Falling for the Hobbiton Aesthetic

Bag end, home of Bilbo and Frodo (with nasturtium and comfrey)

It may be unpatriotic to admit this, but I am not a fan of the Lord of the Rings, or Hobbit, films. I enjoyed reading the Hobbit as a child but found Tolkien's LoTR to be a slog. I have watched all the films, to see what the fuss is about, but had trouble staying awake through them. My favourite bits were always in the Hobbit home village.

Child size chair and a stack of firewood

I do feel a connection with the stay-at-home hobbits that Frodo and Bilbo left behind, with their cosy underground houses, well-stocked pantries and second breakfasts.  So when my cousin from America, who is a serious LoTR film fan, came to Hamilton last week I was happy to have an excuse to visit the nearby film set of Hobbiton, now a Waikato tourist attraction.

Community garden with birdhouse

I was quite charmed by Hobbiton, not so much by the round doors, but by the consistent attention to quaint detail. It feels like a cross between an historical village and a permaculture farm, all scaled down to child size.  Hobbit extras were required to be 5 foot tall, just my height, so being on their the film set was a rare experience of not feeling too short for the world. Even the furniture and tools were to my scale, with practical little ladders scattered everywhere. It was also a welcome oasis of lush green abundance after a long drought.

Little ladders come in handy for hobbit-sized folk

There are no obvious anachronisms once the bus drops you off at the entrance to Hobbiton. In this version of Tolkien's pre-industrial arcadia everything  is made by hand of natural materials (or appears to be); from the thatched roofs,  fancy iron work, carved wooden facades, lead-light windows to the lush green turf and pretty pumpkins piled around.

Punpkins in the Green Dragon 

Hobbit hole facade with doorstep cottage garden 

The original temporary film set has been rebuilt in permanent materials for the popular tourist attraction, now more than 10 years old and entertaining thousands of people every day (70 people every 15-30 minutes all day long every day of the year).  It is all make believe, from the empty spaces behind every hobbit hole facade to the painted lichen on the picket fences. Among all the genuine trees in the village there is one (on top of Bag End) which was built from scratch for the first film, at a cost of one million dollars.

Million dollar fake tree on top of the hill, real trees in the foreground:  pear grafted onto quince  and apple both laden with unpicked fruit

I was especially delighted and inspired by the gardens which (the guide advised) are kept looking in just this state of tidy fecundity year round by a team of 30 gardeners, who must finish their work before the first visitors arrive at 9am every morning.  The gardens in front of the hobbit holes are refreshed with flats, troughs and pots of plants, changed out regularly for year round blooms. Yet this seems entirely appropriate, for the containers are all weathered wood or faded pottery so they look like what Hobbits would use.



These tiny cottage gardens (which could be replicated in a tiny balcony or courtyard) are complemented by larger community gardens which really reminded me of favourite permaculture gardens I have known. They look like a pretty jumble of plants in polycultures, with great a diversity of not only edible but beneficial insect attracting flowers. These larger gardens are not renewed with pots and flats, but I could see succession planting evident everywhere.  Patches of plants abutted in various stages of growth from seedlings to ready to harvest.

The lush green abundance of the whole set is maintained by more irrigation than anyone in town has been using during this recent drought.  It was a welcome rest for eyes seared by my sad dry garden at home. I was also glad my cousins got to see the unique lurid green grass of home that is more usual for the Waikato.

Hobbit swing

Fake as it all is, I still got inspiration, or at least aesthetic affirmation, for my own garden design aspirations: all curves, no hard straight smooth lines or surfaces.  Lots of edges, lots of bee friendly planting.  Flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruit all together filling every niche.

bee and butterfly sharing pollen

Mill with row boat and fishing rod

We got an hour or so to wander through Hobbiton, either at our own pace or following Aiden, our well informed guide. The tour finished at the Green Dragon pub, across a charming stone arch bridge next to the thatched and half timbered mill with working water wheel.  There we supped a free cider served in beautiful hand thrown pottery mugs. Sitting by the (real) fire, we looked out across the mill pond, back to Hobbiton.

Hobbiton across the mill pond

The Hobbiton experience is expensive ($70 adult, $10 child) but I think its good value, even for a non-fan like me. I was utterly charmed and delighted at every turn. After an hour and a half I didn't want to leave.  My Lord of the Rings-fan cousin was satisfied on even more levels.

Charmed

Water moves rocks

This post wraps up my South Island trip: in which I visit a glacier, admire weather stations, spot charismatic megafauna and visit an earthquake struck city.

Franz Joseph Glacier- only a few years ago, the ice extended past the place I was taking the photo.

During my 'Antarctic period' I became tangentially fascinated by glaciers, not only those in Antarctica but elsewhere.  I dreamed about them, I wrote poems about them, I tried to imagine how I would make one but  I'd never actually seen one for myself until last month.

Dirty glacier grinding up the mountain and leaving a big mess of rocks. A bit like a mine, but slower and well, a natural process.

 I found my necessarily-rushed visit to Franz Joseph Glacier to be every bit as exciting and inspiring as I could have hoped for.  I will be going back someday, somehow, for more.

The terminal face from 500m which is the closest we could get with out a guide. Those crevasses are scary looking!  I love how the ice is blue where its been recently exposed by a fall.

Even though the Glacier visit was a sort of last minute add-on to our trip, it turned out to be the key that unlocked my thinking about how to respond to mining issues through my art.  I was struck by the similarities and differences between mining and the natural processes that slowly grind down mountains into rocks and gravel carried across away the landscape.

Rock striated by being dragged down the mountain by the glacier.  I'm restraining myself from posting many more great rock photos from my South Island trip. Rocks were definitely the highlight for me- the West Coast is a geology-geek paradise.

I've already started working on developing ways to express these ideas with needle and thread, and my next posts will be full of those explorations.  In the meantime, here's some photos to give you a flavour of the rest of our week in the South Island.

At snowy Arthur's Pass, four kea were hanging around the railway workmen's barrel fire.

One of the cheeky kea found a workman's satchel, opened the flap, moved the thermos flask and unwrapped his sandwiches!

My travel companion had her own agenda for the trip (to check out monitoring stations), fortunately highly compatible with my mining obsession.  Here Robin inspects the Arthur's Pass weather station.  Under her influence I have become so adept at identifying weather stations in the scenery that sometimes I can spot them even before Robin! (Note my restraint in not posting numerous weather station photos on this blog)

We spend our final few days in Christchurch, staying in the Eastern suburbs on a street with more houses abandoned than occupied.  In many parts of the city this kind of scene (actually in Kaiapoi) is common.  It is heart rending to see how damaged the city remains over a year after the big quakes.

Christchurch's devastation is also pocketed with determinedly cheerful community projects transforming the empty lots and ubiquitous shipping containers into street art.  This is a project in Sumner  that I contributed a couple of crocheted squared to, along with hundreds of other crafters around the world.  

Denniston Moss

Denniston lichens and mosses

The day after our tour of Stockton Mine, Robin and I visited the next plateau south: Denniston. The rich seams of Denniston coal were extensively and famously pit-mined for nearly a century. Denniston's mining history has been romantically immortalised in a couple of popular novels which in turn support some excellent visitor resources on the Plateau.

Top of the Incline (once touted as the 8th wonder of the world!) at Denniston

I like looking at bits of rusty old mining kit as much as the next girl but I really wanted to get a feel for the natural landscape that is (probably) soon going to be open cast mined like Stockton.  The landscape is very similar to what Stockton would have been like before Solid Energy started blasting the surface away. I also really wanted to meet one of the famous snails. 

Looking South from Stockton onto Denniston Plateau

The Arctic has polar bears. The Sumatran rainforest has orangutans.  Every endangered ecosystem needs at least one charismatic megafauna to rally support for habitat conservation. The Buller coal plateau (which includes Stockton and Denniston Plateaux) is an endangered ecosystem so harsh that the most charismatic megafauna it can offer is a giant carnivorous land snail that sucks up live worms like spaghetti.  Unfortunately, as defenders of the plateau have found, snails have a repuation that make most people consider them a slightly ludicrous animal to bother saving.  It's difficult, even for a lifelong greenie like myself, to not secretly snigger just a little about saving snails.

Powelliphanta patrickensis (photo from Forest and Bird)

Of course its not just unique and remarkable snails that are at risk, but an entire unique and remarkable ecosystem (of which snails are a near-top-level predator, much like the polar bear in the Arctic, but infinitely less cuddly-looking). Denniston Plateau's environment is based on a layer of concrete-like sandstone with almost no soil; 6m p/a rainfall with no drainage, at a high altitude between mountains and sea, blasted almost year round with icy Southern winds. 

Typical Denniston landscape- exposed rock with a few short tough plants clinging to tiny nooks and hollows

The tallest trees grow to about knee height in most places.  Most of the animal life is invertebrate, with a few rare birds and lizards who survive there because it is too harsh an environment for the kind of pests that have demolished most of the rest of NZ's native animals. 

My favourite Denniston plant

I didn't see any snails. Or other insects, though I turned over a few rocks looking. No birds, no lizards, nothing but the most enchanting clumps of moss and lichen. We did meet lots of mining vehicles thundering along the narrow twisty gravel roads to and on the Plateau. Bathurst (the company granted consent to open cut on Denniston Plateau) is already open cut mining out the back at Cascade Mine, accessed across Denniston.  

Reminds me of the saucer gardens I used to make when I was a child

This environment is so fragile, so tenuously maintained on the hard sandstone cap that lies above the coal, that I just can't see how Bathurst  can possibly pretend they will be able to restore it after mining.  Like Solid Energy's efforts at Stockton Mine, they may go to a great deal of trouble to make sure the landscape looks green and tidy, (which is admittedly an improvement on pre-RMA mining companies leaving a big toxic mess as at Tui). I mean, look at these pictures.  The ecosystem that is there now is unique to the sandstone cap and can't be replicated on top of blasted rubble with manufactured soil, grass seed and native plantings.  It may very well be a parkland afterwards, but it won't be much like it is now.

Charismatic microflora.  Could a Save the Moss campaign work? It is kind of cuddly looking. 

Coal mining in the bad old days was difficult, dirty and dangerous. Miners died underground in explosions, fires, collapses and gassy pockets. They died overground in machinery failures. If they survived the immediate dangers many still died young of black lung from inhaling coal dust.

Denniston Miners (photos from the interpretive boards on site)

Today coal mining continues to be difficult, dirty and dangerous.  I'm still stitching my memorials to the men who died at Pike River few miles from Denniston not even two years ago.

New Zealand Coal Mining Disasters remembered at Denniston

An open cut mine in a regulated industry is undoubtably less dangerous for workers who spend most of their days inside the comfortable cabs of heavy machinery. But the dangers to the environment from coal mining are both localised and global, immediate and long term. Blasting a landscape, filling the air with dust and acidifying streams are bad enough but burning coal into greenhouse gases is inherently dirty. Clean coal is a dirty lie.  The only clean coal is in the hole.


The difficulty is overcoming the greed of coal mining directors and shareholders who deny that climate change is their problem (yet Colorado burns up as I write this).  The difficulty lies in changing a whole global economic system entirely based on digging up sequestered carbon and releasing it into the atmosphere.

"As new processes evolve, future generations might wonder why their ancestors wastefully burnt so much of this rare and precious fossil fuel."

Open Cut (warning, lots of photos of mining)

BEFORE: Stockton Plateau, looking towards Happy Valley aka Cyprus Extension, not yet open cut but riddled with undergound mine shafts)  See all the blue tarns? The sandstone is a waterproof seal and the rainfall 6m p/a so most of the water just sits on the surface in big puddles making a unique ecosystem.

Ever since I found out that Solid Energy sponsors (almost free) tours of its open cut coal mine at Stockton I've wanted to go visit.  Yes, there are plenty of coal mines (at Huntly) close to where I live but they don't offer 5-6 hour guided tours with an ex-miner-guide mostly paid for by the company!  Mines are such dangerous (not to mention controversial) places  (like this local one closed today due to methane build up) and very few allow the public inside.  I spend way too much time searching the internet looking for mine tours, so I know this for sure.

DURING: An open cut mine is visually confusing because its really just a big mucky mess in a constant state of flux. 

 So I schemed and planned and persuaded my buddy Robin (who has visited Stockton before for her work and is the friend most tolerant of my current mine obsession) to take me there last week. The reason I really really wanted to see a mine with my own eyes is evident in these photos I took on the tour.  Photographs of mines are really difficult to make sense of (I've made these ones as big as I can to help you). The enormous scale, muddy colours and dusty atmosphere combine to make it very difficult to tell what is up or down, vertical or horizontal; just the kind of information I need to interpret or represent a mine in textile relief.  I hoped that the tour would give me, literally, a fresh insight into mining topography.

AFTER:  These stripes are the kind of repetitive pattern I was looking for.  Just to give you a sense of scale,  the little  square thing in the middle of the image is the top of the cab of a really big truck.
The greenish terraces at the top of the image have been revegetated. The greyish ones in the middle are being prepared for revegetation. The tan coloured lower middle and foreground are where sandstone is being dumped from new cuts elsewhere on the mine. When the big hole is filled to a reasonable slope, they'll prep the soil and transfer the vegetation from the next cut to be opened.
Oh, but that ridge on the skyline? that was once Mt Augustus and some 80metres higher than it is now.   

The emphasis of the tour was two-fold: looking at BIG diggers and other kit, which was what the two guys on the tour were there for; and showing off a cutting edge revegetation programme which is probably why Solid Energy sponsors our visit. "Look what extremes we go to to appease environmentalists! See how we tenderly cherish our rare snails! Isn't it pretty! Isn't it natural looking!"  

Stockpiles of coal at the top, muddy hole to be filled at the bottom, revegetation in the foreground

Yeah yeah, whatever, show me how you get the coal. I'm not very interested in the big machines (which are actually quite small compared to Australian mining kit I've seen) and I'm pretty cynical about the reveg. Show me how the mine works!

The colour scheme is coal black and sandstone white with a greenish backdrop of native vegetation. Oh, did I mention that Solid Energy, a state owned power company, is mining here adjacent to Department  of Conservation land (hence the close attention to revegetation and appeasing the public)

 Stockton was mined underground for nearly a century  before technology and economics made open cut a more profitable approach.  A thick seam of very high quality coal sits below about 20metres of concrete-hard sandstone on a high plateau swept by icy winds.  They fill the shafts of the old underground mine with sandy concrete then drill holes for explosives to break up the overburden.

20 metres of sandstone scaped away and now they are digging out a thick seam of rich black coal

Oh before they do that, they scoop up 15cm or so of what passes for top soil on the plateau with all the plants in situ and truck that over to a part of the site where all the coal is already extracted and the ground prepared.  Once that is out of the way, the overburden is scooped into trucks and trundled across the site to be dumped in a big hole.  When they get down to the coal they scoop that into trucks and dump onto stock piles. Depending on the quality of coal it might get washed and crushed  before being blended (and this is the bit that gets me) with lower quality coal so as to make the most possible money. Yes that's right, the high quality coal is too valuable to waste on today's low commodity prices, so they mix it up with rubbishy coal that is even more polluting.  Eventually the coal sails down the mountain in ariel wagons, is loaded onto trains bound for Lyttleton port and then onto ships, mostly to be burned in Indian steel works.

Hgh quality 'peacock coal', almost pure carbon. Way too special just to burn for electricity.  I no longer think of coal as dirty and bad for the environment. What we do with it, like profligate burning is dirty and bad but coal in the ground or a piece in your hand like this, is just beautiful.

In some ways I got what I wanted out of my Stockton experience. It was really interesting and educational and I feel much more confident about interpreting photographs of open cast mines.  On the other hand, I don't feel any more ready to make a mine out of blankets than I did before.  The reality is so much messier than I want my art to be.  The only strong visual patterns are the stockpiles and terraces at the end of the mining process, and the seams and faces of coal itself in the short time its exposed.

One last look down on the mine before we go...

I understand now that mining, at least at Stockton, is all about rapidly changing the landscape, so that it is different from week to week, even day to day. Our tour driver had to keep checking to see if a road she took last week was still there for us this week.  Any representation of an active mine would be outdated immediately and yet this challenge has opened a new direction for me.

I carried my new insights and memories like a glowing ember inside for the rest of my week on the West Coast.  By the time we drove back over snowy Arthur's Pass I was on fire with new ideas for making. Watch this space to see where this mining experience takes my art next, but first expect more posts with photos from other places we saw in the South Island.

Me and a really big truck

Call and Response

The lovely Sculpture Park at Waitakaruru Arboretum has a new exhibition on for Autumn: call and response, curated by Kim Paton and featuring all early career artists. I walked around last week and really enjoyed myself. It is a very fun show with lots of playful interactive pieces.

Taarati Taiaroa's Site drawings involves borrowing a pair of scissors and buying an envelope printed with instructions for foraging from trees around the park.  I chose kahikatea and enjoyed sweet little red berries.

Grace Tai's Sound Hunt : Traces was even more fun with a treasure hunt  for brightly painted boxes hidden around the park, some making a doorbell noise to lead you to the others which had log books, postcards and photos to take in exchange for some small gift back. I made little origamis out of bright gum foil wrappers and took some lovely images home with me.

Another interactive piece was Amber Pearson's happiness tree and good luck gravel. Both demanded some energetic hard work on the hand pump to bring the sculptures up to standing.  This is me pumping up the happiness tree, always a worthwhile endeavour. Good luck gravel shed silver glitter as it grew and I didn't like it so much, perhaps also because of the large bush cockroach than ran out of its folds very close to my face.

Blankets featured in a couple of the pieces, the most successful I thought was this (untitled) by Karen Burns in which the folded blankets lined a large wooden box with a (replica) 1853 musket, a bible in Maori and some beer bottles.  The blankets were all folded with their lovely vintage labels showing, and since I have a thing about blanket labels I photographed each of them individually.

I'm fascinated by the industrial history of the gravel quarry that transformed the landscape at the site before it was planted up by the current owners, so I appreciated Ryan Monro's RIP Greywacke in which little boxes with a big chunk of gravel were scattered inconspicuously around the edges of the quarry.

At the bottom of the quarry Veronica Herber's Slowness Shifting II was a lovely subtle cascade of masking tape down the rocky cliff face and across the path.

Two of the artists I am most familiar with in the show were tucked into the shady forest edges.  I've seem many photographs of Nell Nutsford's Mould, erosions and extrusions but to see them in real life set in the landscape was a whole new experience.  As large glossy photos in a white gallery they seemed purely conceptual, but in among moss and lichens they seemed like they were a new kind of alien plantlife growing our of the gravel.

I met Ross Forbes last month at the opening of Sculpture and Object at Sanderson Gallery where we both had work.  Once again, his signature style was transformed away from the gallery into something much more organic.  With his shards of mirror reflecting foliage instead of walls, and the balance of ropes and weights seeming more precarious on a rocky hillside, and the whole thing covering a much bigger space, I found "clash crash bang" very beautiful and exciting.

There's lots of other work in the show that I liked, and very little that is predictable or boring.  If you are in the Waikato I'd recommend checking out this show before it finishes on 10 June.  I think it would be great to take children around and even people who aren't usually that interested in art would, I think find it stimulating.

The image at the top of the post is  part of a zombie woodland creature picnic, Antoinette Ratcliffe's Freeze Sucker.