New Zealand Day 9: Auckland Maritime Museum

So, after lunch we strolled down to Auckland Harbour.

It looks pretty much like most harbours do, but some of the nearby apartments are stunning.

As you walk along the wharf, they look very swish….

…but it’s when you’re on the other wide of the water you can see that they are designed to look like a cruise ship, portholes and all!

The Auckland Maritime Museum is well worth an hour or two of your time.  The entry fee isn’t expensive (and they honour Australian Seniors Cards here, which is nice).

First of all there was a comprehensive display of Polynesian boats which made those amazing journeys across the Pacific from Tahitian islands to New Zealand about 800 years ago.

warship

Outrigger

This one is sacred, for Polynesian royalty

Green turtle shells

Then there were the European explorers—Portuguese, Dutch, British and French.

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Black Magic NZL-32 (Wikipedia)

The yacht Black Magic NZL32 which won the America’s Cup was there: and I was most amused by signage that said that this yacht was one of only two in the world to have defeated the Americans for the Cup … but they didn’t mention which country the other winner came from!

There was also a replica of the America’s cup, and an extensive display about Sir Peter Blake who captained the yacht, including his ‘lucky red socks’ (replicas of which you can buy in the shop).  Tim (who used to sail in his youth on the family yacht ‘Valhalla’) was captivated by the collection of yachts large and small, from numerous different ‘classes’, and there was a great long cabinet displaying some of the trophies the Kiwis have won.

As in the other NZ museums we’ve visited, there was a Migration Gallery.  This one started with C19th migration and some of the advertising for migrant women caught my eye.  There was also a model of awful cabin conditions in the days of sail, contrasted with a cabin from a 1950s ocean liner (which seemed a bit more rudimentary than what I remember, but we didn’t travel as Ten Pound Poms, so I guess our conditions were better).  Here’s the slideshow:

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But what I liked best of all was all the model ships.  These never fail to enchant me when I find them in museums… I used to love the collection they had on display in the old Melbourne Museum.  The ones here in the Auckland Maritime Museum didn’t disappoint: the detailed fittings and the authenticity of these models is just breathtaking.  Here are two that I especially liked:

Tug boat model

Bucket dredge model

 

Photo credit: Black Magic NZL-32 by Kiwimedia (talk) at en.wikipedia – (Original text : I (Kiwimedia (talk)) created this work entirely by myself.), CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11272123

New Zealand Day 9: Auckland Writers Festival Event

Well, we’ve attended our first Auckland Writers Festival Event, a bespoke lunch with celebrity chef Tony Tan!

But we’ve also checked out the venue for the bookish events… and it is going to take all my self-control not to succumb to some very enticing books a *lot* of Air New Zealand excess baggage charges from the festival bookshop, which is already open.

The Aotea Centre is a stone’s throw from our hotel, but I managed to find some interesting buildings en route all the same.  Here’s the slideshow:

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You will have noticed that I slipped in a picture of Melbourne’s Forum Theatre… as soon as I saw the Auckland Civic Theatre, I recognised the style, and it didn’t take much searching to find that the similarity is owed to the designer John Eberson, who was an American promoter of what were called Atmospheric Theatres.  (If you’ve been inside our Forum Theatre, you know exactly what that means.  If not, click here to find out more).

So, back to our first festival event…

Tony Tan is a celebrity chef, Malaysian-born but based in Melbourne, and to celebrate the launch of his new cookbook Hong Kong Food City, he put on a special lunch at Nic Watt’s Masu restaurant here in Auckland.

Masu is actually a Japanese restaurant, and I asked the man who was obviously in charge of it (owner? maitre d’? head chef?) if it was stressful lending his restaurant to another chef, and he laughed and said yes, it was, because his chefs had no experience cooking Chinese food and before the event, there were lots of emails flying backwards and forwards seeking further instructions about how to do things.  Imagine it! The kitchen staff certainly deserved the sustained applause they got from the delighted patrons!

Anyway, here’s the slideshow… the chicken is inside that packet.  I did take a photo, but, well, it just looks like chicken!

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We took a constitutional down to Prince Wharf afterwards, and from there to the Maritime Museum.  I’ll whip up a post about that after dinner…

Photo credits:

Forum Theatre, Melbourne by Donaldytong – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12856000

Auckland Civic Theatre by Ingolfson at English Wikipedia(Original text: Uploader.) – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.(Original text: Own picture.), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2624467

New Zealand Day 8: arrival in Auckland

Well, it’s taken nearly all day, but we’re here in Auckland.  Our plans to enjoy a last minute stroll around Napier in the morning were thwarted by rain, but we did manage a short walk along the foreshore.  On the right you can see the Napier equivalent of the Myer Music Bowl, and on the left you can see a colonnade – every column has a memorial plaque…

There is also this rather moving plaque – it’s not credited to anyone, but it’s an important reminder to those of us who visit Napier and are charmed by its architecture and ambience, that we should never forget that the city was rebuilt with courage, by people who had lost everything.

So, off to the Napier airport and the inescapable early check-in and hanging around till take-off, but that was all fine and as we expected.  It was when we landed in Auckland and took the SuperShuttle airport bus that we’d pre-booked and paid for that things went tiresomely wrong.

My advice is that if you are contemplating using this shuttle service, #Travellers’Tip, just don’t.   First there was a lengthy diversion to an industrial area to pick up a passenger who didn’t turn up, the bus then turned around and went all the way back to the airport to pick up another passenger, then we went meandering through the suburbs of Auckland to drop off first one of the passengers, and then another couple somewhere else, and by the time we got to our hotel in the CBD, a 20 minute journey had taken an hour and a quarter.  There was no explanation for any of this from the driver, who didn’t even bother to announce our stop—I suppose we were just supposed to know where we were by some kind of osmosis.  We were really fed up by the whole performance, but I felt really sorry for a young mother sitting behind us, nursing a baby for all that time, and still hadn’t got to her destination when we got off the bus.  Here’s another tip: the word ‘Sorry’ goes a very long way with me.  That’s all it takes for me to shrug my shoulders and put shoddy service behind me.  But we didn’t hear a ‘sorry’ at all.

However, now that we are comfortably ensconced in the Scenic Hotel, we are starting to unwind, helped along by a nice G&T and a very belated lunch of fish and chips in the bar.  There are heaps of cafés and take-away shops nearby and so he’s going to have Japanese and I’m going to have Indian, and we’re going to watch some telly!

Tomorrow we will venture out and be proper tourists again:)

New Zealand 2019 Day 7: Napier Museum

Actually, the Napier Museum is also an art gallery and a library!

There are only three floors, but it’s still a very interesting museum.  Alas, I had a Senior’s Moment and left my camera on the desk in the hotel so we have only a few photos on Tim’s phone…

Anyway…

We started off on the ground floor with a display about the 1931 Earthquake.  We had already read about this, and seen the informative video at the Art Deco Trust, but this museum exhibition rounded out the historical facts with personal stories.  There were stories from people who lived through it, including some poignant ones from people who were small children at the time, and there were some treasured trinkets that had been salvaged.  There was also a digital display on a banner, that had voices of the people superimposed over diagrams that showed the transitions as the land rose up and changed the landscape while below it the Richter Scale was climbing.  It was very vivid.  There were replicas of press reports and telegrams, and also photos of the naval ship HMAS Veronica that was anchored in the bay when the quake struck. The ship was thrown right up out of the water and then back down again, coming to rest in newly exposed mudflats when the ocean retreated.  They had to wait until a high tide before it could be re-floated, but they had radio and they sent an SOS to Auckland by Morse Code.  The next day two naval ships arrived with medical help and supplies, and the city has never forgotten the navy and how it managed the relief effort.

There was a lovely display of local silverware, and not all of it was owned by the rich and privileged.  We were both captivated by trophies awarded to two fire stations competing in fire drills.  Tim liked the rooster, and I liked the one with the water cannon!

There was also a display of Maori carvings and whatnot but we’ve seen a lot of that by now (and I think you need to be a bit of an expert to see the difference between them) and the same was true of the exhibition about a pioneering family called Webb.

However we loved the display of architectural drawings by the architect J A Louis Hay.  He was in his fifties and already a notable architect influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright when the earthquake struck and Napier needed rebuilding.  He joined the Napier Reconstruction Committee and ensured that local architects who had the interests of Napier at heart were those who controlled the massive rebuilding task.

There were framed drawings of his proposed buildings, many of which we’ve seen realised as buildings in the CBD, and there was signage that explained that he was a meticulous man who was intolerant of shoddy workmanship.  But it was from Wikipedia that I discovered that his wife was severely injured in the disaster.  I think these architects are real heroes, who restored a ruined city into a truly beautiful place, and I suspect that the local people who had suffered so much must have been delighted to see their new city arising from the disaster.

We also took the opportunity to admire the Napier Library.  It is a beautiful space, quiet and calm, and nicely organised with a spacious feel and what looks like a good contemporary collection.  They also had a clever initiative to encourage borrowing: you can borrow a ‘pot luck’ bookbag of five books, which are tagged ‘romance’, ‘thriller’, ‘paranormal romance’ (what’s that??) or ‘crime’.  You simply scan the bag, take it home and embark on a voyage of discovery!

We rounded off our two days in Napier with a wonderful meal at Bistronomy.  If you like fine food in a creative contemporary style, this is a restaurant you must not miss.  They make excellent cocktails (I had a Sour Tart, made with gin, elderflowers and feijoas (in season now); and Tim had a Lady Marmalade which was made with charred citrus, aniseed and Cointreau.  What we particularly liked was that the cocktails came before the first course as they should, because the whole point of a cocktail is that it’s a pre-dinner drink, and very rarely is it compatible with an entrée.  In a best-forgotten place we went to in Wellington, the bartender took so long to finish his theatrical performance—prancing around, waggling his pony-tail and thrusting his biceps about, that by the time the cocktails arrived #EpicFail we had almost finished entrée…

No such problem at Bistronomy.  The service was excellent, and the food was served perfectly.  Here’s the slideshow, and I have added the description from the menu so that you can see the complexity of the dishes:

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One thing we didn’t photograph, though it wouldn’t have conveyed much if we had, was the house-made bread which came with whipped butter flavoured with lemon and horopito.  We had never heard of this flavoursome ingredient, and it tasted sublime.  It’s a kind of bush pepper apparently… and I really hope we can source it at home! I’d like to try using it to flavour muffins:)

Tomorrow we are off to Auckland!

New Zealand Day 7: Napier, Vintage Car Tour

Today we enjoyed a most informative vintage car tour, with John from the Art Deco Trust.  The car is a beautifully maintained Packard Six, described apparently as the Rolls Royce of America.  Certainly it’s a very comfortable way to cruise around Napier to see the sights.

The tour complemented our walking tour nicely.  As you could see from yesterday’s post, walking is better for photographing the upper stories of the Art Deco buildings, though you need to be on the opposite side of the road to get the best shots.  But from the windows of the car we could see details of Art Deco motifs and leadlight windows, and John’s commentary told us all kinds of interesting details about the buildings.

The tour begins with a short video that explains the history of Napier and its rebuilding after the 1931 earthquake.  The guide who introduced it started off by telling us about her personal experience with a quake magnitude of 5.2 and how her anxiety grew over the 20 seconds so that just as she was about to get out of her warm bed to drop, cover and hold, it stopped.  So that was a vivid illustration of how terrifying the 1931 quake must have been.  It lasted for two-and-a-half minutes, and it not only caused the destruction we’ve heard about, it also completely reshaped the land….

Prior to the quake, Napier was a very small town, hemmed in by the absence of any flat land.  The town was needed as a port on this side of the North Island, but there was a massive lagoon to its west, and swampland to the south.  There just wasn’t anywhere to expand.  But when the plates crashed together, they pushed the land up by two-and-a-half metres, obliterating the lagoon and the swamp.  So along with the tragedy came the opportunity for the town to grow, and under the leadership of a two-man commission rebuilding began in an orderly way, replacing the Victorian buildings with their perilous ornamentation and brickwork vulnerable to collapse with the prevailing architectural style: Art Deco in reinforced concrete.  The smooth facades and decorations mean that the buildings are sturdier, and with all the electricity and phone poles underground, there is less risk of residents being hit by falling objects.

From the CBD, John drove us up a narrow winding road into the hills overlooking the city.  These houses largely survived the quake, so there are charming Victoria era houses, with carved wooden fretwork replacing the iron lacework that you see on Melbourne houses of the same era. There wasn’t really anywhere to stop so I don’t have photos—when I am more confident about the stability of the internet I’ll Google to see what I can find, but I do have a photo from the lookout over the port.

On the left you can see vast quantities of (plantation) timber awaiting shipment to China, and on the right you are looking at the land which rose up after the quake.  All the land you can see, up to the edge of the mountains in the far distance, was where the lagoon was.

After the lookout we stopped at the eccentric National Tobacco Company building.  The company was owned by a prominent businessman and philanthropist, but he preferred art nouveau motifs to art deco.  Since he was the one with the money, he got the design he wanted.  John said that it takes two men to hold the bronze lamps when the bulbs need replacing.

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From there we drove through some postwar housing that puts our Melbourne postwar housing to shame.  Napier also had a critical shortage of building materials, but their solution was to put up a timber frame, cover it with chicken  wire, and then use plaster!  They paint these houses in the typical 1930s sage green, pale blue and dusky pinks, and add decorative Art Deco elements, and apparently they are highly valued and sell for a premium price.  I don’t think anyone would pay a premium price for Melbourne’s 1950s suburban housing: everyone these days alters them just as we have. Here’s a picture through the window of the Packard.

We went back to the Ajuna Cafe again for lunch because it is excellent.  They have a really appealing menu, the service is friendly and prompt and they serve delicious fresh juices and you can have a glass of wine or a beer if you like.  After that we visited the Napier Museum, but I’ll do that as a separate post because I’ll upload this one now while the internet access is behaving itself.

New Zealand 2019 Day 7: Napier

Internet access at the Masonic Art Deco Hotel is so bad, I’m just posting this briefly before it drops out again.

I’ll try posting about our day today but won’t be surprised if I can’t upload it… hopefully things will be better in Auckland.

New Zealand 2019 Day 6: Napier

A nice breakfast (with very good coffee!) at the Copthorne Hotel in Palmerston North, and then we were off to the bus station for the coach to Napier.  Even while we were waiting, there were interesting things to see.  This edifice is the usual ego-booster for the town councillors of the time, but the memorial fountain was erected to commemorate the coronation of Edward VII.  And it made me think, should the worst happen and #shudder Charles becomes king of Australia, will there be a rash of commemorative edifices?

Memorial fountain 2

Memorial fountain plaque

In the same park, there is an information centre, which is the usual ordinary sort of building… until you go round to the other side of it and realise that it is an annex to these beautiful Art Deco restrooms!

Art deco restrooms 1

Art deco restrooms 2

But when the coach finally brought us to Napier, well, breathtaking is the only word to describe the Art Deco treasures here.  Napier was flattened in an earthquake in 1931, with a loss of 256 lives.  The town was rebuilt in the architecture of the era, and it is absolutely stunning.  Here’s the slideshow from our afternoon walk:

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Tomorrow we’re going on a guided tour in a vintage car, so I shall have more to say in due course…

New Zealand 2019 Day 5: Palmerston North

We were up bright and early for the train to Palmerston North.  The Wellington Railway Station is hugely impressive, rather like the one in Rome (which is my favourite of all railway stations in the world).  It is well-organised and easy to navigate inside, (none of this nonsense about checking in your own luggage) and helpful staff everywhere.

The train was very comfortable, other passengers were congenial, and apart from a very brief bumpy bit of track, a smooth ride from start to finish.  I love train travel, and this is a really nice way to see some beautiful scenery in relaxed comfort.  The food is surprisingly good too: we had some sandwiches and coffee and #NotLikeAirlineFood there were other appetising choices too.

On arrival at Palmerston North, we dumped our bags and headed out for a walk to stretch our legs.  Here’s the slideshow:

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Then it was off to the Museum.  Now, everyone you talk to in Wellington and in Palmerston North, will tell you about the Rugby Museum, (and I have developed a friendly patter in response, about The Offspring’s teenage career in representative rugby which conveys the entirely untrue impression that I know something about the game), but it will come as no surprise to my friends that we went to The Other Museum.  It’s called the Te Manawa Museum of Art, Science and History, and it’s wonderful!

We spent a very happy hour there, checking out the Environmental Science exhibits, and I was so pleased to see that they group the taxa together so that children actually learn something from the exhibit. BTW Note the Humble Bee in these images: one of these flew across my face at lunch in the Rose Garden in Wellington, and Tim thought I was exaggerating when I said how big it was.

Insect exhibit (beetles)

Insect exhibit (butterflies)

Insect exhibits chest

Humble bee

I don’t have much patience with so-called interactive exhibits because I don’t think children really learn much from them, but we played with this one on the electromagnetic spectrum, and found it very good at explaining the wavelengths.

There were also exhibits of birds arranged by habitat, a skeleton of an extinct moa and a stuffed Kiwi (which was smaller than I’d expected).  Also on display was the massive stump of a Totara tree.

And then there was the history museum, which had all kinds of interesting things, including a Maori meeting house and some other artefacts that we were allowed to photograph.    Here’s the slideshow:

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You know you’re getting old when the phone booth you were using just a few years ago is in a museum, eh?

Lisa’s Sous vide Wild Red Tussock Venison Short Loin

We dined in at Jimmy Cook’s at the Copthorne Hotel, and had the best venison I’ve ever tasted.

Tomorrow we’re off to Napier!

PS I found two bookshops in Palmerston North, and recommend Papers Plus for friendly service and dedicated shelves of NZ fiction.  I couldn’t resist a new book called The Naturalist by Thom Conroy and an intriguing title called Liberation Square by Gareth Rubin – it’s an alternative history of the UK after it’s been defeated by the Nazis…

New Zealand 2019 Day 4: Wellington, Dockside Restaurant

Just a quick post to showcase the delicious meal we had at Dockside Restaurant on the waterfront.

We got a bit wet getting there, but it was worth it.

The most interesting wine of the night was The Hay Paddock Syrah from Waiheke Island.  It was a full-flavoured red wine rather like a Barossa red, which is not what you expect from a cool-climate region like NZ!

 

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New Zealand 2019 Day 4: Te Papa Museum

After the disappointment of Katherine Mansfield’s house being closed for renovation, things improved.

Yesterday we’d made a brief visit to the Te Papa Museum, which is a modern purpose-built museum opened in 1998.  It is, alas, rather like the Melbourne Museum in concept, that is, there are vast areas of empty space to cross before you actually get anywhere.  I have no idea why anyone thinks this is a good idea.  These modern museums are obviously designed with children in mind and yet not for little legs which get tired.  There are also lifts that don’t operate on all floors so you have to get out of the one cunningly placed next to the shop and then find the other one.  You do a lot of walking without actually seeing anything…

Anyway, the first exhibit is on Level 2, and it’s about New Zealand’s experience of Gallipoli, so we dutifully visited that and then went upstairs to Level 3 where I was keen to see the Suffrage 125 Exhibition.  To say that it was disappointing is an understatement.  Kate Sheppard is a bit of a hero of mine, and she should be a hero for women around the world because she spearheaded the campaign for NZ women to be the first in the world to get the vote.  But she barely got a mention and I know no more about her now than I did before.  The exhibition is what they call a ‘pop-up’ exhibition, and this is a description of what was there from EventFindaCoNZ:

To honour Suffrage 125, Te Papa curators have initiated a special collecting project, sourcing contemporary items related to women’s rights. Recent acquisitions include a breast pump from former Green MP and writer Holly Walker, the NopeSisters T-shirt which addresses sexual abuse, a menstrual cup from MyCup, a company committed to ending period poverty, a suit worn by Dame Jenny Shipley on her first day in office as New Zealand’s first-ever female Prime Minister, and Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban’s puletasi (formal Sāmoan outfit) which she wore to give her maiden speech as New Zealand’s first Pacific Island female Member of Parliament.

IMO If this is the best that New Zealand’s National Museum can do to honour a notable woman, then they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

So then we visited the Blood Earth Fire, Transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand exhibition.  This was huge, taking up nearly the whole floor, and was basically about the impact of humans on the land.

Level 4, which we visited today, was much more to our taste.  We started off with the Treaty Of Waitangi exhibits.  When you first walk in you are confronted by a massive replica of the document—it reaches from floor to ceiling.  Beside it on the wall is a large printed version of what was agreed… which was basically that the Maori ceded sovereignty but got to keep their land.  (And as we all know, it didn’t work out that way at all.)

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But as you progress round the exhibits (which include some of the original gifts that were exchanged as a sign of respect) you learn that actually there are multiple copies of the treaty, because it was copied and different copies of it were taken to sites (that you can see on the map of NZ) for all the chiefs to sign. (Some did, quite a lot didn’t).  In the process the copies got shabby, and the documents weren’t properly preserved and now they are all damaged, much like the one you can see in the cabinet.

This exhibition was interesting to us because it exposes some of the mythology surrounding Australia’s failure to negotiate a treaty.  It is said that in contrast to the disunity amongst Australia’s Indigenous People, the Maori chiefs were united and that made a treaty possible.  Well, clearly, they weren’t all united.   And then, obviously the treaty wasn’t respected anyway, not even enough to keep it safe from damage…

There is a huge exhibition of Maori history and culture on this floor, but unfortunately we weren’t allowed to photograph any of it, and I couldn’t buy postcards or an exhibition catalogue.  However, I can show you a link to the contentious Maori wharenui which is a remarkable artefact.  A wharenui is a meeting house, and this one was apparently removed from its original site without permission and the iwi (tribe) wants it back.  This may be the reason why the signage is inadequate: if you take off your shoes you can go inside it, but there’s nothing to explain the significance of the architecture or the symbolic meanings of the carvings, not even in the digital video outside it.  (I hate those things, I read much quicker than most people do, and it’s really annoying to have to stand and wait while they finish reading and turn the page).

There was also a stunning longboat, and models of the impressive boats that were used for the Maori voyages from Polynesia about 800 years ago—but we couldn’t photograph those either so you’ll just have to imagine them.

However, the museum has a modern version of a wharenui which belongs to everyone, they say, and I’ve found a Wikipedia picture of that:

On the same floor there is a Passports exhibition which is a bit like Melbourne’s Immigration Museum in concept.  Unfortunately the lighting isn’t conducive to taking good photos, but here’s a little slideshow of items that caught my eye:

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Tonight we’re going to Dockside Restaurant which is close by and therefore an ideal choice for tired feet, and tomorrow we are taking the train to Palmerston North. I gather that the main attraction there is a rugby museum, but I’m sure we’ll find something else to amuse ourselves, and I’m expecting the scenery en route to be gorgeous.

Photo credit:

Modern wharenui: by Allie_Caulfield from Germany – 2001-12-02 01-03 Neuseeland 152, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49439428

Museum Entrance: by rheins, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57306604

Kate Sheppard: By Book written by William Sidney Smith (1852-1929) but unclear whether he was photographer – From Outlines of the women’s franchise movement in New Zealand (1905) by William Sidney Smith (1852-1929). See File: Outlines of the women’s franchise movement in New Zealand.djvu, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3329246