Posts by Joe Wylie
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Highway 57 turns very sharply to the right on the final appraoch into Levin. Arapaepae Road becomes Kimberly Road at this bend.
Arapaepae carries on beyond Kimberley in my recollection, but I understand your direction now, thanks :)
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Thanks Hilary, really appreciate the update. For good or ill that place shaped me.
About work conditions for the disabled - with the kind of import restrictions in place in the 50s and 60s Levin was then a booming small manufacturing centre, which promised a good fit with the impetus back then to make useful citizens of the disabled. My mother encouraged my brother and me to drop in on two of her favourites, who she'd known as boys from her time nursing at Templeton.
They lived in a very basic staff house at Ashley wallpapers, and having visitors was probably meant to encourage their attempts at domesticity. While I have no idea how fairly they were treated in their employment they seemed to manage well enough. The only issue for me was their insistence on our listening to both sides of their one and only LP, which featured "Holland's most famous barrel organ".
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
And a few weeks ago we took the back route from Palmerston North through to Levin. I had to slow down to nearly stationery for the sharp bend at the end….and asked Peter what on earth was lurking behind that hedge….hidden, unkempt, gloomy…."That’s Kimberly….”
Enough said.
While I can understand your feelings, I'm not connecting with your geography. The chunk of the old State Farm once occupied by the dreaded Kimberley stretches for close to a kilometer along a dead straight stretch of Kimberley Road, but there are no bends, sharp or otherwise, on or anywhere close to Kimberley proper.
These places, should they be bulldozed, erased?
Six years ago what was left of Kimberley appeared to be securely mothballed, with a pair of bored guards who were keen to talk at the main entrance, but strictly no admittance. When I last visited there in December 2012 they were gone. An access road had been bulldozed past the old main entrance leading to some kind of market gardening activity.
There was a big heap of Roundup containers in the field next to the recently demolished staff house where I spent my first 17 years. Even the pohutukawa my mother planted the year I was born appeared to have been blown over. I didn't want to venture too far in, as the few weatherboard buildings still standing were in bad shape. Like Shelly Bay the place was once an Air Force facility, and the peeling weatherboard atmosphere was very similar.
I'd imagine that the later structures are in better nick, but the sheer room for expansion that the place offered only seemed to encourage empire building.
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
This is causing some concern because of the history of the site including unmarked graves.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are also graves from the time that land was used as a borstal. As part of the ‘State Farm’, some of which was carved off for returned soldier blocks following WW1, the various incarnations of the ‘Kimberley Centre’ were among the many uses that land was put to.
A Horticultural Research Centre immediately across the road was started up at the same time as the Kimberley Centre, using structures from the WW2 Air Force training base. On some days the spray drift was clearly visible. From helping my mother with her cleaning job in their office block I remember the posters for Shell chemicals such as Endrin, Eldrin and Dieldrin, all long since banned for their proven toxicity. It was only years later that I discovered that my own mother suffered two miscarriages. The wife of one of the research scientists who lived on site was supposed to have endured three.
Of course no-one made the connection back then. During the strawberry picking season I was happy to be promoted to spraying Dieldrin for red mite because it paid better and I didn’t have to stoop. I must have swallowed heaps of the stuff that blew back onto my face and trickled down behind my hot sweaty mask.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Everybody Loves…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
sinking lids
Oz rhyming slang for, um, work experience kids?
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to st ephen,
#dirtypolitics, defined as “a Totally Refuted Lift Wung Consprissy Theory Which Everyone Does Anyway”.
If we'd all been to 'good schools' we wouldn't need to be told that.
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Sacha,
see, Tom has his moments
And he never post LOL cat pics.
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
From the DimPost.
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Also, John Key has had a secret tunnel built from Premier House to the nearby US embassy.
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Jim Cathcart,
It should not be my moral indignation that you should be concerned about; it should be the sensitivity of those who live in your fair city.
So what would it take to placate these sensitive souls? A downloadable app linked to a kind of home detention bracelet tailored to fit the errant Mayoral anatomy?
