The emotional weight of the earthquakes
It was a time of shipping containers and road cones, bureaucratic complaints and housing repairs. How do you remember it? Do you even want to remember it? Those who were in Christchurch for the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes and the following half a decade of demolition, stagnation and some green shoots of recovery and rebuilding will recall a time that felt like no other. Words like transitional, temporary or impermanent only gesture at its strangeness.
There were our own private battles and stresses, and then there were the city’s larger battles, the red-zoning and relocation, the blueprint’s big picture.
There is a duty to remember but there is also an understandable reluctance. How has that brief and strange period in the city’s history been memorialised?
There was excellent journalism, especially in The Press. There have been documentaries and one dramatic TV series, Hope and Wire. There were two dramatic films that had only an indirect relationship to earthquake damage, The Changeover and Sunday, but still communicated the city’s emotional states and its weird, quiet emptiness.
And there have been books, of course, both fiction and non-fiction. Amy Head’s Signs of Life, published in 2023, was a relatively late addition but it will last, along with Fiona Farrell’s The Villa At the Edge of the Empire, as the best literary response.
“Avoidance of feelings is common,” Jenny Powell wrote in a review of Signs of Life, published in Landfall. That was the earthquake way, remember? Suppress and distract, keep your feelings private or channel them into your larger anger at the government, the Christchurch City Council, the Earthquake Commission (EQC) or even the media.
The book is a collection of short stories set in Christchurch in the years after the quakes. Some characters recur, especially a young woman named Flick. The very first story sees Flick heading to her grandma’s place in what will be the red zone, to drive her to safety in north Canterbury.
There is a shipping container on the cover, as well as in the book’s opening sentence. It immediately feels familiar.
A Christchurch writer who went to school and university in the city, and even did an internship as a Press sub-editor in 2002 before going on her OE, Head came back to New Zealand to do postgraduate work in creative writing in 2010. Such good timing. She was based in Wellington then, but her family were still in Christchurch and she returned to the city in 2015.
The book took shape as an idea in 2018, the year she began working at Tūranga. Although she had grown up on the west side, by then she was living in the east, close enough to the residential red zone and New Brighton to get a sense of the quake’s social and physical impact. Along with the central city, those areas became key locations.
This is relevant because, as part of the Word Christchurch Festival 2024, Head will take a walking tour of central city locations that have some relationship to the book. At each point, there will be a reading and perhaps some interaction. That depends on who comes along – those who experienced the quakes and the aftermath, or literary quake tourists.
Earthquake details are not laid on thick in Signs of Life. Locals will recognise references to when the university held classes in tents, the reopening of C1 cafe, or streets named after historical writers in industrial Sydenham. “People got their cars upholstered on Burke,” Head writes in one story. “A company on Byron manufactured plastics.”
That is the basic thrill of recognition, the surface details local readers might feel parochial about. There is a deeper sense of loss and drift, a grappling with what it meant to live in a place going through such rapid, unprecedented change and uncertainty.
In this paragraph, Flick’s mother has returned from overseas, and notices what has remained and what has vanished.
“The casino was still there, with its folly on top, like a poker-themed spaceship. The corner opposite had once been dominated by a hotel of angled glass and concrete. Then, she would have climbed steps past the pebbledash at ground level or taken an elevator to the lobby. Now, she wandered through a site that was vacant but for piles of wooden pallets, a coffee truck and picnic tables. The old district court building was off to the right-hand side, where before the quakes people had milled around smoking in their best jackets and shoes.”
Another story, in which a beneficiary has to prove he hasn’t died, is reminiscent of the bureaucratic nightmares of the quake era, when further stress was piled on to an already stressed population.
Much of the work was done when Head was a writer in residence at the University of Canterbury in 2020. The CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive and Red Zone Stories website were valuable resources, along with copies of The Press from the days and weeks after the 2011 quake and even The Press’ Munted series.
This was Head’s third book, but the previous two had historical elements that made them more remote. “I’d never written anything so immediate before,” she says. “Also it had an emotional weight for me but an even stronger emotional weight for most of my family and friends who were here at the time, my colleagues and everybody else I knew. It was definitely not something I wanted to get wrong in my portrayal.
“It was possibly an attempt to try to understand what things had been like for them, by focusing on those few years afterwards. Just trying to get it right, or something approaching right, was one of the big challenges.”
She emphasises that none of the stories come from family or friends, or derive from real-life situations. “There were as many earthquake stories as there were people here at the time.
“I wasn’t going to fictionalise actual stories. The idea was almost not to write about the quakes, if that makes any sense. Just to write almost incidental stories about things that happen in people’s lives but with that setting as the backdrop, and to try to speculate about how that was affecting their worldview and how they were coping.
“I did have somebody approach me at my launch who sounded a little nervous and I told her I was focusing on life after the quakes, and tried to reassure her in that sense.”
Another early creative decision was to not touch directly on anyone who was killed. “I just didn’t want to try to enter into people’s grief or personal tragedies. That’s for them.”
She found some interesting bits of local lore to add texture. There is a passing reference to the site of two horrendous pre-quake murders in Aranui that became a memorial park. Another chapter uncovers the forgotten story of Professor Bickerton’s Pleasure Gardens, where the suburb of Wainoni is today. And how many readers would know anything about “Naughty Boys’ Island” at the New Brighton end of the Avon River, where two boys died in the 1960s?
Head was interested in the social history of the eastern suburbs that is less familiar than the traditional four avenues settler narrative of Christchurch.
The book made the longlist of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and reader responses have been good, as have the reviews. The Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books called it “a profound insight into a city in the aftermath of disaster”. Christchurch journalist Sally Blundell wrote: “The best of these stories hold a mounting sense of tension – roads that are suddenly cul-de-sacs, red zone darkness rearing up on the edge of suburbs.”
Yes, even the reviews bring back that ominous post-quake feeling. And while Head is positive about how the new Christchurch is looking, the next book will probably be set somewhere rural.
Signs of Life, Te Herenga Waka University Press ($30). The Signs of Life event in Word Christchurch is on Saturday, August 31, at 11am. More details at wordchristchurch.co.nz