I haven’t lost faith in bricks. Mortar perhaps, but bricks aren’t the things that seem to break much in this city. On the morning of the 4th of September 2010 when the noises we heard sounded like we were being pounded by the rocks that were undoubtedly rolling down the sides of the valley, we discovered in the light of the coming dawn that quite of few of those noises were being made by the chimney collapsing in upon itself. In the weirdly misguided attempts to clean up the city’s air, the Regional Authority had offered those people with old fireplaces a bribe to get heat pumps installed. The major proviso was that any existing fireplaces be blocked up and if possible, the chimneys removed. And so it was with this house. However the chimney structure below roof level remained. Until the earthquake that is. Being as they were between bedrooms, we were advised by builder friends to remove them as quickly as we could for safety’s sake. When the men came in to take the bricks out, it was appallingly easy to do this job. The mortar was mostly sand, it seemed, and even cleaning the bricks for re-use hardly needed anything more vigorous than a little shake and a mild scrape with a bread and butter knife as it were.
But the bricks! They were as hale as they had been made a century previous in Murphy Brothers’ Brickworks. It was clear from the robust M stamped into their hollow faces that was where they’d been formed. Though I had never made any bricks as such, I had worked at Murphy’s when I left school at 16 with only School Cert to my name, so I felt an emotional attachment to these bricks. Mixed emotions to be sure; while I loved working on the drain pipe manufacturing line, I ended my time at Murphy’s with an odious task. Twenty seven thousand bricks, the last of the Centaurus Rd site’s output, had to be sorted into five different categories. The new Auckland based owners, Ceramco, had decreed that nothing was to be wasted, not even the twisted and misshapen chunks of ceramic agony that looked more like the product of a Rodin, reductio ad absurdum, than a manufactured brick. These blood-red horrors had a new name, Cashmere Reds, and were being used in contemporary design as decorative features, and so too were the four other types of brick Ceramco was putting into glossy catalogues for the building trade. And I was the poor bastard condemned to the brutal December sun of the brickyard to sort these twenty seven thousand fired clay Calibans into orderly pallets, 10 by 10 by 10.
I got that job at the tail end of the fortress economy, when a job surplus was a reality and a glide time nation knew quite conclusively, she’ll be right. My foreman had been fifty years in the job and was looking forward to retiring two years from then. How bizarre to find relics from that time in the National Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, encased in glass and bearing labels speaking of another time. Lichfield shirts, Crown Lynn china, Europa petrol stations, all familiar to generations brought up on the Guaranteed Price and the Family Benefit.
It’s strange looking back. As I pass from one collapsed building to another in this maelstrom of upheaval and liquefaction people once called Christchurch, I see only too clearly the city’s ripped backsides, insides and outsides. I can see the histories laid bare, though only few can read them before they are hauled away into the dumping sites of ephemerality by the trucks that gather, seven times an hour, the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of us and our memories. Ghosts evicted from red stickerville.
Now we are all Macaulay’s New Zealanders, surveying the detritus, the ruins of our cathedrals. Now we are all Ron Mason’s Eskimo Masters, naming the parts of the barren landscape with only rubble and remnants as reference points. As we pick our way through the dust of dried out liquefaction that was a city it’s terribly easy to dig the broken remains of a statue and to read the faded legend: ‘I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty, and despair.’
