1: Reflections on the 2010 Christchurch Experience

by Kennedy Graham

I am sitting in the House and it is Question Time, Thursday.  I should be concentrating on each of the 12 questions, earnestly posed and deftly responded to.  But I cannot easily do this.  The mind remains frozen, my emotions arrested, on yesterday. 

Yesterday I was in Christchurch and its surroundings, having flown back urgently the night before.  I cannot leave the experience behind.  The sheer human drama that is Christchurch right now overwhelms everything else, including the positive efforts in the Parliament to make things better.  So I shall lend one-quarter of an ear to the questions, trusting I am doing sufficient justice to democracy today.

In Christchurch on Wednesday, accompanied by a  colleague Bruce Tulloch, I visited various critical places.  We go first to civil defence HQ.  I meet Mayor Bob Parker and stress the need for sustainable techniques in the re-building programme.  He concurs.  He says it was already in his mind.  I say I believe him.  We visit welfare centres in Addington and in Kaiapoi. 

The searing memory of the day occurs near the end.  I am driving home from the city centre, up Montreal St. in the fading light.  A building is being demolished, the debris catching the setting sun as it falls.  It looks surreal in pink.  I stop the car and walk into Victoria St, which the condemned building fronts onto.  It is a beautiful old building, or was, with a Victorian façade.  It is very familiar to me, or was – directly across the road from an office I often frequent.  But, not long for this world, now.

The demolition team is there in force.  And a small group of people.  I stand next to one woman.  She looks dazed – next to me, but somewhere else.  I ask her, gently, precisely what is going on – apart from the obvious.  She responds calmly.  She lives up there, she says.  On the 2^nd and 3^rd floors.  For 21 years.  She and her husband took off straight after the 7.1, and he refused to re-enter.  They have been living with friends.  But then the demolition order came.  She had no choice.  She resolved, therefore, to re-enter, to collect personal belongings.  They give her an hour.  Then they tell her to vacate the building.  It has to come down, now, they say.  She leaves the building.  With most of her belongings still there.  She looks on, now, silently. I look at the building.  The façade is about to be knocked by the crane, first time.  I do not wish to see more.  I leave. She stays.

I walk around back onto Montreal St. again, to the back of the building.  There is no back wall – three stories high.  It has completely sheared away.  Bricks – not stone.  You look into the building, like an x-ray.  The building stands there, naked in its final moments.  It is almost embarrassing.  Up on the 3^rd floor, is the television set, and the stereo.  On the cabinet, x-rayed from behind.  The building gives a shudder, and the furniture shudders too.  More is to come.  I walk away.  I have had enough. The light is fading fast.

I have seen this kind of raw trauma only once before.  That was in East Jerusalem, back in 1999.  The IDF had just demolished a Palestinian’s house.  The father was in an Israeli prison.  The young mother, babe in arms, stood separately, apart from the larger throng, they who were shouting and gesticulating in anger.  She stood there, the Palestinian, silently, mind and emotions elsewhere.  The reason for the demolition in Christchurch is safety rather than collective punishment.  But the emotions are the same.  Eleven years later, on the other side of the planet, I see the same face – almost the same woman.  In my home town.