the Dunedin Railway Station (above) for a while until my sister finished work. It was a beautiful sunny day, and everything would have been perfect if I could only have found a café. I sat outside with my bags reading From Russia With Love in the sun (which, by the way, is racy in an incredibly old-fashioned, sexist way - but I still had to find out what happened).

My sister V. is married with three kids between the ages of eight and thirteen. They are an awesome family and it was so good to see them again. I also happen to love their house - it's around the Otago peninsula a bit, at the top of a hill, right next to a park with an amazing view of the harbour. They have the most lovely dog, Oscar, as well as a cat called Mufasa, both of whom make me wish that I had a dog and a cat.

When we got there, V., my eldest niece and I went for a walk with Oscar. Dunedin is awesome because it's a city (smallish but still a city) but it's almost like the wilderness is right next door. The wildlife is prolific - sea lions, all manner of birdlife including penguins and falcons, occasinally whales, etc - and there are tons of green green hills.
That evening, V., her husband and I watched Boy, which has just come out on DVD. This is the latest/greatest Kiwi film, directed by Taika Waititi. It's set in the 80s in a tiny community in the North Island and it's about a little boy who is a huge fan of Michael Jackson. It's one of those movies which half the time has you laughing and the other half makes you want to cry. I recommend it highly. Highlights in it were the performances of the children, and their ne'er-do-well father, played by Waititi.

On Saturday, my sister decided to take me to visit Broad Bay China Shop, along with my sister R. who also lives in Dunedin and my niece. I thought this was a strange decision given my current state of earthquake-apprehension. I couldn't drive around Dunedin without audibly wincing at all the tall, old, unstable brick buildings with huge chimneys. So a shop full of breakables wasn't going to be particularly distracting.

It was, however, a good decision. Broad Bay is a short drive around the harbour in a cute wee area, and Broad Bay China is one of the coolest shops I have ever been to. Bursting with china and so many other things, it would undoubtedly be a disaster zone in an earthquake, but nevertheless, it is AWESOME.
Besides the little building you can see in the photo above, there are at least three other rooms jampacked with china, vintage lace, jewellery, clothing, and much much more. There is expensive stuff and there is also stuff that is incredibly affordable and also tempting. I bought stuff and V. bought me a birthday present, and altogether I returned to Christchurch with:
- three saucers with the most beautiful blue and white painted design which I am going to hang on my wall someday.
- a little mug with Big Ears (from Enid Blyton's Noddy books) painted on it.
- salt and pepper shakers that look like toad stools.
- a painted tile which I will use as a hot plate.
My precious...

This Saturday fast became one of my top Saturdays when we stopped in soon after at Broad Bay cemetery. This tiny cemetery is balanced on a little peninsula, which juts out only a little further (pictured below) with huge pine trees surrounding it. I LOVE CEMETERIES AND I LOVE BROAD BAY CEMETERY. I'd put it in my top ten so far.
That night, V. and family took me up to a secret (okay, not secret but not exactly famous) location up the valley where the Leith River flows. We took torches and raincoats and climbed up a gully until we found glow-worms!! It was an amazing experiential moment, standing in a tight little riverbed gazing up above at the dark lushness of the trees and ferns and the slightly less dark sky, with shining little lights like candles speckled around us in the darkness. I felt like huddling down in a sleeping bag and just watching all night.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning. V. and family attend a lovely little church which always seems so happy and enthusiastic. Good refreshment.

In the afternoon, V. and the kids took me to the beach. It was another beautiful day - I cannot help but mention that Dunedin is not known for good weather two days in a row - so despite the still refreshing winds and still-freezing water we were happily paddling and removing outer layers.
While the boys made dams, V., niece and I went for a walk along the beach with Oscar, who is the most charming dog ever known, past people on horses, past surf lifesavers practising, past more and more dogs who all wanted to play...
... then back to the boys where we too mucked around on the beach with sand and water... Lovely.

On Monday morning I caught up with my sister R. again and then went shopping in Dunedin town before catching my bus home. Great weekend. Much needed.

And now I am back at university, trying to get back into the swing of things. There are huge cracks in the plaster walls on our floor, but we have been assured by the VC that 'all the cracks you may come across have been seen by structural engineers and the buildings are perfectly safe'. Well, fingers crossed!

ngaio

Typical. Just typical.

I've been looking through my photos of years past (I wrote that because it sounds good but hardly because I expect to look at photos of years to come), and came across these photos of the beautiful Church of the Holy Innocents in Peel Forest, where my family and I spent Christmas a few years ago. We spent some time wandering round the graveyard, because that's what we like to do, and I took a photo of the gravestone, pictured below, of "Edith Ngaio Marsh" because the name sounded familiar.


I forgot all about this. But in the past few years I've picked up a Ngaio Marsh detective novel or two, and if only I'd read the books when I found her grave completely by accident, I could have got all fangirlish and excited. Now I have to settle for getting slightly excited and fangirlish looking at a photo I took once upon a time.

Wellington, je t'aime

I am surprised to see myself write the above - I've never particularly liked Wellington. Too many suits, too many hills, too much wind and rain, too much earthquake potential.

I flew up on Sunday evening with my friend M., also a historian-in-training, and I was fully prepared to get what I could out of the few days in Wellington, but not expecting to enjoy it all that much.

Well, I did.

Perhaps I have had more than I can take of living in a house with five other people. I don't know. But there was a real luxury to staying at a mere backpackers:

Nomads Capital Wellington. A room to myself, a bathroom of my own, NO MICE. Waking up in the morning, wandering out the door onto a dignified central city street, meandering past Karen Walker and Kate Sylvester on my way to find coffee.

Speaking of coffee, Wellington has a reputation for the good stuff. It has a higher number of cafés, per capita, than cities like New York and so for the cafés to survive the coffee has to be good. Flying up with M., who used to live in the windy city, she was almost salivating at the prospect of it. I was sceptical. Surely you had to have a very refined taste of coffee to be able to tell the difference between all the different cafés?

And then I had breakfast at a Wellington café, and the coffee was everything it was cracked up to be. I could EXIST on that stuff alone. The food, however, was also excellent and the service perfect. I felt luxurious.

Wandering through central Wellington streets, it surprised me how vibrant the city feels. Despite all the suits. It's strange to think that Christchurch is now a bigger city than Wellington, because it just doesn't have the same pulse. I suppose it makes sense given that Wellington is the capital city so it's got all the government jobs and the high-powered atmosphere. Wellington seems more highly strung. It's more like a 'big city'. Christchurch feels like a large rural town, at times.

Another thing that is strange is that Wellington has a fantastic variety of ethnic restaurants, often on the very funky Cuba Street, whereas Christchurch has a more limited variety. Another friend from my university and I were looking for somewhere cheap to eat on Monday night, before I suddenly saw the Malaysian restaurant I was surely fated to eat at. Reasonably cheap, with a menu of food I haven't been able to eat since last time I went to Malaysia - from that point, my friend had little say and we just HAD to eat there. I chose my favourites - masala dosai and roti chanai, with a mango lassi to wash it down - and felt so extremely satisfied with Wellington that walking back to my accommodation in the rain was a pleasant experience. And then sitting in a cosy little cafe reading Agatha Christie, rain streaming down the windows, was the perfect end to a nice day.

Wellington could begin to feel claustrophobic. I come from the wide open vistas of the Canterbury plains, the flatness of Christchurch and the huge sunset sky, whereas Wellington is nestled in among steep hills and even in the flat part of town the buildings seem to swallow up the space above you. For two nights, it's a lot of fun. If the big earthquake does come to Wellington (the city is sitting precisely on the Alpine fault line that runs the length of New Zealand), it would be terrifying.

My purpose in coming to Wellington was to go to a conference being held at Victoria University of Wellington, which sits perched on the side of a steep hill. As sorry as I was not to climb this hill (ha!), it was more tempting to ride the cable car up the hill:

For $1 (student rate), this is a cheap and easy way to get up the hill, and besides that there's a novelty value that makes it much more fun than walking or taking the bus. And you really do feel that you're sitting in a box that is being pulled on a rope up the hill. Weird.

Victoria University of Wellington:
... is a university that by its very existence helps its students get fit. The flat playing field in this picture above is possibly the one flat piece of ground in the entire university. The rest is made up of constant stairs and constant slopes, and there are probably hundreds of mysterious little paths all over the place making their way down the steep, steep hill and between buildings.

The funny thing about the campus is that on the first morning, before I registered for the conference, I wandered around for a while trying to get a good view of the city. But nowhere could I find an unbroken view. It was very strange, given that this university is 2/3 of the way up a very steep hill - but there was always something getting in the way.

Imagine my joy when M. and I went for a walk between conference sessions on the second day of the conference and discovered a little old cemetery on one of the steepest parts of the hill, graves at a ridiculous gradient. You must know by now that I love cemeteries. And this was one of the most romantic of them, hidden away from sight - we even had to climb through a hedge just to get to it!
My joy was even greater, though, when we found that by standing on top of the huge slab of concrete marking the Sisters of Mercy's grave (apologies to the Sisters of Mercy), the wind rushing in our face, we suddenly had an unbroken, wide view of the city, the harbour, and the suburbs disappearing up the valley.

It was exhilarating. One of my favourite moments of the trip.
The conference itself was really fun. I presented at the end of the first day and got a lot of questions which I think is always a good sign, and was followed by someone who was researching a slightly different time and place but who was dealing with very similar concepts. That, I think, was one of the most valuable things about the conference. Even within the history department of a university it's sometimes hard to find people to talk with about the things you're researching who really understand, and so it's very helpful to be given a situation in which you meet the only people in the country who are particularly interested in the same things as you.

The other three from my university who went all did really well, too. And overall I was reminded of all the reasons I've chosen history (although I was also reminded of the types of history I'm not keen on, and the elements of academic life that I'm going to find challenging).
On the final night, I left the conference and went for a wander along the waterfront, and then followed my nose back to the backpackers to pick up my bags. A light dinner in the cafe next door - lamb, haloumi and red capsicum on skewers of rosemary with minted yoghurt for dipping, MMM - followed by a hot chocolate, and then off to the airport and home to Christchurch. Rather a lovely few days.