Greetings from Whitestone City

Having a few days break in Oamaru. Often called Whitestone City because many of the important buildings are made of local limestone. Oamaru was a wealthy place in the 1880's; most of these buildings were built within a four-year period. Unfortunately for Oamaru, the boom soon turned to bust when the city was sidelined by a better port at Timaru, further north. The buildings were not even considered worth demolishing, but now have been preserved and restored as a rare example of a Victorian mercantile and harbour precinct.

The Criterion Hotel

Wool store

Wool and grain merchants

The harbour

I'm staying at Bookbinder's Retreat, run by the craftsman bookbinder here, Michael O'Brien. It's a cosy little studio...

with a compact kitchen...

a peaceful garden...

antique fittings...

a view of the gardens and the sea from... 

the garden balcony.

The weather has been nice today, but a sea-fog is rolling in now. I went for a long walk through the botanic gardens today. Tomorrow I hit the Art Gallery and the bookshops!

A harvest - of non-fiction

I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately:

"Factory girls; from village to city in changing China" by Leslie T. Chang. Fascinating but often depressing look at modern China, focusing on three girls who make the trip from their rural villages to the vast factories of the new Chinese economic miracle. One of these factories employs 11,000 people, and is a small city of its own. Workers, usually young women, live in dormitories, cheek by jowl, and work 10 and 11 hour days, changing employment frequently to get better conditions and more money. Friendship and family connections become tenuous or non-existent, but the lure of money, fashionable consumer goods and a new life away from the boredom of the country is a powerful one that keeps the girls in the big cities.

A much older, very different China is depicted in this travel classic by Peter Goullart. Goullart recounts his years spent in Likiang, Yunnan Province, in the years before the second world war and the subsequent Communist take-over. Likiang is situated at the border of China, Burma and Tibet, and Goullart's experiences of the many different peoples and tribal groups of the area and the now vanished way of life is well worth reading.

Marilyn Johnson wrote an expose of the librarian's world in "This book is overdue!" and here she does the same for archaeologists. Interesting fodder for the Lara Crofts/Indiana Jones's among you, but quite American in its focus, which I found a bit disappointing.

Lastly, Andrea di Robilant's book about finding and naming a mysterious but distinctive un-named rose which grew in the garden of his family palazzo. Suspecting that the rose may be one of the old "China" roses that gave birth to our modern roses, he searches for its identity with rose specialists and through historical research. Di Robilant has written before about his Venetian ancestors, and this is sort of a spin-off of those works. A light read, good for the bedside table.

Bulb planting time

         This pot used to hold bulbs, but was irresistible to Jiro-chan. 

A day for potting up and potting on, and I have planted some bulbs directly in the garden. I find tulips are not very good planted two years running in pots, I think they need a deeper, cooler soil than pots usually provide.

This year's bulb selection. Hope they all come up. I pulled out my last lot of ixias by mistake when weeding - I thought they were grass. The "Cream Beauty" crocuses have been planted in a pot for indoors. They come out early in spring and are just lovely for having as a display on the window bookcase. I tried the anemone blanda in the garden last year, and not one came up as we had a prolonged wet spell after I put them in, so this year I've put these in a pot too, all the better to keep an eye on them.

I'm going down to Oamaru next week, staying at

http://www.bookbinder.co.nz/accommodation/4576453656. This is the studio of the man who is the bookbinder in the old historic precinct. I've been reading up on the town; they have six secondhand book shops, a whisky shop, an art gallery, an artisan cheesemaker, a brewery, a bakery and a little blue penguin viewing gallery, where the penguins come ashore in the evening. (Little blue penguins are quite rare, we do have a colony here on Banks Peninsula but only in small numbers). Oamaru sounds very civilised, I'm looking forward to it and will take lots of pictures.

Oamaru?

Been pondering some big questions lately, about whether I should move from Christchurch to a new place ( new for me that is). I've been thinking about this for some time, since the earthquakes, but now it really is becoming a 'yes, I can' thing. I've lived here for most of my life and stayed here mainly because of my Mum being in care here, but now she will have been dead for four years come this September so I can see that there's really no reason to stay if I don't want to.  Christchurch has changed so much since the earthquakes, and not just physically; the whole spirit of the place has changed. We are inundated with people who are only here to make a lot of money - disaster capitalism they call it. It's all about money now, and we are controlled and bullied by central government with its neo-liberal agenda. The places I loved are gone or altered beyond recognition, even the weather seems worse!

I'd like to live somewhere with a less capitalist vibe. One of the candidates is Oamaru (pronounced Om-aroo). This is an old town now distinguished by its renovation of an old Victorian port precinct. I'm hoping to visit in April and have a nose around. Houses are very much cheaper there, and I could kick my mortgage in the teeth. There are a number of eccentric persons living there so I might fit in! The only problem is it might be cold there; if I want to escape the cold Christchurch winters (damp, drizzly, frosty) this may not be the place to go. The alternative is the Nelson district, which is warmer but housing is more expensive. Of course, jobs are another factor. It's unlikely I would get a job similar to the one I have here, but perhaps it's time for a change there, too.

Bits and pieces

       Oops - think I've already posted this pic of Rudbeckia.

Back to work after a two-week holiday. Funny how everything there remains the same, for some reason I always think things will be different when I go back but no. I had this strange feeling this time that I wouldn't be coming back, that something would happen (winning Lotto, dying in my sleep) which would prevent me from returning, but this did not happen.
  Spent yesterday in a mediation session with a group of neighbours, the Council and a developer who has plans to put a 70-child preschool at the end of our narrow cul-de-sac. He is the typical rich prick wanting to get rich at others' expense. Don't you love developers? They see a nice neighbourhood, say "this is nice", then proceed to destroy all that was pleasant about it; cut down the trees, increase traffic, make more noise. He was turned down by our local Council on his first application, now he has appealed to the Environment Court (a national regulatory body) to overturn the Council's decision. 
   It was good to meet some of the neighbours that I don't know, those who live at the end of our street, who will be more affected than I by the proposal.  Some of them have lived here for many years and have interesting stories to tell. One neighbour told me something  about a previous tenant here, who lived here with his brother who rented the house. When I moved in, there was a 'presence' here, whom I felt rather than saw. I did have a vivid dream about him too; a dark, thin, tall man, pacing in an agitated way at the foot of my bed. ( I know this sounds flaky, but I'm not flaky at all. Really). He really disliked my redecoration of the bathroom, perhaps because he was the one who decorated it last. All sorts of things went wrong with my project in that room, not the least my being mysteriously locked in (the door has never, ever locked before or since) and having to climb out of the very small window sustaining a lot of impressive bruises in my fall to the ground. I asked my neighbour if one of the brothers living here was tall, thin and dark. Yes, very tall, thin and dark, an ex-alcoholic who became sober after living here in this benign spot. I didn't ask if he'd died in the house!! I don't want to know.

Jiro in the garden

Jiro playing with the garden hose. Very hard to get film of him unless he's tired, he just moves around so quickly.

Mt Cavendish views

Went for a little trip yesterday up the Gondola to the top of Mount Cavendish. (This is in the Port Hills above Christchurch for readers overseas). I've got an annual pass, and haven't used it very much, so I'll try and get my money's worth, as they say. The picture above is the view north over the Christchurch estuary towards Pegasus Bay and the foothills of the Southern Alps, obscured by the haze.

Looking down on the other side of the hill of the Port of Lyttelton and over to Diamond Harbour. This harbour is the flooded caldera of an old volcano, about 12 million years old (quite new!) now collapsed and eroded. Another eruption of this hotspot created another harbour, Akaroa Harbour, to the south east of this, about 8 million years ago. We have interesting geology here in New Zealand. Being geologically young means you can see a lot of  different landforms; glaciated landscapes, young fold mountains, karst, and volcanoes both active and extinct. This particular volcano was really a series of volcanic eruptions which built up a mountain about the height that Mt Etna is today. It was huge, and was originally an island out at sea. The remains of the volcanoes were tied onto the mainland by huge shingle fans from the rapidly eroding Southern alps, flushed down into the sea by powerful river systems. These shingle beds created the Canterbury Plains.

View to the south east - the landscape is very dry at this time of year. The bluffs on the left are part of the crater rim. A walking track runs along the tops, fabulous views but can be very cold and exposed. The climate up here is really almost sub-alpine, harsh extremes of cold, wet, dry, hot and windy. And sometimes all in one day.

View to the south-west. The outcrops on the far right are known as the Seven Sleepers. Quail Island in the middle distance was a quarantine station for leprosy sufferers in the bad old days before drugs made leprosy less of a death sentence. It also acted as a quarantine station for dogs and horses taken by Scott and Shackelton on their various expeditions to the Antarctic.

Recommended reads/views

Autumn advances little by little here in NZ. The rudbeckias are out;

the morning sun is a little more subdued and sometimes the air is foggy, but a cat can still enjoy sitting out in the wicker chair. The evenings are drawing in, and there's only a few weeks to go before the end of daylight saving. I've had a little blogging break while I've been on holiday, reading and viewing loads of things. My picks:

Roz Chast is a cartoonist with the New Yorker magazine. This is her tribute and record of her parents' decline into old age and death. It sounds depressing, but is often funny and thoughtful, and those of us who have had to deal with aging parents will recognise many of Roz' observations and concerns. It had special resonance for me, as Roz is also an only child of parents who grew up in the Depression, when talking about unpleasant things was considered inappropriate (as we would say today). My mother used to use this very phrase whenever something came up that she was not comfortable discussing.

I also watched 'Daniel Deronda" again. Loved everything about it, the acting, the story, the costumes. Hugh Bonneville plays what has to be one of the nastiest pieces of work in fiction. And gorgeous Hugh Dancy has the more difficult part of playing a good and earnest young man, and carries it off convincingly. 

I've wanted to see this movie for a long time, having heard a great deal about it. It's rather stagey in some parts, and you sometimes wish they'd turn the background music off, but that was the fashion in movie-making at the time (1963). Odd to see Burt Lancaster as a Sicilian count too, but he carries it off well. Claudia Cardinale is stunning, you just know that she is going to be the cat among the pigeons of the fading aristocracy that she will marry into. She is an interesting person. Born in Tunisia of Sicilian parents, her mother tongues were French, Siciliano and Tunisian Arabic. She only learned Italian after she had begun making movies in Italy, and her voice was dubbed in her first few  movies because it was considered too hoarse  and deep for an actress. 

And the costumes! Worth seeing the movie if only for these!