Austin, Michael

From CollabLandWiki

Austin, M. 1991. Notes on the Colonial City Fabrications - The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 2-3: 35-44

This paper was read as an investigation into the existance of a democratic society existing in a colonial city. The paper discusses how the colonial developments in New Zealand went about it, in terms of treatment toward the Maori people, the design of the colonial town/city and whom this city was designed for.

I firstly refers to the dominance of the Colonial settlers of the landscape. The disregard they had for existing societies, and upon the lines they cut over these for their own society. "This could be a way of avoiding the fact that the landscape was already occupied, or it could be seen that the inhabitants were seen as inseparable from the landscape to be dominated. In either case, the “noisy silence paradox” (in which the early settler claims New Zealand is totally silent, and then proceeds to list all the noises) is, I suggest, the silenced Maori voice." (opinionated).

The Maoris had to help the first settlers and they continued to do so as necessary. However the surveyors who were to cut the grid lines of Colonel Light's settlement grid had to be armed as they were cutting through indigenous settlements, cultivations and burial grounds.

It questions then what where these 'cruel lines' for? "But for our purposes, we have to ask on what basis, what design, what plan did these surveyors-architects-planners cut their cruel lines? In the instructions to the surveyor it was said “Ample reserves should be made for public buildings, a botanical garden, a park, and extensive boulevards - that a broad belt of land should be left for public use between the town and the country sections - that in the form of the town, the future should be provided for rather than the present, and that the public convenience should be consulted and the beautiful appearance of the city secured so far as possible." It was to become Gods own country.

The society intended fo these settlements is also discussed and best read as "...the social make-up of the colonists of the New Zealand Company was a vertical slice through English society, shedding only the bottom layer - to be replaced by Maori."

This reading is about the settlement of Wellington but is about Colonial settlement, of which the values of these settlers remained the same for Christchurch.

Points

• The town/city plans became the desire of the perfect settlement which was a design of somebodies with their perceptions of a perfect society limiting how the settlement developed. This turns out to be a slice of English society. Less the Maori culture/society and the lower class English. This settlement can never be considered democratic as there is too much discrimination.