Shipping containers, gap-fillers and Other Things: UnZud part 3

Ode to Shipping Containers

Oh lovely shipping container, your chunky form delights.

Your squat and solid bottom planted firmly on the ground

Withstands the wrath of Nature, holds boulders at bay

Shoring up the crumbling cliffs and hiding the hills

Your long snaking wall along the Sumner coast

Offers art space

And can, with the help of a legion of New Zealand knitters, be quite cosy.

You are the embodiment of kia kaha* in broken Christchurch

I wonder if your ships miss you while you work so hard on land?

 

*Maori phrase  meaning be strong

Gap-fillers

So many gaps… Half of Christchurch, it seems, is a car-park. A razed rubble wasteland, grey and gloomy. Enterprising Cantabrians, refusing to take it lying down, have taken to filling the gaps with quirky installations – like these: 

 Dad and I went grocery shopping yesterday, and didn't even feel the 4.8 earthquake that rattled the city. Now, 4.8 is a sizeable shake, and it lasted about twenty seconds. Admittedly, the supermarket was noisy enough for us not to hear anything rattling, but I was surprised not to have felt anything. It made me think about the ridiculous and alarmist travel advisory put out by my own government, which was in yesterday's The Press.Oh dear, oh dear...

Destination Christchurch

What’s it like, coming out of marking hell? Well, this time I'm actually still sane (thank you Prozac.) It's been a bit like stepping out of a fog. All of a sudden I can hear my thoughts. I notice the mess in the house and the pile of unpaid bills on the table. Oops. I can think straight and acknowledge tomorrow and next week. I can actually think beyond this exam, this report, this frantic and inhumane pressure. It’s like waking up from a coma. I feel human again, and it’s time to enjoy the school holidays.

First thing on the agenda – visit the Christchurch Hineses! Off to Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud. Fortunately I made all my travel arrangements a couple of months ago, before the descent into marking hell – sometimes I surprise myself! So this is how it goes: a bus trip to Sydney – I finished two blanket squares for my Tutor Group knitting project (more about that in a separate post), a night at the Ibis Airport hotel, an early morning shuttle-bus to the airport, and I’m up, up and away!

Uneventful flight, but as usual I’m sitting next to a fat person who insists on oozing into the seat I have paid for… but I get to read a library book on my Kobo (more about that in yet another post, too!) and after an uninspiring gluten-free airline meal (fish! Erk!) I touch down in Shakytown at 2-something pm.

Chris and Ingrid collect me from the airport and we head across town to Dad & Diana’s place in the eastern suburbs.

It’s been 6 years and several thousand earthquakes since I was last in Christchurch. The recent biggies – the ones that split Dad’s former house in two and filled it with the silt of liquefaction – may seem like old news to those of us in the rest of the world – but they’re daily conversation and an ongoing fact of life for the people who live here. The roads are bumpy and pot-holed, fences and walls are falling down, and shipping containers have demonstrated their versatility in many ways: as storage places for all your worldly goods, holding up damaged buildings, shoring up crumbling cliffs, becoming coffee-shops and boutiques… being covered in artwork or a knitted container-cosy… 

Shipping container shopping mall - called 'The Restart Mall'

 Cantabrian quirkiness and good humour abound, however, and people have developed their own coping mechanisms. ‘Guess the magnitude of THAT’ is a popular game, as is ‘Guess the epicentre’. ‘What used to be there?’ is another. I liked this sign, in a craft shop window in New Brighton:

 

It’s now Tuesday, and I haven’t felt the earth moving – yet – let’s hope it stays that way. In the meantime, here are some photos taken from the periphery of the Red Zone in the city.  The scale of the destruction is hard to imagine – Christchurch has become a city of car-parks (seriously!) and sprawling vacant blocks. The soundtrack that plays in the background is the unceasing thump-thump of construction work – or rather, deconstruction work. Clearing the rubble is a gargantuan task. 

It was a harrowing ‘tour’ that made me feel a little ghoulish, but even worse than looking at the scenes of dereliction in the war-zone that the inner-city resembles was a visit to Dad’s former home.

It used to be a comfortable home with a lovely view of the river. Now it’s a broken shell awaiting the arrival of the deconstruction men. The hallway is a downhill slope. The bath, if filled, would be nearly empty at one end as it overflowed at the other. Ruined books and records litter the floor and the overgrown ‘garden’. Along the whole street, curtains hang in houses where no one lives any more. The street is deserted, apart from demolition workers and their trucks. The river glides past between the built-up gravel banks that run through this ghost-town.

Stuck in the mud - Dad's record cllection

 

The road to Sumner snakes along the coast, and walls of shipping containers act as barriers against the falling rocks and crumbling cliffs. Broken houses hang precariously from the clifftops.

I can’t imagine the noise of the rocks grinding and rumbling, houses being torn apart , trees falling, or the terror that must’ve gripped people as their world crashed down around them. Just looking at the aftermath, all these months later, was enough for me.

A (shaky) Tale of Two Countries

On 22 February, Christchurch, that most English of New Zealand cities, behaved most un-Englishly. It did a shake, rattle and roll routine that left scores of people dead, and thousands homeless.

Here in Australia the horror was metaphorically and literally a bit close to home. Aussies and Kiwis, while we poke fun at each other all the time when things are going well, are really pretty close. Some of us, like me, even have family over there on the other side of the Tasman Sea.  

Even though, like me, he’s a Pommie by birth, my dad, who’s in his 70s now, has spent more of his life in Christchurch than anywhere else on earth.  He’s officially a Kiwi citizen, a Cantabrian, and a resident of that grand old lady city, Christchurch – she who has so recently been brought to her knees by the greater power of Mother Earth (and that’s been one helluva mother-daughter stoush, I have to say!)

I’ve avoided blogging the whole Christchurch earthquake thing, probably because I have felt it from such a personal angle, despite being across the Tasman. Besides, I’ve been part of the chain that’s been busily passing messages between family members here and in the UK. 

But now it’s time. Over the last few weeks I’ve made many phone calls to my dad. He and Diana were rendered ‘earthquake refugees’, without power or water, not knowing whether their home would stand, be condemned-but-habitable, or condemned-and-get-out-now-coz-it’s-unsafe. They still don’t know. At the height of the awfulness, they had to abandon their home - and their traumatised cats - for a while. They’ve stayed with my youngest brother and his lovely wife in another part of town, and also with Diana’s family in faraway Nelson (which sounds like a lovely spot) but are now back home and sleeping in their own bed , despite continuing aftershocks, while they await the engineers’ pronouncement upon the stability and habitability of their home. 

“Come back to Oz, Dad,” I’ve said, more than once since the first very nasty Chch earthquake back in September 2010, and about a hundred times since the latest shake-up. “You have family here – and no earthquakes.” His response?

"Canberra? Bah! Too many bushfires! Brisbane? Floods! And then there are snakes and poisonous spiders! No way, Australia’s too bloody dangerous!"

Ah, Kiwis – shaken but not stirred.

There have been some amazingly heartening developments in amongst all the doom and gloom. Armies of uni student cleaner-uppers have been working around Christchurch, digging tonnes and tonnes of silt from people’s homes, gardens, streets etc. Random people from all over the place have converged on Christchurch, shovels in hand, keen to help wherever they can (many many thanks to the wonderful-but-anonymous people who, out of the blue, helped my brother and a mate of his clear the liquefaction damage from Dad & Diana’s house).

New Zealand is an amazing place. It has a disproportionately massive heart, perhaps because it’s really so small in international, as well as geographical terms. It still has an enviable 'community' feel. 

Despite Christchurch’s own straitened circumstances, New Zealand was one of the first countries to offer help to Japan after the devastating  earthquake & tsunami that hit Japan's east coast on Friday. That selfless response made me a bit teary.

You see, I have a Japanese connection, too. I spent 1977 living and going to high school in Mito-shi – in Ibaraki Prefecture – as an exchange student. My host families and old school friends are all there, in a place that copped a hiding on Friday from that bloody tsunami. As I have gradually and foolishly managed to lose touch with my Japanese friends and families over the last 30-odd years, I have no way of contacting them, or knowing whether (or how badly) any of them were affected by Friday’s unimaginably awful disaster.  It’s a feeling that niggles at me and makes me feel uneasy, unsettled – guilty, even, because of the lack of contact.

Something in particular that’s stuck in my craw, though, since then, is this: 

Only two days after the Japanese quake disaster (and OMG, that news footage is bloody terrifying) I am getting streams of jokes about it on my mobile phone.  I’ve yet to get one about the Chch quake. I’m still trying to think it all through – why do people feel that it’s ok to make jokes about the Japanese situation, but not the Christchurch one? If, as so many people say, humour is such wonderful medicine, why are we leaving our Christchurch cousins out of these bleak, 'healing' earthquake jokes, hmmm?

Oh, maybe that sort of humour isn’t quite so funny after all, when you’re talking about something  close to home. Maybe it’s only jokeworthy when it happens to people who don’t look like us; to people who don’t speak our language; to people who were our enemy in a fucking war that finished a couple of generations ago.

Oh dear, I’m having a rant, aren’t I? Maybe I'm being oversensitive about it, I don't know. Am I? The more I think about it, the crankier I get *sigh*.

Japan, my thoughts are with you.