Travel

Something hurtles past me, disturbing the still air, and I freeze. Acutely aware of where I am, an abandoned house in a deserted area, the startling movement and the realisation that I am not alone makes me afraid.

Where I actually am is the Red Zone of Christchurch. A place that is both the site of a tragedy and a testament to nature in a city where you can both visit what is there, and what is not.

I am visiting what is no longer there, but what I’m also doing is trespassing. This part of the city has been touched so intimately by disaster, where the earthquakes of 2011 caused the land to sink and the houses to twist and bend on their foundations. The residents were forced from their homes and the area is now is off limits, barricaded and designated ‘red’, dangerous, forbidden. It is a place where rooms have been left untouched, where clothes still spill out of cupboards and children’s trikes lie tipped on an angles, where pictures still hang crookedly on walls.

It is the smashed windows and open doors that give clues to the previous trespassers, the ones with very different motives to mine. It is the piles of beer cans and burned rubble in the centre of sitting rooms that gives them away, and when something darts past my face in the entry hall of a small cottage, it is those other visitors that I think of.

I’m wrong though. As my heart stops racing, and there is no second missile, I peer around a corner and into what was a bedroom. There, on a curtain rail, its tail flared, is a fantail, a piwakawaka.

This iconic little bird is traditionally a Maori symbol of death when seen inside a house, but here, as it flutters its erratic path through the rooms, it seems quite different. Here, where the grass is breaking through the driveways and the vines are creeping up the walls of houses, it heralds the return of the wild things, and their reclamation of the land.

I follow the little bird through the house, its tail flashing white and grey as it hangs mid-air, spinning and tumbling. It leads me through the back door and into what was a garden and now is a wilderness. Suddenly, it is gone, and I am alone, standing knee deep in the waving green grass of the Red Zone.

The Red Zone is worth exploring in order to understand the scale of what happened in the Christchurch earthquakes. Include a trip to the central city and the 185 Chairs installation, which commemorates those who died, and a vivid portrait of the earthquakes and its aftermath emerges.