Camellia Map: Riversdale Road Avondale

Bowen Galleries, Wellington 3 - 31 December 2012

I moved to Avondale when we bought our first house two and a half years ago. In doing so I left the community I’d lived in for twelve years, since returning to New Zealand after a similar time living in London. I was displaced by the move, and through it became psychologically connected to the many who have been exiled to alien communities by inner city house prices. In an effort to tie myself to the area I researched local history. Avondale’s past is fascinating. Until 5 June 1882 it was called Te Whau, which is the name, of Māori origin, for Entelea arborescens, a native tree. The old name endures in the Whau River, which is an estuarial branch of the Waitemata Harbour, that runs into a creek that cuts through New Lynn to Green Bay – a Godwit flight path and once one of two major Auckland Portages. Avondale gained its first European settler in 1843, who was joined by several more in the 1850s with the completion of the Great North Road. It is the home of the introduced Australian Huntsman spider (now commonly known as the Avondale spider). The district had many market gardens and was the site of the development of the Hayward variety of kiwifruit. 

There are attributes of contemporary Avondale that don’t fit into this grand narrative. These smaller histories are only observed on the ground through physically being here and seeking a sense of place. The development that has taken place in the area in the past few years, largely unregulated, has covered over prime market garden land with a mix of industrial building and poor housing, jarring a sense of urban design. The street I live on is in a completely flat part of Avondale and there are few trees. I found myself looking up a lot, askance from the cacophony of substandard infill housing and lack of greenery and care.  It was through this daily gesture that the seed of this project began.

Of the few trees that do exist in Avondale, many are Camellias. The story of how they came to feature so abundantly I do not know. But I can say they are incongruous with the housing aesthetic. I became fixated with the landscape created by the Camellia trees. Looming above the built environment, these features took on the characteristics of mountains – where there are none.  I began to take ritualised walks to document these ‘mountains’. After weeks of going through this process every other day, a parallel observation began to take shape, which was the bizarre juxtaposition of each Camellia bush with its associated building.

To document this aspect of the urban environment, and at the same time create an aesthetic value that I could live with, I began a database of house colours and associated Camellia flower colours. Each property with a Camellia was redesigned as a gradient map and in doing so the urban design, or lack of, was remedied. The set I have selected for the project at Bowen Galleries is a sample of all of the houses with Camellias from one street in Avondale, which is the street I live on – one of the streets with possibly the worst housing in this area. The entry to the street has one of the best Camellia Mountains that I documented.

By the time this exhibition closes I will have left Avondale. Through some fluke of the munificence of angels, we have managed to purchase a home back in the community we left two and a half years ago. This, then, has become a loving, and fitting, parting gesture.