67 Esk St's rebirth... The memories and facade remain
The demolition and rebuild at 67 Esk St is a marker for a brighter future in Invercargill, although the memories and the facade remain.
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Somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchenware section is where I was handed the pen to start my days as a sports reporter through the mid-2000s.
Just down from the kitchenware is the kid’s clothing section, an area that once was home to The Southland Times editor’s office. It was where the likes of Fred Tullet would scrutinize the stories of the day and tend to any curly complaints with a pot of coffee close by.
That now kids clothing area is also where talented cartoonist Shaun Yeo once produced his magic during 67 Esk St’s former life.
From 1908 through to 2015, 67 Esk St was home to The Southland Times.
It is where much of Southland’s history has been recorded and the province’s important stories told. Names like Jeff Wilson were introduced to the world from 67 Esk St.
The site - since July 2022 - has become home to the Farmers Department Store. It is the anchor tenant in the Invercargill Central development. The project aimed to breathe life into Invercargill’s decaying city centre.
It’s the marker of a brighter future for Invercargill, although the memories and the facade at 67 Esk St remain.
The developers have done a magnificent job in retaining the facade of the former Southland Times building while demolishing the rest of the building to make way for its new life.
During demolition and construction, I would often spend a moment just marvelling at how they could keep such an old facade standing on its own before attaching a whole new building to it.
It should be noted it came at a cost.
I recall a figure of $1.5 million per facade retention being touted in 2019 during the resource consent hearing process for the planned Invercargill Central development.
I expect the invoice figure would have ended up north of that for the developers.
But what we now have is a beautiful integration of Invercargill’s past and its future.
In a fitting moment during construction, the developers held a “wall signing” ceremony in 2021.
Invercargill Central and Invercargill City Council invited current and ex-staff of the Times to sign the back of the facade before it was plastered to become an entrance to the development.
It prompted mixed emotions for some, but mostly a realisation the memories will forever remain as 67 Esk St takes on its new life.
Many Southlanders called 67 Esk St their workplace at some point in time over the 107 years The Southland Times called it home. Colin Hogg was one of them.
He was a reporter at The Southland Times from 1968 to 1972.
When Hogg heard the news of the imminent disembowelment of the remains of The Southland Times building in Esk St he says he did not shed a tear.
He says he had already shed a last nostalgic tear for his old newspaper a few years earlier when he visited the place on something of a sentimental journey.
Hogg adds he’s a writer who tries not to let sentiment drip in, but it was difficult when he visited Invercargill for that visit in 2015. He was with an old friend, Gordon McBride.
They’d met, way back in 1968, in the newsroom of the Southland Times. Both were eager-beaver 17-year-old cadet reporters.
“Those early learning years at the paper set us both up for variously-marvellous careers, as well as bonding us for life. But, eight years ago, that was all about to end. Gordon had been diagnosed, in his mid-‘60s, with terminal cancer and our trip back south was a farewell tour for the two of us.”
“We stayed at the Kelvin and mooched around, looking for clues to our past and visiting our old newspaper office was the first stop on our loose itinerary.”
Hogg penned a piece from that trip eight years ago for his book Going South: A Road Journey Through Life by Colin Hogg (HarperCollins).
He was kind enough to share an extract from his book with The Tribune. The extract outlines that trip back to The Southland Times’ 67 Esk St building eight years ago when the newspaper was still operating there.
A return to the newsroom eight years ago…In Colin Hogg’s own words
And here we are in the unbustling heart of the city, turning into Kelvin St, parking right outside and checking into the Kelvin Hotel, where we’ve booked two rooms for three nights.
That’s a long time in Invercargill, we’d agreed, but there’s a lot of exploring to be done in Southland, and it was best, we decided, to have a base fully equipped with the essentials of life — a house bar, a restaurant and a smoking balcony, which the Kelvin has (there’s one on every floor).
But we barely have time to drop our bags and catch a breath, because we’re starting the journey into the past immediately with a visit to the Southland Times. Before we left home in Wellington, Gordie had tracked down the current editor of the paper and emailed him to make an appointment for us to visit. The Times office is right where we left it, in its old building in Esk Street, just around the corner from the Kelvin. The acting editor greets us for what turns out to be a sad sort of tour. If there are any past glories here, then they’re hidden.
The lift’s the same, a tiny metal coffin, slow and creaking. This is the lift an unaccompanied goat walked out of onto the editorial floor late one night, wandering over and eating a couple of the stories sitting in my out tray.
Another night, the lift door opened and a man pedalled out on his bike. He was the town’s most prominent eccentric, a Christian by the name of Arnold Brooker, who had a model church he’d put together sitting on his bicycle carrier. He rode once around (the editor) Mr Grimaldi’s office before catching the lift back down. That lift could tell a lot of stories.
There used to be 300 people working at the Southland Times, the acting editor tells us, but now there are only 50-odd, rattling around in this cavernous old place. (The Southland Times moved to Deveron St in 2016).
The only thing Gordie and I remember from the old days really is the lift.
Well, that and the old court drawings of Southland’s most famous murderer, Minnie Dean, which are on a wall, which might be where Mr Grimaldi’s office once was, but it’s hard to tell because it’s a shared work station now and it’s missing a wall. I recall it used to have an open fire, burning coal, keeping all those old editors warm down the years.
When I joined the Southland Times, the Reporters’ Room, as it was called, was not notable for the artworks hanging on its fag-stained walls. But there was that one thing looking down on us, Minnie in her frame.
Born, as mentioned, up the road in Winton, she was hanged only a short walk from the newspaper office in the late 1880s for the murders of a number of babies put in her care. It was said that she put hat needles through their fontanelles to kill them. The number was never agreed on, but it could have been as many as 20. They were unwanted babies and the records weren’t well kept.
Dean was spotted when a sharp-eyed conductor saw her getting on the train for Lumsden with a baby and a hatbox, and getting off with just the hatbox.
Minnie Dean was the only woman ever to be hanged in New Zealand.
According to The Southland Times of the time, ‘She walked firmly and erectly to the scaffold without fear or distress, her last words a brief prayer that she might not suffer. She died instantly. She was 47.’
In the court drawing she looked much older than 47, a tiny chinless woman in a strange little black bonnet.
Gordie chats enthusiastically to everyone we run into on our visit to the Times office, though there are few of them left working in the place now.
There are quite a few desks in the Reporters’ Room, but they’re what they call ‘hot desks’, meaning they’re shared work stations. Only a few reporters are even around.
One of them is a new recruit finishing her first day with paper. She’s written a couple of stories, she says. ‘It’ll be the first day of the rest of your life tomorrow,’ I tell her, trying not to sound like an old dork, ‘seeing your first stories in print’. She smiles nervously. I have several daughters older than her. I feel utterly ancient and suddenly very thirsty.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I whisper to Gordie as the acting editor leads us towards another empty room that used to be something else. He’s not very hopeful about the future, he says. It’s all too bloody depressing.
When Gordie and I started at the paper several generations ago, the atmosphere was anything but depressing. Apart from anything else, the atmosphere was full of smoke. Then, everyone smoked cigarettes like their lives depended on it.
Wastepaper baskets would burst into flames occasionally from discarded matches. We were so busy we barely noticed.
Alcohol loomed large in lifestyle and blood. Everything loomed large. There was a guy working at the paper, the first man I ever heard say ‘The fucking fucker’s fucked’ about something or other that was, obviously, quite fucked.
He might have been referring to his hand of poker. We used to play poker with the printers sometimes after work.
There were a couple of senior writers at the Times who were so senior that they still wrote their copy by hand with fountain pens, never having adapted to ballpoints, never mind typewriters.
One of them, FWG (Fred) Miller, wrote poems under the byline ‘The Poet’.
They were sponsored by one of the big local bakeries, and ran in a little box on the front page of the paper each morning from the 1940s right through until the 1970s.
They weren’t Yeats. They were more Wordsworth, though less florid and shorter, of course. Often, they addressed the weather, but not always.
Usually they were humorous. It’s been estimated that Fred wrote more than 10,000 poems in that time. Like this one, which apparently upset some Southlanders, who to this very day tend to be sensitive about their climate.
The clouds at long last broke apart The old man gave a sigh
As to his awed, delighted gaze
An orb shone in the sky —
A bright, resplendent, radiant thing That hovered for an hour,
And once again slid modestly Behind another shower.
‘Hurrah, hurrah,’ the old man said, ‘that thing must be the sun.
I had to see before I died
And now my day is done!
So that’s the sun, so that’s the sun,’ He said as down he sat,
‘Often in my boyhood days
My father spoke of that!’
Fred Miller was a lovely old guy, a long-time member of the Invercargill Licensing Trust, and a man with a finely-honed instinct for a free drink and a slight air of the old movie comedian WC Fields about him, though much less rambunctious and a great deal fonder of children and gardening. He was whimsical and had some great lines, like his philosophy for life, which went:
‘Pain is inevitable, misery is optional. Stick a geranium in your hat and be happy.’
What a place that newspaper was, such an odd other-world.
Working there was a bit like joining the circus without having to run away, though of course you never quite got back to the real world after newspapers, and you never saw the real world the same way again once you were taught to question everything.
In those days, a cadet reporter started out at the very bottom and worked his or her way up from there, did the dirty work, fetched pies from the pie cart for the subs at supper time, picked up packages from the railway, took down the sports results over the phone, walked around and got the shipping movements from the shipping office.
And even when you did get to go out posing as a proper reporter, the most interesting thing you might get to do for a while was the hotel round, which involved visiting Invercargill’s handful of downtown hotels and asking to see the guest books, in the usually vain hope there might be someone interesting staying.
And by interesting I mean that the guest was from somewhere interesting, somewhere overseas maybe.
Then you’d request an interview, inquire of the foreign visitor what brought them to Invercargill and what, if anything, had caught their fancy about the place.
Or perhaps you simply took fright at all this strangeness and the other-worldly hours and the fags and the booze and dropped out of the newspaper life altogether to do something less life-altering, like school teaching or lion taming.
Being a scribbler wasn’t for everyone… We had to buy our own typewriters in those days.
I arrived at the Times armed with a brand-new Olivetti Lettera 32, a snappy, blue-green metal portable that I hammered for 20 years before bending it badly at the end of the 1980s when I threw it at a wall in Noumea, where I was on the road in trying circumstances with the band Herbs.
Apart from buying our own typewriters, we were also supposed to arrange shorthand and touch-typing lessons at our own expense, but I couldn’t find time for either and, like many newspaper reporters then, I developed my own versions of both.
This could be a testing situation in my early days, especially on Sundays when I’d be on the phone half the night hopelessly trying to type down golf results from various country correspondents. They were usually half drunk and eager to get the job done and head back to the nineteenth hole for another gin. They’d get angry with me. Very angry. And sweary. I recall a lot of yelling in the early days.
‘Call this an intro, Hogg?’ That would be the chief sub, a small, fierce, bright-eyed man called Jim Valli.
The Subs’ Room was through a double-hinged door from the Reporters’ Room. There was plenty of space above and below the swinging door for the yelling to come through.
It was best to learn what you were supposed to be doing fairly quickly, if only to stop all the yelling.
There were other tribes we journalists-in-the-making co-existed with at the newspaper. There were the printers, rugged, inky-fingered, union-loving characters in coats and aprons. The printer in charge wore a tie.
They liked a laugh, especially if it was at the expense of one of us scribblers. One night at the Times one of them sidled up to me and inquired if I wanted to buy a ticket in their raffle. ‘What’s the prize?’ I asked. After all, I didn’t want to look like a fool.
‘Six bottles of piss,’ he said. ‘Piss’, in the rough parlance of the time, meant beer. Well, that’s what I thought. Then, before I knew it, I’d had the great fortune to win the printers’ raffle and went out to pick up my prize to great roars of laughter in the compositing room as I was handed a crate with six milk bottles filled, to varying levels, with piss alright. It was printers’ piss. It turned out that they all had to submit regular urine samples to have checks made on their lead levels, given that they handled so much of the metal.
And then there were the readers, who had their own room, too, and sat there, like a cast straight out of Charles Dickens, reading and checking for mistakes in our stories. They were next to the Subs’ Room, connected by a hatch-sized opening with a glass slide. There was no love lost between those rooms.
No one liked the readers much, a bunch of odd chooks who today no longer even exist in newspapers, killed off by spell-check.
The readers at the Southland Times were mostly women, though the head reader was a man, a pedantic old bugger who was forever getting up our noses with his know-all, finger-pointing, glasses-on- the-end-of-his-snorer ways.
This occasionally drove us to play cruel tricks on him.
There was the night we hooked up a big dead rat by its tail to the spring-loaded flying fox device that shot copy back and forth from the printers through to the Readers’ Room and fired that fat rat straight through… And the night when we went way out over the mark, typing up a fake story about the Queen being assassinated in Australia, in the midst of Her Majesty’s then-current tour of the colonies.
We watched through the glass partition as the Head Reader, a vociferous royalist, rose to his feet, white-faced and trembling, to announce the awful news to his staff. One of the ladies fainted.
I don’t recall how we resolved that awful prank or if I was ever really forgiven.
Out the back from editorial were the various printing departments: the compositors, then the linotype operators with their jittering steam-punk machines full of molten lead. And, down below in the bowels, the pressroom, which would come alive after the witching hour, pumping out thousands of papers for letterboxes all over the province. What a sweet and wonderful time it was, but so long ago.
Going South: A Road Journey Through Life by Colin Hogg is out of print, you’ll find it at your fine library.
Fantastic story ,was it completely true?who cares .great read.