Anniversary Ceremony – Christchurch Art Gallery

Sunday 26 October 2003

Mayor and Mayoress Nakada, distinguished guests from Kurashiki, official guests of the city of Christchurch and colleagues, greetings to you all.

Let us briefly look back on this 30th birthday of our Sister City ties before we again go forward. When you think back 30 years we were living in a very different time in terms of technology and society.

Here in New Zealand we were just getting over the shock of the United Kingdom heading into the Common Market and on the way telling us, its former colony, it was time to grow up and find our own way in the world.

In Japan you were well on your way to becoming one of the world's most dynamic and prosperous economies.

The world itself, although just as dangerous and beset by war as today, was also a place where the sense of time and distance was much larger.

Much of the technology that we now take for granted; home and office computers, the Internet and cell phones, were still the stuff of very advanced laboratories, or more commonly, science fiction.
I don't think many of us then had the slightest idea how massively and totally our world was to change in terms of technology, society and general mobility.

Since then, like all world citizens in the economically developed world, we have been witness to huge and amazing waves of change that have swept through our societies, our families and our lives. Rather than living in the industrial world, we are now told that we live in the post-industrial world. Like many other cities, we are rather good at making and selling products, and we are puzzled to find we that are in a post-industrial world. It appears to me that the “post-industrial world” may be another expression and prediction, like the “paperless office”, that does not stand the test of time.

Cities like Kurashiki and Christchurch, who seek to be world citizens and turn their faces to the sun of our common humanity, have learnt in these times of huge tumult and change that there is only one constant that we can all depend upon. That constant is the need we all have for each other.

Our own first people, the tangata whenua of New Zealand / Aotearoa (here in Christchurch the Ngai Tahu iwi, or tribe), have a saying about what matters in life. Translation is difficult from the Maori language, to English, to Japanese, so I will translate it as saying that what matters in life is – “people; it is people, it is people.”

There is a deep truth here, that those who set up the ties between our two cities realised all that time ago. It is a truth that in the world of globalisation has taken on new strength and value. In a world where many products look, taste and are the same, everywhere, the mantle of our own culture and sense of being has never been so valuable in defining who we are.

At the same time the need to reach out across the barriers of time, race, nation and colour has also never been quite so important. I was vividly reminded of this during my visit to Japan this year, when I took part in the remembrance ceremonies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a lifelong supporter of peace I had always known, intellectually at least, how awful, harrowing and sudden was the horror that was unleashed on
the people of those two cities.

How much worse and how much more real it was to feel the horror of those events, from the blackened relics of buildings and homes, and from the people who lived and suffered directly from the attacks. Because I was given the gift of meeting and listening to some of these people it has now all become so much more real and human to me. It has ceased to be an abstract objection and instead become something I can feel with my heart.

That is the magic and majesty of direct human contact. It is why as a building block of peace the Sister City ties have a value
that it is impossible to quantify. For people in both our cities the other city is not just an abstraction. It is a place with people they know, with whom they have worked and played sport; eaten with and laughed and played with.

The Sister Cities allow us to put a human face on the rest of the world. They are also, in the case of mature ties such as this, increasingly a way of creating something new and unique in the art and culture of the Asia Pacific rim. The importance of this cannot be overstated.

Christchurch opened New Zealand's newest art gallery earlier this year. In the central city, it gives us one of the largest cultural precincts of any city anywhere. Combined with the nearby Arts Centre, the Museum and the Botanical Gardens, we have a huge inner city area devoted to culture, botany and art. It has led to an explosion of creativity in this city.

This is echoed in the intensity, brilliance and quality of the creative exchanges between our two cities. Our stone will be joined together in the Line's Extending sculpture that Graham Bennett has prepared for your city. It is a creative and tangible union that echoes the solidity of the ties between us.

We in return will benefit from Wataru Hamasaka’s work while he is Artist in Residence here at our Arts Centre.

As each creator works in each other’s city they will be absorbing the influences of the new culture around them. Eventually this will lead to new, uniquely different, creative visions emerging.
It is, on an artistic level, the reflection of what has been happening on a human level between our cities for the last 30 years. It is a very special connection and it is great to have this opportunity to publicly celebrate it today.