LOVE FOR THE PORT HILLS

Press, 15 April 1978, Page 17

LOVE FOR THE PORT HILLS

The Port Hills of Christchurch. By Gordon Ogilvie. A. H. and A. W. Reed. 246 pp. $13.50. (Reviewed by Eric Beardsley)

Each of her streets, Professor Arnold Wall once wrote of Cnnsichurcn. s closed witn timing alps. Poetic licence that. Face scruth in Christchurch and one finds our streets closed with the remnants of a volcanic eruption 10 millions years ago, clothed in tussock and exotic trees, burnt grey in midsummer, snow-tipped in the depths of winter and dotted with our only smog-free suburbs.

But for Christchurch the Port Hills are more than a mere punctuation of the plains. Those w'ho do not live on them lift up their eyes to them, walk, jog and ride over them, ponder their moods and take comfort from them. Those who live on them love them.

High time, then, for a book devoted to the Port Hills; and Gordon Ogilvie has devoted himself to providing it. His love for the hills is no devious affair undertaken for the purpose of producing a book, but an abiding fascination springing from his childhood days in Horotane, his tramping, climbing, picnicking and fossicking among them and his awareness of their presence on his horizon, it has been deepened bv his study of the natural and human history of the hills and given both zest and dimension by the scores of interviews he conducted with established residents.

The result is a long, but fascinating ramble round the hills, from the 150metre basalt cliffs of Godley Head around the northern slopes to Gebbies Pass. The pre-European history of each locality is deftly sketched, but for the 25,900 or so residents of the hills the chief interest will be in the detailed accounts of the development of their own district, especially its social history. Mr Ogilvie has clearly been painstaking. There is a wealth of information about the way the

pioneers and their descendants shaped and were shaped by their elevated environment and it is embellished by scores of old and facsinating photographs that enliven and illuminate the text and serve to remind us that man’s capacity for destructive exploitation can be matched by his desire to improve his surroundings. Certainly the gaunt, bare hills f 80 or so years ago have matured and softened in spite of the scars left by the cutting of pockets of bush, roads, quarries and more recently, the march of power pylons. The hills, it seems, have been slightly socially superior since the beginning of European settlement. Edward Dobson was one of the original land purchasers of Sumner. Dr A. C. Barker sold his Clifton land to A. J. White. When it was subdivided the buyers included Hurst Seager and Sir Joseph Kinsey, who was to entertain, among others, Mark Twain, G. B. Shaw and Captain Robert Falcon Scott at his clifftop home. The Moorhouse brothers developed Redcliffs. Major Alfred Hornbrook, Lyttelton’s first grog shop proprietor, achieved respectability and a tidy fortune by land deals on Mount Pleasan' and H. P. Murray-Aynsley was a descendant of the Duke of Athol. The first runholders on Cashmere were W. G. Brittan and Sir John Cracrof' Wilson, whose Indian servants were still to be seen in Cashmere in the 19205. There was croquet on the lawns of Ernest Gray’s Hoon Hay homestead, Edward Staffora, Premier for 12 years, occupied the Landsdowne homestead, and Sir Robert Heaton Rhodes’s Otahuna was renowned in a province noted for its fine farms and homesteads.

It has not been exactly downhill all the way since, but there has been a levelling. The hills had their hotbeds of radicalism — Tammy Taylor James McCullough, John Barr, L. M. Isitt and

the McCombs family, three members of which held the Lyttelton seat for Labour. They were joined by academics, lawyers, architects and journalists, poets, painters and writers. In the whole of Christchurch, Mr Ogilvie says, only Cashmere can rival Sumner in the calibre and range of the creative talent it has produced or attracted.

This is one of the few judgments Mr Ogilvie permits himself and the book would have been of greater merit had there been more of them. One does not exactly want a treatise on the sociology of the superior suburbs, but more attention to the character of each locality and its current standing in the social pecking order would have added spice to a somewhat prosaic presentation.

Mr Ogilvie demonstrates how well he can deal with the controversial in a final chapter on Harry Ell, that splendid maverick, conservationist and man of action, whose contribution to the preservation of much of the hills for public use, the development of rest houses and the care of the remnants of its native bush are too readily taken for granted today. Ell battled, on one occasion almost literally and always magnificently, with authority, spent money that had to be found subsequently and used the skills of unemployed people in the thirties to develop the Summit Road and the Takahe. Had he lived longer the road would no doubt have reached Pigeon Bay by now.

Without the Port Hills giving distinction to its southern skyline, says Mr Ogilvie in his introduction, Christchurch would be a scenic disastei area; merely another sprawling metropolis helped out by a cute little river, some nice parks and a few attractive pieces of neo-Gothic. The hills are its salvation. So they are. His history will rekindle interest in them and. one hopes, prevent, any rash schemes for their development.