Kia Ora from Aotearoa

Build It Back

The collapse in Tuesday's earthquake of the bell tower of ChristChurch cathedral is a tragedy both for those killed and for the heart and soul of New Zealand's second city. The tower was the focus point at the heart of this charming, peaceful chip off the old British block. Its loss is symbolic of the tragedy. It should be rebuilt at once.

Cities vary widely in their response to disaster. London reacted to terrorist attack differently from New York. The resignation of the poor of Pakistan, Haiti and Indonesia faced with earthquake and tsunami surprised western observers, as families and villages turned in on themselves and found a comfort and security the state could not supply. It is the same in time of war.

In each case someone comes along shouting for a memorial. They demand some artist's self-regarding creation of modern sculpture, like a Diana fountain. They demand hunks of concrete and steel, cenotaphs and memorial walls, the crude litterings of New York's Ground Zero or London's Hyde Park Corner. It is as if tragedy required atonement in an all too visible and eternal gesture of commemoration.

I am sure there will be talk in New Zealand of how – and if – the tower's stump should be handled. Whenever a prominent building is damaged or destroyed, there are those who see an opportunity to make some personal statement, if not to win a contract. Some will claim that the ChristChurch ruin should be left as a memorial, even an exercise in urban picturesque.

Some may claim the site should be cleared and used for something else. Some may claim there should be a new tower, but in the "modern idiom", which nowadays usually means a spike, a lump of concrete, a rolled-steel joist or a corkscrew.

I believe that the evil of a disaster, whatever its cause, is best conquered by reinstating the good that was before. This was illustrated in the postwar efforts of defeated, ruined European cities to reinstate what bombs and shells had obliterated. No sooner had the guns gone silent than the citizens of Warsaw were seen with wheelbarrows, spades and trowels, carting in materials to rebuild their Old Town square. It was the boldest possible assertion of their cultural identity and continuity. It restored their morale.

In the same spirit, Stalin ordered the restoration of Leningrad's ruined palaces, even though they evoked the age of the tsars and even though those working on them were starving in their hovels. France rebuilt Caen abbey and the centre of Tours. The recent civil war devastated the former Yugoslavia's churches and mosques. It is being redeemed, where possible, by their reconstruction.

Britain, in contrast, boasted its victory in 1945 by redoubling the destruction of the Luftwaffe. Building contractors descended on Bristol, Plymouth, Southampton and Coventry and tore down what had been left of their historic cores. Neighbourhoods that should have been reinstated to reassert respect for the country's values and give back a spirit of history to its cities were turned into banal modernist memorials to bomber and bulldozer alike.

On Wednesday the dean of ChristChurch cathedral said that the loss of his tower was devastating, "but the most important thing at the moment is not the buildings, it's the people". The dead must be found and buried. I would question only the implied demotion of the buildings. Unlike dead people they can live again, and if revived can restore more than brick and stone. They restore morale, civic pride and collective memory.

ChristChurch cathedral tower is the totem of civic continuity. Begun in 1864, it was built apart from the nave to minimise collateral damage should it fall. The same was true of some East Anglican churches, whose flint and mortar construction made them unstable. While not the greatest work of its English architect, Sir George Gilbert Scott, ChristChurch was in the muscular two-tone gothic favoured for his overseas commissions, as in Newfoundland and South Africa. They reminded the early settlers that Northamptonshire was just a hop and a skip away.

Scott's design was vindicated in Tuesday's collapse, when the tower did not fall on the adjacent church. It had already suffered earthquakes in 1888, 1901 and 2010. On the last occasion, its bells eerily started ringing at the height of the quake, released from their locks to swing free, as if given tongue by the subterranean forces of nature.

Reinstating the past induces existential horror in architects and city planners. The rebuilding of Warsaw is still dismissed as "Disneyland nostalgia" by leftwing critics, for whom the hapless citizens should have awaited the arrival of Le Corbusier and his concrete mixer. A similar "truth to history" led the communists to argue that Dresden's Frauenkirche should be left as a heap of rubble and not be rebuilt, as it has been magnificently. Some wanted the World Trade Centre left as a gaping memorial, the same cult of the ruin as led the Picturesque Romantic William Gilpin to demand that a few more corbels be knocked off Tintern Abbey, the better to evoke the cruel transience of history.

There are those who object to English Heritage's admirable reinstatement of Norman Dover Castle as "Disneyfication", and who abuse Moscow for reconstructing its pre-revolutionary churches as "Disneyland" facsimiles, rather than as steel and concrete boxes. This attitude infests Unesco and the council of Europe, to yield such absurdities as the spatchcock Erechtheion pseudo-ruin on the Acropolis in Athens, and the diktat that the Bamiyan Buddhas, blown up by the Taliban, should not be replaced. The giant niches should be left empty and "true", presumably to punish local peasants for allowing the Taliban to take power in the first place. As Nato bombers pulverise their villages, they will doubtless be banned from restoring them too.

The Victorians of Scott's day suffered no such mumbo jumbo to impede them in the greatest ever rescue of ancient civilisation, that of medieval Europe from industrial and political revolution. From Carcassonne to the Tower of London, from Durham cathedral to the west front of Chartres, from thousands of English churches to almost every medieval structure in Europe, the Victorians studied and sought to restore the past for the enjoyment and edification of the present. Had some official fussed over their archaeological "authenticity", all would have disappeared.

For the Victorians a great building was more than the sum of its parts. It was a manifestation of human identity. Western historians may feel that when a building is damaged or destroyed the ruin should be retained as "part of its memory". But who are they to dictate? Why should the gaping scars of other people's tragedies be left unrepaired, so some pundit can exult in "the pleasure of ruins"? A readiness to restore, to make amends, to gather up the nerve-endings of history to help a community resume normal life, these are surely the best future for a devastated past.

Scott's cathedral tower should be reconstructed as a matter of priority. That way Christchurch will recover quickest from its trauma.

The Church of Christ

Hot Spot

Earthquake in Aotearoa

Newstralia?

A POINT OF VIEW

New Zealand is talking about whether to become part of Australia. It would be a sad step for a country which has used its independence to set an example for the rest of the world, says Simon Schama.

On a recent Sunday morning in New Zealand I'm waiting to do a turn on breakfast TV with a tough, veteran presenter, Paul Holmes, whose sharp tailoring at an hour when most of us are still in pyjamas seems, all by itself, a reproach to dozy thinking.

I'm in a studio in Wellington; he's in Auckland. We are connected by a satellite feed, but there is something about Paul that reminds me of a Latin teacher who had an uncanny knack for spotting where my mind was wandering. The rest of the class would be plodding through Parthia with Caesar's legions, but Schama? He was off somewhere on a Pacific lagoon backing up Elvis as grass skirts swayed to a tropic breeze.

"Boy at the back WAKE UP!" the Master Conjugator would roar and you can bet I did. So, this Sunday, even though my fellow writers at the Wellington festival have been making friends with the Pinot Noir until all hours, I sit up straight in the studio and pay attention as Paul and his politician guests tackle a painful question for the half-hour before my interview.

That subject turns out to be the suicide of New Zealand. No not suicide in New Zealand but a proposal to cash in the country's independence and become instead, the seventh state of the Australian commonwealth. An opinion poll has suggested that no less than one in four New Zealanders are in favour of this startling departure, and fully a half of the polled want to begin serious debate about it.

What - in the name of Edmund Hillary, the haka and all things Kiri te Kanawa - are they talking about? Don't they know that Poms live for the moments - and they happen all too infrequently - when the Aussies get shafted by the Men in Black?

Isn't it bad enough they have the sunshine, the terminally cute wombat, and Nicole Kidman? Must they get the kiwi and the juiciest spring lamb in the world too?

The reasons habitually given for this overture are, surprise, surprise economic and not without a steely logic. Over the past two decades, per capita incomes in the two countries on opposite sides of the Tasman Sea have been diverging with New Zealand on the short end of the trend.

Young brains have been draining to Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. As the British and Irish descendants depart for Oz, the great trans-Pacific Asian migration moves in.

New Zealand is one of the least racially defensive places on the face of the Earth, but even in high-minded circles there's anxiety about a shift in cultural identity. Which seems to me to be even less of a reason to cash in that identity in for the Mephistophelian allure of the mineral-rich economy of Australia.

I must have registered shock for when Paul asks me to chip in, the words "birthright" and "mess of pottage" escape my lips.

Some days later in Sydney, though, I can see the point of kiwis who are thinking the unthinkable. Is there any more gorgeous city on the face of the Earth? No, there isn't.

Paris? Oh please: food and fashion are so over. New York? Uninspired modern art and punitive traffic on the West Side Highway. London. OK the great world city. But unlike London, the economic outlook in Sydney is as sunny as the weather.

Future of megastates

Unemployment stands at 5%. Property prices are going up. As are glittering high rise office towers, designed by the usual premier league of celebrity architects. The creamily clad Opera House sits enthroned on its pedestal in the harbour, as the muscle-toned and the tanned jog by the water.

“ Something deeper and sadder is lurking here: the embarrassment of smallness ”

And for a moment you say to yourself, well, all right, who wouldn't want to be along for that kind of thrilling Aussie ride into the Pacific-Asian future?

But then you snap out of it. Because you realise that the economic rationale for making New Zealand more Australian is just that - a rationalisation. Something deeper and sadder is lurking here: the embarrassment of smallness.

I take a straw poll in the studio in Wellington and it's only the producer who says yes she'd vote for a union tomorrow because the country might stake more of a claim in the coming world. By which she means the world of the economic megastates whose population is counted in the hundreds of millions rather than New Zealand's 4.3.

Better to be a tickbird on the hide of the pachyderm than trampled ignominiously beneath its thundering feet is it?

Wretched cookie cutters

To my appeal to leave New Zealand just as it is, my hosts are too polite to retort "that's rich coming from you" and remind me that in 1973 we ran off to the EU; responding to sleeve tugging from the orphaned antipodes with a brush-off telegram: "Thanks a ton for Gallipoli and all the butter, but this is just the way it is. Sorry about the surplus to requirement sheep. Have a nice life."

“ I'm all for micro-anachronism. Long live Andorra! Hail to thee O Liechtenstein! May Sikkim never perish from the face of the earth! ”

But even acknowledging the hypocrisy, I still don't want to see New Zealanders selling short the rich history of their peculiar place in the world. I'm not an enthusiast for one-size-fits-all versions of national community: interchangeable airports, cookie-cutter multiplexes, die-stamp shopping malls.

I'm all for micro-anachronism. Long live Andorra! Hail to thee O Liechtenstein! May Sikkim never perish from the face of the Earth.

I own up to a smidgin of nostalgia here. For anyone who grew up in the 1950s, it's a weird and not unpleasant experience to travel thousands of miles to the opposite ends of the Earth and, in New Zealand's smaller towns, arrive where you began your life amidst drizzle-sprayed bowling greens, rose gardens, and shops selling Bassett's Liquorice Allsorts.

But that's the knitted tea-cosy cliche about the country. The strength of its history could not be less purl and plain.

Wherever you look, the New Zealand story has been heroic, volcanic, singular. Its island masses, torn from Gondwanaland, stayed so remote that for millions of years they knew no mammalian life. Insects, reptiles and birds shared the lush ecology and without any predators, many birds evolved flightlessly.

Zoological miracle

In an ambitious ecological restoration project, set around an old 19th Century Wellington reservoir, it's possible to get a glimpse of that miracle of zoological idiosyncrasy. Deep in the shade of tree ferns, a lizard-like tuatara, identical to its ancestors 200 million years ago, snoozes, its skin papery, eyelids wrinkled like some retired professor taking a nap.

Higher up a tui bird goes through its sweetly comical repertoire of impersonations, sounding first like the winding of an old clock, then Susan Boyle in top form.

But the exceptional New Zealand history that needs to be preserved is human. Whatever its ethnic and social battles, New Zealand has often led the way. In 1893 it was the first country in the world to give women the vote, and it was the first to offer old-age pensions to the poor.

But it's the story of Maori and pakeha, the settlers of European origin, that - for all the pain, betrayals and suffering - still deserve to be known and celebrated as offering a different model of cultural encounter than anywhere else in the world.

The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi which, in usual imperial style, seized sovereignty from the Maori and laid it at the feet of Queen Victoria did so on condition that their property rights and political and cultural integrity were respected. Needless to say in the generations that followed, this pact was respected more in the breach than the observance, but New Zealand history did follow its own extraordinary course.

In their first wars against violations of Waitangi the Maori effectively won the battle with the pakeha. Decimated by imported diseases for which they had no immunity, the Maori were expected, at the turn of the 20th Century to be on their way to extinction or extreme marginalisation like native Americans or Australian aborigines. Nothing of the sort has happened.

Today they constitute - by one count - almost 20% of the population and astonishingly a special tribunal created in the 1970s has been ruling on land claims dating back to the post-Waitangi years. Maori and the descendants of intermarriages that go back deep into the 19th Century, are to be found in every leading walk of life in the country.

Of course there have been serious problems of unequal social opportunity, of street gangs. But if there is anywhere in the post-colonial world where two cultural worlds truly live an engaged life alongside each other, it's in New Zealand.

Such stories don't come along very often. Cherish them. Chant them. Dance them.

Upane upane, kaupane, whiti te ra! Up the ladder, up the ladder, the Sun Shines.

Safe Aotearoa

On top of the many humiliations that have rained down on Iceland recently – the implosion of its economy, banks and currency to name just three – the erstwhile Viking tiger today lost its title as the safest place in the world.

New Zealand is now officially your best bet for a risk-free destination, according to the new Global Peace Index (GPI), an annual ranking of the world's nations on the basis of how peaceful they are.

Despite the much-vaunted progress on security, Iraq remained bottom of the list, below Afghanistan, Somalia and Israel, which found itself listed as more dangerous than Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the top, the usual Nordic suspects clustered below New Zealand: Denmark, Norway and Iceland came second, third and fourth, followed by Austria and then Sweden.

Britain was 35th: better than last year, and one position higher than Italy, but still below most of Europe and countries as diverse as Botswana, South Korea, Malaysia and Qatar.

The United States has clawed its way up six places to 83rd – still weighed down by two foreign wars, a high prison population and the general availability of guns. Its slight rise was attributed to the number of years since 9/11 that the country has avoided a terrorist attack, and the relative decline of other countries.

The index was collated by the Economist Intelligence Unit for a new thinktank called the Institute for Economics and Peace. It uses a weighted mix of 23 criteria, including foreign wars, internal conflicts, respect for human rights, the number of murders, the number of people in jail, the arms trade, and degrees of democracy.

This year's results found the economic downturn had made the world a little less peaceful. That, say the authors, "appears to reflect the intensification of violent conflict in some countries and the effects of both the rapidly rising food and fuel prices early in 2008 and the dramatic global economic downturn in the final quarter of the year.

"Rapidly rising unemployment, pay freezes and falls in the value of house prices, savings and pensions is causing popular resentment in many countries, with political repercussions that have been registered by the GPI through various indicators measuring safety and security in society."

The results come from a groundbreaking study, released alongside the 2009 GPI, which estimates the economic impact of lost peace on the global economy at $7.2tn (£4.4tn) a year.

Of this, $4.8tn is made up of business activities that never see the light of day because of violence; a further $2.4tn relates to the redeployment of resources and expenditure away from industries benefiting from violence to those that benefit from peace.

"The reality is that the net economic benefit of peace to humanity is substantial, and governments and businesses should seriously consider how adopting practices and policies that promote peace helps their bottom line," said Clyde ­McConaghy, who oversees the index at the institute. "It is this kind of thinking that the Institute for Economics and Peace will promote."

Aotearoa Turns Right

New Zealand may mourn the end of the Clark era: she was a prime minister in a different mould

The end of an era came this week when the millionaire merchant banker John Key was sworn in as New Zealand's 38th prime minister. His centre-right National party had won a resounding victory over the longstanding Labour government. That also sadly meant the end to the reign of one of the country's most successful leaders, Helen Clark, who then resigned as head of the party.

With all that is going on in the world, it is easy to think that peaceful regime change in a country with a population the size of the East Midlands, in the middle of an ocean 12,000 miles from here, isn't exactly vital. (Which may explain why the election hardly got a mention in the British press.) But Helen Clark was a different kind of politician from any New Zealand had seen before - and as an expatriate I know I am not alone in feeling unusually proud of her achievements and sad to see her go.

During her nine years in power, Helen (as the 58-year-old was called by those who loved or reviled her) was a "third way" social democrat, aiming to flatten some of the more glaring inequalities in the country's so-called egalatarian society by introducing a 39% top-tax rate and family tax credits, taking interest off student loans and increasing subsidised healthcare. She revived ailing services like Air New Zealand and the railways by returning them to state ownership, and she made waves in the US when she insisted that New Zealand waters remain free of nuclear-powered vessels.

Like Tony Blair (whose Labour party preceded Helen's to power by two years) she was tasked with bringing together a party with deep ideological divisions. On top of that, in 1996 New Zealand had changed from first past the post to mixed member proportional voting so in each of her governments she had to negotiate constantly with small, often badly behaved parties from the margins.

Her former press officer, Mike Munro, said: "From day one she did an amazing job - there were some fairly feral characters in the Alliance." There were also plenty of controversial MPs in her own party, accused of everything from drink-driving and sexual misconduct to bribery and corruption. Her standards of ministerial accountability were tough, but as Munro put it: "She made sure they were all brought into the tent."

From a farming family in the Waikato, Helen was resolutely down to earth and - in the Kiwi vernacular - not at all "flash". She followed the footie (rugby), liked pop music, and went climbing and walking whenever she got any spare time. As the late Sir Edmund Hillary said of her: "She's always off climbing something, doing something exciting and I think that New Zealanders admire that."

But there were some things about Helen they never felt comfortable with. Her deep voice, her wardrobe of serviceable trouser suits, and her childless marriage to sociologist Peter Davis all brought their share of snide media comment. This didn't seem to bother her much; she was no emotional chin wobbler. But as one media commentator pointed out: "Bossy women aren't much liked or trusted in New Zealand."

Columnist Chris Trotter in the Sunday Star Times went so far as to attribute the election result to ingrained sexism: "It was the men who just couldn't cope with the idea of being led by an intelligent, idealistic, free-spirited woman; the gutless, witless, passionless creatures of the barbecue-pit and the sports bar (and the feckless females who put up with them) who voted Helen Clark out of office."

Others see the election as the result of boredom. The country has, so far, been relatively free of the economic maelstrom that the rest of us are experiencing. But rather than stick with the partnership of Helen and finance minister Dr Michael Cullen that had led to stability and the high living standards New Zealanders enjoy, all the pre-election talk was of the need for "change".

I first met Helen in 1975. I was a first-year at the University of Auckland; she was my political science tutor. She was then as she turned out to be later: informal, plain speaking, occasionally droll, determined and committed. Only six years later she was elected to represent the middle-class Auckland suburb of Mt Albert, a seat she still holds.

The next time I met her was in New Zealand House in London, where she had attended the premiere of Niki Caro's film Whale Rider. All through her government she was also the minister for arts and culture. Not everyone in that particular world felt her reign was beneficial, but generally she was seen as firm but fair, a politician you could talk to.

Just before the election she attended the NZ Music Awards to give out a prize - but it was her appearance that got the standing ovation. From a room full of popular musos, after nine years in office, that says something about Helen. And I can't imagine any British prime minister ever pulling it off.

by Louise Chunn

Thank You!

Janet Frame in Memoriam

Waitangi Day in Aotearoa