Building a future:
Making New Zealand returns to Prime for a second season this week with a look at the housing crisis – the 1930s one that is. Peter Eley reports.
How New Zealand was made.
The idea that a housing crisis is a recent problem is dispelled this week in the Prime documentary series Making New Zealand, which opens its second season with an episode titled Construction.
It chronicles how in the mid-1930s much of the country’s housing stock was badly run down. World War I and the Great Depression had led to a stall in construction and there was a chronic housing shortage as everyday life for ordinary people slowly began to recover.
A Churchillian-like voiceover of blurry black-and-white news footage shot at the time in Wellington’s Aro Valley says, “National prosperity isn’t measured in exports and show and false fronts. It’s in how people live and how much sun they get, where the kids grow up and how sanitation works.”
The country’s Labour government headed by Michael Joseph Savage acknowledged the problem and over the next few decades more than 100,000 state houses were built, creating new suburbs in cities and towns all over the country.
This first episode of Making New Zealand is a fascinating documentation of the part building has played in the nation’s evolution.
From the surprisingly robust and weatherproof raupo houses of pre-European M ori to the towering buildings that dominate the Auckland skyline, those who could build have shaped the framework of our history.
Director Kathleen Mantel says she didn’t want to make, “A history of nuts-and-bolts construction ... It is to me about the social side of the construction of New Zealand.”
The first episode illustrates how intertwined the past and present
are, she says. For example, the seeds of Christchurch’s devastation by the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 were sown much earlier.
Original plans for the city’s cathedral were for it be made of wood, but citizens wanted a stone building which reflected similar structures in England.
The Europeans who arrived early on knew about the country’s earthquakes, but they didn’t heed the danger and buildings weren’t reinforced until quite late in the piece, she says.
“We could have learned as we went along, but sometimes we didn’t,” says Mantel.
One building that suited the country’s climate and geology was the raupo hut used by M ori.
It was weatherproof, warm and easy to build, and it was copied by early settlers.
But M ori didn’t cook inside their huts. Kitchen fires (after childbirth complications) were the leading killer of European women in early colonial times.
While Dunedin had been at the forefront of the fledgling nation, Auckland was coming into its own as the country’s major city by the 1920s. And in 1929, construction began on a building – the Civic Theatre or, as it was known then, the Civic Atmospheric Theatre – that would reflect the rapidly expanding city’s new-found status.
It was the brainchild of movie house magnate Thomas O’Brien. He had borrowed heavily to fund it, so wanted it built quickly to keep costs down.
Bricklayers had to lay 3000 bricks a day, or be fired, and there were queues of apprentices in Queen Street waiting to take the places of those who had been sacked.
Some 500 tonnes of plaster were crafted into the Civic’s exotic mouldings by 100 skilled plasterers.
Such skills have been lost, says Mantel. “It’s like watch-making. People just aren’t learning those things any more.”
Construction is the first of four episodes. The others look at aviation, forestry and mining.
“We could have learned as we went along, but sometimes we didn’t.”
– Director Kathleen Mantel