Mural reflects military history
One woman’s bid to beat taggers at their own game has spawned further efforts to revive Godley Head’s military history with art.
New Brighton artist Bridget Allen first tried to tackle the ‘‘mindless tagging’’ of an old guard house on Christchurch’s Summit Rd by covering it in woodblock prints, her primary medium, in 2016. When they didn’t hold up to the weather, she started planning a mural.
‘‘I just asked council if I could do something over the tagging and they said: yes, as long as it references the history of the place,’’ Allen said.
The painting is based on a historic photograph, provided by the Godley Head Heritage Trust, of a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps peering down the telescope of a depression position finder, a machine that calculated where gun shells should land. The information was then transmitted to the guns’ operators.
The photo dates back to the early 1940s when Godley Head transformed from ‘‘open country and a lighthouse’’ to a World War II coastal defence base occupied by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people, trust chair Peter Wilkins said.
A former military man and historian, he had been disappointed to see the gun emplacements and soldiers’ quarters become targets of vandalism in recent years.
He believed good graffiti art would be respected by taggers and left alone.
‘‘We hoped, rather than get heavy-handed, to adapt to it. We have to move with the time, which is quite hard when you’re as old as I am,’’ the 75-year-old said.
‘‘[Allen] is going to make an effort to show people what it can look like, what it represents, and a damn good example for future dev- elopments,’’ Wilkins said.
Allen hoped to ‘‘build people’s stories of the area’’ from February, when she would establish a printmaking space in the Sergeants Nest, a former dining hall, and the Godley Head Heritage Trust was now turning the defence battery’s radar room into a small museum.
Wilkins said the art was ‘‘a link between reality and imagination’’ and although the Summit Rd work might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it helped keep history alive.
‘‘We want to get people to understand that their grandparents and great-grandparents survived there in a very worrying
Peter Wilkins Godley Head Heritage Trust chair
era,’’ Wilkins said.
‘‘If you can tell people that, the implications and the intentions, then even the most cellphonetapping youth might get a link with that area.’’