Our trip revolved around declining rural centres, rotting industrial architecture and op shops. Our photos are a collection of images of the burnt out meatworks at Patea and the abandoned freezing works and shipping centre in Tokomaru Bay.
At work I’ve been reading mostly about how important coastal shipping was in the past, building up New Zealand’s economy; without knowing the histories of these places these industrial complexes are arbitrary and bizarre, completely foreign in the landscape.
Tokomaru Bay takes the prize for bizarre; such a huge decline in population, a thousand less people living there now than during its heyday. Signage on the shops is the same as it was when the owners abandoned their businesses during the 1960s.
The local motorcycle gang has a beautiful Art Deco bank as their headquarters; the original glass still identifies the building, “Bank of New Zealand”. As you drive towards the freezing works, you pass through an avenue of huge exotic palms; the carnival atmosphere evoked by these is jarringly at odds with the town itself and only serves to draw more attention to the disintegration of the houses around them. The avenue leads ultimately to Tokomaru wharf, a rotting concrete structure from where meat and wool was once shipped internationally. Today the thing shakes like a leaf in the wind and against the tides and currents of the sea.
I write this as merely a sketch of a town that fascinates me in its present day appearance and in the history of its rise and decline – I really can’t say anything novel, or new, or interesting, or even Not Trite about the area. The buildings themselves just seem to stand so resolutely despite their complete neglect – fascinating, to visit, like tourism in the bones of history.
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