Hagley golf course should be improved to world standard
I would like to clarify a point to Hagley Golf Club members about comments I made in an article in October 2012 on Hagley Park and, specifically, the Hagley Park golf course that have been taken out of context.
I stand by my comments that the Hagley Park golf course is no more than a pitch and putt and poor use of space. If we are to have a golf course in Hagley Park, it should be redesigned as a ninehole parklands course to international standards that would then be very attractive to market to local, domestic and international visitors.
A redesigned nine-hole (fulllength) golf course could incorporate new native plantings and sustainable ecological areas, to integrate other recreational users such as runners, walkers and bikers. It would connect as an extension to the Christchurch Botanic Gardens.
All sports surfaces and facilities in Hagley Park managed or leased to sporting organisations by the Christchurch City Council are poorly resourced and lack a strategic plan that connects to the wider central-city plan blueprint.
I don’t necessarily want the golf course removed (as written in the article of Dec 20). However, we need a strategy to upgrade all sporting and recreation facilities in Hagley Park. IAN McKENDRY
Chairman Sportsturf Association of New Zealand
Lincoln
Review overdue
In the article, ‘‘Hackles up at Hagley’’ (Dec 20), Hagley Golf Club president Geoff Druery is quoted as saying proudly that the 119-year old club is not going anywhere.
Some might say that a review of the golf club’s right to remain in a public park, set aside for the benefit of all the citizens of Christchurch, is long overdue.
A public park should be a place where everyone can walk freely or sit safely. As it is at present, a large section of North Hagley Park has an invisible fence around it, which the public enters at its peril.
Can it be imagined that in Hyde or Central Park a private group would be permitted to project missiles in all directions into the air, subsidised by the very people who are denied access?
The playing of golf in a public reserve is a safety hazard, with the potential to endanger life. One death from being hit by a flying golf ball would be one too many.
Golf in North Hagley Park is totally inappropriate in the 21st century.
NEIL ROBERTS
Richmond
Cricket supports golf
You reported (Dec 20) that the Hagley Park golf course had ‘‘come under siege from critics in rival code cricket’’. This seemed to be an implied attempt to somehow justify our sports proposal to enhance Hagley Oval.
Iwould like to categorically state that Canterbury Cricket does not have and has not ever expressed this opinion.
In fact, there are many common factors between the Canterbury Cricket Association and the Hagley Park golf course.
We both provide recreation to thousands of Cantabrians – in cricket’s case more than 20,000 members (the most of any sport in Canterbury), we are both not-forprofit organisations, with any money made going back into our respective sport to put golf clubs or cricket bats in the hands of our members, and both golf and cricket have been played in Hagley Park for more than 100 years.
The cricket community as a whole is very supportive of golf and there is a strong relationship between our codes for the good of active participation and shared activity within Hagley Park.
LEE GERMON Chief Executive Canterbury Cricket
Riverside extravagance
One of the most hopeful themes to come out of the Christchurch City Council’s Share an Idea on the recovery was the desire to turn the abandoned red-zoned riverside in the east into a park.
What has yet more fetishising extravagance in the central business district to do with that?
For many years, I used the riverside from Madras St to the hospital as a pedestrian route, threading my way through the elegant bridges, the big trees and the grassy banks beside our little Avon. In the past decade, it was increasingly shallow, so that the slightly foolish punts grounded on the bottom and the ducks sometimes paddled.
What reference to that area the great, greasy stretches of water in Melbourne and Brisbane, whose riverside developments you tell us (Dec 21) are what Roger Sutton wants ours to be like?
Why is what Sutton wants of any interest or importance, unless he is a dictator?
LESLEY BEAVEN
Blenheim
Raw milk dangers
Like the Drummond family 70-plus years ago, I, too, drank raw milk straight from the cow.
This was great until we got a house cow with tuberculosis, which led to my father’s death after years of illness at just 50, with my sister, brother and me all getting TB.
I spent more than 12 months in bed, with, among other things, very painful injections four times a day of streptomycin. My left lung was artificially collapsed, followed by a weekly pump up of air under my diaphragm delivered through a needle about 3mm thick. These ‘‘refills’’ continued for four years after I came out of hospital.
Please don’t tell me that there are no cows in New Zealand with TB and modern treatment cures TB. It is the No 1 killer in the world today and one strain is resistant to all known antibiotics.
Please don’t drink raw milk, as nice as it tastes.
JOHN SMITH
Takaka, Golden Bay
Great honour
It may be that the Nobel Prize is not an appropriate one for the discovery of a mathematical solution to a not so long-standing problem in theoretical physics (Dec 26). However, the Einstein medal or, more importantly, the Fields medal is.
The latter is a much-revered award within the mathematical community and it is conceivable that its recipients would not trade theirs in for one of the Nobel variety.
Within the community of mathematicians, the kudos associated with the Fields medal is second to none. It could, for example, be given to the person who first comes up with a universally acceptable solution or proof to the long-standing fourcolour map problem.
Notwithstanding, the award of an Einstein medal in its field is thoroughly respectable, well earned and it should not be sneezed at.
JOHN D MAHONY
Mt Pleasant