A guide to Christchurch, a city rebuilding with public dance, craft beer and Maori design – Lost and Found
While Aotearoa, New Zealand, is a popular tourist destination for the rest of the world, there are many Australians who haven’t yet hopped the Tasman Sea and paid a visit to our smaller neighbour.
Those who do often flock to the country’s most populous city (Auckland) and the beaches that surround it, or Wellington (the nation’s capital, when it comes to both coffee and politics).
But this time, Lost and Found asks you to consider Ōtautahi, Christchurch — the South Island’s biggest city.
And of all the places we’ve been in this series, Christchurch might be the among the first that graduates from an imagined destination to the real thing, if the trans-Tasman travel bubble becomes a reality.
‘A marketplace’
“Before colonisation, pre-European settlement, Maori traversed the lakes and waterways [of the Christchurch area],” Lynne Te Aika, general manager Te Taumatua at Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, told Jonathan Green on Lost and Found.
“Pre-European contact, the tribal economy was food gathering and exchange of food or precious stone, or pounamu, our greenstone.”
Te Aika says locals would camp on the banks of the Ōtākaro (Avon river), while gathering different resources depending on the season.
“For example, on the spring tides our people would journey into what we know as Christchurch city and gather different types of fish and eels, tuna, etc, on the waterways,” she says.
Christchurch is a city still recovering from disasters.
Maori would often travel great distances, but would then return to the area to exchange food for supplies.
“It was almost a marketplace in central Christchurch, on early European contact,” Te Aika says.
Garden City
Christchurch became a city by Royal Charter in 1856 (making it the officially oldest city in New Zealand) and the Christchurch Botanic Gardens were established not long after.
The Christchurch Botanic Garden also has a fernery filled with New Zealand plants.
Tim Entwisle, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, says this was a time when great cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Christchurch built great botanic gardens in a very English style.
He says the Christchurch Botanic Gardens are a great place to visit roses, begonias and big deciduous trees like oaks and maples. There’s also a fernery for New Zealand plants.
Christchurch is known as New Zealand’s “Garden City” and the botanic gardens have long been a gathering place for residents.
They became critically important after the mass shootings at two of the city’s mosques in March 2019.
“The gardens became a place where people would bring flowers, and it was the place they gathered for calmness, for some kind of respite, or a place to reflect,” Entwisle says.
Restoring of place
It’s been a difficult decade for Christchurch, but almost 10 years after the earthquakes that killed 185 people and destroyed or damaged 170,000 buildings, visitors will find a city still rebuilding — but rebuilding in a different way.
Since the earthquake, the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch has been operating from their temporary home, the Transitional Cathedral. It is the world’s only cathedral made substantially from cardboard.
Te Aika says: “Christchurch city is based on England and English culture … So it didn’t really reflect the local people in the make-up and build of the city prior to the earthquakes.”
But Ngāi Tahu (the principal tribal group of the South Island) are involved in the rebuild through the Matapopore Charitable Trust.
“Matapopore is mandated by our local iwi (tribal group) … to work with architects and designers around the rebuild and some of the key anchor projects in Christchurch, to give a cultural narrative to the build and a restoring of place,” says Te Aika, a Matapopore trustee.
These “anchor projects” are major public construction projects for Christchurch’s central area, worth NZ$4.8 billion.
Te Aika says Matapopore commissions artists to create art for these projects that will “bring to life the stories of Māori Ngāi Tahu”.
Mataporore was a key partner in the development of Tūranga, Christchurch’s new central library.
The group were heavily involved in the award-winning design of Tūranga, central Christchurch’s new library.
Filling gaps
Among the remaining old buildings, new developments and vacant lots, street art has found a new home.
So has dance.
Coralie Winn is co-founder of Gap Filler, a creative social enterprise which emerged after the first earthquake in 2010.
“It really came from this sense of wanting to bring life to the city, wanting to experiment with what could be possible, but make the recovery of the city something that was for everyone.”
Gap Filler runs creative projects, interventions and events; most famously, the Dance-O-Mat which they’ve set up in vacant sites around the city.
The Dance-O-Mat’s rectangular wooden dancefloor is sprung, which means it’s kind on the knees.
NZ$2 fed into a washing machine/amp buys you half an hour of DJ-time on a public dance floor fit out with lighting, sound system and disco ball.
Anyone can join in.
“You get these wonderful social interactions where a bunch of young teenagers doing some hip hop on a Saturday night will suddenly have people … who are maybe in their 50s come and have a dance,” Winn says.
“It has been massively successful, ridiculously successful. It has become an institution in the city.”
Street art has become a key part of Christchurch, post earthquake (pictured here, Elephants by Owen Dippie).
Turning water into beer
Christchurch, like the rest of New Zealand, is known for its craft beer.
“The crux of beer really is its water profile, it’s most of what goes into beer, and so it’s the most important ingredient,” says Rachael Norcross, co-owner of Punky Brewster, Christchurch’s first craft beer fillery.
Just outside of Christchurch, beer-makers can tap into the artesian wells under the Waimakariri River.
“‘Makariri’ is te reo [Maori] for ‘cold’ and ‘wai’ is te reo for ‘water’ … it’s water that has come from the mountains and then has also being filtrated … and the purity is pretty extreme,” Norcross says.
Norcross describes this New Zealand dessert as a “diabetes in a roll”.
But what to eat with your delicious beer made with that pure water? Consider the lolly cake.
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“They [the lollies] are chopped up brutally and distributed through this mash of biscuits and condensed milk and rolled up and sliced up into slices … It’s diabetes in a roll,” Norcross says.
Or, perhaps after a long day of visiting gardens, checking out new buildings, dancing in public and appreciating street art, you should stop by one of the city’s many fish and chip shops and order a jam wrap.
“It’s a doughnut with jam on the inside, rolled out into a flat shape and then deep fried in oil and covered in sugar and cinnamon,” Norcross explains.
“It should be banned, really, but it’s also truly delicious.”