Paul Moon reviews The Near West: A history of Grey Lynn, Arch Hill and Westmere by Tania Mace for New Zealand Journal of History:
‘OF THE DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF HISTORY published in New Zealand, those tackling the country’s suburbs can be among the more challenging. This is due to a combination of the irregularity, and often insufficiency, of source material, budgetary constraints, parsimonious publishers, and, sometimes, the skill of those assembling and writing these accounts. These challenges can be compounded by the approaches adopted in these histories, from the occasionally highly idiosyncratic narratives, through to works which resemble little more than a dry inventory of dates and occurrences. And these are just the works that make it to publication. Many more suburban histories are probably born to blush unseen, with the cost of producing them proving insurmountable in many cases.
Given all these potential impediments, The Near West represents a superb accomplishment in this category of history, and for many reasons. Firstly, its author, Tania Mace, has achieved that important synthesis of academic rigor and readability. The detail is considerable but never extraneous, and the prose style is taut and accessible. Where lesser writers might get bogged down in minutiae, Mace exercises a judicious approach to evidence selection. The focus throughout the book is on explaining the area to readers who may be familiar with some aspects of its past, and those many more who have just a passing awareness of these suburbs.
Organizationally, The Near West is divided into chapters which deal with themes in the suburbs. These start in loose sequence, with topics such as geology, Māori history, farming, and residential development, but then radiate out into fields such as recreation, sport, and the visual arts. There is still some chronological momentum in these later chapters, but the themes come to dominate more as the work progresses. This sort of architecture requires careful treatment because of the risk of making each topic appear segregated. Mace has approached this design carefully and manages to sidestep such pitfalls. The chapter on faith is representative of how she examines a particular subject in a manner that intersects with other material in the book, while still allowing the topic to illuminate the history of the suburbs in specific ways.
‘Faith’ begins with fledgling church-planting in the area in the late nineteenth century. The Anglicans erected a modest chapel, and initially struggled to find sufficient funds to support it. It was a similar pattern that applied to the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and others who followed in their wake. The approach of the Catholics was slightly different, with church establishment accompanied by Catholic schools being founded. Mace notes that the trend in the car-less nineteenth century was to have churches within walking distance of their congregations, which led to a proliferation of smaller places of worship, rather than just one major church per denomination in the area.
As the demographic profile of these suburbs evolved, so, too, did their religious complexion. Immigration, changing settlement patterns, growing diversity, and, especially, increasing secularization, led to numerous shifts in the manifestation of faith in these suburbs. The post-war era saw a steady decline in church attendance across the country, but this trend was interrupted in some cases in parts of these suburbs by the influx of Polynesians, whose church attendance rates were much higher than the national average. Thus, while some churches in other parts of Auckland were either closing or combining, new churches, including those of smaller denominations such as Congregationalists, were being formed and flourishing in these suburbs. However, as the Pasifika populations in the area began to diminish from the 1980s, the tide of faith started to show signs of receding. Several church buildings were sold, and those that were not demolished acquired new purposes, ranging from shops to art studios, and even housing.
The evolution of faith has left an imprint on the architectural character of the area. Places of worship – due to a combination of their scale, purpose, and the desire of their creators to proclaim the importance of their faith – tend to encapsulate the more pronounced aspects of those architectural styles prevalent at the time of their creation. The judicious selection of images that accompany this chapter allow the reader to chart the changes in religious building styles in these suburbs since the nineteenth century, without the author having to labour the point in text. This marriage of pictures and prose is a particularly happy one, not only in this chapter but throughout the book. The treatment of the subject of faith, as with all the other topics in The Near West, adds to the overall complexion of the area. Mace is careful, however, not to fall into the trap of over-compartmentalizing her selected subjects. Instead, she has ensured that there are ties that bind each topic to the other.
Massey University Press deserves its share of credit, too. The Near West is generously illustrated, with obvious care having gone into the choice of images. Perhaps the only gripe is the absence of a bibliography. The work is fully referenced with endnotes, but a list of sources would have been helpful. That aside, The Near West is a taonga – informative, elegantly written, and visually engaging.’
