Joining forces to save our heritage

In a first, I emailed the Pope the other day. It bounced back at me, mail undelivered. After a little exploration I discovered the Pontiff’s email address was discontinued in 2014. I surmised that a leader with a name borrowed from St Francis probably jammed the system with a flood of requests all pleading for prayers to be said on their behalf. A line from Dostoevsky immediately came to mind about human tears, ‘‘which the earth is saturated from its crust to its centre’’.

I was writing to the Pope about a distressing matter related to our local diocese, one that has engendered tears and sorrow among many in this city. I was following in the footsteps of Adrienne Livingston, daughter of the late Lois Livingstone who had fought the good fight against the proposed demolition of Euphrasie House, the beautiful old Catholic Church Convent on Clyde Street. Adrienne has bravely picked up where her mother tragically left off. She has written to the Pope, via a postal address, alerting him to what is afoot here in Hamilton with regard to this very rare historic piece of architecture.

The Catholic dioceses, against the wishes of many in the town, want this heritage building brought down.

In the Vatican City, things from the past get preserved. That is why tourists and pilgrims flock to the place to see the beauty of old buildings, to soak up the atmosphere of art and architecture, to feel the weight and presence of the past press in on them and provide a sense of spiritual sustenance.

Here in New Zealand, in a young, brash and blokey nation, we lack the capacity for gravitas. We are more mercantile. We have a used-by-date mentality that is almost adolescent, living for the moment, unable to comprehend the larger picture of things that accumulate around buildings that afford continuity and history.

The Kiwi way is to instinctively knock things down, replace it with something new and then repeat the process further down the track. There is a restless itch to us, born out of the fact that we are only a few decades out from the pioneer generation who got lots of practice at knocking things down – the bush essentially. So it’s in the blood, this propensity to take a hammer or axe to things.

But that kind of conduct has long outlived its usefulness. Indeed it has become a liability at many levels.

First, it is not good stewardship on a planet with finite resources. Constantly knocking buildings down and replacing them fills up endless skips which in turn clogs up endless landfills with mountains of rubbish. The world is fast running out of space and places to dump all this stuff.

Second, it destroys beauty and the embodiment of memory which does damage to the spiritual wellbeing of people and a community. It is like performing a lobotomy on the body politic.

Many will have experienced that sad encounter of returning to the place of one’s birth, only to find the house once lived in gone and replaced with something else. That gutted feeling is associated with the erasure of something fundamentally precious, akin to the loss or destruction of old photographic albums.

Practise this sort of erasure often enough to a community and you do damage to the soul of a people. All sorts of reverberations are set in motion which in the end gives a place a bad name. It lends a feel of ephemerality and transience to a city. Hamilton has experienced enough of this already to make it known as a transit town. It lacks definition and struggles with a sense of identity because nothing lasts long enough for character to take hold with constant demolitions.

As a young lad I remember walking along Grey St opposite the old Catholic Church and stopping to watch an artist paint a picture of it, his easel set up on the pavement. The painting was nearly complete and I noticed the artist had forgotten to include a small detail, which I pointed out. The old church is long gone. So is the Presbytery which I helped my brother work on, fixing the roof some years back. So might the beautiful convent soon if things turn out badly. The only thing left is the old chapel. One out of four is not a good average for a church struggling with a damaged reputation which the present Pope is wrestling to restore.

By now he will have received Adrienne’s letter and there will be tears from a man (his first language Spanish), who will find direct affinity with a structure built in the Spanish Mission style of the late 19th century.

As we approach D-day for the building, concerned politicians, who also feel too much of New Zealand’s heritage has already been destroyed, are raising their voices along with benefactors in the city who too want to see the building preserved.

The values of a throwaway society need to be reversed and the preservation of our taonga secured for future generations before all is lost.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR