The river corridor is probably the largest area of managed retreat in an urban centre worldwide. How can our experience inform processes of managed retreat elsewhere? The question is central to this project, which has developed a model of ‘retreat’, ‘relocation’ and ‘re-imagining’. Re-imagining asks how can the land be re-used for projects that further lower environmental and social risks.
Mark Gibson
Mark Gibson, Methodist Minister, founder, Avon Ōtākaro Network and River of Life.
Mark is a retired (2022), ordained Methodist Minister, who was based in New Brighton at the time of the February 2011 earthquake. He chaired the New Brighton Project, and was the first chair, and then co-chair, of the Avon Ōtākaro Network (AvON). Part of his ministry was the River of Life Project, which gave rise to a series of community-focused initiatives in the red zone, including the annual Great Ōtākaro Avon River Walk, now in its fourteenth year. He was also involved with Tanya Didham in Eastern Rising, and with the River of Flowers.
How did you become involved with the New Brighton community?
I'm an ordained minister in the Methodist Church. I've retired now, but I took up a new position in New Brighton two and a half weeks before the February 2011 quake. I was actually in the church building with three other people at the time: we were having a meeting to discuss the possibility of some kind of autumn festival for the greater Brighton area, celebrating harvest and so on. We were really excited and engaged around this and the quake struck. A significant part of the building, the brick end, fell down. Luckily, we were at the wooden end and managed to get out. That completely shaped why I was in New Brighton. I was probably there a lot longer than I originally had in mind. I thought I might be there for five or six years and the main brief I was given, because it was a small struggling parish, was to engage strongly with the wider community and get involved in leadership.
Alongside that position, which was three-quarters time, I had sold to my regional church, that we call synod, a vision of an alternative type of ministry that was focused on ecological issues because that had become very important to me. And I had felt for a number of years that it was a part of my ministry that I needed to be able to give expression to. So, to cut a long story short, my synod said, yes, we'll support you in that quarter time as a very experimental type of ministry. Well, the earthquake happened and okay, my first question was “What's this going to look like?!”
Within weeks, I'd been approached by the New Brighton Project. They were in crisis and they needed a new chair: they'd already seen me at work on the ground and said you're the sort of person we're looking for. So, I took up being chair of the New Brighton Project and within a week or two after the earthquake, I was in conversation with Marcus, the paid worker for the Project. We decided that we needed to bring the community together, so we organized an event called Together We Are One by the War Memorial in New Brighton. It was about two or three Sundays after the earthquake. And Lianne Dalziel spoke as the local MP. We were delighted that Tipene O'Regan, who lived in Brighton, decided he wanted to come because he thought it was very important. So we asked him to speak and his daughter, Hana, too. It was quite a significant gathering and event, and a lot of Brighton people were there: it might have been 100 people. So, suddenly, I was very engaged with the community, and people were already seeing me in a leadership role.
And then you become involved with setting up the Avon Ōtākaro Network?
We got to a few months down the track and the red zoning happened. Ashley Campbell got this Facebook page going. She lived out of town, but her beginnings had been in Bexley and her family home and her parents had been red zoned in Bexley. I didn't know Ashley, but I discovered the Facebook page within the first week. I'd started to get involved in social media immediately following the earthquakes, as one of my daughters said, “Dad, you've got so many stories you're telling us of what's happening there and what you're involved in. You've got to get into social media’. So, I did, and I saw this page that Ashley had set up. And I was fascinated with the conversations that were getting going.
But the community activist in me got frustrated as it wasn't going anywhere. My sense was that we needed to get beyond the talk. So, wearing the hat of my other ministry, which was called the River of Life Project, I decided this is going to be one of the early initiatives. I'm going to call a public meeting and get it going. So, on what turned out to be the coldest day that winter in August, the meeting happened at the pavilion at the New Brighton Community Gardens. And the building was packed. It got to almost standing room around the doorway. There were 55 people in there. I was just amazed. I'd asked Evan Smith and the local Anglican priest, Carly, who was Australian, they were both living in the red zone, to speak. It was an incredible meeting; I chaired it because I'd called it, and I had chairing skills. By the end, people were saying we need an action group. About 15 people put their hands up and said, we'd like to be part of it. And then they all looked at me and said, you're the chair.
I didn't know what I was getting myself in for. It was unbelievable. What began was incredibly intense, time consuming, exciting, scary, something different to anything I'd ever been involved in before. I would say it was the same for everybody else. And we had to kind of work it out as we went along. At our first meeting we whittled it down to about 10 people and the key people very quickly emerged. Evan was definitely one of them. And Bryan Jenkins, who had been the CEO of ECan [Environment Canterbury, the regional council]. A number of them were only involved for a while and it's been one of the realities of the Avon Otakaro Network (AvON) that the membership kept changing.
The petition quickly became very important and a lot of work went into gathering signatures and we got 18,000. We'd set ourselves the goal of doing this for a number of months. We wouldn't keep it going indefinitely because we wanted to give a message to government quite quickly. The main message was that we want the red zone to stay public land. It must never be built on again. And it needs to become a space for community and for recreation and for nature. And we saw huge potential for it to become the native flora and fauna version of Hagley Park. ‘From the city to the sea’ became quite a phrase. Peggy Kelly, who'd been involved, connected us with a very creative book binder. The petitions were put into two books that were very beautiful and we got the feedback from the petition crew at Parliament that it was the most amazing looking petition they'd ever seen. They were quite struck by it.
When it came time to take it to Parliament, it was taken from the estuary to the airport on water and land by people in kayaks and then runners and walkers and so on. I was there with others on the estuary, on the water, and took it to people at the jetty at Redcliffs, and then it carried on. And then it was eventually handed to me at the airport and I flew with it to Wellington. I met up with Ashley's parents Helen and Alan at the Backbencher pub opposite Parliament and then Deon Swiggs joined us. At his own expense he’d flown to Wellington to be part of it. And then we presented it to Lianne Dalziel, the local MP, on the steps of Parliament. And Eugenie Sage was also there as a local MP. It was presented in Parliament that afternoon. We stayed for that. And then quite some time later, the select committee came to Otautāhi Christchurch and we met with them out at the Antarctic Centre and they took our oral submission.
The petition was a significant part of the early work. But there was also work done on communication such as creating pamphlets that we could distribute. We were out in public places talking about the vision and also trying to engage with decision makers. There was a meeting with various politicians I can think of, with Gerry Brownlee [the Minister for Earthquake Recovery]. They kept talking about the word ‘recovery’, but from very early on it was the wrong word as far as we were concerned, because our vision was about much more than that. So, we were a lot more comfortable with the word ‘regeneration’ when it emerged.
You were doing this at the same time as your parish work?
Yes. I was the chair of AvON for, I can't even remember now, maybe up to two years. We kept evolving. We started off very much as an activist group. But then we were starting to develop policy around all sorts of things. I'm not as comfortable in that sort of space. Evan was much more skilled with all of that. So, after a year or two we evolved to having a co-chair model. He and I were co-chairs for about the next three years. We had to meet extremely regularly so that we were on the same page. I did much of the chairing, but he took on a lot of the other roles, including some of the paid ones. And we had to manage that conflict of interest thing. We had other people who were in part-time or temporary paid roles. We got funding for it, but it got very complex and more and more out of my comfort zone.
I found it very hard to be in the AvON leadership role, trying to keep abreast of all of this, whilst also trying to give leadership in a parish that had been whacked by the earthquake. We ended up in a huge parish rebuild programme and a whole new building complex emerged. That was incredibly intense and all consuming. Plus, we had a number of initiatives going in the local community, like a support group that I led for people whose houses were either going to be rebuilds or huge repair jobs, and the stress they were under. That was for people living alone who were trying to deal with this on their own. We had a community outreach thing which evolved into a weekly barbecue, which then became a community meal. The people who were coming to that needed a lot of support and encouragement.
So there was an awful lot going on. The New Brighton Project was the first thing I gave up. I decided chairing that and AvON was too much. And I was also doing a lot of creative things around the River of Life project with the regional church. There was quite a bit of overlap between some of the things I was doing there and what we were doing in the Avon Ōtākaro.
Can you say something about the River of Life?
It was an experimental initiative and quite a bit of it focused around what was happening with our rivers in the city. The earthquakes had raised all those issues hugely. A group of people got involved in helping support that, coming up with ideas for workshops and ways of engaging with the community. So for example, I ride my bike or walk around what used to be called the red zone. And it's woven with memories, it's become a very storied place for me. I think that one of the most significant things that the River of Life project got going was an annual walk along the Ōtākaro Avon River. Each year it's varied a little bit in terms of where it’s started and ended. But it's called the Great Ōtākaro Avon River Walk, and we've just had the 14th one.
So it's happened every year. In fact, some years there were two. On the first one or two, there was a lot of people walking. We started at the South Brighton jetty and went all the way to the original source of the Ōtākaro River, where the spring was. It was on private property. The couple who owned it were thrilled that we asked them if we could finish the walk in their backyard in Avonhead. Some people only walked a little bit of the way, but they wanted to participate. Lianne Dalziel was one who really wanted to support this. We'd have people like Evan Smith and Bryan Jenkins speaking, as we saw it as an opportunity to hear what was going on, how unhealthy the river is and how through the vision of the AvON, maybe the health of the river could improve a lot, if we made the right decisions and saw a lot of the river reforested, and did the right things with waste water.
Alongside that, the River of Life project was running workshops on water quality. Opposite Avonside Girls High one day we had a community workshop and a number of people came. We involved the experts and tested the quality of the water. We got people involved in conversation around what we need to do. It was really educational. We also had workshops on rainwater harvesting, and a series of speakers and community conversations.
How has the River Walk developed?
The walks stopped going to the source when that elderly couple sold the property and moved to the North Island. For the last few years it has gone from the pier to the Antigua Boatshed. And sometimes to the Millbrook Reserve because beyond that there’s limited public access: it’s a privatised river and we talk about that. But from Millbrook the whole walk can be by the river. And people would reflect on the fact that in the wealthy part of the city you can't walk by the river, but in the central city and in the poorer part of the city you can.
When the Christchurch Walking Festival started, probably about half the length of this walk in years, we made a strategic decision to locate the walk in the festival. There were some losses in that because you have to agree to a number of bureaucratic things the Council requires, but the huge plus was they do all the publicity and we noticed straight away, we got more people. They didn't have a festival last year, so we did the walk anyway and there was only a handful of people. And this year they didn't do nearly as much publicity. The walk was just this last Saturday with about nine people, But usually in the walking festival, there's been about 20. Not everyone walks the whole thing. I think the most people who walked from beginning to end was about 25, and that would have started at over 40. We think a tradition has started, and it's worth keeping it going.
Ashley Campbell talking during the Great Ōtākaro Avon River Walk in 2015.
Evan Smith up the tree, talking to walkers in 2015.
Even though he didn't organize it, people like Evan Smith would often walk some of it, and some of the other key people in AvON would too. One year when we got to where Evan's house used to be down here in Richmond, we had arranged with him that he would meet us. We'd be walking along and I'd say, we're just going to detour slightly here. And then Evan would greet us from up a tree that used to be in his front yard. It made quite an impact. A number of years we also stopped down the way where Bill Willmott and Di Madgin’s house was. They would meet us and tell us the story because the house and garden was intact [until 2014, at 373 River Road]. They had quite a story to tell; they were intimately connected
with the whole Avon River network. There are other examples as well, where we wove in people who were deeply involved in AvON, or some of the side groups that were under its umbrella. So, we heard those stories and along the way people were engaging with the vision.
Invariably when we started off, people would say they didn't know much. But we share stories all along the way and we educate people, and sometimes it would be tangata whenua who would meet us somewhere. Some years we'd stop at the Mahinga Kai Exemplar [an AvOn project in the Burwood part of the red zone]. We'd stop and engage with those stories. People would tell us at the end that it had been inspirational, that they'd never known most of what they'd learned along the way. And it's amazing to actually walk the river. They said we used to see it in Hagley Park or in the city centre, but the walk has given us a sense of the whole river. People would end the walk with lots of questions and that was great.
With that sense of knowing the river more, one of the things that was often said on the walk repeated something that Peter Beck said. Maybe Peter and I were saying it around the same time. We got sick of hearing people saying that the Anglican Cathedral was the spiritual heart of the city. I always strongly disagreed with that as the spiritual heart of the city is the Ōtākaro Avon River. It's the thread that connects east and west. If people go somewhere for comfort or healing in my experience, they'll go for a walk, along the river or on the beach. They don't go to the cathedral. There was nothing religious about this walk. People have their own experience, but invariably what I hear walking with people was in their own words, they'd find that it had been a spiritual experience. There was something uplifting or transformational or something had changed for them. That's why we keep it going. It just, it opens something up.
What other activities did you develop along the river?
The River of Life had its life and finished. But the river walk continues. And then there was another walk that happened as well, that some of the key people in AvON also got caught up in. It also originated as a River of Life thing. It started as a cafe conversation between me a guy called David Hill. It became the 7 Weeks 7 Rivers Initiative. We wanted to focus on what is happening to our Canterbury rivers. The second meeting was at the Boatshed Cafe and it had gone from 2 to 15 people. Two of the people around the table were movie makers. We created the event but it was filmed as well. It became the full feature documentary movie ‘Seven Rivers Walking’ which ended up in the Christchurch Film Festival. It debuted there in 2016 or 2017. It was at the Isaac Theatre Royal and there were 900 people there. It was unbelievable. Then it was in a number of movie festivals around the country, and it went overseas. It was in movie festivals in France and places like that. The last walk in the seven that featured in the movie was the Ōtākaro Avon River and a significant part of the footage was at the Mahinga Kai Exemplar. And one of Gerard Smythe’s documentary series on CTV also featured that walk.
The Eastern Rising crew in the Plains FM studio.
I think Tanya [Didham] has talked about Eastern Rising, the series of programmes that was on Plains FM. I had the idea of Eastern Rising and having a radio show, so I put something on Facebook asking various friends if they were interested. And Tanya said yes. There was about five of us, and we did that for two or three years. It was quite exciting, and the first show we put together was of the Great Ōtākaro Avon River Walk that year. Tanya came along and interviewed people. We stopped somewhere near here, in Richmond along the river. I'd written a poem called “Regeneration”, and I recited it. It was the very first radio show we put together. And I think it was
exceptional. My brother-in-law, who's now no longer with us, was the first inner city chaplain. He had this whole ministry in the inner city and he was part of that radio show as well. He told some quite compelling stories in the central city along the river. And that year we were nominated in the New Zealand Radio Awards. We were shortlisted for the Best Community Radio Show. We didn't win, but we were shortlisted down to the last three. We were quite blown over by that.
One of the other things that happened on and off was that Evan and I were asked to give guided bus tours of what was then the red zone. So we would take people through the red zone and tell them what was going on. People just absolutely engaged with it. I can remember one with the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists. The parish and I also invited the president and vice president of the Methodist Church into coming to Otautāhi Christchurch, because they're both from up north. One was Māori, one was Pākehā, and I said you need to come and spend three days getting to grips with what's happening in east Christchurch and engage with those on the front lines. And to my surprise, they said yes. I took them on a tour through the red zone and they were just blown away. They had no idea of what people were dealing with and the scale of what had happened and how whole communities have been hugely impacted. They were from Auckland and Dargaville and it was a real eye opener to them.
Something else I think is relevant was with my parish in New Brighton. Very early on, we went to a workshop on the other side of the city that had been organized by the regional church. It was about ministering to communities that were dealing with trauma and the impact of the earthquakes. One of the other parishes there was from Greymouth. And they were still totally involved with [the mine accident at] Pike River, with the families who had lost loved ones there. And it was really interesting that at this two-day workshop, the New Brighton people gravitated towards the Greymouth people and vice versa and we started sharing stories and I got this idea. I thought we need to keep supporting each other. So we formed what we called the Coast to Coast, the alternative Coast to Coast.
We went to Greymouth for three days and Greymouth came to us for three days. We actually went to Greymouth twice. They took us on a tour and we went to a number of sites on the West Coast where trauma had impacted people historically as well as in Greymouth. A lot of it was mining stuff but it was more than that. And then when they came here, we took them on a tour through the red zone. We took them to what was happening in the central city around some of the really creative, exciting stuff, like Gapfiller projects. We moved things on from trauma to healing, to stories of hope. I can remember the Greymouth people almost with their mouths open. Some of the places and groups we took them to were amazing. So that was something else I was involved in where I think there was a lot of overlap between the red zone and the kind of ministry I was involved in.
And have you heard about the River of Flowers? I led the ceremony that happened in New Brighton for a number of years. I was quite involved with Michelle Whittaker and what she was doing on the wider stage there. It was incredible how the New Brighton community engaged with that. One year we had over 300 people down at the river. We had children involved and a Waka Ama crew out on the river and the waka chanting. It was spine tingling. The whole community found it so meaningful and moving. It was a place to take in what was happening for them personally and have a sense of the community being together and supporting each other.
How did all this affect you personally?
On and off over the years, I'm a writer and a poet. How I processed what was happening for me, and to us as a family, was I started writing poetry again. After a few years, I realized I had a lot of material. So I got talking with a few people and found a publisher. What emerged was a book called The In-Between Land [Wellington, 2015] and that is my poetic way of describing the red zone. We launched it at the Wainoni Methodist Church in the red zone. That church doesn't exist anymore. In the last few years of its existence, I was part-time appointed there as a transitional minister to help the parish work out were they going to stay, relocate, close down or whatever. Anyway, the book’s gone to all sorts of places. I keep hearing from people they've given the book to around New Zealand and overseas.
It was really important for me to do that. When I resigned from being the chair of AvON, I decided not to stay on the committee either. I needed a complete break from it. I was still really supportive and wanted to see the vision realized, but I'd burned out. It had been so intense and I'd given so much to it. And with a heavy heart, but also with some relief, I let it go. Things were also changing for me professionally and I knew I was going to be moving further away from the red zone, and that wasn't where a lot of my energy and focus was going to be. It just seemed to be the right time to do it. And I knew Evan would be continuing, he would chair it.
I've continued to support from a more of a distance, but there have been critical times when I've turned up. So when oversight of what was no longer the red zone but now the Ōtākaro Avon River Corridor was handed over by the Crown to the City Council, there was a kind of official handing over. I turned up that day because I thought it was important. I've also continued to follow the whole process of co-governance. It really concerns me that there is not an official at-the-table community voice. Some people say, oh well, if Council is there, they are representing the community. I don't agree. Politicians come and go, but those from the community who are on the ground know the story and have the connection over all these years: that institutional memory is really in danger of being lost. A lot has already gone with Evan’s passing [in 2020]. A lot's gone with Bryan Jenkins moving to Adelaide, as well as all the others who have moved on. For the community voice not to be recognized in the ongoing governance I think would be a travesty.
So where do you think the red/green zone has got to in relation to the things that have concerned you over the last 10 or 15 years?
Apart from the governance issues, I still think there's a lot of positive things at the community level. But one of the main motivators for me right from the start was the health and well-being of the river. And I still have that concern. I don't see that the health of the river has improved. A lot of time and energy and resource went making the river much more a feature of the central city. But I'm not sure in terms of what's polluting this river that a lot's changed. I know a lot of focus has gone into infrastructure, water infrastructure, wastewater and so on. But I’m not sure the well-being of the river has been seriously addressed. I've had conversations with key people in the Council staff who've said things like it'll all cost too much and politically the city won't buy it. That leaves me with a heavy heart but I don't accept it.
I'm one of these crazy people who believes if you look after the river, the well-being of the community would be a lot better. Because I see the impact on people when they look at the river and how unhealthy it is. And it makes them sad and despondent and depressed. And I also see the impact it has on people if they're in a natural place that is healthy and it takes them to a different place. So it goes pretty deep for me. This is why I think I have a strong affinity with the tangata whenua approach which does have a deeply spiritual component. The health and wellbeing of water is really, really important. A river just isn't a thing. And it's not about utilitarian values and so on. It goes much deeper than that.
It's a much more holistic thing. That's where my motivation continues to be. On Saturday when we did the annual river walk, for the first time we could see where it can now flood and overflow into the new wetland area in Baxley. We need more of that kind of enabling the river to be much more naturalized. I think that's where the hope is. Part of the vision was always to the City to Sea pathway. Seeing that now coming to fruition is exciting. I cycled on it to come here today. It brings people to the river. And if you walk or cycle along it, it changes your sense of the river and its importance. It opens something up, because it starts to give people a different experience. I'm a huge believer and I have been for a long time in what I call experiential education.
You can sit people in seminars and workshops and all the rest of it and have a talk fest and there's a place for that, but something I've tried to do for a long time is take people places and give them an experience. It's a whole awareness raising. It grows a sense of relationship with the river. It gives them a holistic experience, which I think is where the real change and transformation happens. So if from here on I'm involved in anything to do with this river or the whenua along the river, it will be those experiential things. With other people and with community, because that is where the most worthwhile stuff happens. Regeneration, I think, for people and place happens in that experiential way.
I’m very happy to leave it there. It's been quite a spiel.
Interview with Eric Pawson at Avebury House, 16 April 2025