Symbol Of A City: As the Cathedral fares, so fares Christchurch itself.
IF QUEEN ELIZABETH, inspired by her financial advisers,
decided to demolish St Paul’s Cathedral, England would be horrified. No one
would care that, as Head of the Anglican Church and Tenant-in-Chief of all
England, such ecclesiastical property was hers to use as she pleased. St Paul’s
Cathedral, they would say, does not belong to the House of Windsor, it belongs
to the people of England. Some would go further, insisting that such a
beautiful artefact of the past belongs to all humanity.
And if the Queen persisted? If the protests of her subjects
(not to mention those of her eldest son!) and appeals from lovers of
neo-classical architecture all around the world were insufficient to make the
Queen abandon her plans? Well then, I suspect the British Parliament would
intervene on their behalf. If St Paul’s could defy Hitler’s bombers, I’m pretty
sure it could defy Her Majesty.
There are some buildings whose power and dignity simply
scorn the ravages of man and nature. Which is why, even if Hitler’s bombers had
found their target, and the mighty dome of Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece
no longer towered over the streets of England’s capital, I strongly suspect
that Londoners, like the citizens of Dresden, would have rebuilt their beloved
cathedral stone by stone – no matter how long it took, no matter how much it
cost.
What does that say about us? Why aren’t more New Zealanders
willing to join with the 5,000 Cantabrians who marched on Saturday to save
Christchurch Cathedral from the wrecker’s ball? Why isn’t the Opposition
calling for the Government step in and “nationalise” this New Zealand icon?
What is wrong with Prime Minister Key and his cabinet that they have not
already – unbidden – promised Christchurch, and the country, that no matter how
long it takes, no matter how much it costs, their beloved cathedral will be
rebuilt?
Is it simply because the men who somehow ended up in charge
of rebuilding Christchurch have turned out to be too oafishly “pragmatic” to
even consider the restoration of the city’s historic precincts? Is it because
they share Henry Ford’s conviction that “history is bunk”? Believing that no right-thinking person could, for a
single second, entertain the expensive fiction that the preservation of a
precious civic icon – like the cathedral – was anybody’s business but it’s
owners?
Or, should we look elsewhere for answers? Does the fault lie
not in our political stars – but in ourselves?
The men and women who, in the second half of the Nineteenth
Century, erected New Zealand’s greatest buildings, were persons of
extraordinary confidence and vision. They were part of what New Zealand
historian, Professor James Belich, calls “the settler revolution and the rise
of the Anglo-World”. In just a few decades, from Chicago, Illinois to
Melbourne, Victoria, their cultural and commercial certainty had summoned forth
huge cities, replete with stunning architectural tributes to all the ages of
Western Civilisation – from the Roman Republic to Byzantium; from Gothic spires
to Baroque rotundas. Citizens who walked on streets that were barely as old as
they were, looked up at buildings that might have stood for centuries. These
towering manifestoes in stone declared proudly to posterity that their makers,
the children of empire, had come to stay.
Is that what now eats away at the decision-making of the New
Zealand Anglican Church? In its new, bi-cultural, guise does it recoil in
dismay from the thought of pouring both its reputation and its treasure into
such an unequivocally imperial statement? Is that why the cathedral’s temporary
replacement (cardboard being a so much humbler building material than stone)
looks so much like a wharenui? Is the
Bishop, mindful of her own homeland’s problematic relationship with the
indigenous, unwilling to rush back in where white marble angels were once so
unafraid to tread?
This discomfort with history is not, I suspect, limited to
the Anglican Church. The spirit of globalisation also has scant patience with
the past. Reading the historical record as an unending sequence of economic
errors, it will as easily press “Delete” on imperial preferences, protectionist
tariffs and five-year plans, as the architectural follies in which they were
conceived. Glass and steel, not slate and stone, are the signature materials of
neoliberalism’s brave new world. If the past features at all, it is only as pastiche.
On that terrible February day, when I switched on the
television to scenes of blood and horror, it was the sight of the ruined
cathedral that unlocked my emotional floodgates. There, in a heap of rubble,
lay the symbol of the city.
The decision not to rebuild Christchurch’s iconic cathedral
makes a profound statement about the entire city’s future. Those shattered
stones are more than fallen masonry, they represent everything else that the
earthquakes destroyed.
As the Cathedral fares, so fares Christchurch itself.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday 29 May 2012.
