Sockburn - A Pākehā Pepeha

On the surface, Sockburn is an unremarkable suburb. There’s no mall or shopping precinct. It’s not a destination, it’s a forgettable suburb you pass on your way out of town or elsewhere. Put it this way, it definitely hasn’t reached bumper sticker status.?

I’ve never been particularly proud to admit it, but Sockburn is where I grew up.?

For some people, Sockburn’s most distressing feature is the Sockburn roundabout, where a torrent of cars converge from Blenheim and Main South Roads into an intense whirlpool of steel and gas. This manmade river was not my Awa. As an urban Pākehā too young to drive, it was an impenetrable boundary to the South—a place to fear and avoid.

But, if you push past the industrial exterior, a hair-raising offramp onto Epsom Road, you discover a rich, connected, thriving community. At least in the '80s when I was growing up. Feeding this community were many collective gathering grounds.?

At the heart was Sockburn Pool.?

Thousands of families would converge to picnic, chew k-bars, swim and burn under the sun every summer. While still manmade and not entirely ‘of nature’, it connected people and nature, and for lack of a local river, it was our awa. By 2007, long after landing my last bomb in its sub-zero diving well, Sockburn Pool and all it embodied was gone.?

Practising Catholics were abundant in Sockburn. Hundreds of families would gather every weekend to commune at Our Lady of Victories, one of Christchurch’s most iconic churches. In the 80s, Christianity played a significant role in shaping values, correcting deviation, embedding rituals and expanding thinking from the physical realm into the spiritual. Like a Marae, it encapsulated the values of family, community and tradition.?

Many of my generation have since turned away from the Church. Even when young, we’d go to great lengths to avoid attending church. Most Sundays at 5 p.m., you’d find a gang of guilt-ridden teenage Catholics seeking refuge at Bowlarama, clocking arcade games instead of reciting prayers. Values and priorities have shifted. We're now classified as ‘non-practising’. Whatever that means.

Growing up in Sockburn during the 80s was an adventure. Walking to school would involve picking up friends at every corner, shortcutting through empty fields, throwing clods and dodging magpies. There was still a sense of the rural with many horse training stables servicing Riccarton Racecourse on the nor’west fringe of town. The Racecourse was a vast open playground, where anything and everything imaginable could happen. For a large part of Sockburn’s community, it represented a meeting of town and country, quintessentially ‘New Zealand’ at the time.?

Before arriving in ōtautahi Christchurch my parents farmed in Waikari, my birthplace. Before then, the connection was further south, in and around Oamaru and the Waitaki Valley, where my grandparents and great-grandparents farmed. Like many rural families, we were refugees of ’80s inflation and the subsequent reforms that decimated the farming community.?

Epsom Rd was our family’s first home in the city. Within a short few years of arriving in Sockburn, I was a fully integrated urbanist, happily and eagerly replacing country life with skateboarding, computer games, and mall ratting.

As a young suburb in the 80s, life in Sockburn could be described as the urban New Zealand dream. Neighbours knew each other, schools, churches, pools, racing, and rugby connected the community. There wasn’t a sense of the haves or have-nots in Sockburn. Although it wasn’t perfect, it felt egalitarian. But within twenty years, all that had changed.?

As Pākehā I don’t often look back to move forward. Looking back one generation, a drop in the ocean of true whakapapa, it’s incredible how much of the collective cultural identity that shaped us as Pākehā has changed. How fickle it is.?

One thing we can be sure of is that the mountains, rivers and land will stand the test of time. Our parents and ancestors are attached to us permanently, as we are to our children. There are lessons in all of their stories.?

It’s too easy to get caught in the bustle of change, the noise, the industrious whirlpool. But there’s always an offramp.?

May the Sockburn roundabout be a reminder.