Giveaways
SOUTH of Auckland lies Hamilton, the largest inland city in New Zealand. These days, Hamilton has a population of nearly 200,000, and is the fourth most populous urban area in New Zealand after Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.
Hamilton’s Māori name is Kirikiroa, or ‘long stretch of cultivated land,’ a reference to the embankments of the Waikato River, which runs through the middle of the city, part of a network of gardens that help to make this somewhat overlooked city worthy of a visit.
The embankments are now a lovely esplanade area, forming part of a system of parklands that really make Hamilton, or Kirikiriroa, worth a visit.
Several pou or totemic poles (one currently away for repairs) hark back to the days of Maori cultivation of this area.
One honours the goddess of death and misfortune, Hine-nui-te-Pō, whose counterparts include Kali in India and Skaði (‘the scathing one’) in Norse mythology.
Further south, the embankments widen out into the magnificent Hamilton Gardens, lately ranked among the top 1% of world attractions by Tripadvisor.
The Hamilton Gardens include a freely accessible parkland where you can wander through woodlands and encounter such surprises as a Russian belfry on top of a hill.
And a large pond with a café, and walkways around it.
But the must-see part is the enclosed gardens, which currently cost NZ $20 for an adult visitor to enter, or $50 for an annual pass. You enter them through a building called the Gallagher Visitor Centre.
The enclosed gardens consist of 18 themed gardens, including what may be the only, or last, remaining traditional Māori garden, known as Te Parapara, which honours the way Kirikiroa used to be.
Other enclosed gardens include the Italian Renaissance Garden.
And the intensely photogenic Ancient Egyptian Garden, the most recent of the enclosed gardens to be completed.
Here is a video of the Ancient Egyptian Garden:
The enclosed gardens are divided into several themes, such as the Paradise Garden Collection, which includes the Italian Renaissance Garden. You can explore the themes from a brick courtyard with a fountain in the middle.
Here’s photo taken inside the Japanese Garden:
And a bamboo walkway in the Chinese Scholar’s Garden.
The Indo-Persian Charbagh (‘four gardens’) garden, with its four-corners theme, is also one of the Paradise Gardens.
Other themes include practical food and herb gardens, of which Te Parapara is one, and the following Permaculture Garden.
Gardens of a more fantastic sort include the Tudor Garden:
And the Picturesque Garden, with 18th-century Viennese themes:
There’s a mockup of Katherine Mansfield’s childhood home called the Mansfield Garden, all set out for a garden party with a marquee, in a manner that evokes her short story ‘The Garden Party.’
Perhaps the most fantastic part is the Surrealist Section, which you enter through a yellow wardrobe (shades of C S Lewis) and which includes robotic moving trees and a floating steampunk blimp, the Huddleston Airship.
More gardens are being added to the total and will be open shortly. They include Mediaeval, Pasifika, and Baroque Gardens.
Other garden areas include the Hamilton Lake Domain and the remains of the town belt, the long rectangular parks that can be seen in the map at the start.
There’s lots of fascinating street art, such as this mural on Victoria Street, one of Hamilton’s most important streets. It overlook a carparks that can be seen from Garden Place on the western side of Victoria Street, and sits next to the Old Post Office, now part of the Sky City complex of eateries, conference centre, casino and a pub (the same Sky City that has the pou on the riverbank behind).
Here's a photo of Garden Place:
The next photograph shows the beige tower of the MLC Building peeping above the trees of Garden Place. MLC was a former Australian insurance company with classy 1940-vintage headquarters in several New Zealand cities, each building bearing a sculpture with the legend ‘Union is Strength.’ These can still be seen, though MLC was taken over long ago.
Garden Place used to be a lot less leafy: in fact, it used to be a carpark. In the next photo, taken in 1966 from the opposite direction to the one above, you can see the MLC Building at the left, overlooking not trees, but a sea of cars.
What is now the Old Post Office, on the far side of Victoria Street, can be seen in the right middle background of the picture next to the Bank of New Zealand building (BNZ), which seems to have been remodelled since but still sports an updated BNZ logo.
Here’s some more street art, next to an orange building that is, in its turn, right next to the Waikato Museum.
The Waikato Museum has a statue of Riff Raff, one of the characters in the Rocky Horror Show, written by a British-born Hamiltonian called Richard O’Brien who also played Riff Raff in the Rocky Horror Picture Show: how’s that?
Another modern statue, of Sapper Horace Millichamp Moore-Jones, is to be seen on Victoria Street opposite Sapper Moore-Jones Place.
At Gallipoli, Moore-Jones, another local hero though of a different sort, painted the legendary watercolours of the ‘Man with the Donkey’ and subsequently survived the First World War (which he served right through), only to die from burns received while trying to rescue people from a fire in the Hamilton Hotel in 1922.
Hamilton has an excellent bus terminal, with more mural art.
The city is named after a British officer named John Fane Charles Hamilton, whose last words were “follow me, men.” The name is a little controversial, as Hamilton was killed fighting the cultivators of Kirikiroa at the Battle of Gate Pā near Tauranga in April 1864, some nine months after the British Invasion of the Waikato had begun.
A statue of Captain Hamilton was erected as recently as 2013 in the city that bears his name, only to be pulled down again in 2020 in deference to fast-changing sensibilities.
(For more on this historical background, see my earlier posts ‘Carrying on Down the Waikato’ and ‘Carrying on Down the Waikato (Part Two).’)
Finally, there are lots of eccentric or one-off businesses in provincial New Zealand. For instance, check out New Zealand’s one and only, as far as I know, completely dedicated Map and Chart Shop, further up Victoria Street!
If you liked this post, check out my award-winning book about the North Island, available from this website a-maverick.com.
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