Why scarfies name their flats
Dunedin’s named flats are not just funny, they are culturally significant. By Sarah Gallagher.
As a student in Dunedin,
I lived in named flats, but honestly, at the time, I didn’t think about why they had names. I was new to town, I’d never seen anything like it before and simply accepted it as a Dunedin thing.
The naming process was something to do as a flat while you were getting to know each other. I had no idea at the time that by hanging out a sign, my flatmates and I were joining a subculture that had been in existence for several decades, for generations, and that would continue for decades to come.
By 2000, I’d spent nine years at the University of Otago, either as a student or a member of staff, and saw named flats every day on my walk to campus. These flats became such a part of my visual landscape that I stopped noticing them.
I certainly didn’t recognise them for what they represented, but some – like Eltsac Castle – did make me pause for thought.
It was while I was working in the Law Library at varsity and studying towards a Master of Library & Information Studies (MLIS) through Victoria University of Wellington that I had an epiphany.
At the time, I was immersed in the Print Culture in New Zealand paper led by Dr Sydney Shep, and working on a group project to create a pitch for an exhibition that would present something about ephemera and thereby introduce the concept of print culture to the wider public.
We were hunting for ideas when it struck me that I walked through an ephemeral print-culture phenomenon every day! It was there all around me, a weird and wonderfully handcrafted edgy form of bogan art.
Ephemera is the stuff we usually throw out – fliers, advertising leaflets, pamphlets, posters, gig tickets, receipts, packaging… It’s something that fulfils a specific purpose for a specific period of time. Through it we can discover what was useful or popular, and what was important or of interest to people, it’s ‘‘a fragment of social history, a reflection of the spirit of its time’’.
I recognised that the practice of naming a flat, often with random fragments of recycled materials, and hanging out a sign was an example of ephemera. These signs seemed to reflect the culture of students, the things that were important, interesting or amusing to them, back at the community.
I figured it all had to mean something. A drive-by of the flats was undertaken with the help of Steve, my (then) boyfriend (now husband), and a dear friend (also named Sarah) in her black van called Stealth.
We followed a route I’d mapped out on a hardcopy campus map, one of those you’d pick up from the desk at the University Library. Sarah drove Stealth, Steve took notes and I rolled in and out of the van, shooting flats with my Pentax ME Super on 35mm film as we crawled through the student ghetto.
We did receive a few sideways glances. I was amazed at how pervasive the naming phenomenon was and photographed nearly 50 flats that summer.
Once I’d realised the extent of the practice, I kept an eye out over the next two years, snapping new names as they emerged, and mourning the demise of favourites that were displaced by incoming tenants or unsympathetic landlords, or destroyed by climatic conditions.
As ephemeral items, these signs were a window into student life and, on analysis, I could see reflected glimpses of our society through trends in building quality, music, literature, design and attitudes – fugitive pieces of our culture seen through youthful eyes.
They were, and in the most part continue to be, clever and funny, layered with multiple meanings and displaying a palpable esprit de corps – the same spirit Sam Elworthy mentions in his examination of Otago student culture in his book, Ritual
Song of Defiance. My mission became to preserve them.
Returning to New Zealand in 2005 after a few years overseas, I kept up the practice and later was able to start sharing my trove of forgotten flat names with the wider world. Part of the original project had involved creating a database that the public could interact with to include their own photos and memories.
The idea was to connect with people who had experiences with named flats – at the time this was easier said than done. It seems funny now to read the email sent to my colleagues in 2000 when we were knocking around the idea of an online database: ‘‘The web immediately sprang to mind, I guess because it’s a fun media to work with, but for the public, it’s not that accessible and they’re really our audience.’’
It’s hard to believe, but at the start of the 21st century, the New Zealand public didn’t have easy access to the internet. It was slow and cumbersome and, outside of discussion forums, it was generally read-only.
A mere seven years later, I was using a digital camera, Flickr and Facebook, which provided places for achieving the ends projected in the original exhibition pitch.
Without the aid of these technologies, which have enabled previous flatdwellers to make contact and share their stories, none of this would have been possible. Sharing these images made an impression. Facebook became integral to the collection becoming a community, as well as to find and verify information. People started commenting and they had stories to tell!
This created a seismic shift from merely photographing and recording dates, flat names and addresses, to discovering the story behind the name and the motivation for this uniquely Dunedin practice. The
Dunedin Flat Names Project was created as a consequence of the affordance of technologies to reveal, collect, collate, curate and disseminate information about these named flats.
North Dunedin is a village. It’s one of the largest rental areas in the country and has the highest population of Victorian houses in New Zealand – houses full of character that lend the imagination to creative naming opportunities. It’s an area in which many people know each other and identify themselves as a community. The majority of people flatting are from outside Dunedin and it’s tight, as most immigrant communities are.
Typically, first and second years live close to campus while senior students move further out (unless they are on Hyde St). Those who live within four blocks of campus tend to walk there, and it is within this area that flat names are largely found. Students from over the decades consistently comment that having a flat name is easier than remembering house numbers!
All of this raises the question, why? Why do students name their flats?
As social animals, humans have a deep need to belong, to identify with those around us, and to create environments that meet these needs. Creating a sign is a simple and effective way of making their mark, asserting their identity on what may be their first home-away-from-home.
With a sign, they can identifying themselves within the student community and become findable and knowable. The signs come and go, sometimes they move houses, or the name and their meanings can morph over time, but one thing hasn’t changed over the decades: named flats are ever-present in Dunedin.
They largely follow the season of the academic year, but there are some that have taken root and have become embedded in the visual landscape. In her thesis Authentic
Scarfie Flats, Amy Spurdle investigated the opinions of students about the importance of their character housing. Many of these houses also had names.
‘‘For the university student community, character flats are more than homes, they are a representation of a valued time in people’s lives, of stories, memories, traditions and experiences associated with their student life. Each flat has its own legends or tales that form a collective value, sense of place that creates a distinct and special atmosphere, felt both by past and current students.’’
It may also be that the liminality of adolescence has something to do with why students name their flats; a compulsion to stake a claim, to forge an identity in a new place at a new time in their lives.
When asked about the name of his flat on Howe St, Steve Thompson said: ‘‘We at the Howes of God often feel as though we are living like gods but, in reality, we live in pretty much a s...hole. We feel as though the rights and freedoms awarded to us since leaving home give us a kind of godlike status.
‘‘In hindsight, it is evident we are only appreciative of the relative freedoms compared to the restricted nature of childhood. The name and flat may represent the freedom that is sought by us and potentially many generations of students that have come to Dunedin before us.’’
As a young Pa¯ keha woman in the late 1980s and 1990s, I didn’t have many cultural touchstones that I could connect with as a New Zealander. I don’t have a whakapapa to draw on.
I’m a fifth-generation Kiwi, my people are from Canterbury, the West Coast and Southland by way of Scotland, Northern Ireland and England. So, I bloom where I’m planted and create a home around me and create family of my friends.
Having lived the experience of moving to Dunedin as a young person and residing in a named flat, and then naming flats myself, I have some insight into the practice and I feel very connected to this place.
You’d be surprised how long flat-naming has been going on. As I researched and collected over the years, I discovered there was a long history of student flat-naming in Dunedin.
The Bach, the earliest name uncovered, dates from the 1930s. There was The Chookery in the 1940s, and The Shambles and The Jam Factory were popular party flats in the 1950s; Smersh HQ, House at Pooh Corner, Toad Hall and Ipanema in the 1960s; Department of Slavonic Studies, Nightmare Abbey, Ratvia, Gilgamesh, Hobbit and Footrot Flats in the 1970s; Toad Works, Greenwich Villa, Off Hand Manor, The Herm and the Dirty Half-Dozen from the dirty old 80s.
The 1990s gave us flats with names like Erebus, DSIR, Cargill Street Commune, The Lodge, The Cock and Swallow, Libido’s Bar and Grill, and Scoring Ryan’s Privates.
The practice continues in the new century with Lavender Cottage, The Drunken Clam, Frottage Cottage, Loch Ness, and The Chamber of Secrets; and, into this decade, The Shrieking Shack, The Burrow, Bag End, The Wardrobe, and The Libra Flat… there’s more than 600 of them!
A sense of tradition around the practice of naming flats has developed in Dunedin, and with that, a sense of belonging to a time and a place. But it’s also about being part of a bigger story – part legend, part fantasy, sometimes cold, sometimes drunk, not always making the best decisions, but mindexpanding, challenging your values, your preconceptions and attitudes… shaping you into the person you are becoming.
Living back in Dunedin and observing the changes in housing stock, university culture and the rhythm of life on campus, it seems more important than ever to preserve this small but telling aspect of student culture.
It’s easy to miss the flats as you drive by them on the street, and it’s easy to stop seeing them once you know they are there. The naming and claiming of flats by Dunedin’s students speak to their importance as buildings and homes, to the influence of these places in our lives, the connections we make with people through them, and the identity we create from the experience.
As the 1986 Otago University Students’ Association President Peter Reidie said: ‘‘These are our homes.’’
Keep an eye out for them.