Thursday 8th March 2007. Wellington. New Zealand.

Interesting New Zealand fact...Maybe its the Maori traditions that lead to New Zealand having the highest proportion of body art (tattoos) in the world.

A DAY OF BELLS AND SMELLS...

Breakfast this morning was at the Deluxe Cafe on Kent Terrace.

My first stop is the the stunning Catholic church of St Mary of the Angels which was named by Father J.J.P.O'Reily (the first resident Catholic priest of Wellington) following the Franciscan tradition of naming their foundation churches after the first church of St Francis in Assisi. This is a beautifully peaceful place set in the bustling heart of Wellington. Ornate yet understated the stained glass windows are simply breathtaking.

In 1873 a larger church was erected on this site but it was destroyed by fire in 1918. The existing Gothic reinforced concrete and steel structure is the work of Frederick de Jersey Clere and Llewellyn Williams and was completed in 1922. When the original builders went bankrupt during construction the work was finished by the priest and a group of unskilled labourers.

On now to Plimmer Steps where St John's in the City Presbyterian Church was first sited holding its first services in the original Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute building. The church worshiped here from November 1853 until August of 1856 when a church was built on Willis Street.

The New Zealand Institute of Surveyors also held their inaugural meeting at the Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute on September 4th 1888. The Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute opened its hall on this site in 1850 having held the first New Zealand secular adult education class in May 1842.

The steps are named after John Plimmer (to whom there is a beautiful statue walking his dog Fritz which stands in the middle of the sidewalk) arrived in Wellington on the Gertrude on October 31st 1841. During his long residence on the steps that bear his name he was active in the city's commercial and political life.

I had noted when I was investigating Plimmer Steps a hoodie and black leather jacket combo watching me. So clutching my bag tighter I set off along Lambton Quay and when he made his 'grab' I was ready for him. There was no way I was going to give up the man-bag easily (it was a gift from my dear friend Sandra Marsh and it is resplendent in its vibrant patriotic Aussie colours. The Bag is also now legendary to the Connections and Intrepid crews. Also I could not afford to lose yet another camera).

The Lambton Quarter has the most concentrated shopping in New Zealand.

Anyway, still with my man-bag (its only 9.40am...you don't expect to be robbed so early in the day) I head for the Cenotaph where a lonely US Stars and Stripes has been placed at the door. A reminder of the current sacrifices being made in Iraq in the cause of freedom or a lone anti-wart protest? It certainly makes you reflect on the words...
These laid the world away,
Poured out the sweet red wine of youth,
Gave up the years to be of work and joy
And that unhoped serene that men call age.

And those who would have been their sons they gave their immortality.


The Cenotaph was built in 1929 to house the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and it is Wellington's memorial to the fallen of both world wars.

The Boer War and the First World War were actually the first in the British Empire in which the death of common soldiers was commemorated, even celebrated. Before this soldiers were simply numbered losses - if they were that - they were the uncoffined mass. For this reason I have developed a life-long interest in war memorials, which are much more than commemorative trophies and actually very significant indicators of social history.

My next stop is Old St Paul's a fine example of 19th century Gothic Revival architecture that was adapted to colonial conditions and materials. The first Anglican Cathedral of Wellington is considered the finest work of the Reverend Frederick Thatcher.

Old St Paul's in the 1960's was to become the scene of one of New Zealand's greatest heritage battles. As the diocese tried to dismiss the church that had served them for almost 100 years strong protest grew capturing significant support. Eventually the government purchased the building in 1967 to preserve the site in the hands of New Zealand's Historic Places Trust.

The building is constructed entirely from native timbers. As the established church of the Empire this church is filled with memorial items and is a living monument to the history of Wellington. Intrinsically linked to the great and the good of historic Wellington the carved English oak pulpit commemorates Premier Richard John Seddon. The original stone font and the brass lectern in the form of an eagle with outstretched wings (the symbol of St John the Evangelist)are highlights of the church. The ensigns of the Royal Navy, the New Zealand Merchant Navy and the American Marine Corps (second division) who were stationed in Wellington during World War II stand testament to man's sacrifice.

It is striking as one travels the globe you uncover the litany of young lives lost to war. What strikes me more though is that for all those recorded there are numerous faceless souls who go unknown.

God preserve us from the idiocy of human greed.

Next stop is the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Hill Street, the only church in the North Island designed in the Roman Basilica style by Dunedin architect F. W. Petre. For me the building is almost Virginian in its design with an exterior and interior evocative of the presbyterian purity of the New World.

The first Catholic cathedral on this site St Mary's was begun in 1850 and completed in 1867. However that building was destroyed by fire in 1898. The statue of the Blessed Virgin - a gift from Wellington's first Bishop Philippe Viard - that stood in the tower of the old cathedral fell during the fire but suffered almost no damage. Many consider its preservation miraculous. Today the statue can be found in the cathedral's cloister courtyard.

The Sacred Heart Cathedral opened in 1901 and was one of the first Wellington buildings roofed with Marseille tiles (since removed). The Ionic columns of the west entrance are of Oamaru limestone from the South Island and the coffered ceiling (popular in the fashionable homes of the day) inside is made of pressed zinc imported from Wunderlich Ltd. of Sydney.

One thing I have enjoyed in all the churches I have visited in New Zealand is the strong Maori influence and the blending of Western and Maori iconography.

Now to the Katherine Mansfield birthplace. 25 (previously 11) Tinakori Road was the childhood home of New Zealand's most famous author and one of the world's greatest short story writers.

Katherine Mansfield, born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888, left Wellington for the final time at the age of 19 spending the remainder of her adult life in Europe. The house was built the year Kathleen was born for Henry Beauchamp, an aspiring young merchant who became a highly successful businessman and was later knighted for his services to commerce. For the first five years of Kathleen's life three generations of her family shared the property at the north end of Thorndon, the oldest suburb in Wellington.

Thorndon lies on a relatively flat area just north of where the original beach lay. The first European settlers moved here in 1840 after they were flooded in their original settlememt at Petone. The area was named after New Zealand Company director Lord Petre's home in England.


Katherine's memories of the house are depicted in the stories "A Birthday"; "The Aloe" and "Prelude".

This museum is run by a very well meaning, if slightly ditsy, group of ladies. As I enjoy the late 19th century garden which has been replanted with flowers and plants available in the Wellington of the late 1800's I watch one lady demolish some of the said garden (and the back of her car) with her somewhat ernest driving skills.

Exploring the house the first thing I note in the Drawing Room is the music atop the piano, Charity by one Stephen Glover.

My explorations of the property lead me to agree with Mansfield; this is a dark and crowded home...but it is of its time.

In the exhibition in the Main Bedroom upstairs the most exotic photograph of Mansfield is one from Rottingdean (in my beloved Brighton) where she has a wonderful North African look (trendy at the time with the exotic Bloomsbury Set of whom she was a friend). Indeed, there can be no denying that her work was influenced by, and her talents enhanced by, her association with innovative writers such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Elliot and D.H. Lawrence.

Less than 100 years on and I wonder if such writers would seem so exotic. Mass transit and mass communication bring the world into every sitting room even if the average Joe is to foolish to understand it. We are after all meant to have a greater understanding of each other and our multi-cultural world?

There can be no doubt that Mansfield was part of the new dawn in English literature along with T.S. Elliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was fortunate enough to associate with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world.

Yes, it is true she is a New Zealander; but she was educated at Queen's College, London. Yes, she was born and educated in New Zealand until age 14; yet the education that shapes your thinking (the secondary years) was undertaken in the Mother Country. Here she also gained her real world experience which must have coloured her writings about her childhood in New Zealand...its people, places and colloquial speech. After all, she went to Europe to experience "life" from a new country where she snobbishly considered few people literate.

That said she did recognise the importance of her New Zealand heritage. Writing to her father in 1922 she noted "the longer I live the more I turn to New Zealand. A young country is a real heritage though it takes one time to recognise it. But New Zealand is in my very bones."

Whatever her influences, her stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment; a crisis or turning point; rather than a sequence of events.

With plot being secondary to the mood and characters (who are revealed in flashbacks) her stories are innovative. Her stories feature simple things: a doll's house; a charwoman; her frequent use of imagery drawing on nature (flowers, wind and colours). She sets a scene with which the reader can easily identify and her themes are universal: human isolation; the questioning of the traditional roles of men and women; the conflict between love and disillusionment; idealism and reality; beauty and ugliness; joy and suffering and the inevitability of those paradoxes.

Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp - which hints at layers of meaning with suggestion and implication replacing direct detail.

Mansfield is an important character in English literature and her married life with the distinguished critic J. Middleton Murry was a colourful affair. However it is her skill as a writer that means she is studied across the globe by students today. In her brief lifetime her work in the field of the short story was influential. Her fame was established by Bliss (1920).

In dealing with human emotions portrayed in brief scenes from everyday life she is a master at describing the feelings and emotions of girls and one could argue unsurpassed as a writer even today. Mansfield rightly gained fame for her innovative narrative technique.

Mansfield died of tuberculosis in 1923 at Fontainbleau.

My lunch today was at The Backbencher. Straight across the road from parliament this institution is filled to bursting with New Zealand's political history told in cartoon and wax work form. This may be the house with no peers but it was filled to bursting with the lunchtime political crowd.

I must say the London Assembly has a huge number of overpaid and underworked wind bags for a city government, but New Zealand, with a population less than half that of London, is bureaucrat heaven!

Oh and the food...not great, but the service was excellent.

I went souvenir shopping at Wellington's premier store Kirkcaldie and Staines and it so reminded me of my London life and my dear Francesca; what with the doorman and the atmosphere of the store. This was reinforced when I was back on the street and confronted by a London Transport Routemaster claiming to be heading for Trafalgar Square.

Tonight I am off again to the theatre. This time the venue is the Downstage Theatre, the longest-running professional theatre in New Zealand. It was from this theatre that Circa split in the 1970's.

Flagons and Foxtrots is set on a Saturday night in mid-Sixties New Zealand when the only place to be was the local dance hall.

The plot is very thin and revolves around Sid Jenkins who has been running the dance hall for years - helped by the Scottish Aunty Ina. Ina is also the local switchboard operator. Archie Moore is like all young men of the time; dreaming of becoming a rock 'n' roll star. The problem is convincing Sid to let his band play. Into the mix is hormone-ravaged brother Pinkie, the rocky romance between Jack and Jill and Rita the sexy "other woman".

This is pure nostalgia, it was not theatre. It proved to be no better than a high school production. If this is the standard of acting one can expect from Downstage then it is no wonder that Circa split. Tonight's performance was the first time I remember when I seriously thought about leaving a play at the interval. Indeed, it was the first time I have been invited on stage and refused.

As a piece of theatre it was poor, but as a marketing exercise it excelled. Getting the audience to dance with the cast on stage to all the classics as if at a family wedding meant that everyone left feeling good and forgetting how thin the plot was and how amateur the acting.

At least the building was interesting. The Hannah Playhouse is the home of Wellington's first professional theatre company and it was built in 1974 (in the style of St Peter's Dumbarton) on a site where the company first performed in a cafe in 1964.

If this work had been presented to me as an assignment I would have noted that the idea was there but there was no development of the concept. The writers Alison Quigan and Ross Grumbley had the opportunity to tell a story about life in the dance halls of New Zealand in the 50s and 60s. This was after all the birth of the teenager, the time when every garage across the Western world held the dreams of the original boy bands. When the young of rural areas would travel miles to attend The Dance with the hope of meeting Mr or Miss Right. It was a time when the stars of tomorrow could be heard palying gigs in dead-end venues across their native countries.

For New Zealand all this was to change with liberalisation of the drinking laws and a move to 10 o'clock closing. Bands moved on to pubs and people stopped dancing...leading to the late night drinking culture we have today where people too often dance alone.

This play could have been a true social study that made the audience envious of simplier times
when human beings were actually in contact with each other. Sadly the opportunity was lost.

I dined tonight at the Shish Mahal where I was seated next to a table of arrogant businessman...the loudest of whom was the Scottish fool who seems to think we all need to hear his conversation.

Point to note for the North Island Intrepid Crew...its seems every Indian restaurant in Wellington takes hours to serve the food!!