The (mostly) placid Puni
A modest creek with a rich history Invercargill sprang up around the Puni Creek. It’s coped with us pretty admirably, writes
What to say of a waterway so unprepossessing that even the name Otepuni Stream struck generations of Invercargill people as rather too grand? It’s just the Puni Creek, really, isn’t it?
But it looms large in the city’s civic history. Larger, still, in many people’s childhood memories.
Some dull historical types would tell you its most dramatic moments were in the floods of 1940 and 1984.
Or they might darkly refer to assaults and grim discoveries beside, and within, its waters, stretching back to Victorian times.
But many a citizen raised by its banks would quietly take the view that the Puni was never the source of more excitement than when they were playing there.
I was raised a block away from its passage through suburban Invercargill, in Islington St; not an adventurous child but still one who was not unaccustomed to dunkings.
Mind you, this was while attempting great feats of bicycle brinksmanship on the unprotected edges of the bridge by the St Mary’s tennis court. Unwise, given my skill set, but such was the potency of a D-Double-Dare.
Truth to tell, for a while there I was a troll under that narrow bridge.
With companions who had led me astray, we’d lurk in the banks beneath the span, shouting menacing threats to startle people, ideally cycling girls, as they were crossing.
It turned out that squeaky young voices trying to sound deep, and failing by who knows how many octaves, did manage to be a bit startling. We never quite caused a girl to fall off, but there was some cross language, which was nearly as good.
That the bridge had no sides which made it all the more acceptable for duck farts – the ploppy effect you get from sending a stone vertically down, ideally into deeper water than the puny Puni could muster, but we did our best.
Our badly-made model boats suffered titanic tragedies aplenty, some of them floating no better than, let’s say, a green beret, that might have flying saucered into the wet – for reasons that had nothing to do with us, in spite of what the St Caths nuns might have phoned up the Marist brothers to complain about.
Through some failure of imagination we never actually rafted; unlike the next-generation likes of Invercargill-raised Opshop singer-songwriter Jason Kerrison who with his mates made vessels that took them from way down near Ascot Park all the way through town. Mind you, they had access to polystyrene by then. Cheaters.
A lot of water has gone under those Puni bridges over the years. A lot of other stuff too.
Not all of it makes for warm reminiscences.
There were legends about horrible finds but, at our age, there were legends about all sorts of things that didn’t turn out true, so it was startling to come across a report in The Southland Times March 4, 1889: ‘‘Yesterday forenoon a boy was searching for birds’ nests along the bank of the old Puni creek . . . when he observed a bundle floating in the water. Natural curiosity prompted him to drag it out, then until a string and unwind a towel and piece of calico which formed the covering where there was disclosed the body of a child.’’
Victorian era, ladies and gentlemen. Seldom to be described as the good old days.
The Puni was central to Invercargill’s civic creation.
It was puddling its way to the estuary when surveyor John Turnbull Thomson showed up in 1856 ready to lay out a town that until then existed only on paper – and not any sort of detailed paper plan, either, more a declaration of Government intention.
The far south needed a decentsized town. The Governor Thomas Gore-Browne had determined this town would be named after Otago Superintendent Captain William Cargill and would be sited . . . well, details, details.
The job fell to Thomson, who chose a site by the Puni, near the whare where John Kelly had settled (about where Reading Cinemas is now).
Thomson’s earliest sketches featured just three streets and the Otepuni.
Among his first calls was that land on either side of the creek, from what would be Clyde St to what would be Elles Rd, should be designated for the town gardens.
When the town fathers properly
got around to planning the gardens, in 1872, they offered a mighty 20 pounds’ reward for the best design.
At the time there was some scepticism about the practicality of a garden because the Puni had been playing up and flooding.
‘‘I would ask,’’ one querulous correspondent to The Southland Times wrote, ‘‘how a generally sluggish and all but stagnant stream cutting through a small
piece of land can be particularly ornamental.’’
Well, it could.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the competition winner, James Morton, was a florist.
Borough gardener Thomas Waugh undertook the work. Tussocks were cleared, eucalypts, conifers pines and macrocarpa planted. A nursery garden, conservatory, and pond were installed. It was a big job and when he dropped dead in 1986 his obituary blamed overwork.
The gardens were, for a time, the main city park, featuring a nursery, display houses and aviaries.
But the Otepuni Gardens were deemed too small to suffice as the town’s main gardens, so attention turned instead to the far larger – and reliably drier – Queen’s Park.
The city grew up around it while the Puni just went with the flow.
Not a terribly vigorous flow, at times, though many enjoyed when it froze in 1927, proving a popular skating track for a few days.
The creek was occasionally incontinent after periods of heavy rain, and also came to flood dramatically. Valentine’s Day 1940 loomed large in people’s memory, destroying the gardens’ summer display. They blamed it on recent straightening work that sped up the flow from the higher reaches.
But more emphatic still was the city’s 1984 floods.
Though the overspilling Puni and businesses far less extravagantly than the Waihopai River further north, but still rampaging to an extent that effectively split the city in two.
As with many other southern waterways, it was deemed to require serious stop banking most of which, nowadays is quite pretty, lending charm to the Otepuni stream walkway which stretches through the city from Rockdale Rd to the Clyde St bridge. In so doing it passes through industrial, suburban and urban areas.
Nowadays the downtown part – the Otepuni Gardens – comprise nine hectares encompassing four city blocks, offering what the city’s promoters describe as ‘‘a peaceful sanctuary to city workers, shoppers and visitors’’.
And with the resurgent city block development underway a little to the north, and the recent K-Mart building to the south-west, the gardens now fit nicely into an agenda of civic upgrade.
Which is welcome, but is the Puni creek itself still a playground? Well, if we scornfully disregard the likes of the Nissan Sentra, Mazda 929 and Toyota Corolla that have one way or another found their way into its waters, there’s been the bankside entertainments of the Cherrystock rock concerts and Shakespeare in the Park.
As for more up-close-andpersonal engagements with its waters, it’s hard to go past the wa-hey cavortings of Southern Institute of Technology students during O Week.
It has to be said that the Puni has at times been a waterway into which you wouldn’t lightly foray. At its upstream levels, it has been bespoiled by home kill viscera, through its more industrial passageways it has endured oil and other chemical spills.
A writer in 2003 complained to the paper about the stretch between Nith and Conon streets: ‘‘full of weed, bottles, rags, paper, cardboard boxes, plastic containers, all floating merrily on their way, where they weren’t held up by all the ugly weed, growing profusely.’’
Certainly, aquatic weed has been problematic further upstream, though the detritus closer to downtown has been attributed, rather daintily, to ‘‘high usage’’ getting on top of regular litter removal.
It tidies up well enough but even during these exercises, it can retain a capacity to surprise. A 2008 cleanup from a group of Verdon College pupils revealed two plastic bags poking from under shrubs in a garden plot on its banks. Inside, two degrading boxes of live ammo – 389 rounds including 12-gauge shotgun ammunition, .22 calibre hollowpoint bullets and 230.06 calibre bullets.
Wildlife? Well, at times hundreds of eels have turned up dead in a stretch of the creek. It happened a couple of times in early 1999 and some sort of guilty seepages were suspected. Ducks, sure. In 2013, a group of cousins found themselves at the creek armed with a couple of slub guns and, ahem, a crossbow. One was prosecuted for shooting a duck. He assured the court he had never even heard that there was such a thing as a duck season; he’d just taken it into his head to go ‘‘hunting critters’’ to get something to eat.
Then there’s the baby seal that managed to appear at a Highfield Tce garage in 2004 about half a kilometre from the stream.
Invercargill writer-poet Lyle Dear wrote quite fondly of the Puni, even though in her youth some ‘‘hideous boy’’ – long before my time, you understand – threw her hat into its brackish dull drift. Don’t think of the Thames, don’t consider the Rhine Amazon’s out of its league Trace the source of the Nile, Think of Puni – and smile
For it’s only our local back creek
True, but deserving of respect. To invoke an old Americanism, it will continue to be a valued part of the city, ‘‘God willin’ and the creek don’t rise’’.