April 17, 2010
With the scrap over New Zealand selling its apples to Australia entering a new round this week, Geoff Collett seeks out an Australian view on the long-running debate.
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IT IS tempting to imagine that the mere mention of the name "John Corboy" will have eyes rolling and curses muttered on orchards throughout New Zealand.
Any apple grower who has paid more than passing attention to the never- ending dispute over whether Kiwi pipfruit should be sold in Australia, and whether it poses a biosecurity risk, must have come across the name of the frontman for the Australian fruit industry's campaign to keep New Zealand apples and pears out.
For upwards of a decade now, Mr Corboy has been leading the tub- thumping over the risk supposedly posed by New Zealand apples and pears if they're allowed into shops over there - the risk, according to the Aussies, of carrying the tree-killing bacterial disease fireblight into that country's fireblight-free orchards.
The debate has frequently descended into a trans-Tasman slanging match. The Aussies insist - typically with a healthy dose of indignation - that any risk is too great to bear, such would be the devastation fireblight would spread. The Kiwis counter with varying degrees of incredulity, frustration, outrage and righteousness that the Australians are using shonky science to put up trade barriers; that they are scared of competition and so are rorting the rules to suit themselves.
The debate got another kick-along this week, with leaked reports that New Zealand has succeeded in an appeal to the World Trade Organisation challenging the Australians' restrictions. The familiar arguments have been wheeled out, and Mr Corboy has once again found his phone ringing constantly as journalists seek his response.
Judging by the file of his 10 years of previous comments, he's having no trouble sticking to message this week, as he takes 20 minutes out from running his substantial fruitgrowing business in the Victorian fruitbowl region of the Goulburn Valley to once again have a crack at the New Zealand campaign and insist that he and his fellow orchardists are motivated by nothing more than a concern for their families' livelihood.
"I make no apologies for our position, " he says early on in the interview. "I don't say it tongue in cheek, but put the boot on the other foot - Jesus, your guys would be bloody climbing the wall. They'd be belting the hell out of anybody they could to make sure that their interests are protected."
Which sounds, it needs to be said, like the precise tactics he and his orcharding colleagues have been practising in their lobbying efforts, to convince Australian politicians to keep the trade barriers up.
On this side of the Tasman, it is occasionally suggested that those growers take every advantage of their leverage in marginal electorates to secure political support for their campaign, and could be expected to do the same in this year's Australian general election.
Mr Corboy doesn't exactly deny the charge. "We've certainly been ensuring as much as we can that the processes are adhered to, and we don't make any apology for that. If New Zealand takes offence at that, I'd say look at your own back door - you haven't been too bad at influencing where you need to."
The fireblight debate has been mired in years of ponderous and arcane arguments over statistical risk, scientific analysis, the bureaucracy of biosecurity and the finer details of WTO trade rules. It's hardly gripping stuff, but Mr Corboy can, in his bluff, blunt-spoken style, boil it down to something more attention-grabbing.
When it's idly suggested that after devoting so long to campaigning on the issue, he might be over it by now, he responds: "If somebody's got a gun pointing at your family, are you ever over it?
"My family relies on the business. That's an ultimate motivator for everybody. If you take the pear industry out of the Goulburn Valley, by jove you'd leave a massive hole."
Goulburn is Australia's biggest pipfruit growing region - the source, he says, of 87 per cent of that country's pear crop. Australia grows far less pipfruit than New Zealand, and isn't a huge consumer of the stuff either, but Mr Corboy compares the significance of the industry in his region to Nelson or Hawke's Bay.
While fireblight can be managed on New Zealand orchards, he and his industry colleagues argue that in Australian conditions, it could spread far more vigorously, and devastate pears in particular. He likens it to foot and mouth in cattle to reinforce the point.
If his concern is dismissed on this side of the Tasman - or at least, rejected on the grounds that there's no credible evidence that such devastation could be caused by importing mature New Zealand apples - Mr Corboy is confident that he's got the Australian public with him.
"The percentage of public support has been very high. If you put it in the right way, it's something people can identify with fairly clearly.
"There's two schools of thought out there in the general public. One is, 'Well, s..., you shouldn't take that risk'; but there's quite often a rider of, 'Look, we don't need the apples anyhow'. I'm not saying that's a justified position, but certainly in the general public, they seem to be fairly fascinated as to why we've got this big s...fight going when in their mind, we don't need any more apples."
Which leads to the sideshow aspect of the great trans-Tasman apple debate: a mine's-bigger-than-yours scrap over whose apples are better, the Kiwis inevitably insisting that ours leave theirs in the dust.
Mr Corboy offers his verdict. "I don't think there's much difference, to be frank. Look, it's similar to in Australia - in different areas, different varieties are grown better, but if you line up the best areas in Australia for gala vis-a-vis the best areas in New Zealand, to be frank, I can't tell the difference.
"I don't reckon you get close to us on pink ladies. Your granny smiths I don't reckon match ours. Your fuji possibly beat ours."
What really matters, he reasons, is the market realities. For one thing, the Australian apple market is heavily dominated by the granny smith and pink lady varieties (about 60 per cent of the total between them, he says). "You're not going to be shoving a lot of them over here."
For another, "I'm also a stonefruit grower and I've also been involved in the kiwifruit industry, and I've seen New Zealand come into Australia on both of those products, make an awful lot of noise and a big splash and then go home. And that's what's going to happen with apples".
So is that an acceptance that, after 90 years of keeping the doors shut, he is finally resigned to Australia letting Kiwi apples into its fruit shops and supermarkets? "That's an open bet. You won't get a categoric no from me."
He is cagey around the question of what the WTO report means for the orchardists' arguments, saying he hasn't seen it, so can't respond - before launching into a spiel about how robust he reckons the Australian case was, and how if any part of it has been overturned, it will be a travesty.
But even if there is an element of resignation in the man who's led the battle to make sure New Zealand apples remain the forbidden fruit of Australia, if they should finally arrive, the principles will remain the same - it's just the tactics that will change.
"We would have to make sure that any fruit that came into this region, the chances of it causing an outbreak were minimised.
"We would be saying to the Australian public that yes, New Zealand fruit's here, but we think ours is better than theirs. We'd be going to chains and saying if you're going to stock New Zealand, you'd better label it.
"We would insist as much as we can on labelling if New Zealand fruit comes here. That's fair that the consumer knows and can compare. That's a clear indication that we're not frightened of New Zealand fruit being better than ours."
Saturday, April 30, 2011
The wealth in the waterways
April 3, 2010
Making money from the water of the Waimea will mean spending money first, writes Geoff Collett.
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Nelson MP Nick Smith's analogy of New Zealand water to Saudi oil is apt in various ways - not least for the potential wealth it speaks of that lies in the billions and billions of litres flowing down rivers such as the Waimea each year. And it is money that will lie at the heart of the debate over whether the Lee dam becomes the solution to watering the Waimea Plains for the next 100 years.
The price tag for the dam is intended to be mostly, but not entirely, paid for by those who want to take water, whether to water crops or for urban supply. But attached to that price tag are two looming questions that could conceivably derail the plan.
The first has been well publicised - the cost to irrigators and others who will want to tap into the Waimea aquifer. It has been calculated out on a per-hectare basis and could be up to as much as $580 per hectare on the calculations prepared so far.
In part, it reflects the detailed financing arrangements planned to get the dam built, but it has surprised even those closest to the project. Worryingly for them, it has caused some would-be irrigators to balk, especially those whose properties could do with water but don't depend on it to survive.
The immediate risk is if too many landowners opt out of the scheme, the costs for those who want or need to be part of it will start to spiral.
The dam size could be reduced to get the bill down, but the committee would be reluctant to do that, chairman Murray King says. At that point, the area that could be serviced would have to be reduced, potential users would miss out and the group's determination to set up the Waimea district with a scheme that will last 100 years would be eroded.
"I know that in 20 years, we will look back and say, 'Why didn't we do it sooner - it looks cheap', " he says.
The consultants who came up with the numbers have put things in blacker and whiter terms. They say that if such a project does not go ahead, the cost to the region through lost farm productivity could amount to $440 million over 25 years.
Whatever you make of such projections, clearly, as Dr Smith points out, the value of water to productive land is vast and lasting.
He thinks today's landowners should bite the bullet. "The cost of their share of contributing to the scheme will pay them more than enough dividend in terms of increased land values from an improved water supply, " he says.
But that leads to the other critical factor hanging over the Waimea project. While it envisages irrigators meeting most of the cost, it is based on also receiving a hefty boost from the public purse.
The augmentation committee has settled on the view that 30 per cent of the total benefits of securing flows down the river will go to the public rather than irrigators, and so 30 per cent of the bill - say, $12m - should come from taxes or rates.
As Neil Deans, of Fish and Game, points out, the argument can quickly become complicated. Some could argue that there would be no need to pay to keep the river healthy in the first place if the irrigators hadn't been allowed to take so much water. He can see the other side, that if there is to be a benefit to the community from the work, the community should contribute. But should it be as much as 30 per cent? "That's a very hard question. I've thought long and hard about that. The answer is probably. I may never be able to give a better answer than that."
After all, as he points out, the Opuha Dam in South Canterbury - a similar scheme, and widely regarded as a boon for the local farming community - was entirely funded by irrigation interests.
Dr Smith is sympathetic to the argument for a contribution from rates and taxes, but not uncritically so.
The debate about how costs and benefits from irrigation should be carved up is happening in government circles, he says, and it is not straightforward. He thinks that ultimately the Government will accept it has some role to play in helping new schemes happen, for the greater good they can deliver. He hopes, but does not promise that the Government will stump up something to the Lee dam, presuming it gets built. But he is cagey about how much. "I don't want to lock myself into a position when there is still a further process of community consultation".
And he adds: "I do have a firm message for landowners, and that is, you cannot expect the taxpayer or the ratepayer to fund your improved land values."
A further complication for the committee is Nelson city's role. The Nelson City Council has officially been part of the project to date and Mr King says it makes sense for it to remain so, meaning, presumably, helping pay if and when the dam gets built.
The council, however, doesn't see it that way. Its staff representative on the Waimea water committee, utilities engineer Dave Plant, says the city considers it has "sufficient water for the very foreseeable future with the Maitai dam", which provides plenty of drought security. Indeed, not only is the council unlikely to stay involved in the Waimea project, but it hopes to eventually claw back the $200,000 seed money it contributed to help get the project started.
Mr King hopes the council can be convinced to look at the project differently. While he is reluctant to comment much on Nelson's situation, "thinking longer term, there are a couple of things that we see with Nelson's water that they don't".
Then again, if the Waimea scheme did not need to include provision for helping water the city, it could help scale back the dam size and push the price down a bit. That's one possibility, Mr King confirms, but equally, "we might find someone else might want it [the city's share]. Someone else might underwrite it and sell it back to Nelson city later. Who knows?"
Making money from the water of the Waimea will mean spending money first, writes Geoff Collett.
--------------------
Nelson MP Nick Smith's analogy of New Zealand water to Saudi oil is apt in various ways - not least for the potential wealth it speaks of that lies in the billions and billions of litres flowing down rivers such as the Waimea each year. And it is money that will lie at the heart of the debate over whether the Lee dam becomes the solution to watering the Waimea Plains for the next 100 years.
The price tag for the dam is intended to be mostly, but not entirely, paid for by those who want to take water, whether to water crops or for urban supply. But attached to that price tag are two looming questions that could conceivably derail the plan.
The first has been well publicised - the cost to irrigators and others who will want to tap into the Waimea aquifer. It has been calculated out on a per-hectare basis and could be up to as much as $580 per hectare on the calculations prepared so far.
In part, it reflects the detailed financing arrangements planned to get the dam built, but it has surprised even those closest to the project. Worryingly for them, it has caused some would-be irrigators to balk, especially those whose properties could do with water but don't depend on it to survive.
The immediate risk is if too many landowners opt out of the scheme, the costs for those who want or need to be part of it will start to spiral.
The dam size could be reduced to get the bill down, but the committee would be reluctant to do that, chairman Murray King says. At that point, the area that could be serviced would have to be reduced, potential users would miss out and the group's determination to set up the Waimea district with a scheme that will last 100 years would be eroded.
"I know that in 20 years, we will look back and say, 'Why didn't we do it sooner - it looks cheap', " he says.
The consultants who came up with the numbers have put things in blacker and whiter terms. They say that if such a project does not go ahead, the cost to the region through lost farm productivity could amount to $440 million over 25 years.
Whatever you make of such projections, clearly, as Dr Smith points out, the value of water to productive land is vast and lasting.
He thinks today's landowners should bite the bullet. "The cost of their share of contributing to the scheme will pay them more than enough dividend in terms of increased land values from an improved water supply, " he says.
But that leads to the other critical factor hanging over the Waimea project. While it envisages irrigators meeting most of the cost, it is based on also receiving a hefty boost from the public purse.
The augmentation committee has settled on the view that 30 per cent of the total benefits of securing flows down the river will go to the public rather than irrigators, and so 30 per cent of the bill - say, $12m - should come from taxes or rates.
As Neil Deans, of Fish and Game, points out, the argument can quickly become complicated. Some could argue that there would be no need to pay to keep the river healthy in the first place if the irrigators hadn't been allowed to take so much water. He can see the other side, that if there is to be a benefit to the community from the work, the community should contribute. But should it be as much as 30 per cent? "That's a very hard question. I've thought long and hard about that. The answer is probably. I may never be able to give a better answer than that."
After all, as he points out, the Opuha Dam in South Canterbury - a similar scheme, and widely regarded as a boon for the local farming community - was entirely funded by irrigation interests.
Dr Smith is sympathetic to the argument for a contribution from rates and taxes, but not uncritically so.
The debate about how costs and benefits from irrigation should be carved up is happening in government circles, he says, and it is not straightforward. He thinks that ultimately the Government will accept it has some role to play in helping new schemes happen, for the greater good they can deliver. He hopes, but does not promise that the Government will stump up something to the Lee dam, presuming it gets built. But he is cagey about how much. "I don't want to lock myself into a position when there is still a further process of community consultation".
And he adds: "I do have a firm message for landowners, and that is, you cannot expect the taxpayer or the ratepayer to fund your improved land values."
A further complication for the committee is Nelson city's role. The Nelson City Council has officially been part of the project to date and Mr King says it makes sense for it to remain so, meaning, presumably, helping pay if and when the dam gets built.
The council, however, doesn't see it that way. Its staff representative on the Waimea water committee, utilities engineer Dave Plant, says the city considers it has "sufficient water for the very foreseeable future with the Maitai dam", which provides plenty of drought security. Indeed, not only is the council unlikely to stay involved in the Waimea project, but it hopes to eventually claw back the $200,000 seed money it contributed to help get the project started.
Mr King hopes the council can be convinced to look at the project differently. While he is reluctant to comment much on Nelson's situation, "thinking longer term, there are a couple of things that we see with Nelson's water that they don't".
Then again, if the Waimea scheme did not need to include provision for helping water the city, it could help scale back the dam size and push the price down a bit. That's one possibility, Mr King confirms, but equally, "we might find someone else might want it [the city's share]. Someone else might underwrite it and sell it back to Nelson city later. Who knows?"
Why we might give a dam
April 3, 2010
Could there really be a way to bring badly needed irrigation water to the Waimea Plains and keep everybody else happy in the process? Geoff Collett looks at the ambitious plan to dam a river to save a river.
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Start talking about irrigation and tapping wild rivers for their lifeblood and it seems everybody has some kind of startling, remarkable or sobering fact or anecdote to throw at you.
Take Murray King, the Appleby dairy farmer who is leading the most ambitious irrigation and river management plan seen in this region.
"It was really brought home to me back in 2003, " he says. He was on a scholarship-funded trip to study irrigation issues in the United States. "I remember driving through Idaho, through what they call the high desert, and there's nothing - and all of a sudden, I came across this field growing probably 1000 acres of potatoes. You just think, 'Man - that is the power of water'."
Or Joseph Thomas, the Tasman District Council hydrology expert who is also central to the same plans for building a dam high in the hills behind Brightwater to bring water security to the Waimea Plains for the first time in decades.
"I'll show you some statistics that will shock you, " he says, brandishing an A4 piece of paper with a chart on it. Actually, the numbers, setting out flow rates on the Waimea River system, are more bamboozling than frightening to the layman, but their basic message is clear: the present use of the Waimea and its underground aquifers to fuel the district's productive heartland is hopelessly over-subscribed.
Depending on how you cut the numbers, to keep the river flowing at an acceptable rate through a dry summer could require taking away 70 per cent of the amount allocated for irrigating the plains' orchards, glasshouses, farms, market gardens, process growers and what-have-you. If it ever came to that, Mr Thomas says, "basically, people may as well shut shop and walk away".
Nelson MP and Environment Minister Nick Smith can chip in a couple of mind-focusing factoids too, about the wider debate over irrigation and water use that is building momentum around New Zealand.
They include his discovery that "the expansion of irrigation in New Zealand during the past couple of decades has been huge in international terms. Thirty-five per cent of new irrigated land in OECD countries during the past two decades has been in New Zealand - and New Zealand makes up 1 per cent of the population of the OECD."
One of Dr Smith's favourite lines, reflecting the Government's enthusiasm for irrigation as a driver of economic growth, is that "fresh water is to New Zealand what oil is to Saudi Arabia".
And now, it looks like Tasman's turn to tap the wellhead has arrived.
Most Nelsonians will know the Lee Valley, but only a little bit - probably its first few kilometres as it twists its way up the steep, forest-covered hill country behind Brightwater. Thousands head up there each summer to cool off in the scattering of swimming holes in the Lee River as it winds from high in those hills down to the flats, joining with the Wairoa River and then the Waimea.
But keep going a long way up, past where the the road turns to shingle, the picnic areas run out and the houses stop.
It's tough country, the edge of Mt Richmond Forest Park but rarely visited; as Department of Conservation Nelson Marlborough technical services manager Martin Heine recalls, the last person who tried coming down that way from Mt Rintoul took searchers four or five days to find.
It's way up there that the search for a way to let Tasman join the growing stampede to harness fresh water has led.
It is an ingenious idea: build a dam across the river, big enough to flood 65ha of the hinterland and create a freshwater lake; fill it with the heavy winter rainfalls common in these hills; then use the lake to control flows in the river system all the way down to the sea at Appleby.
The experts reckon this scheme would mean the Waimea River would always have a good, steady flow - enough to keep the swimming holes filled, to keep the fish and their angling enemies happy, to flush out the weed and nurture the ecosystems, to sustain what Maori talk of as its mauri, its life force.
But more than all that, there would be enough water to keep recharging the network of underground reservoirs beneath the Waimea Plains, to the extent that almost 6000ha of land could eventually be watered, large parts of it now without any irrigation source.
Depending on how you look at the world, that's where the real gold - or oil - lies.
Those aquifers are already the plains' main water source, tapped by numerous farmers' bores and wells, as well as Richmond's and Brightwater's town supplies.
The beauty of being able to draw water straight from the aquifer, at least for those with land on top of it, is that it does away with the need for expensive pipes or canals to deliver the water to the crops.
The catch is that flows through the Waimea aquifer are, as Mr Thomas explains, closely and quickly influenced by the state of the river. If the river dries up, the aquifers soon follow.
The closest things got to this kind of disaster was in 2001, after a months-long drought saw the river stop flowing for three weeks. Saltwater started coming up the river from the sea and threatened to make its way into the aquifers.
The Tasman District Council was considering building a barrier to keep the sea out; swingeing restrictions on water use were put in place.
It was April before the rain arrived and saved the day.
That was the worst experience to date but in most years since, some kind of restrictions on water use have been imposed as the rain has stopped and irrigation has sucked up the groundwater.
Among the lessons rammed home in 2001 was that the Tasman council, and before it, the Nelson Catchment Board, had badly miscalculated the demands they could put on the river.
As Mr Thomas explains, the council's modelling of how the river worked was pioneering but flawed. It let the river run down to a trickle during summer (a minimum flow rate of 250 litres per second near the Appleby Bridge), but also allowed irrigators to then draw down more than the river could bear even at such a derisory flow - 22 per cent more, it turned out.
In fact, the river's ideal minimum flow was eventually determined to be around five times as much, and under that sort of requirement, the over-allocation of irrigation water during droughts could be up to 70 per cent.
There are various ways of sorting out a crisis of that magnitude, Mr Thomas says. One would be to impose cuts when drought strikes and risk ruining more than a few growers and driving productive business off the plains. One is to call in the lawyers and get the courts to decree how the water should be allocated - a guaranteed "lose-lose", as Fish and Game Nelson-Marlborough manager Neil Deans puts it, under which no-one would get what they wanted.
A more hopeful scenario suggested itself: a group of irrigators and the Tasman District Council were driving through plans for a small dam to feed the Wai-iti River and their efforts were generally judged a success. Their experience suggested that some form of water "harvesting" and storage could be achieved without resorting to crippling disputes with opponents. The Wai-iti group offered those looking for solutions on the Waimea a simple but crucial lesson, as Murray King recalls: engage as many stakeholders as possible at an early stage.
If it sounds banal, think again. The traditional model for water-use debates around the country has been the adversarial one. For the likes of iwi interests in particular, and Fish & Game and the Department of Conservation to a lesser extent, it was a novel experience to be asked by irrigation interests to sit down and figure out the best way to manage a river so everybody might get their share.
This inclusive and consensus approach has been the most telling aspect of the group so formed in 2003, the Waimea Water Augmentation Committee, a coalition of farmers, growers, local government, conservationists, tangata whenua and anglers who agreed to try to hammer out a lasting, long-term plan for the Waimea.
They have tried, too, to be as open as possible; having just spent many tens of thousands of dollars on feasibility plans, which will form the basis of an eventual resource consent application, they have made all the plans freely available. Their meeting minutes have been widely circulated. They have talked wherever they have found interest and approached groups who are not part of the committee to seek out obstacles in advance. "The last thing we want is something coming out of the woodwork that we hadn't thought about, " Mr King says.
Neil Deans - who has long and occasionally unpleasant experience in dealing with water allocation debates far and wide - says that while it has not all been sweetness and light and some concerns linger, "I'm conscious that this model we've got with the Waimea is being looked at very carefully by other parts of the country . . . It has got a long way . . . and other parties have been saying, 'How have they been able to do that?' "
That it has taken seven years so far just to get a detailed plan to test whether it will work for the wider community reflects, Mr King says, the grinding wheels of the system, but also the long-term horizon they've set - 100 years out - and the scale of their vision.
The group has explored numerous possibilities and settled on a handful of variations for a Lee dam; their favoured one is the biggest and most expensive, with a cost in the rough order of $40 million. Of the many big calls that are going to be needed if the dam finally happens, the bill is obviously the biggest. (See separate story.)
But presuming for the moment it can negotiate both the mountainous financial hurdle and then the years of politics and process that still lie ahead, the even bigger question would be, what if it does happen? Might it change the character of the Waimea Plains in some profound manner?
Murray King is cautious about reading the future. But he knows that what could be seen as a big advantage for the project is that the plains are not, and are never likely to be, a big dairy area, so should be spared the heated arguments over the environmental effects of dairying that mark so many irrigation debates elsewhere.
Mr King knows those arguments as well as anyone. With extensive business interests in the industry, including in Canterbury, he can talk all day about the enormous issues, political, commercial, technical and much else, that dairy farmers are increasingly ensnared in.
But up here, it's of largely academic interest; his small Appleby farm is one of only three or four left on the plains, where the land is too valuable to run cows. Put water on it to add to the abundant sunshine, and its capacity to produce intensively grown crops is vast. Glasshouses are a more likely symbol of the future there than rotary milking sheds, he suggests.
But there is much water to flow under the Appleby bridge before the current impasse facing the Waimea River can be broken. While at one level, Mr King could moan about how long it has taken to guide the project this far - seven years is an eternity in many private businesses - he knows that if they do it properly first time, they are far more likely to have the community applauding when the ribbon is finally cut on a Lee Valley dam, maybe in four years' time.
So - how confident is he? Supremely? "Highly confident, " he decides. "We can't afford not to do anything. That's probably the more important thing."
Or, as Neil Deans puts it: "The alternative isn't very nice, frankly, to think about."
Or Joseph Thomas: "To me, the question of whether we need the water or not is a no-brainer . . . I know it's a challenge. But it's a challenge the community as a whole needs to rise up to."
Could there really be a way to bring badly needed irrigation water to the Waimea Plains and keep everybody else happy in the process? Geoff Collett looks at the ambitious plan to dam a river to save a river.
--------------------
Start talking about irrigation and tapping wild rivers for their lifeblood and it seems everybody has some kind of startling, remarkable or sobering fact or anecdote to throw at you.
Take Murray King, the Appleby dairy farmer who is leading the most ambitious irrigation and river management plan seen in this region.
"It was really brought home to me back in 2003, " he says. He was on a scholarship-funded trip to study irrigation issues in the United States. "I remember driving through Idaho, through what they call the high desert, and there's nothing - and all of a sudden, I came across this field growing probably 1000 acres of potatoes. You just think, 'Man - that is the power of water'."
Or Joseph Thomas, the Tasman District Council hydrology expert who is also central to the same plans for building a dam high in the hills behind Brightwater to bring water security to the Waimea Plains for the first time in decades.
"I'll show you some statistics that will shock you, " he says, brandishing an A4 piece of paper with a chart on it. Actually, the numbers, setting out flow rates on the Waimea River system, are more bamboozling than frightening to the layman, but their basic message is clear: the present use of the Waimea and its underground aquifers to fuel the district's productive heartland is hopelessly over-subscribed.
Depending on how you cut the numbers, to keep the river flowing at an acceptable rate through a dry summer could require taking away 70 per cent of the amount allocated for irrigating the plains' orchards, glasshouses, farms, market gardens, process growers and what-have-you. If it ever came to that, Mr Thomas says, "basically, people may as well shut shop and walk away".
Nelson MP and Environment Minister Nick Smith can chip in a couple of mind-focusing factoids too, about the wider debate over irrigation and water use that is building momentum around New Zealand.
They include his discovery that "the expansion of irrigation in New Zealand during the past couple of decades has been huge in international terms. Thirty-five per cent of new irrigated land in OECD countries during the past two decades has been in New Zealand - and New Zealand makes up 1 per cent of the population of the OECD."
One of Dr Smith's favourite lines, reflecting the Government's enthusiasm for irrigation as a driver of economic growth, is that "fresh water is to New Zealand what oil is to Saudi Arabia".
And now, it looks like Tasman's turn to tap the wellhead has arrived.
Most Nelsonians will know the Lee Valley, but only a little bit - probably its first few kilometres as it twists its way up the steep, forest-covered hill country behind Brightwater. Thousands head up there each summer to cool off in the scattering of swimming holes in the Lee River as it winds from high in those hills down to the flats, joining with the Wairoa River and then the Waimea.
But keep going a long way up, past where the the road turns to shingle, the picnic areas run out and the houses stop.
It's tough country, the edge of Mt Richmond Forest Park but rarely visited; as Department of Conservation Nelson Marlborough technical services manager Martin Heine recalls, the last person who tried coming down that way from Mt Rintoul took searchers four or five days to find.
It's way up there that the search for a way to let Tasman join the growing stampede to harness fresh water has led.
It is an ingenious idea: build a dam across the river, big enough to flood 65ha of the hinterland and create a freshwater lake; fill it with the heavy winter rainfalls common in these hills; then use the lake to control flows in the river system all the way down to the sea at Appleby.
The experts reckon this scheme would mean the Waimea River would always have a good, steady flow - enough to keep the swimming holes filled, to keep the fish and their angling enemies happy, to flush out the weed and nurture the ecosystems, to sustain what Maori talk of as its mauri, its life force.
But more than all that, there would be enough water to keep recharging the network of underground reservoirs beneath the Waimea Plains, to the extent that almost 6000ha of land could eventually be watered, large parts of it now without any irrigation source.
Depending on how you look at the world, that's where the real gold - or oil - lies.
Those aquifers are already the plains' main water source, tapped by numerous farmers' bores and wells, as well as Richmond's and Brightwater's town supplies.
The beauty of being able to draw water straight from the aquifer, at least for those with land on top of it, is that it does away with the need for expensive pipes or canals to deliver the water to the crops.
The catch is that flows through the Waimea aquifer are, as Mr Thomas explains, closely and quickly influenced by the state of the river. If the river dries up, the aquifers soon follow.
The closest things got to this kind of disaster was in 2001, after a months-long drought saw the river stop flowing for three weeks. Saltwater started coming up the river from the sea and threatened to make its way into the aquifers.
The Tasman District Council was considering building a barrier to keep the sea out; swingeing restrictions on water use were put in place.
It was April before the rain arrived and saved the day.
That was the worst experience to date but in most years since, some kind of restrictions on water use have been imposed as the rain has stopped and irrigation has sucked up the groundwater.
Among the lessons rammed home in 2001 was that the Tasman council, and before it, the Nelson Catchment Board, had badly miscalculated the demands they could put on the river.
As Mr Thomas explains, the council's modelling of how the river worked was pioneering but flawed. It let the river run down to a trickle during summer (a minimum flow rate of 250 litres per second near the Appleby Bridge), but also allowed irrigators to then draw down more than the river could bear even at such a derisory flow - 22 per cent more, it turned out.
In fact, the river's ideal minimum flow was eventually determined to be around five times as much, and under that sort of requirement, the over-allocation of irrigation water during droughts could be up to 70 per cent.
There are various ways of sorting out a crisis of that magnitude, Mr Thomas says. One would be to impose cuts when drought strikes and risk ruining more than a few growers and driving productive business off the plains. One is to call in the lawyers and get the courts to decree how the water should be allocated - a guaranteed "lose-lose", as Fish and Game Nelson-Marlborough manager Neil Deans puts it, under which no-one would get what they wanted.
A more hopeful scenario suggested itself: a group of irrigators and the Tasman District Council were driving through plans for a small dam to feed the Wai-iti River and their efforts were generally judged a success. Their experience suggested that some form of water "harvesting" and storage could be achieved without resorting to crippling disputes with opponents. The Wai-iti group offered those looking for solutions on the Waimea a simple but crucial lesson, as Murray King recalls: engage as many stakeholders as possible at an early stage.
If it sounds banal, think again. The traditional model for water-use debates around the country has been the adversarial one. For the likes of iwi interests in particular, and Fish & Game and the Department of Conservation to a lesser extent, it was a novel experience to be asked by irrigation interests to sit down and figure out the best way to manage a river so everybody might get their share.
This inclusive and consensus approach has been the most telling aspect of the group so formed in 2003, the Waimea Water Augmentation Committee, a coalition of farmers, growers, local government, conservationists, tangata whenua and anglers who agreed to try to hammer out a lasting, long-term plan for the Waimea.
They have tried, too, to be as open as possible; having just spent many tens of thousands of dollars on feasibility plans, which will form the basis of an eventual resource consent application, they have made all the plans freely available. Their meeting minutes have been widely circulated. They have talked wherever they have found interest and approached groups who are not part of the committee to seek out obstacles in advance. "The last thing we want is something coming out of the woodwork that we hadn't thought about, " Mr King says.
Neil Deans - who has long and occasionally unpleasant experience in dealing with water allocation debates far and wide - says that while it has not all been sweetness and light and some concerns linger, "I'm conscious that this model we've got with the Waimea is being looked at very carefully by other parts of the country . . . It has got a long way . . . and other parties have been saying, 'How have they been able to do that?' "
That it has taken seven years so far just to get a detailed plan to test whether it will work for the wider community reflects, Mr King says, the grinding wheels of the system, but also the long-term horizon they've set - 100 years out - and the scale of their vision.
The group has explored numerous possibilities and settled on a handful of variations for a Lee dam; their favoured one is the biggest and most expensive, with a cost in the rough order of $40 million. Of the many big calls that are going to be needed if the dam finally happens, the bill is obviously the biggest. (See separate story.)
But presuming for the moment it can negotiate both the mountainous financial hurdle and then the years of politics and process that still lie ahead, the even bigger question would be, what if it does happen? Might it change the character of the Waimea Plains in some profound manner?
Murray King is cautious about reading the future. But he knows that what could be seen as a big advantage for the project is that the plains are not, and are never likely to be, a big dairy area, so should be spared the heated arguments over the environmental effects of dairying that mark so many irrigation debates elsewhere.
Mr King knows those arguments as well as anyone. With extensive business interests in the industry, including in Canterbury, he can talk all day about the enormous issues, political, commercial, technical and much else, that dairy farmers are increasingly ensnared in.
But up here, it's of largely academic interest; his small Appleby farm is one of only three or four left on the plains, where the land is too valuable to run cows. Put water on it to add to the abundant sunshine, and its capacity to produce intensively grown crops is vast. Glasshouses are a more likely symbol of the future there than rotary milking sheds, he suggests.
But there is much water to flow under the Appleby bridge before the current impasse facing the Waimea River can be broken. While at one level, Mr King could moan about how long it has taken to guide the project this far - seven years is an eternity in many private businesses - he knows that if they do it properly first time, they are far more likely to have the community applauding when the ribbon is finally cut on a Lee Valley dam, maybe in four years' time.
So - how confident is he? Supremely? "Highly confident, " he decides. "We can't afford not to do anything. That's probably the more important thing."
Or, as Neil Deans puts it: "The alternative isn't very nice, frankly, to think about."
Or Joseph Thomas: "To me, the question of whether we need the water or not is a no-brainer . . . I know it's a challenge. But it's a challenge the community as a whole needs to rise up to."
Youth on stage
March 27, 2010
Nelson Youth Theatre is celebrating its 10th anniversary in the ambitious style that is the hallmark of its founder. Geoff Collett reports.
--------------------
There is an unavoidable sense of the driven about Richard Carruthers and his role at the helm of Nelson Youth Theatre.
How else to explain the company's extraordinary output of productions over the past 10 years? Or the increasingly ambitious goals Mr Carruthers is setting for it? The commitment and risk he is prepared to carry on its behalf? And the time and energy he has devoted to it during that decade?
He is, he admits, "hyperactive". Plus, "a few people have commented over the years about my ability - or maybe drawback - to push people beyond the boundaries of where they feel comfortable. Which can be scary or painful, but I think at the end of it, you grow immensely if you're forced to step beyond that comfort zone and do something more than what you were anticipating with a role".
That readiness to occupy the discomfort zone led to his own immersion in Nelson's amateur theatre scene, which became a commitment far beyond what might normally be expected of a dad who got into drama because he was looking for a hobby he could enjoy with his young children.
He quickly fell for it, but also quickly discovered that it wasn't as child- friendly as he had hoped.
"I found that whenever I went to auditions with the kids, I would get cast, being an adult, and they would be in the chorus or not get a callback. I thought that was an incredibly selfish hobby for me, because I was the one having all the fun while they were standing around being the cannon fodder."
The answer, he decided, lay in his conviction that despite being a newcomer to the scene, his professional experience and personality type suited producing and directing plays of his own. Then he could start making things happen for budding actors. Nelson Youth Theatre was born, if in humble circumstances.
Early productions, he freely concedes today, were a bit rough, reflecting the inexperience at play, but also hinted at bold ambitions.
The shows may not have been "anything like as polished as what we can put on now", but the packaging - including early "multiplex" shows, where a series of plays was staged at a single venue at the same time - demonstrated that he was determined to both maximise the involvement of the youngsters and push the boundaries of what was possible.
It was, he says, "a very fast learning curve".
"It's very stressful when you don't know what you're doing, so I was incredibly stressed in my first few years."
It didn't exactly deter him. The idea of a youth company struck a chord with others - including, crucially, Nelson Intermediate School, where teacher and youth theatre supporter Jim Wiseman convinced the hierarchy to lend its facilities to the fledgling group. For almost all of its 10 years, the company has been able to call the school home, using its hall, its classrooms, its sewing classroom, its storage facilities, even many of its pupils to help it grow and evolve.
"Their gift to us has been enormous, " Mr Carruthers says.
Meanwhile, the company has continued to pursue ever-loftier goals.
Throughout its life, Nelson Youth Theatre has put on plenty of small, humble shows, primarily designed to help test and develop the talents of its members; but, especially in the past few years, it has embraced ever more ambitious undertakings.
The biggest so far was 2007's production of Les Miserables. If anything proves the seriousness with which Mr Carruthers has pursued his vision, it would have to be the near- $100,000 budget that lay behind that youthful execution of one of the most loved of epic musicals.
The company relies almost entirely on audiences paying for the cost of staging such big productions. and Mr Carruthers carries the ultimate liability if something falls badly flat. "No risk, no gain, " he says, before adding wryly, "I guess I'll change my philosophy one day when we lose 40 grand".
It is worth noting that his Nelson osteopathy practice has become the de facto administrative base for the company; a notice on one of the clinic's internal doors advises it to be the office of Nelson Youth Theatre, and the practice secretary is also the theatre company's production manager, handling all its paperwork.
His commitment has even spilled, in a way, overseas. On a family trip to Africa a few years ago, he came across a young man running a modest scheme to offer simple artistic opportunities to Kenyan slum children who had been locked up by the police.
Back in Nelson, Mr Carruthers convinced Nelson Youth Theatre to help raise money through its productions - up to $600 a month - which now funds a much-enhanced project teaching the otherwise hopeless young slum dwellers creative performance skills.
The challenges, meanwhile, keep mounting. Given that Nelson Youth Theatre has a landmark birthday to celebrate, 2010 is shaping up as its biggest year. It has a staggering 85 individual productions from its first nine years (all of them produced by Mr Carruthers, and two-thirds of them under his direction). By the end of next week, that will be up to 87 as it opens its double bill anniversary show - two musicals, a Stephen Sondheim fairytale mash-up called Into the Woods and the perennially popular Oliver!.
The dust will hardly have settled on that before the company will be into its next project, a one-act festival of 10 individual plays scheduled for May, to push the total number of shows staged to 97.
In October comes the biggest undertaking yet, a triple-bill lineup of musicals, each staged daily one after the other over a 10-day season, with 30 performances in all - Little Princess, Godspell and My Fair Lady - and so notching up 100 shows in 10 years.
If it sounds absurd in its scope, Mr Carruthers is unfazed.
"I wouldn't be launching into it if I didn't think we could do it, " he says, arguing that such a landmark needs to be marked in a way that involves the maximum number of participants.
Then again, he reflects only half- joking, "I'm not sure that [doing three musicals at once] has ever been done anywhere. Who else would be stupid enough to do three musicals at once with one company?".
All of this poses the question: why? He offers a couple of explanations.
A personal one goes back to his own childhood, when he was a rising star as a schoolboy cricketer in his native England - he won a contest to find the country's fastest schoolboy bowler - but never had the sort of follow-up mentoring and coaching that could have seen him develop into a professional. He knows now how life- changing it can be for a youngster to have raw talent nurtured and directed into the polished form.
He also argues that it's the sheer enthusiasm of his casts that prompts him to keep his foot on the throttle.
But there is, as he himself admits, his own personality to consider. "I guess I'm the sort of person who just does it, and to hell with the consequences."
Nelson Youth Theatre is celebrating its 10th anniversary in the ambitious style that is the hallmark of its founder. Geoff Collett reports.
--------------------
There is an unavoidable sense of the driven about Richard Carruthers and his role at the helm of Nelson Youth Theatre.
How else to explain the company's extraordinary output of productions over the past 10 years? Or the increasingly ambitious goals Mr Carruthers is setting for it? The commitment and risk he is prepared to carry on its behalf? And the time and energy he has devoted to it during that decade?
He is, he admits, "hyperactive". Plus, "a few people have commented over the years about my ability - or maybe drawback - to push people beyond the boundaries of where they feel comfortable. Which can be scary or painful, but I think at the end of it, you grow immensely if you're forced to step beyond that comfort zone and do something more than what you were anticipating with a role".
That readiness to occupy the discomfort zone led to his own immersion in Nelson's amateur theatre scene, which became a commitment far beyond what might normally be expected of a dad who got into drama because he was looking for a hobby he could enjoy with his young children.
He quickly fell for it, but also quickly discovered that it wasn't as child- friendly as he had hoped.
"I found that whenever I went to auditions with the kids, I would get cast, being an adult, and they would be in the chorus or not get a callback. I thought that was an incredibly selfish hobby for me, because I was the one having all the fun while they were standing around being the cannon fodder."
The answer, he decided, lay in his conviction that despite being a newcomer to the scene, his professional experience and personality type suited producing and directing plays of his own. Then he could start making things happen for budding actors. Nelson Youth Theatre was born, if in humble circumstances.
Early productions, he freely concedes today, were a bit rough, reflecting the inexperience at play, but also hinted at bold ambitions.
The shows may not have been "anything like as polished as what we can put on now", but the packaging - including early "multiplex" shows, where a series of plays was staged at a single venue at the same time - demonstrated that he was determined to both maximise the involvement of the youngsters and push the boundaries of what was possible.
It was, he says, "a very fast learning curve".
"It's very stressful when you don't know what you're doing, so I was incredibly stressed in my first few years."
It didn't exactly deter him. The idea of a youth company struck a chord with others - including, crucially, Nelson Intermediate School, where teacher and youth theatre supporter Jim Wiseman convinced the hierarchy to lend its facilities to the fledgling group. For almost all of its 10 years, the company has been able to call the school home, using its hall, its classrooms, its sewing classroom, its storage facilities, even many of its pupils to help it grow and evolve.
"Their gift to us has been enormous, " Mr Carruthers says.
Meanwhile, the company has continued to pursue ever-loftier goals.
Throughout its life, Nelson Youth Theatre has put on plenty of small, humble shows, primarily designed to help test and develop the talents of its members; but, especially in the past few years, it has embraced ever more ambitious undertakings.
The biggest so far was 2007's production of Les Miserables. If anything proves the seriousness with which Mr Carruthers has pursued his vision, it would have to be the near- $100,000 budget that lay behind that youthful execution of one of the most loved of epic musicals.
The company relies almost entirely on audiences paying for the cost of staging such big productions. and Mr Carruthers carries the ultimate liability if something falls badly flat. "No risk, no gain, " he says, before adding wryly, "I guess I'll change my philosophy one day when we lose 40 grand".
It is worth noting that his Nelson osteopathy practice has become the de facto administrative base for the company; a notice on one of the clinic's internal doors advises it to be the office of Nelson Youth Theatre, and the practice secretary is also the theatre company's production manager, handling all its paperwork.
His commitment has even spilled, in a way, overseas. On a family trip to Africa a few years ago, he came across a young man running a modest scheme to offer simple artistic opportunities to Kenyan slum children who had been locked up by the police.
Back in Nelson, Mr Carruthers convinced Nelson Youth Theatre to help raise money through its productions - up to $600 a month - which now funds a much-enhanced project teaching the otherwise hopeless young slum dwellers creative performance skills.
The challenges, meanwhile, keep mounting. Given that Nelson Youth Theatre has a landmark birthday to celebrate, 2010 is shaping up as its biggest year. It has a staggering 85 individual productions from its first nine years (all of them produced by Mr Carruthers, and two-thirds of them under his direction). By the end of next week, that will be up to 87 as it opens its double bill anniversary show - two musicals, a Stephen Sondheim fairytale mash-up called Into the Woods and the perennially popular Oliver!.
The dust will hardly have settled on that before the company will be into its next project, a one-act festival of 10 individual plays scheduled for May, to push the total number of shows staged to 97.
In October comes the biggest undertaking yet, a triple-bill lineup of musicals, each staged daily one after the other over a 10-day season, with 30 performances in all - Little Princess, Godspell and My Fair Lady - and so notching up 100 shows in 10 years.
If it sounds absurd in its scope, Mr Carruthers is unfazed.
"I wouldn't be launching into it if I didn't think we could do it, " he says, arguing that such a landmark needs to be marked in a way that involves the maximum number of participants.
Then again, he reflects only half- joking, "I'm not sure that [doing three musicals at once] has ever been done anywhere. Who else would be stupid enough to do three musicals at once with one company?".
All of this poses the question: why? He offers a couple of explanations.
A personal one goes back to his own childhood, when he was a rising star as a schoolboy cricketer in his native England - he won a contest to find the country's fastest schoolboy bowler - but never had the sort of follow-up mentoring and coaching that could have seen him develop into a professional. He knows now how life- changing it can be for a youngster to have raw talent nurtured and directed into the polished form.
He also argues that it's the sheer enthusiasm of his casts that prompts him to keep his foot on the throttle.
But there is, as he himself admits, his own personality to consider. "I guess I'm the sort of person who just does it, and to hell with the consequences."
Answering the call of the wild
March 20, 2010
Kahurangi has been calling Gerard Hindmarsh for more than 30 years. Now he has put together the first comprehensive collection of stories about the vast wilderness. By Geoff Collett.
--------------------
IF GERARD Hindmarsh looks out the back window of his Golden Bay home he gazes across to Parapara Peak. He's lived with the vista for years and years, "and I never ever tire of it, I'm always absolutely fascinated - in fact, every year goes by I get more and more drawn to it", he says.
The peak is more than his local mountain. It serves as a sentinel and marker post to the vast Kahurangi National Park, hundreds of thousands of hectares of some of New Zealand's toughest wilderness, rolling back through mountain and forest all the way to the West Coast.
It is countryside which has claimed a special place in Hindmarsh's heart and mind, and one which the Golden Bay journalist and writer has paid tribute to in his new book, Kahurangi Calling. The book's broad sweep across the park's natural and social history is a sort of culmination-so-far of an adult lifetime's worth of Hindmarsh's own direct connections to the park, but is much larger than that.
As he explains, he started seriously pulling together the idea for a book of stories from Kahurangi country about 10 years ago, as he kept coming across various epic and unlikely tales.
But when he started talking his ideas through with his editor at Nelson's Craig Potton Publishing, Robbie Burton, the message was that "if you want to be authoritative, you're going to need to weave in all the natural history and the geology and the geography and everything else, because that's what will catch the imagination", Hindmarsh recalls.
Which he duly did, throwing himself into two years of writing and research, gathering both the big picture and the telling detail, to weave together stories of the Kahurangi's unrivalled geology, its rich flora and fauna, its rugged geography, its cast of unlikely characters and legendary experiences.
His is the first attempt at anything like a comprehensive portrayal; after all, as he points out, the national park itself is young, only being gazetted in 1995, and despite its numerous significant natural features it lacks what he calls any "big noters" - no tallest mountains, spectacular glaciers or geothermal wonderlands to grab the attention of the wider world.
Something it does have, in spades, is stories. They include the Murchison earthquake, for example, and its almost incomprehensible effects on the landscape, and the legendary asbestos prospectors, Henry and Annie Chaffey. And there are the less- remembered but no less memorable, such as the four greenhorn rafters from Takaka who made a pioneering descent of the grade-5 Karamea River in airforce-surplus inflatable rafts in 1954; or the two ambitious Forestry Service workers who attempted to claim salvage rights to a wrecked squid boat on the Kahurangi coast back in the mid-1970s.
That latter story serves as a sort of metaphor for Hindmarsh as to how the attitudes towards and within the park have shifted over not much more than a generation.
He sees a change from a place where the wild nature of the country was reflected in the way people responded to it; to today where he laments the continual outpouring of rules and reports from the Department of Conservation in Wellington dictating how things need to be in the modern national park.
Back when he first began exploring it, after he moved to the Bay in 1976, the country was forest park and aspects of its story (including various attempts at exploiting its resources and the introduction of undesirable exotic plants) reflect that.
These days, Hindmarsh occasionally finds himself cast in the role of defender of some of its traditions - notably through his well-publicised criticisms of DOC's removal of historic huts. He pulls up another example, just drawn to his attention - proposed new bylaws for the park seeking to limit the size of groups and the length of time campers are allowed to spend there.
As he puts it in the preface, "an unexpected theme that I became aware of while writing these stories was how they all hark back to a less structured and unregulated time . . . A time when wilderness meant just that, wilderness, left alone except by those who dared enter at their own risk".
If it is a time that has been cast into history, at least he can claim to have started to commit it to posterity.
Kahurangi has been calling Gerard Hindmarsh for more than 30 years. Now he has put together the first comprehensive collection of stories about the vast wilderness. By Geoff Collett.
--------------------
IF GERARD Hindmarsh looks out the back window of his Golden Bay home he gazes across to Parapara Peak. He's lived with the vista for years and years, "and I never ever tire of it, I'm always absolutely fascinated - in fact, every year goes by I get more and more drawn to it", he says.
The peak is more than his local mountain. It serves as a sentinel and marker post to the vast Kahurangi National Park, hundreds of thousands of hectares of some of New Zealand's toughest wilderness, rolling back through mountain and forest all the way to the West Coast.
It is countryside which has claimed a special place in Hindmarsh's heart and mind, and one which the Golden Bay journalist and writer has paid tribute to in his new book, Kahurangi Calling. The book's broad sweep across the park's natural and social history is a sort of culmination-so-far of an adult lifetime's worth of Hindmarsh's own direct connections to the park, but is much larger than that.
As he explains, he started seriously pulling together the idea for a book of stories from Kahurangi country about 10 years ago, as he kept coming across various epic and unlikely tales.
But when he started talking his ideas through with his editor at Nelson's Craig Potton Publishing, Robbie Burton, the message was that "if you want to be authoritative, you're going to need to weave in all the natural history and the geology and the geography and everything else, because that's what will catch the imagination", Hindmarsh recalls.
Which he duly did, throwing himself into two years of writing and research, gathering both the big picture and the telling detail, to weave together stories of the Kahurangi's unrivalled geology, its rich flora and fauna, its rugged geography, its cast of unlikely characters and legendary experiences.
His is the first attempt at anything like a comprehensive portrayal; after all, as he points out, the national park itself is young, only being gazetted in 1995, and despite its numerous significant natural features it lacks what he calls any "big noters" - no tallest mountains, spectacular glaciers or geothermal wonderlands to grab the attention of the wider world.
Something it does have, in spades, is stories. They include the Murchison earthquake, for example, and its almost incomprehensible effects on the landscape, and the legendary asbestos prospectors, Henry and Annie Chaffey. And there are the less- remembered but no less memorable, such as the four greenhorn rafters from Takaka who made a pioneering descent of the grade-5 Karamea River in airforce-surplus inflatable rafts in 1954; or the two ambitious Forestry Service workers who attempted to claim salvage rights to a wrecked squid boat on the Kahurangi coast back in the mid-1970s.
That latter story serves as a sort of metaphor for Hindmarsh as to how the attitudes towards and within the park have shifted over not much more than a generation.
He sees a change from a place where the wild nature of the country was reflected in the way people responded to it; to today where he laments the continual outpouring of rules and reports from the Department of Conservation in Wellington dictating how things need to be in the modern national park.
Back when he first began exploring it, after he moved to the Bay in 1976, the country was forest park and aspects of its story (including various attempts at exploiting its resources and the introduction of undesirable exotic plants) reflect that.
These days, Hindmarsh occasionally finds himself cast in the role of defender of some of its traditions - notably through his well-publicised criticisms of DOC's removal of historic huts. He pulls up another example, just drawn to his attention - proposed new bylaws for the park seeking to limit the size of groups and the length of time campers are allowed to spend there.
As he puts it in the preface, "an unexpected theme that I became aware of while writing these stories was how they all hark back to a less structured and unregulated time . . . A time when wilderness meant just that, wilderness, left alone except by those who dared enter at their own risk".
If it is a time that has been cast into history, at least he can claim to have started to commit it to posterity.
Inside Leunig's head
March 13, 2010
Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig is coming to Nelson next week. He talks to Geoff Collett about psychotherapy, war, being a living treasure and his problem with being Australian. --------------------
Tuesday afternoon at Michael Leunig's place in some quiet corner of rural Victoria, and inspiration is coming slowly to the legendary Australian cartoonist. He is working on something for the papers to do with that country's Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, but the subject hasn't fired him up much.
"I'm not highly inspired. It's one of those days when the news is a bit flat, " he admits on the phone.
No matter. There is no shortage of other things to talk about and he can still get a hearty laugh from musing out loud about Mr Abbott, a notoriously arch-conservative Catholic now leading the Liberal Party, whose most famous moment to date was making an ill-judged public appearance in his budgie-smuggler Speedo togs.
Leunig does the political cartoonist's trademark disdain for politics well: "It's just becoming more and more fake and stylised and slick. You can't believe anything any more, and there's something disgusting about it, " he grumbles.
But for all that, and his obvious distance from the sorts of things Tony Abbott stands for, one suspects that Mr Abbott's presence is far easier for the cartoonist to bear than that of another recent Liberal leader, John Howard. The wounds left by Mr Howard still run deep and raw with Michael Leunig, so that even on this gentle, flat- news-day afternoon, talking down a phone line between a peaceful bit of the Aussie bush and languid Nelson, the resentment wells up easily.
In Australia, Leunig is a legend - in fact, officially a "national living treasure", and known for commentary, poetry, philosophy, painting, collaborations with numerous other artists, occasional television appearances and frequent public- speaking engagements, as well as his principal gig as a political cartoonist for The Age newspaper in Melbourne.
Over here, he is more likely to be known for any of the 20 or 30 books he has produced, various collections of his decades of cartooning, any of which will quickly demonstrate that Leunig is not your garden-variety political cartoonist.
He realised when he started out in the business 40 years ago that he was not especially taken by the traditional "black and white caricature thing" and wanted to treat his own work as "little visual poems", off-centre musings on the more "poetic" realm of human behaviour.
On his website, he writes - and it's worth reading - of his first act of rebellion against the "deadlines, punchlines and politics" during his early years of newspaper work. He sent through a drawing of "a man riding towards the sunset on a large duck", wearing a large teapot on his head. Somehow, it worked. Somehow, it got past his editor.
It was soon followed by an increasingly bewildering parade - goats, chickens, dreamers, lost souls, explorers, the dispossessed, angels and a vast array of others - carrying Leunig's musings on the ceaseless strangeness of humanity.
Not everybody got them. "From the word go, a lot of people were a bit mystified, " he says, especially those who were still waiting for the punchline. But he always believed that art was only alive if it offered something beyond complete understanding.
"There's got to be a fair element of mystique in it . . . if you hear a poem and you don't quite get it, but it draws you back, it enchants you, it makes you want to stay with it."
Given his fascination with humanity's foibles and the fanciful way he explores them, it can be strange, almost jarring - at least from this distance - to realise that Leunig remains at heart a political cartoonist and a newspaper man.
"Newspapers are somehow in my blood - it's where I started. It's got a vaudevillian down-to-earthiness about it. I have to be robust and quick and honest, and there's really great value in that, you can't become too precious in newspapers."
But, he adds, "sometimes you get dragged down into the banality of party politics - you think, 'This is so tiny, this is so parochial, I want to fly a little bit', and I'm sure the public does somewhat . . . I've always seen my role in newspapers like that, to offer a funny little sparkle".
How effectively he has could be answered in all sorts of ways.
For one example, Leunig is in Nelson next week as a keynote speaker at a national gathering of psychotherapists (as well as appearing at a sold-out public engagement, and doing some book signing). It is not the first time he has addressed such a group. His frequent musings on the "so-called darker areas" of human behaviour have given him some common ground with the profession, he points out.
Then there's the whole "living treasure" and "philosopher" thing, labels which have come to define him as much as "cartoonist" in later years. He is self-effacing about that sort of stuff.
He knows better than most that favouritism is fleeting in the public mind. "In Australia, if you have been working for 40 or 50 years, you become just part of the furniture, which is a bit of a problem, but it's sort of sweet, because you become just a domestic artefact. You're no longer some fascinating thing.
"But it also means that people can maybe listen to some of your more preposterous ideas or improbable ideas. It cuts both ways."
His ideas on being Australian have become, however, mixed, and there is sadness here.
It gets back to that John Howard thing. Mr Howard was the one politician, he says, who encouraged him to revert to the more familiar type of the political cartoonist, of unleashing vicious, personal observations on an individual, "who I think did an appalling thing that I couldn't live with, which is take us into a most terrible, unjust and obscene war".
Australia's involvement in the invasion of Iraq was a deeply depressing watershed for Leunig.
"I curse the day - as do many people - when one minute the nation was sailing along with normal business and suddenly we're in this war, and I felt so dismal about that at that stage of my life. It was as if I had been conscripted into it in some way, and it was so sordid and horrible . . . "
He felt compelled to use his various platforms to speak out. "I mean, if you're not unbalanced by war, what are you unbalanced by? And if you're not totally appalled and lose your cool over the slaughter of the innocents, what sort of human being are you?"
He found not everyone shared his outrage. "When a nation goes to war, a lot is revealed about the values of a country, by what people feel they are entitled to say." It included hate mail and threats.
The bitter, brutal experience "tipped me sideways", he says, and seven years on from the invasion, he hasn't so much moved on as "balanced myself". But the resentment is easily recalled.
"I became very alienated from a lot of Australia and retain that to this day - it was part of my detachment from the Australian system, and that will never return. It was a total loss to me. I didn't ride it out well in the end. I think I lost a bit of my country in a way."
But not all of it. After all, there are still plenty who are prepared to forgive him for being around forever, his lack of punchlines, his self-confessed self-indulgences, his various "great mistakes" and his occasional shrieking controversies.
Increasingly, he lives life how he wants in his quiet little corner of a big, brash country.
Chatting about his impending time in New Zealand, he seizes on the point that we like to play things a bit low key in these parts.
"That's what New Zealanders are famous for, and that appeals to me, " he enthuses. "It's the bombastic, brash Americanisation of Australia I loathe and so many people who live in the rural parts of Australia can't stand. The old Australia is still alive and well, but it doesn't get much publicity."
Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig is coming to Nelson next week. He talks to Geoff Collett about psychotherapy, war, being a living treasure and his problem with being Australian. --------------------
Tuesday afternoon at Michael Leunig's place in some quiet corner of rural Victoria, and inspiration is coming slowly to the legendary Australian cartoonist. He is working on something for the papers to do with that country's Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, but the subject hasn't fired him up much.
"I'm not highly inspired. It's one of those days when the news is a bit flat, " he admits on the phone.
No matter. There is no shortage of other things to talk about and he can still get a hearty laugh from musing out loud about Mr Abbott, a notoriously arch-conservative Catholic now leading the Liberal Party, whose most famous moment to date was making an ill-judged public appearance in his budgie-smuggler Speedo togs.
Leunig does the political cartoonist's trademark disdain for politics well: "It's just becoming more and more fake and stylised and slick. You can't believe anything any more, and there's something disgusting about it, " he grumbles.
But for all that, and his obvious distance from the sorts of things Tony Abbott stands for, one suspects that Mr Abbott's presence is far easier for the cartoonist to bear than that of another recent Liberal leader, John Howard. The wounds left by Mr Howard still run deep and raw with Michael Leunig, so that even on this gentle, flat- news-day afternoon, talking down a phone line between a peaceful bit of the Aussie bush and languid Nelson, the resentment wells up easily.
In Australia, Leunig is a legend - in fact, officially a "national living treasure", and known for commentary, poetry, philosophy, painting, collaborations with numerous other artists, occasional television appearances and frequent public- speaking engagements, as well as his principal gig as a political cartoonist for The Age newspaper in Melbourne.
Over here, he is more likely to be known for any of the 20 or 30 books he has produced, various collections of his decades of cartooning, any of which will quickly demonstrate that Leunig is not your garden-variety political cartoonist.
He realised when he started out in the business 40 years ago that he was not especially taken by the traditional "black and white caricature thing" and wanted to treat his own work as "little visual poems", off-centre musings on the more "poetic" realm of human behaviour.
On his website, he writes - and it's worth reading - of his first act of rebellion against the "deadlines, punchlines and politics" during his early years of newspaper work. He sent through a drawing of "a man riding towards the sunset on a large duck", wearing a large teapot on his head. Somehow, it worked. Somehow, it got past his editor.
It was soon followed by an increasingly bewildering parade - goats, chickens, dreamers, lost souls, explorers, the dispossessed, angels and a vast array of others - carrying Leunig's musings on the ceaseless strangeness of humanity.
Not everybody got them. "From the word go, a lot of people were a bit mystified, " he says, especially those who were still waiting for the punchline. But he always believed that art was only alive if it offered something beyond complete understanding.
"There's got to be a fair element of mystique in it . . . if you hear a poem and you don't quite get it, but it draws you back, it enchants you, it makes you want to stay with it."
Given his fascination with humanity's foibles and the fanciful way he explores them, it can be strange, almost jarring - at least from this distance - to realise that Leunig remains at heart a political cartoonist and a newspaper man.
"Newspapers are somehow in my blood - it's where I started. It's got a vaudevillian down-to-earthiness about it. I have to be robust and quick and honest, and there's really great value in that, you can't become too precious in newspapers."
But, he adds, "sometimes you get dragged down into the banality of party politics - you think, 'This is so tiny, this is so parochial, I want to fly a little bit', and I'm sure the public does somewhat . . . I've always seen my role in newspapers like that, to offer a funny little sparkle".
How effectively he has could be answered in all sorts of ways.
For one example, Leunig is in Nelson next week as a keynote speaker at a national gathering of psychotherapists (as well as appearing at a sold-out public engagement, and doing some book signing). It is not the first time he has addressed such a group. His frequent musings on the "so-called darker areas" of human behaviour have given him some common ground with the profession, he points out.
Then there's the whole "living treasure" and "philosopher" thing, labels which have come to define him as much as "cartoonist" in later years. He is self-effacing about that sort of stuff.
He knows better than most that favouritism is fleeting in the public mind. "In Australia, if you have been working for 40 or 50 years, you become just part of the furniture, which is a bit of a problem, but it's sort of sweet, because you become just a domestic artefact. You're no longer some fascinating thing.
"But it also means that people can maybe listen to some of your more preposterous ideas or improbable ideas. It cuts both ways."
His ideas on being Australian have become, however, mixed, and there is sadness here.
It gets back to that John Howard thing. Mr Howard was the one politician, he says, who encouraged him to revert to the more familiar type of the political cartoonist, of unleashing vicious, personal observations on an individual, "who I think did an appalling thing that I couldn't live with, which is take us into a most terrible, unjust and obscene war".
Australia's involvement in the invasion of Iraq was a deeply depressing watershed for Leunig.
"I curse the day - as do many people - when one minute the nation was sailing along with normal business and suddenly we're in this war, and I felt so dismal about that at that stage of my life. It was as if I had been conscripted into it in some way, and it was so sordid and horrible . . . "
He felt compelled to use his various platforms to speak out. "I mean, if you're not unbalanced by war, what are you unbalanced by? And if you're not totally appalled and lose your cool over the slaughter of the innocents, what sort of human being are you?"
He found not everyone shared his outrage. "When a nation goes to war, a lot is revealed about the values of a country, by what people feel they are entitled to say." It included hate mail and threats.
The bitter, brutal experience "tipped me sideways", he says, and seven years on from the invasion, he hasn't so much moved on as "balanced myself". But the resentment is easily recalled.
"I became very alienated from a lot of Australia and retain that to this day - it was part of my detachment from the Australian system, and that will never return. It was a total loss to me. I didn't ride it out well in the end. I think I lost a bit of my country in a way."
But not all of it. After all, there are still plenty who are prepared to forgive him for being around forever, his lack of punchlines, his self-confessed self-indulgences, his various "great mistakes" and his occasional shrieking controversies.
Increasingly, he lives life how he wants in his quiet little corner of a big, brash country.
Chatting about his impending time in New Zealand, he seizes on the point that we like to play things a bit low key in these parts.
"That's what New Zealanders are famous for, and that appeals to me, " he enthuses. "It's the bombastic, brash Americanisation of Australia I loathe and so many people who live in the rural parts of Australia can't stand. The old Australia is still alive and well, but it doesn't get much publicity."
Just passing through?
March 6, 2010
They like to say it's all good there, but the drab display Richmond puts on to the passing world is attracting increasing criticism. Geoff Collett reports.
--------------------
Welcome, as they say, to Richmond; not that you'll necessarily know you've arrived - nor, for that matter, see a good reason to slow down.
"I've talked to people in the past who have said, 'We have come to Nelson for years . . . and we always thought Richmond was some kind of industrial suburb - we didn't realise it had a retail centre', " says Phil Taylor, a dedicated champion of Richmond business and a high street retailer there.
"Overseas tourists don't stop in Richmond, and the irony is almost every one of them travels past."
Recent rejigging of the major intersections, meant to feed passing traffic into the heart of the town, has improved things, he says, but there's still a way to go.
Look at McGlashen Ave, the main entry point to the town centre from the Richmond Deviation. Or maybe don't. "Looking up there, people are hardly going to think, 'This is a place I want to go', " Mr Taylor says of the scrappy streetscape.
Robin Simpson, an urban designer who has a particular interest in the way Richmond presents itself to the world, echoes the sentiment.
"If I didn't know that area at all, what would give me the idea that this was a place I wanted to stop . . . and what would give me any idea of what the character of the place I was going to was? And what would tell me where I needed to go for what?"
For years, it seems, Richmond and its civic leaders have been content to let the town muddle along, staying true to its roots as a no-fuss rural service town, not a place that takes much interest in things like urban design, or spends public money on fripperies like fancy landscaping.
"I just think it's how we've always been, " says Tasman Mayor Richard Kempthorne.
The problem is, it seems that the world is passing Richmond by.
If first impressions are what counts, the drive into Richmond from Gladstone Rd can be a troubling one.
If a traveller is coming from the Coastal Highway - maybe after a day spent savouring the beauty of Abel Tasman National Park or the cafes of Mapua - the first view of Richmond is from the Appleby overbridge at Three Brothers Corner. In prime position is a stack of car wrecks.
For the next couple of kilometres, there should be no doubt that working the land and catering to population growth is the source of wealth here: places specialising in roofing, timber, water tanks, machinery, tractors, pumps, pipes, tyres, fuel, garages, engineering. There are, to be fair, several modern motels, the entrance to a retirement village, some playing fields, a colourful but aged public toilet, and a small building with a discreet sign advising that it is the local tourist information office.
It now has lots of traffic lights, too; but the strange thing is the absence of even a single sign announcing that the retail hub of Tasman district is but a stone's throw to your right.
By the time you've negotiated the three sets of lights and the bewildering array of lane changes the highway descends into at this point, you're likely to be in the fast lane to Nelson city - but not before you've got the chance to admire the grimy backyards of the Beach Rd light industrial area and the worse-for-wear rear fences of suburban Richmond.
Mr Kempthorne promises that the lack of signs - long a bane of the town's promotional group, Richmond Unlimited - is on the Tasman Dictrict Council's to-do list.
As well as signs pointing the way off the state highway into the town centre, a plan is in train, he says, to create a nicely planted spot near Network Tasman on the highway just before Three Brothers, with signs announcing the imminent presence of Richmond town. Council staff have also been talking about some simple, low-key plantings to screen the dire views along the deviation.
What about Gladstone Rd? Is the town stuck with the no-frills appearance of its main highway entrance?
"I think it probably is, " Mr Kempthorne concedes. But he adds that the council has signed up to an urban design protocol under which he has become the "urban design champion" for the district. "Not that I've got any particular expertise, but I'm the sort of touchstone for trying to put processes in place to improve our urban design."
He points to the planned sign outside Network Tasman. "That's going to make quite a difference, " he says, admitting that, "at the moment, you just sort of merge into Richmond without knowing it's there. The plan is to make it attractive, not being too expensive so it becomes a problem, but doing something distinctive that looks really nice."
And if it works, and the passing traffic is tempted to flock to Queen St, is it really, as the town's catchline has it, "all good here"?
For a promotions champion, Phil Taylor is surprisingly downbeat about the showing the town's main street puts on for the public. A former chairman and deputy chairman of Richmond Unlimited who runs shoe shops in both Queen St and Nelson's Trafalgar St (he also chairs the regional tourism agency), Mr Taylor says: "I think Queen St is suffering badly from not being upgraded. Basically, it's a 1970s streetscape. Nelson city - Trafalgar St - completely walks all over it in terms of being an appealing place to go shopping." The footpaths are too narrow. The street furniture is "appalling". The camber of the road is all wrong for pedestrians.
Of course, to many shoppers, the retail experience in Richmond is all about the mall, which draws customers from far and wide and provides a huge, free carpark. The mall has done "great things" for Richmond, Mr Taylor says. But meanwhile, the high street shopping experience has slowly declined.
Richmond Unlimited has been lobbying the council to take even basic measures, such as improving the links between Queen St and the mall. But its big frustration is with the endless delays to plans for a major facelift of Queen St, first proposed in 2002.
On the latest plans, it will happen in 2017. As the promotions group complained in its last submission to the council, that "is essentially never for any business centre facing real competition from other centres, in particular in our case Nelson city".
It is a big project - the council has budgeted $6.1 million for it - and Mr Kempthorne says that before the street is beautified, underground services - water mains, cables, drains - have to be upgraded. The council wants to impose a targeted rate on Queen St businesses to help pay for the project, and has yet to discuss that with business owners; nor has the council actually committed its contribution.
The mayor suggests that if the two parties are willing, the work could happen much sooner. Does he accept that the need is urgent? "It's not really urgent, but it would be really good to get it done, and it would be good to get it done before 2017 . . ."
So what's the mayor's view of Richmond's high street now? "Adequate. But not as good as it should be."
There is an argument that central Richmond needs more than just a facelift. Richmond Unlimited and Mr Taylor point to a long list of services and functions the town should be planning for - tourist accommodation, tourist activities, a restaurant precinct, a community hall, a cinema, art and culture . . .
There couldn't be much dispute that Richmond largely dies at night, once the shops have closed. A handful of bars and restaurants keep a few lights burning after dark but, as Matt Bouterey of the town's most celebrated eatery, Bouterey's at 251, puts it, "people don't arrive and wander around, going for a drink here, dropping in there for a meal, there for a dessert, then going there for a cocktail. It would be so good for Richmond if it happened".
They like to say it's all good there, but the drab display Richmond puts on to the passing world is attracting increasing criticism. Geoff Collett reports.
--------------------
Welcome, as they say, to Richmond; not that you'll necessarily know you've arrived - nor, for that matter, see a good reason to slow down.
"I've talked to people in the past who have said, 'We have come to Nelson for years . . . and we always thought Richmond was some kind of industrial suburb - we didn't realise it had a retail centre', " says Phil Taylor, a dedicated champion of Richmond business and a high street retailer there.
"Overseas tourists don't stop in Richmond, and the irony is almost every one of them travels past."
Recent rejigging of the major intersections, meant to feed passing traffic into the heart of the town, has improved things, he says, but there's still a way to go.
Look at McGlashen Ave, the main entry point to the town centre from the Richmond Deviation. Or maybe don't. "Looking up there, people are hardly going to think, 'This is a place I want to go', " Mr Taylor says of the scrappy streetscape.
Robin Simpson, an urban designer who has a particular interest in the way Richmond presents itself to the world, echoes the sentiment.
"If I didn't know that area at all, what would give me the idea that this was a place I wanted to stop . . . and what would give me any idea of what the character of the place I was going to was? And what would tell me where I needed to go for what?"
For years, it seems, Richmond and its civic leaders have been content to let the town muddle along, staying true to its roots as a no-fuss rural service town, not a place that takes much interest in things like urban design, or spends public money on fripperies like fancy landscaping.
"I just think it's how we've always been, " says Tasman Mayor Richard Kempthorne.
The problem is, it seems that the world is passing Richmond by.
If first impressions are what counts, the drive into Richmond from Gladstone Rd can be a troubling one.
If a traveller is coming from the Coastal Highway - maybe after a day spent savouring the beauty of Abel Tasman National Park or the cafes of Mapua - the first view of Richmond is from the Appleby overbridge at Three Brothers Corner. In prime position is a stack of car wrecks.
For the next couple of kilometres, there should be no doubt that working the land and catering to population growth is the source of wealth here: places specialising in roofing, timber, water tanks, machinery, tractors, pumps, pipes, tyres, fuel, garages, engineering. There are, to be fair, several modern motels, the entrance to a retirement village, some playing fields, a colourful but aged public toilet, and a small building with a discreet sign advising that it is the local tourist information office.
It now has lots of traffic lights, too; but the strange thing is the absence of even a single sign announcing that the retail hub of Tasman district is but a stone's throw to your right.
By the time you've negotiated the three sets of lights and the bewildering array of lane changes the highway descends into at this point, you're likely to be in the fast lane to Nelson city - but not before you've got the chance to admire the grimy backyards of the Beach Rd light industrial area and the worse-for-wear rear fences of suburban Richmond.
Mr Kempthorne promises that the lack of signs - long a bane of the town's promotional group, Richmond Unlimited - is on the Tasman Dictrict Council's to-do list.
As well as signs pointing the way off the state highway into the town centre, a plan is in train, he says, to create a nicely planted spot near Network Tasman on the highway just before Three Brothers, with signs announcing the imminent presence of Richmond town. Council staff have also been talking about some simple, low-key plantings to screen the dire views along the deviation.
What about Gladstone Rd? Is the town stuck with the no-frills appearance of its main highway entrance?
"I think it probably is, " Mr Kempthorne concedes. But he adds that the council has signed up to an urban design protocol under which he has become the "urban design champion" for the district. "Not that I've got any particular expertise, but I'm the sort of touchstone for trying to put processes in place to improve our urban design."
He points to the planned sign outside Network Tasman. "That's going to make quite a difference, " he says, admitting that, "at the moment, you just sort of merge into Richmond without knowing it's there. The plan is to make it attractive, not being too expensive so it becomes a problem, but doing something distinctive that looks really nice."
And if it works, and the passing traffic is tempted to flock to Queen St, is it really, as the town's catchline has it, "all good here"?
For a promotions champion, Phil Taylor is surprisingly downbeat about the showing the town's main street puts on for the public. A former chairman and deputy chairman of Richmond Unlimited who runs shoe shops in both Queen St and Nelson's Trafalgar St (he also chairs the regional tourism agency), Mr Taylor says: "I think Queen St is suffering badly from not being upgraded. Basically, it's a 1970s streetscape. Nelson city - Trafalgar St - completely walks all over it in terms of being an appealing place to go shopping." The footpaths are too narrow. The street furniture is "appalling". The camber of the road is all wrong for pedestrians.
Of course, to many shoppers, the retail experience in Richmond is all about the mall, which draws customers from far and wide and provides a huge, free carpark. The mall has done "great things" for Richmond, Mr Taylor says. But meanwhile, the high street shopping experience has slowly declined.
Richmond Unlimited has been lobbying the council to take even basic measures, such as improving the links between Queen St and the mall. But its big frustration is with the endless delays to plans for a major facelift of Queen St, first proposed in 2002.
On the latest plans, it will happen in 2017. As the promotions group complained in its last submission to the council, that "is essentially never for any business centre facing real competition from other centres, in particular in our case Nelson city".
It is a big project - the council has budgeted $6.1 million for it - and Mr Kempthorne says that before the street is beautified, underground services - water mains, cables, drains - have to be upgraded. The council wants to impose a targeted rate on Queen St businesses to help pay for the project, and has yet to discuss that with business owners; nor has the council actually committed its contribution.
The mayor suggests that if the two parties are willing, the work could happen much sooner. Does he accept that the need is urgent? "It's not really urgent, but it would be really good to get it done, and it would be good to get it done before 2017 . . ."
So what's the mayor's view of Richmond's high street now? "Adequate. But not as good as it should be."
There is an argument that central Richmond needs more than just a facelift. Richmond Unlimited and Mr Taylor point to a long list of services and functions the town should be planning for - tourist accommodation, tourist activities, a restaurant precinct, a community hall, a cinema, art and culture . . .
There couldn't be much dispute that Richmond largely dies at night, once the shops have closed. A handful of bars and restaurants keep a few lights burning after dark but, as Matt Bouterey of the town's most celebrated eatery, Bouterey's at 251, puts it, "people don't arrive and wander around, going for a drink here, dropping in there for a meal, there for a dessert, then going there for a cocktail. It would be so good for Richmond if it happened".
Return of the native
February 27, 2010
Ten years ago, a couple of determined conservationists made a vow: to bring the birds back to one of Nelson's most popular wilderness spots. Geoff Collett reports on the Friends of Flora.
To the untrained eye, the two tiny flapping silhouettes in the sky far across the Flora Valley could be anything. Hawks, tui, seagulls - who knows?
"Wood pigeons, " says Maryann Ewers after a second's observation.
Of course.
Up in the treetops near the start of the Flora Saddle Track, she spies some imperceptible activity. Gradually, tiny, flitting, tawny brown shapes appear. Brown creepers, she says - beautiful little birds. They're too high up to challenge her assessment.
Her conversation up here on the flanks of Mt Arthur is peppered with sudden silences and distractions, as she stops talking and cocks an ear. "That's kakariki, " she'll say of an unnoticed squawk from somewhere far off. Or "There's a tomtit", or a robin, rifleman or bellbird, as a variety of shadowy shapes flick and hop through the surrounding shrubbery.
She dives off the track to point out the gouged bark of a dead tree. It's the mark of a kaka, where it's been digging for insects, she explains. She's always happy to spot the big parrot's calling card.
Ms Ewers knows her birds. But more than that, if credit was to be given for all these feathered friends even being on the busy track up Nelson's mightiest mountain, she and her partner Bill Rooke would surely take a place at the front of the queue.
Ten years ago, the couple were tramping through this country when they made a vow. Both are ardent conservationists and run a guiding business, Bush and Beyond, taking trampers all over Kahurangi National Park and promoting a conservation message.
They liked to keep notes on the birds they encountered, and on that particular trip in May 2000, a trend that had been getting hard to ignore became overwhelming.
Birds that should have been there weren't. Predatory pests, led by stoats, were taking over in the heart of the busiest part of one of the country's biggest national parks, overwhelming the birdlife and the Department of Conservation's ever- stretched abilities to cope.
"We had talked over the previous couple of years that we should set up a trapping project here; then we'd get home and life gets in the way, " Ms Ewers recalls. "But on that particular trip, we more or less made a pact with each other that when we got back, we would contact DOC."
They also made a list of birds that had long since disappeared from the area, which they were determined would one day again call the Flora home. At the top was the whio, the blue duck; next, the great spotted kiwi.
Their vision was, frankly, outlandish: a volunteer-managed network of stoat traps across the Flora Stream catchment, all the way to the Tableland and Gordons Pyramid, and almost as far as the Cobb. Something like 5000 hectares, much of it tiger country, requiring hundreds of traps, each of which would have to be regularly checked and re-baited, including through the depths of snowbound winters.
Did they appreciate exactly what they were suggesting? "No - I don't think we still do, " Ms Ewers laughs.
The DOC staff they met with must have been shaking their heads. "We were basically told it's a good idea, but we're dreaming, " she recalls.
And they were. Not that dreams have to be impossible. Besides, as she reflects now, "I guess passion drives people on to do silly things".
Despite any scepticism, DOC wanted to encourage the couple's enthusiasm, and they took its advice to start gently, laying their first line of traps up the easily accessible Flora Valley floor.
They put an advertisement in the newspaper, seeking others to help. A new group was soon born: the Friends of Flora.
It has never been huge - its membership is in the dozens - but it has always been determined. DOC was close behind, supporting the group as it slowly rolled out kilometre after kilometre of trap lines.
And, slowly, the birds - some of which, like the rifleman, DOC had feared were on the way out for good - started coming back.
Then came the turn of the first of the birds on the Ewers-Rooke list. A lone male whio was the sole survivor of the species known to be living in the Flora catchment. In what was to prove an especially steep stretch of the learning curve they had embarked on, the Friends arranged for a clutch of hand-reared whio chicks to be moved from captivity in Christchurch to a new life in the Flora Stream.
It quickly emerged that the ducks weren't cut out for alpine life. They struggled in a place where the climate was harsh and food could be hard to come by. Six starved; the other four were shifted to easier terrain in the Wangapeka.
The Friends tried again, this time finding a juvenile female which they shifted to the stream, hoping she would settle and partner up with the solitary boy duck. It worked. In 2007, the first whio chicks to hatch in the area for 10 years emerged into the world.
A survey at the end of last year counted something like 18 birds, including 11 ducklings. Given their shy nature, there are bound to be more, Ms Ewers says. "We're well on the way to having a sustainable population of whio."
Now it's the turn of the kiwi.
In a couple of months - 10 years almost to the day since the couple came back from that walk, determined to turn the tide in the birds' favour - they hope to be releasing the first of a fledgling great spotted kiwi colony back into the Flora, about 30 years since the birds are known to have had any kind of established presence there.
The plan is as ambitious as anything the Friends have yet tackled. It centres on shifting 14 birds - probably seven pairs - from an area in the park's north, which has a healthy kiwi population, to the Flora. It comes at a cost to the Friends of about $100,000 over three years - an enormous challenge.
The first big chunk of that - about a quarter - was raised last year in an epic effort by group members. It will pay for finding and catching the birds, attaching transmitters to them, and then flying them by helicopter to their new home, a process that will be done in stages from late March, with the first of the birds to be ceremonially released on May 1.
Then the Friends will have to knuckle down to finding another $70,000, most of it to employ someone who can lead a three-year monitoring project to see how the birds fare.
It is not just ambitious, but high- stakes. Who knows how the kiwi will adapt to a new home? Will they stick around? Will they breed? Has the stoat threat been nullified, and for how long?
"We're very hopeful, " Ms Ewers says of the prospects. "But of course, no-one can guarantee anything in this business."
On this late February day, Ms Ewers and Mr Rooke are once again - yet again - heading off from the Flora carpark and up the valley, this time with a couple of DOC staff and a bunch of fellow Friends of Flora, to collect some intelligence on stoat numbers.
Today, Mr Rooke can look up the valley and say, "I reckon there must be up to 100km of trapping lines up there. As someone from DOC said to me recently, it's become a monster". "A good one, " Ms Ewers chips in.
Ten years ago, a couple of determined conservationists made a vow: to bring the birds back to one of Nelson's most popular wilderness spots. Geoff Collett reports on the Friends of Flora.
To the untrained eye, the two tiny flapping silhouettes in the sky far across the Flora Valley could be anything. Hawks, tui, seagulls - who knows?
"Wood pigeons, " says Maryann Ewers after a second's observation.
Of course.
Up in the treetops near the start of the Flora Saddle Track, she spies some imperceptible activity. Gradually, tiny, flitting, tawny brown shapes appear. Brown creepers, she says - beautiful little birds. They're too high up to challenge her assessment.
Her conversation up here on the flanks of Mt Arthur is peppered with sudden silences and distractions, as she stops talking and cocks an ear. "That's kakariki, " she'll say of an unnoticed squawk from somewhere far off. Or "There's a tomtit", or a robin, rifleman or bellbird, as a variety of shadowy shapes flick and hop through the surrounding shrubbery.
She dives off the track to point out the gouged bark of a dead tree. It's the mark of a kaka, where it's been digging for insects, she explains. She's always happy to spot the big parrot's calling card.
Ms Ewers knows her birds. But more than that, if credit was to be given for all these feathered friends even being on the busy track up Nelson's mightiest mountain, she and her partner Bill Rooke would surely take a place at the front of the queue.
Ten years ago, the couple were tramping through this country when they made a vow. Both are ardent conservationists and run a guiding business, Bush and Beyond, taking trampers all over Kahurangi National Park and promoting a conservation message.
They liked to keep notes on the birds they encountered, and on that particular trip in May 2000, a trend that had been getting hard to ignore became overwhelming.
Birds that should have been there weren't. Predatory pests, led by stoats, were taking over in the heart of the busiest part of one of the country's biggest national parks, overwhelming the birdlife and the Department of Conservation's ever- stretched abilities to cope.
"We had talked over the previous couple of years that we should set up a trapping project here; then we'd get home and life gets in the way, " Ms Ewers recalls. "But on that particular trip, we more or less made a pact with each other that when we got back, we would contact DOC."
They also made a list of birds that had long since disappeared from the area, which they were determined would one day again call the Flora home. At the top was the whio, the blue duck; next, the great spotted kiwi.
Their vision was, frankly, outlandish: a volunteer-managed network of stoat traps across the Flora Stream catchment, all the way to the Tableland and Gordons Pyramid, and almost as far as the Cobb. Something like 5000 hectares, much of it tiger country, requiring hundreds of traps, each of which would have to be regularly checked and re-baited, including through the depths of snowbound winters.
Did they appreciate exactly what they were suggesting? "No - I don't think we still do, " Ms Ewers laughs.
The DOC staff they met with must have been shaking their heads. "We were basically told it's a good idea, but we're dreaming, " she recalls.
And they were. Not that dreams have to be impossible. Besides, as she reflects now, "I guess passion drives people on to do silly things".
Despite any scepticism, DOC wanted to encourage the couple's enthusiasm, and they took its advice to start gently, laying their first line of traps up the easily accessible Flora Valley floor.
They put an advertisement in the newspaper, seeking others to help. A new group was soon born: the Friends of Flora.
It has never been huge - its membership is in the dozens - but it has always been determined. DOC was close behind, supporting the group as it slowly rolled out kilometre after kilometre of trap lines.
And, slowly, the birds - some of which, like the rifleman, DOC had feared were on the way out for good - started coming back.
Then came the turn of the first of the birds on the Ewers-Rooke list. A lone male whio was the sole survivor of the species known to be living in the Flora catchment. In what was to prove an especially steep stretch of the learning curve they had embarked on, the Friends arranged for a clutch of hand-reared whio chicks to be moved from captivity in Christchurch to a new life in the Flora Stream.
It quickly emerged that the ducks weren't cut out for alpine life. They struggled in a place where the climate was harsh and food could be hard to come by. Six starved; the other four were shifted to easier terrain in the Wangapeka.
The Friends tried again, this time finding a juvenile female which they shifted to the stream, hoping she would settle and partner up with the solitary boy duck. It worked. In 2007, the first whio chicks to hatch in the area for 10 years emerged into the world.
A survey at the end of last year counted something like 18 birds, including 11 ducklings. Given their shy nature, there are bound to be more, Ms Ewers says. "We're well on the way to having a sustainable population of whio."
Now it's the turn of the kiwi.
In a couple of months - 10 years almost to the day since the couple came back from that walk, determined to turn the tide in the birds' favour - they hope to be releasing the first of a fledgling great spotted kiwi colony back into the Flora, about 30 years since the birds are known to have had any kind of established presence there.
The plan is as ambitious as anything the Friends have yet tackled. It centres on shifting 14 birds - probably seven pairs - from an area in the park's north, which has a healthy kiwi population, to the Flora. It comes at a cost to the Friends of about $100,000 over three years - an enormous challenge.
The first big chunk of that - about a quarter - was raised last year in an epic effort by group members. It will pay for finding and catching the birds, attaching transmitters to them, and then flying them by helicopter to their new home, a process that will be done in stages from late March, with the first of the birds to be ceremonially released on May 1.
Then the Friends will have to knuckle down to finding another $70,000, most of it to employ someone who can lead a three-year monitoring project to see how the birds fare.
It is not just ambitious, but high- stakes. Who knows how the kiwi will adapt to a new home? Will they stick around? Will they breed? Has the stoat threat been nullified, and for how long?
"We're very hopeful, " Ms Ewers says of the prospects. "But of course, no-one can guarantee anything in this business."
On this late February day, Ms Ewers and Mr Rooke are once again - yet again - heading off from the Flora carpark and up the valley, this time with a couple of DOC staff and a bunch of fellow Friends of Flora, to collect some intelligence on stoat numbers.
Today, Mr Rooke can look up the valley and say, "I reckon there must be up to 100km of trapping lines up there. As someone from DOC said to me recently, it's become a monster". "A good one, " Ms Ewers chips in.
A win for Victory
January 30, 2010
It used to be the place the rest of Nelson avoided. Now it is held up as an example to the rest of New Zealand of what a community can aspire to.
Geoff Collett looks at the transformation of Victory
--------------------
EVEN if you arrive in the heart of Victory Square with a lifetime supply of traditional Nelson prejudices - the sort that will have you nervously keeping an eye on your parked car, the passers- by, those tough looking dudes coming out of the bar - you'll be hard-pressed to miss the evidence that, these days, you're in a place that rates itself.
The notice stuck to various windows and noticeboards around the square's shopping centre speaks volumes: a message to the locals, urging them to get behind the bid to have Victory named New Zealand's "community of the year" in a nationwide competition. It seems to have worked, too: Victory has made it to the final three and will find out next Wednesday night whether it has indeed seized the title.
Other signs are there, too. The newly painted mural on the side of the convenience store; the flyers and newsletters listing free services at the local community centre; the general absence of tagging, litter, vandalism; the air of a place that is, you could say, comfortable in its own skin.
On the edge of the shopping centre there's a pocket-sized cafe, opened last year, funky in the fashion familiar in inner-suburb cafes everywhere, steadily busy on a mid-week morning.
Nelson journalist and Victory resident Matt Lawrey - a relatively new arrival in the neighbourhood and among its many boosters - likes to point out that, years ago, the cafe premises were a butcher's shop, later a sex shop. That history, he suggests, could serve as a microcosm of the wider area's evolution, from its earlier days as a solid, unfashionable working-class suburb; to its 1990s-early-2000s period as a vaguely seedy part of town with a dodgy reputation; to now, a place that reckons it is worthy of being known as New Zealand's community of the year.
Over at the community centre off Totara St - part of the Victory Primary School campus - community activist Kindra Douglas also singles out the cafe to make a point. "I've noticed a lot of different people coming into the community now to go to that cafe, people who would have never dreamed of coming to Victory for a social experience, " she says, and laughs.
Then again, most Nelsonians should have twigged long before the cafe came along that things were happening in Victory. It has been hard to avoid the feelgood stories coming out of the place over the past half-dozen years, as a group of local champions have laboured to reverse its history of hardships.
It's getting to the point, Ms Douglas says, where "a lot of people say, 'everything that's going on is happening in Victory' ".
And she muses that it's also getting to the point where there is the risk that "outsiders looking in will just turn it around and do the tall poppy thing on us".
A decade ago, talking about tall poppies and Victory in the same breath would have been absurd. The 1990s were hard on the place. Gang associates and crime families were established there. Poverty and poor housing kept the neighbourhood depressed. It had the city's highest crime rate, suffered disproportionate vandalism, petty crime, burglary.
Families came and went, moving on when their problems caught up with them. At Victory Primary School, they tell of how in the mid-1990s, more than half the school roll turned over in a year, as children arrived then left with their transient parents. (Today, the turnover is less than one in 10).
And hanging over the whole place was the plan to drive the city's southern link highway extension through the middle of the community.
Wander around Emano or Murphy streets today - both once notorious Nelson addresses, to some minds, anyway - you would struggle to reconcile the old infamy with today's reality. There are still some rough- looking places, some overgrown gardens. But virtually no tagging. No car wrecks. No hordes of shiftless youth, or menacing apprenticed thugs.
What's changed is obvious. But how? Ms Douglas's favoured phrase is "a perfect storm". "There was this convergence of a number of different things at the right time, " she says - people, ideas, opportunities, needs - starting around 2000. Among the early pioneers were Mark Brown, the principal at Victory Primary, and Briar Maaroufi, who determined that the place needed a low- or no-cost community health centre and launched the long, often frustrating campaign to get one (she died before her dream was realised).
John O'Donovan - the community constable from March 2000 until late 2005 - was another pivotal figure. Determined to convince people to raise their own standards, he ran numerous schemes, whether helping people get their driving licences so they wouldn't be caught driving illegally; convincing youngsters not to tag their own neighbourhoods; or convincing Nelson City Council to act quicker to clear away the car wrecks being dumped there with depressing frequency.
Then, in 2004, the community helped dash the roading authorities' plan to build the southern link, with the Environment Court tossing the plan out because of the effect it would have on life in Victory. Kindra Douglas sees that as a watershed, convincing the locals that their community had a better future.
The property market played a part, too. As house prices soared everywhere, rents started climbing and, Mr O'Donovan, the large number of drug users living in Victory moved away.
With Victory still offering cheap housing by Nelson standards, new homeowners started coming in, with "a desire to put in gardens and paint their houses", as he puts it.
The suburb hasn't exactly been gentrified, but there's an entirely different atmosphere.
"Massively different, " he says. "It's unbelievably so. People are ecstatic about living there, they say they wouldn't live anywhere else, they like the fact that there is a huge camaraderie and that people know their neighbours."
The crime rate has plummeted.
Ms Douglas says the rise in property prices and rents has caused some consternation among those who fear poorer families will be driven out; but she acknowledges that Victory still is - and probably always will be - a place of cheaper housing, much of it tucked into cold valleys and hillsides. It is still a working-class community, popular with beneficiaries, far more ethnically varied than most of the city. And if that feeds a lingering stigma in other suburbs, a more worldly view of the community has developed over recent years.
It's not hard to find recent arrivals who tell of being warned off moving there by old Nelsonians, but they have just as likely ignored the advice.
Mike Hindmarsh could be typical of the newcomers: a furniture maker with a young family, who moved to Murphy St a couple of years ago, in part attracted by the school, who is if anything bemused by Victory's rough reputation. Even before he moved there, it never struck him as being a particularly scary part of town - to the contrary, "there's a lot of young families around here - the kids have got a lot of playmates, and it's safe".
He has demonstrated his enthusiasm for the neighbourhood by getting himself on to the local community association; he shares what he says is a growing desire around the place among the various artists and younger people living there to "funkify" the suburb, to get more community facilities designed to reflect Victory's particular identity.
But if you're looking for the one place where Victory's turning point can be traced back to, you'll surely start, and stop, at the school.
Mark Brown notched up his 20th anniversary there last year (and his 15th in the principal's office); his connections go back even further, to a stint he had there as a beginner teacher. It may not have been everyone's idea of a dream job, but for Mr Brown, "even though it was seen to be a challenge, it fitted my own educational idea about making a difference for people". He never saw a lost cause. "It always had a strong underlying spirit."
His core philosophy sounds simple enough - insisting that families were central to the development of their children - but he had a task on his hands putting that into effect.
The story of Victory Primary's steady progress under Mr Brown's management has been well documented and has attracted attention far and wide (including from the likes of Prime Minister John Key and the Families Commission, which has been studying the Victory approach).
In short, one thing led to another. First came earning the parents' and community's trust. Parents started interacting with the school and taking a closer interest. Other agencies that needed to build ties with the people of Victory started to base themselves at the school. The ripples spread.
"We had people working all over the place, in interview rooms and converted toilet spaces and cloakbays. But it wasn't about the facilities, but about the relationships they were building, " Mr Brown says.
As the demand intensified the school stepped up even further. In need of a new hall itself, it convinced the education authorities that it could go into deeper partnership with the community and build a new wing that would include not just a hall but meeting rooms and offices to serve the rapidly growing line-up of support agencies operating from the school, including a community health centre. The result was the Victory Community Centre, headquarters to Ms Douglas and her colleagues. But the building is only part of it: the school has numerous facilities it freely shares with the public, including a community garden, a hangi pit, sport courts and play equipment. It is the hub around which Victory's renaissance revolves.
Mr Brown sees room for the school to do yet more. "We've certainly set our sights and our expectations far higher than what they were five years ago, " he says. "We now know that there's another realm of things that we can still enhance the school into."
He has stacks of reports and statistics to prove the validity of Victory's approach. One he is especially proud of is that 90 per cent of Victory's 400-odd pupils meet or better benchmark standards in reading, writing and numeracy - far better than the norm for such a low socio- economic area.
Like Kindra Douglas, Mr Brown sees a risk that Victory's success could yet backfire, if funding agencies decide it is has had its fair share. Ms Douglas estimates the community centre relies on about 20 different funding sources. She hopes that the strength of their relationships - and the growing evidence that Victory people are embracing the opportunities now being offered them - are enough to protect such arrangements.
There are other threats, surely none greater than the prospect that the southern link could yet be revived.
That raises a crucial point about the Victory story: that it is not just a hunger for publicity that makes the community's boosters so eager to keep the outside world informed of their progress. They understand the politics of community activism, they know that the more sympathy they can call on around Nelson and beyond, the harder it will be to ever build a highway through the heart of Victory. As Matt Lawrey wrote in his Nelson Mail column a couple of weeks ago, what politician would want to claim credit for building the southern link through the "community of the year"?
And it's an on-going challenge. For despite all the undoubted progress, and even if you go along with the view that Emano St is no longer such a bad address, there are still those who see Victory's greatest value to the city as the route for a four-lane expressway. As long as that attitude exists, you can expect to keep hearing the people of Victory telling you another story.
"We want to keep creating a counter-reality, that it's a beautiful place in its own right, " Ms Douglas says.
And if that means getting political, so be it.
"We see ourselves living and breathing as a political act in its own way - for daring to do something like this."
It used to be the place the rest of Nelson avoided. Now it is held up as an example to the rest of New Zealand of what a community can aspire to.
Geoff Collett looks at the transformation of Victory
--------------------
EVEN if you arrive in the heart of Victory Square with a lifetime supply of traditional Nelson prejudices - the sort that will have you nervously keeping an eye on your parked car, the passers- by, those tough looking dudes coming out of the bar - you'll be hard-pressed to miss the evidence that, these days, you're in a place that rates itself.
The notice stuck to various windows and noticeboards around the square's shopping centre speaks volumes: a message to the locals, urging them to get behind the bid to have Victory named New Zealand's "community of the year" in a nationwide competition. It seems to have worked, too: Victory has made it to the final three and will find out next Wednesday night whether it has indeed seized the title.
Other signs are there, too. The newly painted mural on the side of the convenience store; the flyers and newsletters listing free services at the local community centre; the general absence of tagging, litter, vandalism; the air of a place that is, you could say, comfortable in its own skin.
On the edge of the shopping centre there's a pocket-sized cafe, opened last year, funky in the fashion familiar in inner-suburb cafes everywhere, steadily busy on a mid-week morning.
Nelson journalist and Victory resident Matt Lawrey - a relatively new arrival in the neighbourhood and among its many boosters - likes to point out that, years ago, the cafe premises were a butcher's shop, later a sex shop. That history, he suggests, could serve as a microcosm of the wider area's evolution, from its earlier days as a solid, unfashionable working-class suburb; to its 1990s-early-2000s period as a vaguely seedy part of town with a dodgy reputation; to now, a place that reckons it is worthy of being known as New Zealand's community of the year.
Over at the community centre off Totara St - part of the Victory Primary School campus - community activist Kindra Douglas also singles out the cafe to make a point. "I've noticed a lot of different people coming into the community now to go to that cafe, people who would have never dreamed of coming to Victory for a social experience, " she says, and laughs.
Then again, most Nelsonians should have twigged long before the cafe came along that things were happening in Victory. It has been hard to avoid the feelgood stories coming out of the place over the past half-dozen years, as a group of local champions have laboured to reverse its history of hardships.
It's getting to the point, Ms Douglas says, where "a lot of people say, 'everything that's going on is happening in Victory' ".
And she muses that it's also getting to the point where there is the risk that "outsiders looking in will just turn it around and do the tall poppy thing on us".
A decade ago, talking about tall poppies and Victory in the same breath would have been absurd. The 1990s were hard on the place. Gang associates and crime families were established there. Poverty and poor housing kept the neighbourhood depressed. It had the city's highest crime rate, suffered disproportionate vandalism, petty crime, burglary.
Families came and went, moving on when their problems caught up with them. At Victory Primary School, they tell of how in the mid-1990s, more than half the school roll turned over in a year, as children arrived then left with their transient parents. (Today, the turnover is less than one in 10).
And hanging over the whole place was the plan to drive the city's southern link highway extension through the middle of the community.
Wander around Emano or Murphy streets today - both once notorious Nelson addresses, to some minds, anyway - you would struggle to reconcile the old infamy with today's reality. There are still some rough- looking places, some overgrown gardens. But virtually no tagging. No car wrecks. No hordes of shiftless youth, or menacing apprenticed thugs.
What's changed is obvious. But how? Ms Douglas's favoured phrase is "a perfect storm". "There was this convergence of a number of different things at the right time, " she says - people, ideas, opportunities, needs - starting around 2000. Among the early pioneers were Mark Brown, the principal at Victory Primary, and Briar Maaroufi, who determined that the place needed a low- or no-cost community health centre and launched the long, often frustrating campaign to get one (she died before her dream was realised).
John O'Donovan - the community constable from March 2000 until late 2005 - was another pivotal figure. Determined to convince people to raise their own standards, he ran numerous schemes, whether helping people get their driving licences so they wouldn't be caught driving illegally; convincing youngsters not to tag their own neighbourhoods; or convincing Nelson City Council to act quicker to clear away the car wrecks being dumped there with depressing frequency.
Then, in 2004, the community helped dash the roading authorities' plan to build the southern link, with the Environment Court tossing the plan out because of the effect it would have on life in Victory. Kindra Douglas sees that as a watershed, convincing the locals that their community had a better future.
The property market played a part, too. As house prices soared everywhere, rents started climbing and, Mr O'Donovan, the large number of drug users living in Victory moved away.
With Victory still offering cheap housing by Nelson standards, new homeowners started coming in, with "a desire to put in gardens and paint their houses", as he puts it.
The suburb hasn't exactly been gentrified, but there's an entirely different atmosphere.
"Massively different, " he says. "It's unbelievably so. People are ecstatic about living there, they say they wouldn't live anywhere else, they like the fact that there is a huge camaraderie and that people know their neighbours."
The crime rate has plummeted.
Ms Douglas says the rise in property prices and rents has caused some consternation among those who fear poorer families will be driven out; but she acknowledges that Victory still is - and probably always will be - a place of cheaper housing, much of it tucked into cold valleys and hillsides. It is still a working-class community, popular with beneficiaries, far more ethnically varied than most of the city. And if that feeds a lingering stigma in other suburbs, a more worldly view of the community has developed over recent years.
It's not hard to find recent arrivals who tell of being warned off moving there by old Nelsonians, but they have just as likely ignored the advice.
Mike Hindmarsh could be typical of the newcomers: a furniture maker with a young family, who moved to Murphy St a couple of years ago, in part attracted by the school, who is if anything bemused by Victory's rough reputation. Even before he moved there, it never struck him as being a particularly scary part of town - to the contrary, "there's a lot of young families around here - the kids have got a lot of playmates, and it's safe".
He has demonstrated his enthusiasm for the neighbourhood by getting himself on to the local community association; he shares what he says is a growing desire around the place among the various artists and younger people living there to "funkify" the suburb, to get more community facilities designed to reflect Victory's particular identity.
But if you're looking for the one place where Victory's turning point can be traced back to, you'll surely start, and stop, at the school.
Mark Brown notched up his 20th anniversary there last year (and his 15th in the principal's office); his connections go back even further, to a stint he had there as a beginner teacher. It may not have been everyone's idea of a dream job, but for Mr Brown, "even though it was seen to be a challenge, it fitted my own educational idea about making a difference for people". He never saw a lost cause. "It always had a strong underlying spirit."
His core philosophy sounds simple enough - insisting that families were central to the development of their children - but he had a task on his hands putting that into effect.
The story of Victory Primary's steady progress under Mr Brown's management has been well documented and has attracted attention far and wide (including from the likes of Prime Minister John Key and the Families Commission, which has been studying the Victory approach).
In short, one thing led to another. First came earning the parents' and community's trust. Parents started interacting with the school and taking a closer interest. Other agencies that needed to build ties with the people of Victory started to base themselves at the school. The ripples spread.
"We had people working all over the place, in interview rooms and converted toilet spaces and cloakbays. But it wasn't about the facilities, but about the relationships they were building, " Mr Brown says.
As the demand intensified the school stepped up even further. In need of a new hall itself, it convinced the education authorities that it could go into deeper partnership with the community and build a new wing that would include not just a hall but meeting rooms and offices to serve the rapidly growing line-up of support agencies operating from the school, including a community health centre. The result was the Victory Community Centre, headquarters to Ms Douglas and her colleagues. But the building is only part of it: the school has numerous facilities it freely shares with the public, including a community garden, a hangi pit, sport courts and play equipment. It is the hub around which Victory's renaissance revolves.
Mr Brown sees room for the school to do yet more. "We've certainly set our sights and our expectations far higher than what they were five years ago, " he says. "We now know that there's another realm of things that we can still enhance the school into."
He has stacks of reports and statistics to prove the validity of Victory's approach. One he is especially proud of is that 90 per cent of Victory's 400-odd pupils meet or better benchmark standards in reading, writing and numeracy - far better than the norm for such a low socio- economic area.
Like Kindra Douglas, Mr Brown sees a risk that Victory's success could yet backfire, if funding agencies decide it is has had its fair share. Ms Douglas estimates the community centre relies on about 20 different funding sources. She hopes that the strength of their relationships - and the growing evidence that Victory people are embracing the opportunities now being offered them - are enough to protect such arrangements.
There are other threats, surely none greater than the prospect that the southern link could yet be revived.
That raises a crucial point about the Victory story: that it is not just a hunger for publicity that makes the community's boosters so eager to keep the outside world informed of their progress. They understand the politics of community activism, they know that the more sympathy they can call on around Nelson and beyond, the harder it will be to ever build a highway through the heart of Victory. As Matt Lawrey wrote in his Nelson Mail column a couple of weeks ago, what politician would want to claim credit for building the southern link through the "community of the year"?
And it's an on-going challenge. For despite all the undoubted progress, and even if you go along with the view that Emano St is no longer such a bad address, there are still those who see Victory's greatest value to the city as the route for a four-lane expressway. As long as that attitude exists, you can expect to keep hearing the people of Victory telling you another story.
"We want to keep creating a counter-reality, that it's a beautiful place in its own right, " Ms Douglas says.
And if that means getting political, so be it.
"We see ourselves living and breathing as a political act in its own way - for daring to do something like this."
Working for the planet
December 12, 2009
Nelson businessman Andrew Booth was behind this week's report predicting that large parts of the city will disappear under water if climate change is not tackled. As Geoff Collett learns, he has a long history of drawing public attention to environmental issues.
--------------------
The Nelson sunlight is streaming through the big windows in the Hardy St office of Andrew Booth's latest venture, and fittingly so. Solar energy is what he's all about these days: the next stage in a lifetime of fighting to save the planet.
Compared with where he's come from, it might seem a bit underwhelming - a bit mild-mannered, maybe.
In his youth, he was a key figure in Greenpeace in his native England, rising to lead its national campaigns and securing a place on its international board and frequently throwing himself directly in harm's way in the organisation's high-profile campaigns. After that, he helped found an international television business to push environmental and human rights issues into the media mainstream.
These days, he's hoping to convince Nelson people to fit solar water heating panels to their roofs. If it sounds like a comedown, to Mr Booth it is ultimately about the same ends: doing something real about saving the planet.
And don't underestimate the end goal. The young company Mr Booth is at the head of, Solar City, may be immediately focused on a scheme to get Nelson building owners to install solar water heating, but the picture is much bigger than that. If climate change is the biggest environmental challenge facing the world, then Solar City intends to be "right at the heart of the debate about climate change in Nelson and New Zealand", Mr Booth says.
Hence this week's report produced by the Cawthron Institute, commissioned by Solar City, to apply the latest science on climate change to Nelson and draw some practical conclusions about what could be in store. They include the prediction that, depending on the rate of sea level rise caused by melting ice caps, much of the city's heart as we know it will vanish into Tasman Bay - airports, ports, supermarkets, beaches, business infrastructure, houses.
But given its long-term view - 100 years or so - and what looks like a fairly gloomy worst-case approach, was the report really intended to be anything more than a button- pushing exercise - a bit of a stunt to publicise a cause, even?
Mr Booth doesn't go with the scepticism. "I think it's really difficult for people to appreciate . . . what climate change might actually mean. What Cawthron have done is find some everyday reference points so that people can actually appreciate what it might mean for a city like Nelson. And, sure, it's all theory at the moment, it's all what scientists think might happen."
But what strikes him about the climate change debate is that it is being largely led by the scientists, and "science is driving the politicians to act". More than that, he says, the real impetus for change won't come from politicians, with their focus on the election cycle, but from "ordinary people, with children and grandchildren", who take the longer view about their legacy.
"Rather than leave people with that feeling that all these nasty things are happening, people do want to get involved."
He freely admits that the firebrand approach to environmental activism - the stance he adopted when he first threw himself into the movement as a teenager some 30 years ago - is really the stuff of youth. It was images of the big seal culls in Canada that first caught his attention and stoked his outrage. He studied zoology at university, and from there volunteered for Greenpeace. His qualification saw him quickly become involved in campaigning, as well as the more mundane tasks expected of volunteers - packing T-shirts and the like. "Much of my 20s was spent all around different parts of Europe and the world, campaigning on a variety of issues."
Today, Greenpeace is often accused of staging stunts for the television cameras. Mr Booth is unapologetic that capturing media and political attention was the motive, but "these weren't designed as stunts"; the aim was always to make the public and the decision makers recognise "how urgently we as young people felt and how concerned we were about some of the issues".
The risks those young people took were high, too - his closest call was nearly ending up in the propellers of a ship he had tied himself to during a blockade of the Dutch port of Rotterdam.
By his late 20s, he was in charge of Greenpeace campaigns for Britain, and from there he was elected to Greenpeace's five-person international board. He remains a supporter, but recognised long ago that Greenpeace relies on making way for the next generation.
"As you get older, I don't think you share the same passion about trying to move things forward for your next generation. I think you run out of steam to a certain extent. and you also need fresh ideas. It really is, from my perspective, an organisation that needs to be out there challenging the status quo, and I think you need the younger person's perspective."
With age comes savviness - in his case, after 15 years with Greenpeace, a growing recognition of the way the levers of power operate, particularly those controlled by the news media.
His theory was and is that the world's news diet is essentially controlled by a duopoly - the two giant news agencies of Reuters and Associated Press (AP), which feed news reports to a mass of subscribers around the world, including all the major news companies.
Frustrated that the news machine had a narrow focus with little room for stories about the environment or human rights, Mr Booth and a colleague, Peter Sibley, came up with a plan: they created their own television production company, World Television, to specialise in professionally made news reports about such issues, partnering with one of the big players to feed those stories into the agency's subscriber services. Reuters took them on, and World Television thrived. It has long since outgrown its original remit and listed on the sharemarket.
His involvement now is limited to a directorship, but he remains a close student of the fast-changing forces affecting the media landscape. "What's interesting is that the news media largely . . . mediate the relationship - the economic relationship - between nations."
But since moving to New Zealand and Nelson eight years ago with his Kiwi wife Lorraine and their four children, he has sought to change down. "I've tried to move as far as I can towards living a simpler life."
He acknowledges the contradictions between "the purity of vision" he had in his youth and the business world he has been immersed in since; they are, he muses, all part of the compromises and complications that are the reality of getting on in life. But he maintains that he holds true to that vision of his youth, even if it is expressed in a more modest, less confrontational way - the vision of solar panels on rooftops the length and breadth of the country, one that he is working towards with fellow investors Barry Leay and Simon Stockdale.
Solar City is still in its early days but has already acquired a couple of other companies (a Christchurch manufacturer of solar hot water panels, an Auckland firm that sources world-leading solar electrical technology). It is also monitoring the progress of technology that will allow homeowners to use the sun's rays to generate electricity, both for household use and to sell back into the electricity grid.
Besides being central to the climate change debate, he wants it to emerge as a "world-class solar business".
"No-one's really grasping the fact that the New Zealand solar resource is 20 to 30 times better than anywhere else. Being able to use that sort of resource just seems a no- brainer, " he says.
"We see a huge opportunity to create quite a big industry here, providing clean jobs at a time when everybody's going to be looking for alternative energy sources and trying to decarbonise economy.
"A city that grabs the opportunity it has and becomes a leader in clean energy technologies will be a leader in the economy that comes out of the climate change debate. And I think Nelson has that opportunity."
Nelson businessman Andrew Booth was behind this week's report predicting that large parts of the city will disappear under water if climate change is not tackled. As Geoff Collett learns, he has a long history of drawing public attention to environmental issues.
--------------------
The Nelson sunlight is streaming through the big windows in the Hardy St office of Andrew Booth's latest venture, and fittingly so. Solar energy is what he's all about these days: the next stage in a lifetime of fighting to save the planet.
Compared with where he's come from, it might seem a bit underwhelming - a bit mild-mannered, maybe.
In his youth, he was a key figure in Greenpeace in his native England, rising to lead its national campaigns and securing a place on its international board and frequently throwing himself directly in harm's way in the organisation's high-profile campaigns. After that, he helped found an international television business to push environmental and human rights issues into the media mainstream.
These days, he's hoping to convince Nelson people to fit solar water heating panels to their roofs. If it sounds like a comedown, to Mr Booth it is ultimately about the same ends: doing something real about saving the planet.
And don't underestimate the end goal. The young company Mr Booth is at the head of, Solar City, may be immediately focused on a scheme to get Nelson building owners to install solar water heating, but the picture is much bigger than that. If climate change is the biggest environmental challenge facing the world, then Solar City intends to be "right at the heart of the debate about climate change in Nelson and New Zealand", Mr Booth says.
Hence this week's report produced by the Cawthron Institute, commissioned by Solar City, to apply the latest science on climate change to Nelson and draw some practical conclusions about what could be in store. They include the prediction that, depending on the rate of sea level rise caused by melting ice caps, much of the city's heart as we know it will vanish into Tasman Bay - airports, ports, supermarkets, beaches, business infrastructure, houses.
But given its long-term view - 100 years or so - and what looks like a fairly gloomy worst-case approach, was the report really intended to be anything more than a button- pushing exercise - a bit of a stunt to publicise a cause, even?
Mr Booth doesn't go with the scepticism. "I think it's really difficult for people to appreciate . . . what climate change might actually mean. What Cawthron have done is find some everyday reference points so that people can actually appreciate what it might mean for a city like Nelson. And, sure, it's all theory at the moment, it's all what scientists think might happen."
But what strikes him about the climate change debate is that it is being largely led by the scientists, and "science is driving the politicians to act". More than that, he says, the real impetus for change won't come from politicians, with their focus on the election cycle, but from "ordinary people, with children and grandchildren", who take the longer view about their legacy.
"Rather than leave people with that feeling that all these nasty things are happening, people do want to get involved."
He freely admits that the firebrand approach to environmental activism - the stance he adopted when he first threw himself into the movement as a teenager some 30 years ago - is really the stuff of youth. It was images of the big seal culls in Canada that first caught his attention and stoked his outrage. He studied zoology at university, and from there volunteered for Greenpeace. His qualification saw him quickly become involved in campaigning, as well as the more mundane tasks expected of volunteers - packing T-shirts and the like. "Much of my 20s was spent all around different parts of Europe and the world, campaigning on a variety of issues."
Today, Greenpeace is often accused of staging stunts for the television cameras. Mr Booth is unapologetic that capturing media and political attention was the motive, but "these weren't designed as stunts"; the aim was always to make the public and the decision makers recognise "how urgently we as young people felt and how concerned we were about some of the issues".
The risks those young people took were high, too - his closest call was nearly ending up in the propellers of a ship he had tied himself to during a blockade of the Dutch port of Rotterdam.
By his late 20s, he was in charge of Greenpeace campaigns for Britain, and from there he was elected to Greenpeace's five-person international board. He remains a supporter, but recognised long ago that Greenpeace relies on making way for the next generation.
"As you get older, I don't think you share the same passion about trying to move things forward for your next generation. I think you run out of steam to a certain extent. and you also need fresh ideas. It really is, from my perspective, an organisation that needs to be out there challenging the status quo, and I think you need the younger person's perspective."
With age comes savviness - in his case, after 15 years with Greenpeace, a growing recognition of the way the levers of power operate, particularly those controlled by the news media.
His theory was and is that the world's news diet is essentially controlled by a duopoly - the two giant news agencies of Reuters and Associated Press (AP), which feed news reports to a mass of subscribers around the world, including all the major news companies.
Frustrated that the news machine had a narrow focus with little room for stories about the environment or human rights, Mr Booth and a colleague, Peter Sibley, came up with a plan: they created their own television production company, World Television, to specialise in professionally made news reports about such issues, partnering with one of the big players to feed those stories into the agency's subscriber services. Reuters took them on, and World Television thrived. It has long since outgrown its original remit and listed on the sharemarket.
His involvement now is limited to a directorship, but he remains a close student of the fast-changing forces affecting the media landscape. "What's interesting is that the news media largely . . . mediate the relationship - the economic relationship - between nations."
But since moving to New Zealand and Nelson eight years ago with his Kiwi wife Lorraine and their four children, he has sought to change down. "I've tried to move as far as I can towards living a simpler life."
He acknowledges the contradictions between "the purity of vision" he had in his youth and the business world he has been immersed in since; they are, he muses, all part of the compromises and complications that are the reality of getting on in life. But he maintains that he holds true to that vision of his youth, even if it is expressed in a more modest, less confrontational way - the vision of solar panels on rooftops the length and breadth of the country, one that he is working towards with fellow investors Barry Leay and Simon Stockdale.
Solar City is still in its early days but has already acquired a couple of other companies (a Christchurch manufacturer of solar hot water panels, an Auckland firm that sources world-leading solar electrical technology). It is also monitoring the progress of technology that will allow homeowners to use the sun's rays to generate electricity, both for household use and to sell back into the electricity grid.
Besides being central to the climate change debate, he wants it to emerge as a "world-class solar business".
"No-one's really grasping the fact that the New Zealand solar resource is 20 to 30 times better than anywhere else. Being able to use that sort of resource just seems a no- brainer, " he says.
"We see a huge opportunity to create quite a big industry here, providing clean jobs at a time when everybody's going to be looking for alternative energy sources and trying to decarbonise economy.
"A city that grabs the opportunity it has and becomes a leader in clean energy technologies will be a leader in the economy that comes out of the climate change debate. And I think Nelson has that opportunity."
The longest-running show in town
November 7, 2009
In the second of our series backgrounding the performing arts centre debate, Geoff Collett looks at the long-running efforts of the Millennium Centre Trust to get the centre built.
* January 1996: The Majestic Theatre burns down, depriving Nelson of its only large-scale theatre.
* May 1998: The Nelson Millennium Centre Trust is established at the Nelson City Council and granted $15,000 by the two councils to pay for a feasibility study for a theatre project.
* August 1998: The trust reveals plans for a centre at Millers Acre.
* October 1998: Council elections and a change at the top at the Nelson City Council see the project put on hold.
* March 2001: After being told by the council that Millers Acre is not available for development, the trust shifts its focus to Wakatu Square.
* February 2002: The trust reveals its feasibility study for a $20.4m building in Wakatu Square.
* March 2002: The council sells a portion of Wakatu Square, scuttling the trust's idea.
* October 2003: A new consultants' report is released, assessing 20 sites for a centre. The land between West Yates' offices in Trafalgar St and the Trafalgar Centre (dubbed "the Maitai River precinct") tops the list, followed by Millers Acre and Buxton Square.
* April 2004: The council adopts Rutherford Park, alongside the Trafalgar Centre, as its preferred location.
* October 2007: A performing arts centre becomes a major issue at the local body elections.
* July 2008: The council announces that it has bought a site next to the Rutherford Hotel for the centre.
* November 2009: The council seeks public views on the project. Go to nelsoncitycouncil.co.nz for more details. --------------------
Even the most implacable opponent of the Nelson performing arts centre dream would have to concede that Brian Rhoades is a man who sticks to his guns.
For someone who admits that he is not really that plugged into the performing arts scene, he has been unwavering in his conviction that the city needs to do better around its facilities for theatre, shows, concerts and community gatherings. "It's been obvious the whole time I've lived in Nelson, since 1985, that we were lacking in those facilities that every other centre had, " he says.
Not that many people listened to him, until that day in early 1996 when the nearest thing Nelson had to such a venue, the Majestic Theatre in Trafalgar St, went up in flames.
The hole left by the demise of the old, tired, 1200-seat building was immediately obvious, and it wasn't long before Dr Rhoades' phone was ringing, with the region's two mayors at the time - Nelson's Philip Woollaston and Tasman's Kerry Marshall - suggesting they were ready to take him up on his offer to put some spadework into figuring out what would be required if the city was to finally get a purpose-built performance centre.
That we can skip from early 1996 to late 2009 and find Dr Rhoades sitting in a city cafe still talking about the gap in the community infrastructure defies belief - to his mind, at least. "I'm just astounded it's taken so long . . . and I really can't understand why."
In mid-1998, a couple of years after he first scoped out his ideas, the Nelson and Tasman councils set up the Nelson Millennium Centre Trust to keep the project moving. Dr Rhoades was the logical choice for chairman, and was joined by a variety of other enthusiasts (accountant Bronwyn Monopoli, lawyer Brian Smythe, architect Maurice Tebbs, and musician and event organiser Pete Rainey, among others).
The trust's name was the clearest sign that the mayors had a vision of cutting the ribbon on a magnificent new building just in time for year 2000 celebrations. Today, after years of prevarication and procrastination, it might seem like an embarrassing reminder of wishful thinking, but Dr Rhoades' conviction remains undiminished, even if some of his optimism has been tested.
These days, Mrs Monopoli heads the trust. She recalls a meeting between trustees and the newly elected Tasman District Council a couple of years ago, when a new councillor was wanting to know what the trust had been up to for the previous 10 years. It was Mr Smythe who rose to the challenge, telling the councillor: "I think I'll describe it as a litany of lost opportunities."
Each of those opportunities comes with its own paper trail - a stack of feasibility studies, evaluation projects, reviews of feasibility studies, site assessments, economic impact reports and draft plans. As Mrs Monopoli puts it, there wouldn't be a large-scale site within central Nelson that has not been pored over, scrutinised and imagined as a possible location.
Dr Rhoades worked largely for love in producing the first pile of paperwork, coming up with the original feasibility study - which he says still contains all the answers to counter those who continue to question the need for a centre.
He maintains that his vision was "modest" rather than grandiose, although he was bold where he felt it was necessary - a 1420-seat auditorium with tiered seating; professional-standard backstage facilities, with a fly tower to accommodate equipment needed for lighting, scenery, props and the like; a second, much smaller theatre for rehearsals and small gatherings; and space for conferences capable of hosting up to 1000 people at a sit-down dinner. The cost was estimated at $20.4 million in 2001 money.
Dr Rhoades is also convinced that the public supports the project. What he and his fellow trustees perhaps didn't count on was a shifting and unpredictable political environment, starting at the end of 1998 when Mr Woollaston lost the Nelson mayoralty to Paul Matheson, while in Tasman, a bluff, straight-talking farmer, John Hurley, filled the vacancy left by Mr Marshall's retirement.
The trustees and subsequent consultants had firmly identified Millers Acre as the ideal site. Its central location, council ownership and various planning considerations made it perfect, but the new city council had other ideas. As Dr Rhoades recalls, shortly after the election "Paul Matheson said, 'Go away for a year or two while we worry about other things - we're interested in this, we know it's important, but come back' ".
The trustees remained active, and when they were summoned again to produce some plans, "[the council] told us quite bluntly that Millers Acre was not a site that was available".
Instead, the trust was "directed" to Wakatu Square - still under development at the time and surrounded by some prime retail development land.
This led to probably the unhappiest hours in the trust's life. While it dutifully reworked its plans and calculations to make a theatre and conference centre work on the square, the council was negotiating to sell a large chunk of it to another developer.
Asked why they didn't give up at that point and take up more rewarding pursuits, both Dr Rhoades' and Mrs Monopoli's reply is simple: "Because we believe in the project."
"I don't know that anyone's been against us, " Dr Rhoades says.
"We've had generally pretty good receptions from both councils when we've talked to them. I think people realise that we need this thing. It's really a case of, it's big and it's difficult and . . . to many people, it's outside the scale of projects they've previously been involved with."
In the second of our series backgrounding the performing arts centre debate, Geoff Collett looks at the long-running efforts of the Millennium Centre Trust to get the centre built.
* January 1996: The Majestic Theatre burns down, depriving Nelson of its only large-scale theatre.
* May 1998: The Nelson Millennium Centre Trust is established at the Nelson City Council and granted $15,000 by the two councils to pay for a feasibility study for a theatre project.
* August 1998: The trust reveals plans for a centre at Millers Acre.
* October 1998: Council elections and a change at the top at the Nelson City Council see the project put on hold.
* March 2001: After being told by the council that Millers Acre is not available for development, the trust shifts its focus to Wakatu Square.
* February 2002: The trust reveals its feasibility study for a $20.4m building in Wakatu Square.
* March 2002: The council sells a portion of Wakatu Square, scuttling the trust's idea.
* October 2003: A new consultants' report is released, assessing 20 sites for a centre. The land between West Yates' offices in Trafalgar St and the Trafalgar Centre (dubbed "the Maitai River precinct") tops the list, followed by Millers Acre and Buxton Square.
* April 2004: The council adopts Rutherford Park, alongside the Trafalgar Centre, as its preferred location.
* October 2007: A performing arts centre becomes a major issue at the local body elections.
* July 2008: The council announces that it has bought a site next to the Rutherford Hotel for the centre.
* November 2009: The council seeks public views on the project. Go to nelsoncitycouncil.co.nz for more details. --------------------
Even the most implacable opponent of the Nelson performing arts centre dream would have to concede that Brian Rhoades is a man who sticks to his guns.
For someone who admits that he is not really that plugged into the performing arts scene, he has been unwavering in his conviction that the city needs to do better around its facilities for theatre, shows, concerts and community gatherings. "It's been obvious the whole time I've lived in Nelson, since 1985, that we were lacking in those facilities that every other centre had, " he says.
Not that many people listened to him, until that day in early 1996 when the nearest thing Nelson had to such a venue, the Majestic Theatre in Trafalgar St, went up in flames.
The hole left by the demise of the old, tired, 1200-seat building was immediately obvious, and it wasn't long before Dr Rhoades' phone was ringing, with the region's two mayors at the time - Nelson's Philip Woollaston and Tasman's Kerry Marshall - suggesting they were ready to take him up on his offer to put some spadework into figuring out what would be required if the city was to finally get a purpose-built performance centre.
That we can skip from early 1996 to late 2009 and find Dr Rhoades sitting in a city cafe still talking about the gap in the community infrastructure defies belief - to his mind, at least. "I'm just astounded it's taken so long . . . and I really can't understand why."
In mid-1998, a couple of years after he first scoped out his ideas, the Nelson and Tasman councils set up the Nelson Millennium Centre Trust to keep the project moving. Dr Rhoades was the logical choice for chairman, and was joined by a variety of other enthusiasts (accountant Bronwyn Monopoli, lawyer Brian Smythe, architect Maurice Tebbs, and musician and event organiser Pete Rainey, among others).
The trust's name was the clearest sign that the mayors had a vision of cutting the ribbon on a magnificent new building just in time for year 2000 celebrations. Today, after years of prevarication and procrastination, it might seem like an embarrassing reminder of wishful thinking, but Dr Rhoades' conviction remains undiminished, even if some of his optimism has been tested.
These days, Mrs Monopoli heads the trust. She recalls a meeting between trustees and the newly elected Tasman District Council a couple of years ago, when a new councillor was wanting to know what the trust had been up to for the previous 10 years. It was Mr Smythe who rose to the challenge, telling the councillor: "I think I'll describe it as a litany of lost opportunities."
Each of those opportunities comes with its own paper trail - a stack of feasibility studies, evaluation projects, reviews of feasibility studies, site assessments, economic impact reports and draft plans. As Mrs Monopoli puts it, there wouldn't be a large-scale site within central Nelson that has not been pored over, scrutinised and imagined as a possible location.
Dr Rhoades worked largely for love in producing the first pile of paperwork, coming up with the original feasibility study - which he says still contains all the answers to counter those who continue to question the need for a centre.
He maintains that his vision was "modest" rather than grandiose, although he was bold where he felt it was necessary - a 1420-seat auditorium with tiered seating; professional-standard backstage facilities, with a fly tower to accommodate equipment needed for lighting, scenery, props and the like; a second, much smaller theatre for rehearsals and small gatherings; and space for conferences capable of hosting up to 1000 people at a sit-down dinner. The cost was estimated at $20.4 million in 2001 money.
Dr Rhoades is also convinced that the public supports the project. What he and his fellow trustees perhaps didn't count on was a shifting and unpredictable political environment, starting at the end of 1998 when Mr Woollaston lost the Nelson mayoralty to Paul Matheson, while in Tasman, a bluff, straight-talking farmer, John Hurley, filled the vacancy left by Mr Marshall's retirement.
The trustees and subsequent consultants had firmly identified Millers Acre as the ideal site. Its central location, council ownership and various planning considerations made it perfect, but the new city council had other ideas. As Dr Rhoades recalls, shortly after the election "Paul Matheson said, 'Go away for a year or two while we worry about other things - we're interested in this, we know it's important, but come back' ".
The trustees remained active, and when they were summoned again to produce some plans, "[the council] told us quite bluntly that Millers Acre was not a site that was available".
Instead, the trust was "directed" to Wakatu Square - still under development at the time and surrounded by some prime retail development land.
This led to probably the unhappiest hours in the trust's life. While it dutifully reworked its plans and calculations to make a theatre and conference centre work on the square, the council was negotiating to sell a large chunk of it to another developer.
Asked why they didn't give up at that point and take up more rewarding pursuits, both Dr Rhoades' and Mrs Monopoli's reply is simple: "Because we believe in the project."
"I don't know that anyone's been against us, " Dr Rhoades says.
"We've had generally pretty good receptions from both councils when we've talked to them. I think people realise that we need this thing. It's really a case of, it's big and it's difficult and . . . to many people, it's outside the scale of projects they've previously been involved with."
How did they do it?
October 31, 2009
As Nelson embarks on the latest round of debate over plans for a performing arts theatre and conference centre, Geoff Collett looks at what other New Zealand towns and cities have achieved in recent years. --------------------
Eight years ago, I was on a mission - sent off on assignment by The Nelson Mail to far-off, balmy Napier. It seemed like a good idea at the time: to find out how a provincial city of a size and nature not terribly dissimilar to Nelson could spend millions of dollars on the sort of theatre and conference facilities that were being talked about for here.
If there were any lessons to be learned from what I discovered in Napier, in the 2000 words dutifully filed for the Mail in July, 2001, nobody seemed to have noticed.
Eight years on and Nelson is still thrashing around over the same issue it was confronted with then, when the Millennium Centre Trust was valiantly trying to convince the community that it was a time to be bold and invest to fill the gaping hole left by the fiery demise of the Majestic Theatre in 1996.
Still, there were a couple of points from the Napier mission that still strike as noteworthy.
The Hawke's Bay city had done an impressive job in ramming through millions of dollars worth of council spending on the facilities in question, despite an astonishingly nasty political atmosphere - far more vicious than anything witnessed here. The obvious conclusion was that all it needed was a mayor who was determined to the point of bloody-mindedness, had a steel-plated hide, an unashamed pump- priming approach to spending public money and the smarts to get the votes around the council table.
It also can't have hurt to have had the shell of the necessary facilities in place, even if they were run-down. Napier already had its theatre, an Art Deco beauty that had fallen on hard times, and a function venue/hall similarly in need of attention.
Bringing them up to the standard the Napier council wanted so it could claim to be a progressive and appealing city to live and visit cost a shade under $11 million in 1990s money and helped burden the city council with a layer of political brutality that lasted for years.
For old times' sake, I checked back this week on how things were going in Napier. According to the council's Tourism Services business, which manages the facilities, they attract reasonable business but require ongoing council support. The city council's most recent annual report (2007-08) showed the theatre was used 154 days that year and cost the council $454,000 to support; the conference centre (which can be used by community organisations for a discounted, non-commercial rate) was used for 252 days and cost the council $232,000.
Whatever Napier's experience, if you are looking for examples of other regional centres that have spent up to establish good-quality theatre and/or conference centres, you have a wide choice.
Rotorua, for example, which has not only developed a large convention centre incorporating its civic theatre, but has also built a massive events centre capable of hosting 2600 people at a sit-down banquet.
Or maybe Hastings, with its recently refurbished opera house-cum-conference centre, completed in 2007 for $12m.
Or possibly Blenheim, which has scored itself a modern convention centre in a novel council-community partnership, and is now planning a new civic theatre.
And most likely New Plymouth, which has spent more than a decade and tens of millions of dollars on an array of facilities and gained international recognition for its trouble, including a Livable Communities award for the best city of its population size in the world.
New Plymouth District Council chief executive Barbara McKerrow points out that her council had a couple of advantages when embarking on its spend-up. Its projects include a major redevelopment of its opera house, now known as TSB Showplace, for $6 million a decade ago and a $12.7m direct contribution to the ambitious combined museum, library and visitor centre, Puke Ariki (another $11m was raised through council partnerships).
"This local authority has been in the fortunate position over many, many councils of having invested effectively in its base infrastructure, and I think that's probably what gives us a bit of an edge at the moment, " Mrs McKerrow says.
And it sat on its shares in its electricity distribution company, Powerco, eventually selling up for about $260m, which was then invested with an independently managed but council-owned fund. The return from the fund is used to offset rates - to the tune of $21.5m this year alone (compared with a general rate take of $57.6m).
Even so, "our community doesn't necessarily understand sometimes how fortunate we are", Mrs McKerrow says. "No-one likes to pay rates, so we have the same debate about paying rates as any other community does."
The council there accepts that facilities such as theatres and the Puke Ariki centre will never be commercially self-sustaining; the public is up for an ongoing commitment. The council's policy is to fund the capital costs from debt, to spread the burden over successive generations of ratepayers. In the case of Puke Ariki, $3m of the capital raised was set aside for ongoing "refreshing" of the building.
The New Plymouth experience has been driven by a philosophy that there is more to investing in such facilities than hoping for a direct economic return. "One of the key statements we make about the strategic intent of the New Plymouth District Council for our community is that we'll offer an attractive living environment that compares favourably, nationally and internationally, " Mrs McKerrow says.
"Skilled people have choices about where they decide to shift with their families to live and work, and when you're in a provincial centre off the beaten track - and I guess Nelson is similar to New Plymouth, in that sense - you have to work quite hard to persuade people that it's a good place to come and live.
"The fact New Plymouth is enhancing its reputation as a reasonably vibrant place to live because of the events that are held here, and the access to art galleries and good museums and other community facilities - all of these things help turn around the attitude and the image."
Among New Zealand's provincial centres, Rotorua is a long way from Nelson, in all sorts of ways, but its experience is still notable if only for demonstrating the possibilities of thinking big. As probably the country's oldest and best-known tourist city, it has always attracted conference business; in the mid-1990s, it built a dedicated convention centre, which incorporated its old 700-seat civic theatre and could host up to 400 delegates. In recent years it struggled to cope with the demand for bigger gatherings, and decided to take the plunge into the big time of conference- hosting, building the Energy Events Centre.
Opened in February, 2007, this enormous venue provides for both stadium sports and big conventions, with capacity to host banquets for up to 2600 sit-down guests.
The general manager of Rotorua District Council's Events and Venues management business, Peter McLeod, says the 11,000-square-metre building incorporates the city's old sportsdrome and several purpose- designed features for conference hosting, and cost $28m (catering fitout costs were additional, paid for by the catering contractor).
The district council drove the project, but, as Mr McLeod puts it, "every now and then with these venues you need to get lucky". In this case, the Rotorua Energy Charitable Trust (established from the proceeds of the sale of the local energy company) agreed to make it a flagship project, paying about half the cost as "essentially a no-strings- attached philanthropic donation". The council put in $8m with $2m to be repaid from operating surpluses, and the final $6m came from community fundraising.
But was it worth it? "It's been unbelievably successful in terms of conferences, " Mr McLeod says. "The number of conferences we've attracted is about five times the original projections and the number of attendees is about 7 1/2 times."
It's been additional business, not at the expense of the smaller convention centre, and the Energy Events Centre largely pays its own way, though the council funds its depreciation.
Rotorua's established reputation in the convention market and its location close to major population centres mean it can compete in a corner of the market traditionally dominated by Auckland and Christchurch; that and the fact it has 13,000 tourist beds.
Hamilton is rebuilding its Claudelands events centre to include capacity for conferences of 1000-plus delegates and will be in direct competition with Rotorua, but Mr McLeod is confident his city can hold its own. He says that despite its size and cost, the centre did not generate significant controversy, and what opposition there was has evaporated since it opened. Perhaps that reflects the city's acceptance that tourism is its bread and butter.
"Everybody wheels out the line, 'build it and they will come', " Mr McLeod says. "You can never be that reckless in terms of committing capital expenditure. You need to back it with good business plans and good research and so on, but there is an element of truth in that. You do grow the market each time these new facilities are developed and we've been delighted by the success of it."
At the other end of the scale from Rotorua's big-thinking is Blenheim's rather more boutique approach, which is, according to Marlborough Mayor Alastair Sowman, a highly successful one.
About five years ago, the council piggy-backed on a plan by three of the town's clubs (the RSA, the Workingmen's Club and the Marlborough Club) to build a combined clubhouse on the banks of the Taylor River in Blenheim. The council saw an opportunity to include a convention centre in the new building; it took the downstairs space and, $3.9m of council money later, had a facility that can host conferences of up to 700 delegates, or 400 if they are dining.
"It's exceeded all expectations, " Mr Sowman says. "We did a budget, of course, and we're way ahead of that, and it's proving very good."
The council has contracted the running of the centre to hotel operator Scenic Circle, which was required to add 50 rooms to its Blenheim hotel as a condition of its contract, and there are no continuing costs the council has to cover. There are no plans to go bigger, either - medium-sized conferences are what Blenheim is suited to, Mr Sowman says.
The council has now turned its attention to plans for a new civic theatre, a $15m project to replace the 20-plus-year-old existing theatre, which was developed in an old supermarket building.
While the existing theatre has attracted a steady flow of visiting shows, including some that bypass Nelson, the mayor says it needs extensive work and at 400-plus seats is on the small side. Rather than spending millions there, the council and local theatre trust want a new and bigger venue.
Their site of choice is next door to the combined clubs and convention centre and Mr Sowman says it could have "huge benefits" for conference activity, as well as improving the theatre's appeal.
The site is proving contentious because of concerns about the loss of car parking spaces (and a council plan to build a new parking building nearby). But presuming the development goes ahead as planned, Mr Sowman is optimistic. A rebuilt theatre will need ongoing council funding - he says up to $200,000 a year - "but it's no different to councils running sports grounds and other things".
The key to Blenheim's progress has been a large block of land at the base of the Wither Hills that was bought by a former council years ago and has been gradually subdivided and sold off since. That met the $3.9m cost of the convention centre and Mr Sowman expects the council's $5m contribution to a new theatre will also be entirely from reserves.
"When you've only got a limited ratepayer base like we have - we only have about 23,000 ratepayers - this is a great boost."
One common theme through what all cities have achieved is the often highly charged political atmosphere that has developed around their projects. Back in New Plymouth, Mrs McKerrow says that at times her council simply had to tough it out, knowing the end result would be the right thing.
"You do need strong leaders on your council who will listen to all of the arguments but make a decision which they feel is the right decision.
"It is quite tough. Opponents of anything that a council is trying to achieve will always be very vocal, much more vocal usually than the supporters of the project, and it can seem to a councillor that the entire community is against them and it's much easier to step back and say, 'Let's not do this'.
"But if we'd done that in New Plymouth, we would not have most of the major cultural facilities we have here."
As Nelson embarks on the latest round of debate over plans for a performing arts theatre and conference centre, Geoff Collett looks at what other New Zealand towns and cities have achieved in recent years. --------------------
Eight years ago, I was on a mission - sent off on assignment by The Nelson Mail to far-off, balmy Napier. It seemed like a good idea at the time: to find out how a provincial city of a size and nature not terribly dissimilar to Nelson could spend millions of dollars on the sort of theatre and conference facilities that were being talked about for here.
If there were any lessons to be learned from what I discovered in Napier, in the 2000 words dutifully filed for the Mail in July, 2001, nobody seemed to have noticed.
Eight years on and Nelson is still thrashing around over the same issue it was confronted with then, when the Millennium Centre Trust was valiantly trying to convince the community that it was a time to be bold and invest to fill the gaping hole left by the fiery demise of the Majestic Theatre in 1996.
Still, there were a couple of points from the Napier mission that still strike as noteworthy.
The Hawke's Bay city had done an impressive job in ramming through millions of dollars worth of council spending on the facilities in question, despite an astonishingly nasty political atmosphere - far more vicious than anything witnessed here. The obvious conclusion was that all it needed was a mayor who was determined to the point of bloody-mindedness, had a steel-plated hide, an unashamed pump- priming approach to spending public money and the smarts to get the votes around the council table.
It also can't have hurt to have had the shell of the necessary facilities in place, even if they were run-down. Napier already had its theatre, an Art Deco beauty that had fallen on hard times, and a function venue/hall similarly in need of attention.
Bringing them up to the standard the Napier council wanted so it could claim to be a progressive and appealing city to live and visit cost a shade under $11 million in 1990s money and helped burden the city council with a layer of political brutality that lasted for years.
For old times' sake, I checked back this week on how things were going in Napier. According to the council's Tourism Services business, which manages the facilities, they attract reasonable business but require ongoing council support. The city council's most recent annual report (2007-08) showed the theatre was used 154 days that year and cost the council $454,000 to support; the conference centre (which can be used by community organisations for a discounted, non-commercial rate) was used for 252 days and cost the council $232,000.
Whatever Napier's experience, if you are looking for examples of other regional centres that have spent up to establish good-quality theatre and/or conference centres, you have a wide choice.
Rotorua, for example, which has not only developed a large convention centre incorporating its civic theatre, but has also built a massive events centre capable of hosting 2600 people at a sit-down banquet.
Or maybe Hastings, with its recently refurbished opera house-cum-conference centre, completed in 2007 for $12m.
Or possibly Blenheim, which has scored itself a modern convention centre in a novel council-community partnership, and is now planning a new civic theatre.
And most likely New Plymouth, which has spent more than a decade and tens of millions of dollars on an array of facilities and gained international recognition for its trouble, including a Livable Communities award for the best city of its population size in the world.
New Plymouth District Council chief executive Barbara McKerrow points out that her council had a couple of advantages when embarking on its spend-up. Its projects include a major redevelopment of its opera house, now known as TSB Showplace, for $6 million a decade ago and a $12.7m direct contribution to the ambitious combined museum, library and visitor centre, Puke Ariki (another $11m was raised through council partnerships).
"This local authority has been in the fortunate position over many, many councils of having invested effectively in its base infrastructure, and I think that's probably what gives us a bit of an edge at the moment, " Mrs McKerrow says.
And it sat on its shares in its electricity distribution company, Powerco, eventually selling up for about $260m, which was then invested with an independently managed but council-owned fund. The return from the fund is used to offset rates - to the tune of $21.5m this year alone (compared with a general rate take of $57.6m).
Even so, "our community doesn't necessarily understand sometimes how fortunate we are", Mrs McKerrow says. "No-one likes to pay rates, so we have the same debate about paying rates as any other community does."
The council there accepts that facilities such as theatres and the Puke Ariki centre will never be commercially self-sustaining; the public is up for an ongoing commitment. The council's policy is to fund the capital costs from debt, to spread the burden over successive generations of ratepayers. In the case of Puke Ariki, $3m of the capital raised was set aside for ongoing "refreshing" of the building.
The New Plymouth experience has been driven by a philosophy that there is more to investing in such facilities than hoping for a direct economic return. "One of the key statements we make about the strategic intent of the New Plymouth District Council for our community is that we'll offer an attractive living environment that compares favourably, nationally and internationally, " Mrs McKerrow says.
"Skilled people have choices about where they decide to shift with their families to live and work, and when you're in a provincial centre off the beaten track - and I guess Nelson is similar to New Plymouth, in that sense - you have to work quite hard to persuade people that it's a good place to come and live.
"The fact New Plymouth is enhancing its reputation as a reasonably vibrant place to live because of the events that are held here, and the access to art galleries and good museums and other community facilities - all of these things help turn around the attitude and the image."
Among New Zealand's provincial centres, Rotorua is a long way from Nelson, in all sorts of ways, but its experience is still notable if only for demonstrating the possibilities of thinking big. As probably the country's oldest and best-known tourist city, it has always attracted conference business; in the mid-1990s, it built a dedicated convention centre, which incorporated its old 700-seat civic theatre and could host up to 400 delegates. In recent years it struggled to cope with the demand for bigger gatherings, and decided to take the plunge into the big time of conference- hosting, building the Energy Events Centre.
Opened in February, 2007, this enormous venue provides for both stadium sports and big conventions, with capacity to host banquets for up to 2600 sit-down guests.
The general manager of Rotorua District Council's Events and Venues management business, Peter McLeod, says the 11,000-square-metre building incorporates the city's old sportsdrome and several purpose- designed features for conference hosting, and cost $28m (catering fitout costs were additional, paid for by the catering contractor).
The district council drove the project, but, as Mr McLeod puts it, "every now and then with these venues you need to get lucky". In this case, the Rotorua Energy Charitable Trust (established from the proceeds of the sale of the local energy company) agreed to make it a flagship project, paying about half the cost as "essentially a no-strings- attached philanthropic donation". The council put in $8m with $2m to be repaid from operating surpluses, and the final $6m came from community fundraising.
But was it worth it? "It's been unbelievably successful in terms of conferences, " Mr McLeod says. "The number of conferences we've attracted is about five times the original projections and the number of attendees is about 7 1/2 times."
It's been additional business, not at the expense of the smaller convention centre, and the Energy Events Centre largely pays its own way, though the council funds its depreciation.
Rotorua's established reputation in the convention market and its location close to major population centres mean it can compete in a corner of the market traditionally dominated by Auckland and Christchurch; that and the fact it has 13,000 tourist beds.
Hamilton is rebuilding its Claudelands events centre to include capacity for conferences of 1000-plus delegates and will be in direct competition with Rotorua, but Mr McLeod is confident his city can hold its own. He says that despite its size and cost, the centre did not generate significant controversy, and what opposition there was has evaporated since it opened. Perhaps that reflects the city's acceptance that tourism is its bread and butter.
"Everybody wheels out the line, 'build it and they will come', " Mr McLeod says. "You can never be that reckless in terms of committing capital expenditure. You need to back it with good business plans and good research and so on, but there is an element of truth in that. You do grow the market each time these new facilities are developed and we've been delighted by the success of it."
At the other end of the scale from Rotorua's big-thinking is Blenheim's rather more boutique approach, which is, according to Marlborough Mayor Alastair Sowman, a highly successful one.
About five years ago, the council piggy-backed on a plan by three of the town's clubs (the RSA, the Workingmen's Club and the Marlborough Club) to build a combined clubhouse on the banks of the Taylor River in Blenheim. The council saw an opportunity to include a convention centre in the new building; it took the downstairs space and, $3.9m of council money later, had a facility that can host conferences of up to 700 delegates, or 400 if they are dining.
"It's exceeded all expectations, " Mr Sowman says. "We did a budget, of course, and we're way ahead of that, and it's proving very good."
The council has contracted the running of the centre to hotel operator Scenic Circle, which was required to add 50 rooms to its Blenheim hotel as a condition of its contract, and there are no continuing costs the council has to cover. There are no plans to go bigger, either - medium-sized conferences are what Blenheim is suited to, Mr Sowman says.
The council has now turned its attention to plans for a new civic theatre, a $15m project to replace the 20-plus-year-old existing theatre, which was developed in an old supermarket building.
While the existing theatre has attracted a steady flow of visiting shows, including some that bypass Nelson, the mayor says it needs extensive work and at 400-plus seats is on the small side. Rather than spending millions there, the council and local theatre trust want a new and bigger venue.
Their site of choice is next door to the combined clubs and convention centre and Mr Sowman says it could have "huge benefits" for conference activity, as well as improving the theatre's appeal.
The site is proving contentious because of concerns about the loss of car parking spaces (and a council plan to build a new parking building nearby). But presuming the development goes ahead as planned, Mr Sowman is optimistic. A rebuilt theatre will need ongoing council funding - he says up to $200,000 a year - "but it's no different to councils running sports grounds and other things".
The key to Blenheim's progress has been a large block of land at the base of the Wither Hills that was bought by a former council years ago and has been gradually subdivided and sold off since. That met the $3.9m cost of the convention centre and Mr Sowman expects the council's $5m contribution to a new theatre will also be entirely from reserves.
"When you've only got a limited ratepayer base like we have - we only have about 23,000 ratepayers - this is a great boost."
One common theme through what all cities have achieved is the often highly charged political atmosphere that has developed around their projects. Back in New Plymouth, Mrs McKerrow says that at times her council simply had to tough it out, knowing the end result would be the right thing.
"You do need strong leaders on your council who will listen to all of the arguments but make a decision which they feel is the right decision.
"It is quite tough. Opponents of anything that a council is trying to achieve will always be very vocal, much more vocal usually than the supporters of the project, and it can seem to a councillor that the entire community is against them and it's much easier to step back and say, 'Let's not do this'.
"But if we'd done that in New Plymouth, we would not have most of the major cultural facilities we have here."
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