Dunedin Railway Station was finished in 1906. It's remarkable on the outside, but the main foyer where you buy your tickets is incredibly elaborate. The amount of detail that they put into the ticket booths, and staircases and doorways is really impressive. I suppose that railway stations back then were real status symbols, like international airports now.Dunedin City Council tells us that the DK Travel Guide series lists this railway station as one of the top 200 places to see in the world. This puts it in the same category as the Taj Mahal. I don't want to disparage the judgement of travel guide writers, but I feel someone working their way through the list might be a bit underwhelmed when the arrived outside the entrance of the Dunedin Railway Station.
Nevertheless, Dunedin is a city filled with remarkable buildings.
Once upon a time a great deal of money used to buy a city flash architecture. Dunedin was built on the gold rushes of the 1860s. In the second half of the 19th century it was New-Zealand's premiere city.One man responsible for the look of Dunedin, Oamaru, and other places in the region was architect Robert Lawson. He designed First Church, Larnach Castle and Otago Boys' High School amongst other structures.
Unfortunately he came a cropper with his design of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. Even before it has been finished there were land slips that rendered sections of the structure unsafe.After a glittering career Robert Lawson was forced to flee to Australia (how awful).According to Michael King there were darker reasons that Seacliff was doomed:"[Otago Maori] believed that the authorities had courted physical and psychic disaster by building the hospital over a tribal burial ground. According to this interpretation, the structural collapses, the fire, and the general air of terror said to prevail in the wards holding the most disturbed patients were all consequences of a failure to respect the ethos and the tapu of the location."Wrestling with the Angel, Michael King (p.73)
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Not just this part of the story is untrue.
It's cold. The platform at Dunedin Railway Station is very long. My mother is waiting. Marshall often runs late, but this time he is very late. Perhaps he gets off a train or, this is better, perhaps my mother is waiting at the front of the station and he comes across the car park and garden.
It's getting late. You can smell the smoke of the fireplaces in Dunedin; it's an earthy smell. He apologises for being late, hesitates, and then tells her about his mother. There is the din of a train coming into the station. All those men in suits in hats heading home after work.
It's a nice image, but remember, it's not true.
When Mum was dying Marshall met her for the first time in his memory. I thought he was very brave to visit her, but he wanted to. She gave him such a piercing look. Our Uncle Charlie, who was with us said, “She must think you are Jack, your father”. Charlie thought Marshall resembled Dad in his younger days.
It's cold. The platform at Dunedin Railway Station is very long. My mother is waiting. Marshall often runs late, but this time he is very late. Perhaps he gets off a train or, this is better, perhaps my mother is waiting at the front of the station and he comes across the car park and garden.
It's getting late. You can smell the smoke of the fireplaces in Dunedin; it's an earthy smell. He apologises for being late, hesitates, and then tells her about his mother. There is the din of a train coming into the station. All those men in suits in hats heading home after work.
It's a nice image, but remember, it's not true.
When Mum was dying Marshall met her for the first time in his memory. I thought he was very brave to visit her, but he wanted to. She gave him such a piercing look. Our Uncle Charlie, who was with us said, “She must think you are Jack, your father”. Charlie thought Marshall resembled Dad in his younger days.
Stories for my Grandchildren, Isobel Spence
My mother says that when Marshall came back he was a little shell-shocked: "an old woman with no teeth," he said. He had never met her before in his memory. Perhaps if he wanted a flattering image of his mother he shouldn't have gone at all.
These old people sit at the special table, have cream on their pudding, and are hurried early to their rooms, undressed, put to bed and locked in. Immediately the nurse is gone they get out of bed and potter around the room making sure looking for things seeing to things. They continue thus, restlessly, most of the night and in the morning after only fitful sleep, sometimes with their beds wet and dirty, they begin again to solve the puzzle of being where they are, of not being allowed to go outside, of losing their garters and their handkerchiefs and of being involved in the complexities of going from one place to another, of going to the lavatory and remembering to wipe themselves, of being led from dayroom to meal table and back again.The old women will eventually be put to bed for the last time; they will lie in the dreary sunless rooms that stink of urine; they will washed and "turned" daily, and the film, the final deception, will grow over their eyes. And one morning, if you walk down the corridor through Ward One, you will see in the small room where one of the old women has been sleeping, the floor newly scrubbed smelling of disinfectant, the bed stripped, the mattress turned back to air; the vacancy created in the night by death.
Faces in the Water, Janet Frame, pp.60-1
Maggie died in 1959.
Nijinsky died in 1950. Out of the past we invent stories. Mr. Ostwald made up this story about thirty years of unhappiness. It might not be true, but it is a nice story.
"Nijinsky looms as a magnificent example of a man who achieved greatness and suffered miserably. Self-sacrificing, creative, destructive, and victimized by misfortune, he inspired an entire generation of dancers, not to mention the musicians, painters, designers, sculptors, writers, poets, and psychiatrists whose lives he profoundly affected. Movement was his metier. It freed him from the confines of a small environment in St. Petersburg, and propelled him into the heady world of the Ballets Russes. He danced his way around globe, and he leapt into that mysterious universe called madness. He was a saint, a genius, a martyr, and a madman. One can see him still, arcing in space, jumping and flapping, cavorting and flailing, shooting into the sky, suspended, laughing, crying, grimacing, screaming. He remains a myth, an apparition, an emblem, a creature of fantasy, a biological creation, a fleeting image of God. Nijinsky, the God of the Dance. (pp.342-3)
My mother says that when Marshall came back he was a little shell-shocked: "an old woman with no teeth," he said. He had never met her before in his memory. Perhaps if he wanted a flattering image of his mother he shouldn't have gone at all.These old people sit at the special table, have cream on their pudding, and are hurried early to their rooms, undressed, put to bed and locked in. Immediately the nurse is gone they get out of bed and potter around the room making sure looking for things seeing to things. They continue thus, restlessly, most of the night and in the morning after only fitful sleep, sometimes with their beds wet and dirty, they begin again to solve the puzzle of being where they are, of not being allowed to go outside, of losing their garters and their handkerchiefs and of being involved in the complexities of going from one place to another, of going to the lavatory and remembering to wipe themselves, of being led from dayroom to meal table and back again.The old women will eventually be put to bed for the last time; they will lie in the dreary sunless rooms that stink of urine; they will washed and "turned" daily, and the film, the final deception, will grow over their eyes. And one morning, if you walk down the corridor through Ward One, you will see in the small room where one of the old women has been sleeping, the floor newly scrubbed smelling of disinfectant, the bed stripped, the mattress turned back to air; the vacancy created in the night by death.
Faces in the Water, Janet Frame, pp.60-1
Maggie died in 1959.
Nijinsky died in 1950. Out of the past we invent stories. Mr. Ostwald made up this story about thirty years of unhappiness. It might not be true, but it is a nice story.
"Nijinsky looms as a magnificent example of a man who achieved greatness and suffered miserably. Self-sacrificing, creative, destructive, and victimized by misfortune, he inspired an entire generation of dancers, not to mention the musicians, painters, designers, sculptors, writers, poets, and psychiatrists whose lives he profoundly affected. Movement was his metier. It freed him from the confines of a small environment in St. Petersburg, and propelled him into the heady world of the Ballets Russes. He danced his way around globe, and he leapt into that mysterious universe called madness. He was a saint, a genius, a martyr, and a madman. One can see him still, arcing in space, jumping and flapping, cavorting and flailing, shooting into the sky, suspended, laughing, crying, grimacing, screaming. He remains a myth, an apparition, an emblem, a creature of fantasy, a biological creation, a fleeting image of God. Nijinsky, the God of the Dance. (pp.342-3) 
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