From todays Christchurch Press
A sense of closure The Press | Saturday, 02 August 2008
David Hallett
Wigram Airbase is to become Wigram Village. Families, not fighter planes, will call it home and memories of its military past will fade. PHILIP MATTHEWS explores what's been and what's to come.
The British science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard once wondered why he kept coming back to the same haunting landscape. Drained swimming pools. Abandoned buildings. Empty highways. Digging deeper into his memory, he realised that this was the landscape of his remote childhood the landscape of pre-war Shanghai after the Japanese invaded.
The lost landscapes of my childhood are New Zealand's Air Force bases, built in the 1930s and '40s. The massive clay-brown hangars and glassed-in control towers. The Art Deco elegance of the officers' mess. Long concrete runways stretching across the grass. A big sky and a strange kind of silence.
If you weren't in the Air Force, your map of New Zealand might go: Auckland, Rotorua, Wellington, Picton, Christchurch, Queenstown. If you were in the Air Force, or your dad was, you developed another New Zealand itinerary: Hobsonville, Whenuapai, Ohakea, Woodbourne, Wigram.
It's not an entirely lost landscape, but it's fading fast. Hobsonville is making way for houses and boat-building. Whenuapai is expected to go by 2015 at the latest. The long-term goal is to concentrate the force in Ohakea and Woodbourne.
And Wigram? That was the first base to open and, in 1995, the first major one to close. It's been a slow demise. You could have fought World War 2 nearly three times over in the space between the tough 1991 budget that sealed Wigram's fate and the announcement last month that all flying will cease at the base from September.
My dad had two tours at Wigram in the 1970s. During one he trained as a navigator and during the second, he was training others. I'm pretty sure he also navigated search-and-rescue missions on Orions, looking for lost yachties in the dead of night. But when I think about my dad and the Air Force, it's the time between those Wigram tours that comes back when he flew on Hercules out of Whenuapai for 40 Squadron. He would be away at least two-thirds of the year and I can't ask him anymore exactly where he went, but within Geoffrey Bentley and Maurice Conly's book, Portrait of an Air Force, there is some detail about the squadron's movements in December 1973:
"In December alone the squadron flew nine return flights to Antarctica, made an historic flight to the USSR, flew relief aid into Fiji following Cyclone Lottie, assisted No. 5 Squadron's deployment from RAAF Edinburgh after the Fincastle Trophy competition, maintained the usual internal schedules and carried the Prime Minister of New Zealand, the Rt Hon Norman Kirk, on a tour of South-East Asia."
Wigram was different. He was at home more we didn't trudge out to the base to wait for the Hercules to fly back from Antarctica or Vietnam or the Pacific (or, once, Disneyland). Wigram was more pedestrian. It was about watching movies in the base cinema. Learning to swim in the base pool. Watching air shows from the control tower.
We didn't live on base, so our domestic memories don't have planes buzzing overhead. But the strongest still have planes: we were in Riccarton Mall when TV news carried pictures of the crash at Mount Erebus. For someone who had flown there and knew how treacherous it was that news must have hit deeply.
We left Christchurch in 1980. I only came back last October. I knew that the base had closed in the meantime, but when I went to meet my dad there in January, I was surprised how much of it remained. The airfield was still there, only without an Air Force to use it. The control tower, those hangars. The Harvard mounted at the original gates of the base since 1973, when it was put up to mark 50 years since the New Zealand Permanent Air Force was formed.
The same big sky and the same big paddock, and my dad's two-seater plane flying in from Auckland and back out three days later, taking the time to look for whales off Kaikoura. And it was the last time I saw that plane in the sky. So I can't ask now what it was like for an ex-Air Force man to fly back into Wigram after all those years. About whether there is unconscious flying knowledge that comes back when you need it? An intuitive memory of wind directions and flight paths, hills and landmarks?
I needed to go back out there. Everyone who has lived in Christchurch long enough seems to have Wigram stories. I caught a taxi to Sockburn and the driver obliged he remembered parades and camps when he was in the Air Training Corps. Others remember a base sealed off from the rest of Christchurch, a village within a city.
In the reference section of the Christchurch Central Library, there's an inventory of what used to be there: "427 buildings (including 159 houses and five flats); 22 miles of roads; 40 acres of lawns and gardens; playing fields, six tennis courts, a 25-foot swimming pool, a miniature rifle range, a hobbies club, gymnasium, a wet and dry canteen, a cinema, a dance hall, a post office and a hospital."
Air Force bases seemed like a quieter and tidier version of the outside world. That quiet still hangs over Wigram on a grey Monday afternoon in July. The traffic roars on Main South Road, but by the time you make it up Harvard Avenue to the Air Force Museum, you're into deep silence.
You could see the juxtaposition of the Harvard plane and a showroom as an instant symbol of the suburban development that will, sooner or later, sweep across that empty airfield. No-one's home in the Air Force recruiting office. The carpark of the Air Force Museum is empty and the retired officer behind the till says that I have the place to myself. He also says they knew the end was coming, but still ...
You expect to be stirred by the roll of honour a long wall commemorating those who died in service but two of the upstairs exhibits are just as affecting. There is a replica of the interior of a wartime house.
I was a child of the 1970s, not the 1940s, but to live within Air Force life was to live within the long shadow of World War 2. Most bases were wartime bases. You were immersed in plane lore you knew your Bristol Freighter from your Sunderland bomber. You knew two German words: Achtung and Spitfeur. You started enjoying movies like The Guns of Navarone and The Battle of Britain.
The Antarctic room had even closer connections. My dad took brilliant photos of icebergs as he navigated the Hercules south from Whenuapai stopping to fill up at Harewood but it was the idea of the Point of Safe Return that always got to me. A display explains it. The Hercules doesn't carry enough fuel to go all the way from Christchurch to Antarctica and back again, so there's a point about five hours into the seven-hour flight south when they have to decide: will they continue or will they go back? The issue is that Antarctic weather can turn bad very quickly and if you choose to go on, you commit to landing on the ice, no matter what. And it is the navigator who makes the call.
This was poignant, but it wasn't telling me anything about everyday life on the ground at Wigram. The bland, tidy new houses on streets named for vanished planes and helicopters Mustang, Corsair, Iroquois, Red Checkers cover much of what used to be there. Most of it was bulldozed 10 years ago.
To get a sense of the old Wigram, I rang Paul Harrison. A former Air Force historian, Harrison compiled a slim book called RNZAF Base Wigram: 1916 to 1995, commissioned to mark the closing of the base. There's a lot of ordinary life in its photos: interior shots of the barracks and the mess, games of hockey and water polo, parades and pipe bands, guys tinkering with engines. The base's last commander, Gordon Wood, said in 1995 that "it's very much like a village which people live in and become part of. People have to go through a grieving process."
Harrison says that the base was busiest during the war years, when between 1500 and 2000 men were being trained at any one time. After the war, numbers varied depending on trainee intakes, and by 1990, there were about 900 there with a total of 1500 on the base, including dependents. The Air Force's overall strength had declined from about 4400 in the mid-'60s to about 2800 in the early '90s.
Did Wigram have a unique culture? Yes, he says, and for two reasons. It was the oldest base and was, like Hobsonville, built along RAF lines Whenuapai and Ohakea were wartime bases, built more for functionality than style. But Harrison remembers an elegance about much of Wigram he lived in the Officers' Mess in the '70s and it still had British plugs.
The second thing: as it was a training base, almost everyone in the Air Force, from air crew to officers to ground crew, went through it. It was where most Air Force careers started. There was that kind of nostalgia people carried a memory of Wigram with them.
The Ruth Richardson budget of 1991 essentially asked the Air Force to do the same job with less money, and there were hard choices to make. Training could move from Wigram to Woodbourne or vice versa, but one had to close. There were greater savings in closing Wigram.
And you have to see the context, Harrison says the Air Force also had to close the smaller Shelly Bay base in Wellington, and the Army and Navy closed bases.
In Christchurch, there was a lot of emotion around the base closure and concern about the future. Ngai Tahu bought the parcel of land for $16 million, but what would happen to it? In 1995, an editorial in The Press said, "Wigram deserves better than to be just a name for a new residential or commercial subdivision".
There's no doubt that if Ngai Tahu Property were to simply duplicate those new houses on streets named for planes all the way across the empty field, the result would be depressing. But this isn't what will happen.
Ngai Tahu Property hasn't shown its masterplan for Wigram Village to many people yet, but a four-person team headed by Ngai Tahu Property chief executive Tony Sewell gave me a presentation this week.
Before they start, Sewell says that they want to clear up some popular misconceptions, including one that Ngai Tahu is turning land originally gifted by Sir Henry Wigram into suburbia. Actually, that land which includes the Air Force Museum and an adjacent paddock is still in Crown hands and Ngai Tahu can't and won't touch it.
Then there's this idea that Ngai Tahu said it would let the land be used by planes and pilots in perpetuity. The truth is that there was talk, a decade ago, of the Christchurch City Council leasing the land back from Ngai Tahu for aviation uses, until international consultants told the council that the aerodrome would need to see 250,000 flight movements a year to be viable. The Air Force did 45,000 a year. Christchurch International Airport does about 134,000. By 2007, flight movements at Wigram Aerodrome were at 5900.
So aviation was never realistic. For 10 years, the land has been rented out to a range of nickel-and-dime operators. A farmer grazes cattle near the eastern end of the runway. Ngai Tahu Property grows trees for subdivisions in another corner. There has been crash-barrier testing, flying instructors, the Southern Institute of Technology teaching in hangars.
Yes, Ngai Tahu is aware of the complications of buying public land it comes with so many collective memories. They've been there before. But having the first right to land sold by the Crown was a hard-won clause in Ngai Tahu's Treaty of Waitangi settlement and, besides, would any other property developer have been more sensitive? There's surely a streak of racism in claims that Ngai Tahu is "desecrating" this or any other piece of New Zealand history.
So what's happening at Wigram and why now? There were zoning issues to tidy up and a long wait for Transit New Zealand to clarify where the southern motorway extension would go and whether off-ramps have to fit into the Wigram plans. The good news is that they don't, and the motorway will skirt around the southern fringe of the old aerodrome.
A Ngai Tahu vision statement talks about building on and complementing historic references, events and collective memories. Two of the historic hangars will stay, perhaps to evolve into indoor sports facilities. The Art Deco control tower will become retail space maybe there could be a cafe on the top floor with views in every direction. But that's small detail; the masterplan paints a bigger picture.
They don't want this to be ordinary house-and-section suburbia. Ngai Tahu Property has gone back to "garden city" principles, working from ideas developed in the early 20th century about building workers' suburbs with well-organised, public spaces examples include Daceyville in Australia and Welwyn in Britain. Such towns spread outwards in concentric circles from a commercial core, with streets laid out like a spider's web. It's about efficiency and sustainability the cul-de-sac might be safe and quiet but it doesn't move people around. These roads will.
The village will be more high-density than other new suburbs, reflecting the council's Urban Design Strategy and its plans for growth on the south-west side of Christchurch. The council's greenspace in the western corner will manage stormwater. The existing main runway will become the central boulevard of this green village and small parks and shared spaces will be dotted throughout.
As before, the aviation theme will remain in street names, while a memorial will mark the spot where Charles Kingsford Smith landed the Southern Cross on the first trans-Tasman flight.
The anniversary approaches he landed on September 11, 1928. Air traffic will end at Wigram 80 years later, almost to the day, when the Canterbury Aero Club will do one last fly-in. Most of the existing tenants will have gone by February. Ngai Tahu Property will then start building on a 40ha slice of land at the western side of the base. About 320 houses will go in, with another 1800 to follow once the rest of the land is rezoned. All up, Wigram Village should hold more than 2100 houses and about 5000 people within a chunk of land larger than Hagley Park.
This is a big dream. And it takes time. Based on experience at Hillmorton, Ngai Tahu Property estimates that it can develop about 100 sections a year, so the entire project will take 10 years if they're fast, but more like 20 years. It helps that Ngai Tahu is no fly-by-night developer but sees itself as a family business that can ride out the short-term highs and lows of the market.
Was I convinced?
Pretty much, as long as Ngai Tahu can get this utopian urban village off the page and onto the ground. You could summarise it like this. Wigram has had a glorious past. It's having a very ordinary present. It might still have a glorious future.
For Wayne Matthews, retired Wing Commander, 1945-2008.
www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/4639980a13135.html
appears its the hangars next to the control tower.
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