Shaky Ground

Since February 22, 2011, there’s hardly been a day when the Christchurch earthquakes haven’t been mentioned in the media, especially by Campbell Live, which has, admirably in many respects, made it the programme’s mission to interrogate and advocate for the people of Christchurch. There is the long running saga about insurance, the EQC and the quality of house repairs, flooding in the Flockton Basin, the changed water table, and the many people who are still in miserable situations. The rebuild! And then again the rebuild.  Now we have a new documentary series on survivors. Is there anything else to say?

The problem with disaster is that it leads to disaster reporting and not much else. And of course there has been plenty of disaster to report on in Christchurch, including the ever-worsening budgets. Christchurch, the garden city, used to be such a boringly picture postcard place, interrupted only by some hate crimes and occasional lurid murders. Beautiful gardens, cultivated people, a pretty stone cathedral, the river Avon, boys in boaters, what’s not to like? Now that Christchurch is a desolated landscape other bits of that picture have gone wobbly too. Gaylene Preston’s drama Hope and Wire was attacked for juxtaposing Christchurch’s notorious skinhead population with marital and seismic problems in the tonier suburbs. But the earthquakes have peeled off layers in all sorts of ways, and pushed everyone into confronting not only what the earth can do when the mood takes it, but what happens to complex human societies when they have to face monumental destruction. Christchurch is perhaps lucky that it’s the Alpine Fault and not a marauding army that has laid waste to it. 

One of the difficulties faced by all of us is how to make sense of an event (or rather events) on this kind of scale without resorting to sensationalism, blaming, and name-calling. The job of repairing and remaking an entire city is a long and hard one of course, and needs watchdogs, but not only watchdogs. The nation needed Jane Bowron in the days following the event. Her blog about what Old Bucky had done to her street and her faithful feline companion Benecio, shocked with candid detail about what it was like digging a hole in the garden for a loo, boiling water over a fire, living a shanty life. 

The Shaky Ground seminar series, about to kick off at Victoria University, brings together some of the players in the epic drama of Christchurch and explores aspects of the earthquake aftermath that have been under the radar.

What about Christchurch’s objects? We know what happened to the buildings, what about the Rita Angus paintings, the Olivia Spencer Bowers, the Toss Woollastons? What do you do with a gallery that has been ‘closed for repairs’ for four years? Paul Millar, at Canterbury University, set up CEISMIC, a comprehensive digital archive to preserve the ‘struggles and chaos’ but also the creativity-the pop up shops (which have now popped up everywhere in empty buildings)- the brooches made from rubble, the white chair installation, the fashion designers, musicians and actors who improvised and continued. 

And under it all the geology that caused all the trouble and reminded us who really is in charge. Are we Tectonic Man? How have earthquakes shaped our development? And do we know anything new about the precarious ledge of rock on which we all live? There are innumerable stories about Christchurch, and a whole landscape of people and things going on. Sometimes we think about it all through too narrow a window. Shaky Ground opens up a few more in the hope that the story about Christchurch will become as rich and varied as the lives Cantabrians live.