Mainly houses

Sketching Update

Most of my sketching from life the past few days has been of houses in the immediate neighbourhood, in the course of my daily walks.

The winter weather has been fine and pleasant for a stroll most days.

Continuing the theme of the lat post, here (right) is another view of Wharepapa. I was further down the end of Lemon Street, at the corner of Pukenui Street, looking back to Fort Niger.

Another day, heading along Pendarves Street towards Fort Niger Reserve, I stopped to sketch these two contrasting houses.

In the foreground is a brand-new spec house in a modern style.

Behind it, higher up the hill, is a much older building, also white, to contrast with it.

In Watson Street, just round the corner, is this older villa, late nineteenth century. It looks a bit tired these days, but when we shifted in to this house here in Lemon Street, the former owner of this Watson St house, a retired builder, came to our garage sale and spent a while chatting about our new home and its history.

Half-way from here to Pukenui Street and the view sketched at the top of this post is this older cottage. When we lived in this neighbourhood in the early eighties it was owned by a couple of acquaintances, but since then it has been badly neglected, as I hope my charcoal sketch shows.

On the odd days when the weather has not co-operated, I have worked in other media: this vase of daphne was on the table, so I took out my pastels and tried to get it on to the paper.

Another day I took out an old book about the Greek islands and did a water-colour version of a photo of one of the harbours in Crete (below).

We even had a second wet day, so I looked at our travel photos again: here is my watercolour of the youth hostel we stayed in near St Paul's Cathedral, with yours truly about to knock on the front door!

History all around us

My walk to town

On a beautiful morning last week I took my usual route to town.

New Plymouth is full of history, no part more so than the neighbourhood where we live. Our house is the cottage behind the house in the foreground.

Behind both houses, both re-sited on this double section about forty years ago, you can see the trees which adorn the top of the hill. In pre-European days it was a kainga called Wharepapa. During the war scares in 1860 it was turned into a fort, one of a ring that served as outposts defending the town.

It was named, after the navy ship its builders served in, Fort Niger, and the reserve is still called by that name.

Looking west, above, you can see the older houses on our side of the street, and at the corner of Eliot Street, our local dairy.

At the other end of the next block is a building now used as a backpackers' hostel.

When you turn at the dairy and face the north, as I do, you get this view on the left.

McDonalds is right in front of us now, so you can see we are not far from morning tea and the kids' play area when we have the grandchildren with us!

At the next intersection, we glance to the left, west, to see the traffic coming along State Highway 45 (Surf Highway).

Eliot Street behind us is part of State Highway 3 from Hawera, and Courtenay Street, heading east, is the continuation of Highway 3 towards Waitara and Hamilton.

Courtenay Street is named after the family of the Earls of Devon, especially Henry who was the Chair of the Board when New Plymouth was being planned.

The next corner is where Eliot Street crosses Devon Street, New Plymouth's nominal main street, and also named after the Earl of Devon (below).

Here, Eliot Street forms part of Highway 44, which connects Highway 3 with Port Taranaki, and has lots of heavy vehicles like logging trucks and oil tankers, thundering along it.

My route takes me west along Devon Street at this point, because that is where the shop verandahs are and on wet days I can stay dry all the way to the city centre.

The photo below is taken further west along Devon Street and shows the unprepossessing building of the Sunworld restaurant on the left.

In the centre of the photo is the State Hotel, originally called the Red House, on the corner of Gover Street.

Behind that is the TSB Bank head office building. Taranakians are very proud of their own bank, and the fact that it is one of the few banks still owned by New Zeralanders.

Every year the profits of the banking business are distributed to public and charitable organisations throughout Taranaki to assist with various community projects.

Opposite the State Hotel Building is "Best 4 Less", the discount shop where I buy a lot of my art materials.

There are at least three other discount stores close to the city centre where I can find much of the same art requirements.

In the next photo we have moved on to the frontage of the TSB bank building. Here are the bank branches whose signs you can read, but also our local branch of the bank where we do our business.

In the last view of our walk to town, we have moved another few metres west and are now just about outside the Trade Aid shop. In the eighties Marg and I worked as volunteers and shop committee members for Trade Aid, and were part of the organisation when the shop moved into the central business area, near its present site.

The traffic lights at the end of the block mark New Plymouth's central intersection. This is where the inner defence of the wartime town, a trench and watchhouse ring, had its eastern limit.

To the right of the traffic lights you can see the top of the facade of the new Len Lye Centre on the skyline.

But the walk along to that part of town needs another blog!

Our Historic Home

   An old photo

After several months of debate and thought we think we have identified our house in this photo from about 1900, when it was very new, taken from the top of Fort Niger, or Wharepapa, just behind us here. The original print is held in the Puke Ariki collection (A3.300).

Immediately behind the shed in the foreground is a four-roomed cottage, with a brick chimney at the far end of the gable, and another chimney on the wall this side. It has a lean-to at the back, and a verandah along the front.

The farside chimney provided the outlet for fires in the corners of the two western rooms, and the other chimney is probably for a range in the kitchen. The lean-to, which covers our present bathroom and laundry, served, we presume, as scullery, laundry and bathroom. You can see an outside toilet in the photo, between the neighbour's long-drop and a garden shed.

We presume that there was a corridor down the middle of the house, from the front door to the lean-to. Remains of the corridor are still clearly visible today. The four other rooms were probably a kitchen/dining/living room and three bedrooms, or one of them may have been a drawing-room.

Landmarks 

You can see a glimpse of Leach Street in the background, now part of the west-bound one-way section of State Highway 3 before it turns the right-angle to head south towards Hawera. Along the northern side of Leach Street runs the old railway track, which means the photo is earlier than 1907, when the railway was relocated to its present route.

Behind that are houses along Eliot Street on the site of what is now McDonald's. Behind that again are houses in Courtenay Street and a couple of two-storeyed buildings in Devon Street.

This is part of a long panoramic photo on the historic noticeboard, that includes Lemon Street further east, which enables us to pinpoint one of the houses on the opposite side of the street which is still standing almost unaltered. And the extension to the left shows Pendarves Street behind us, which enables us to confirm the positions.

Alterations

If you have visited us you will know that south-west of the lean-to, the house was extended to include the present kitchen area, and south-east of the lean-to is the flat we added eight years ago. And when the house was moved back on the section for sub-division around 35 years ago, the verandah was extended down most of the two sides of the house, and the brick chimney-stacks removed. Only the diagonal section in the corners of the ceilings now show where the western one used to be.

Before that, during the seventies, the house had been altered extensively, and at one stage divided into two flats.

We have met several people who have lived in our house previously, one of whom remembered the old glass which is still in the sash window in the front room. Another couple remembered the house as two flats. One of my U3A colleagues was responsible, with her late husband, for the modernising, shifting and renovation work in the mid-eighties.

This Flag Debate

Disappointing!

That is to put it mildly.

Where are the existing alternatives? We already have the 1835 Declaration of Independence Flag, and the Tino Rangatiratanga Flag, which has flown in front of our local District Council Building for years.

Surely they should be among the choices for voting in the first referendum? Both have a history and a special association with our country.

I can readily understand the PM's reasons for wanting a change. Having lived overseas, it is clear to me our present flag confuses foreigners: it is almost identical to the Australian one, and it incorporates the British one. So how come we say NZ is an independent and democratic country?

In Indian languages, for instance, "republic" and "democracy" are the same word, different from "independence" or "self-government". They see us as "self-governing" like any crown colony, but not "democratic". Our head of state is a citizen of a foreign land. Our flag does not separate us from others. So I think it is long past the time we should have changed our constitution, our flag, our anthem and our name to reflect our unique nationhood and our democratic principles.

And, to use the language of the Treaty, how can we have, both Maori and Pakeha, tino rangatiratanga
if the authority of our kawanatanga is vested in a foreigner, who lives overseas and takes scant interest in us?

In the seventies, when I attended the Waitangi Day celebrations for the first time, I was horrified to see the Union Jack at the top of the main flagstaff. Where was the New Zealand flag?

The next day I put that question to Norman Kirk, who was then the PM, at a meeting I attended hosted by the Labour Party. He said, "Yes. I wondered that too. Leave it with me." The next year the Queen visited and her first act on reaching NZ was to present the PM with a NZ flag to be flown at Waitangi, at the top.

I would be happy to vote, say, for the Tino Rangatiratanga flag, but it looks like I won't get the opportunity.

New Plymouth's new icon

This morning, beautiful winter weather, cold, sunny, dry.

After breakfast at the Cathedral Cafe I walked through the city, first stop the clocktower to catch a view of the new Len Lye Centre building.

 

The clocktower is here at the right.

We are looking straight down Queen Street to the cenotaph, with the new building on the left-hand corner.

You may be able to pick out the White Hart Hotel reflected in the stainless steel facade.

Through the arch of the clocktower, we can see the southern side of the building and the way it reflects the Atkinson Building on the opposite side of Devon Street.

Here you can see both facades at once, one on the sunny eastern side, and the other to the south.

One of the objectives of the architect was to reflect more light into Queen Street between the buildings.

What a morning to see how successful he has been!

Sketching Progress?

I have recently been trying out using pastels for my sketching.

A new book that Margaret found for me has a whole section on drawing with pastels and this is based on one of the illustrations in those pages.

It is a sketch of one of the churches in Venice.

The second one here is also in pastel, with some pencil and ink thrown in for good measure as well.

It depicts the hillside village of St George in North Wales, based on a photo taken while we were visiting there some years ago.

The church in the centre of the picture is where Terry and Karen were married.

Another pastel effort was the view from our kitchen window of a kowhai tree on the left and a totara on the right. It illustrates the ease and simplicity of using pastels for this kind of drawing.

On an earlier occasion I had used pencil to sketch the same kowhai tree.

And below is a water-colour version of the same tree, this time with kereru resting in the branches, as they regularly do in the autumn, when they come down from their summer feeding-grounds in the bush around the mountain.
















Finally, another shot at white on black paper.

This is a building photographed by one of my grandchildren in their travels. I will have to find a better way of depicting grey skies!

Good Journalism Still Thrives

It was great to see Susan Wood back on our screen on Sunday morning’s Q+A programme.

In our household Q+A is probably the most-watched programme of the lot.

Susan interviewed the editor of Time Magazine about Time’s health in this era when print media are being swamped by on-line and other electronic whizz-bangs.

I remember reading Time in the early 1950s when my father discovered it. I was a student and getting interested in the world and its events and issues, such as the US Presidential elections of 1952 when Ike Eisenhower was the successful candidate.

In those days Time made a name for itself renovating the vocabulary and syntax of journalese language to bring in a new succinct style that really packed information into its sentences, and cut out any unnecessary verbiage.

Each week my father and I would fight for the first chance to read the new issue from cover to cover; and then the discussion would run for a day or two as to our opinions on what was reported.

As the current editor told Susan, Time provides a useful summary of the important news, issues and discussion from around the world. In the 50s we certainly soon learned that the magazine’s stance was greatly influenced by its leaning towards the Republican Party, but if you took that on board it was easy enough to discount about 20% of the mildly right-wing bias and reach a middle of the road standpoint.

Q+A, we find, provides a similarly useful concise summary and round-up of the important political and economic issues of the week, with interviews with the key figures, and a pretty unbiased take giving several points of view on each item.

Ten years after we first read Time, I was working in India and still reading each week’s issue, thanks to a gift subscription from my father. Fortunately around that stage I also got the chance to compare it with a similar publication, because I took out a subscription to the Times Weekly Airmail edition, the weekly summary of the London Times newspaper on very light paper, airmailed all over the world.

So on Fridays I would receive the Times from London, and on Monday Time from New York. I regularly found the news from London was a week ahead of the US version, if they both covered the same story.

The record for speed was the week when the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer read his Budget Speech in the House of Commons on Wednesday afternoon, and I read about it in the Times on Friday half-way round the world in the Indian backwater I lived in. And that was before the days of jet-powered airliners.

When we went on our annual holidays, I would send a note to both papers to change the address for the four weeks. The Times continued to come like clockwork, taking the changes of address in its stride, but the American firm did not trust my instructions and wanted confirmation in writing a second time, by which time we had been for our holiday and come home again.

Back in New Zealand, I found the NZ Listener performed something of the same function. For a while I also read the BBC Listener as well and found that useful too. I still remember fondly an article by Clive James on the Wimbledon Championships’ broadcasts: wonderful concise, colourful language and thoughtful opinions.

The editor of Time told Susan that readership has doubled in the last year, largely due to electronic media outlets, and that the future looks bright for the venerable old lady; we hope Q+A has a similarly hopeful outlook.