Sally Blundell
Still Standing: A memoir by Anna Crighton (Canterbury University Press, 2024), 240pp, $39.99
The cover is sheer provocation. An adolescent, around 11 years old, hand on hip, one foot on a towering podocarp, a bring-it-on smile on her young face. The title, Still Standing, a defiant riposte to those many people who, as art and architectural historian, heritage advocate and former city councillor Anna Crighton writes in her epilogue to this book, ‘have underestimated me and my abilities’.
But there is also pathos behind the title. As a result of the 2010–2011 earthquakes, many of Ōtautahi Christchurch’s heritage buildings are not still standing. In the city centre, just under half of the 309 heritage buildings were lost to the bulldozers.
And there’s poignancy. Young Shirley Anne (she later changed her name) spent her first birthday in Christchurch Public Hospital after a misadventure with a kettle full of boiling water. It was here she uttered her first words: ‘Stand up’.
And stand up she does, again and again. Despite an unloving childhood, a brutal marriage, solo parenthood, professional chauvinism, bereavement, and a post-earthquake government policy epitomised by the ‘get rid of the old dungers’ statement by then Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Gerry Brownlee, she stands up. Determinedly. Proudly. She completes a master’s degree and later a PhD; builds a career as a gallery registrar; becomes a Christchurch City Council councillor; serves on almost every local art or heritage board known to provincial officialdom; buys and lovingly restores her own ‘grand Victorian pile’ in the city; and is appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to heritage preservation and governance.
During the first Covid lockdown, she rolls up her sleeves for the next job at hand—this straight-talking, record-straightening, galloping ‘memoir’ (parts of her life, she writes, have been omitted, but the chronological breadth of this book pivots closer towards autobiography than memoir).
Her story hurtles along, from her birth to a disciplinarian father and an undemonstrative mother in a nursing home on a sandhill in east Christchurch, to schools in Christchurch, then Dunedin, then back to Christchurch, to Digby’s Commercial College, to a job in a legal office, to boys. This was the late 1950s—teenage girls, she writes, were either ‘prim, proper, Anglican and virginal’ or tearaways ‘who bubbled with sexuality and rebelliousness’: ‘I ended up as one of the latter group, and it felt good.’
She is sent to the Mount Magdala Convent to be ‘straightened out’ through daily prayers and laundry duties, but in less than two months she is back to her wild-child life, hanging out at milk bars, dancing to Dinah Lee and Max Merritt, and falling in love, again and again.
‘No one had any idea,’ she writes, ‘of my deep longing to belong somewhere, to be loved, and even married, with children. I covered it well.’
She did cover it up, and she does in a way in this book. As we follow her from city to city, country to country, job to job and house to house, she remains slightly obscured, taking shelter perhaps behind the more gritty and increasingly recognisable public figure that she becomes. In explaining her rather baffling decision to write a memoir, she admits she is accustomed to ‘bottling down’ her true feelings. Clearly, she is thinking of her son and three granddaughters to whom this book is dedicated. Still, in this process of self-restraint—and ‘avoiding self-pity at all costs’—Crighton seems reluctant to delve too deeply into those ‘true feelings’ (this sense of detachment has a strange parallel in the slippage from first person to third in some of the photo captions).
It is mainly through reported speech that we get a glimpse of a more vulnerable Anna Crighton. Through the clinical observations of her medical notes, we see her as a young woman: the desperation, the anxiety, the empty bottle of Mogadon tablets, ‘Looks to men with a childish dependency’. Through the lines from a poem she wrote in 1981, we see her despair: ‘I am in a black hole / I feel myself falling / I am fighting to get free / But my strength is waning … Please, please help me.’
Through the description of a former fellow student, we see her singular unconventionality: ‘Slender, with what was her trademark heavy eye makeup—that is with an abundance of blue eyeshadow that accentuated her cornflower blue eyes. She had a somewhat bohemian air about her … there was something terribly interesting about her.’
There are moments of poignancy—celebrating her 21st birthday alone in a bedsit in the UK five months pregnant; hiding in the bedroom in her mother’s house back in Christchurch so visitors would not see the obviously pregnant unmarried daughter; giving birth with a strategically placed pillow so she could not catch even a glimpse of her soon-to-be-adopted baby girl. But a measure of wry expedience quickly weighs in: ‘It was a lonely and frightening experience, but I had no choice. After all, this must be punishment for my misspent youth.’ (She later meets her adult daughter.)
Her account of domestic abuse suffered at the hands of her husband ‘M’—the beatings, the rape, the overwhelming sense of shame and isolation, the courageous flight with her then-young son Dorian—is raw. But again, Crighton doesn’t linger. Rather, she launches into her academic career, including a BA majoring in history, art history and classics, and a master’s thesis typed in triplicate on a Remington typewriter. From here, she works first as assistant then registrar at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, clocking up ‘many of the happiest days of my life’.
With the imminent closure of the McDougall Gallery, she entered local politics, first on the local community board and then, in 1995, on the Christchurch City Council. In her 12 years around the council table, she comes across as a determined adversary. She fought successfully against user fees for libraries, the gallery and museum; the sale of CCC/Christchurch City Holdings shares in the Lyttelton Port Company; and, after a U-turn, the closure of some suburban libraries.
In 2001, she argued against architect Ian Athfield’s planned alterations to Canterbury Museum on the grounds they would compromise the building’s significant heritage values: ‘Just because they were the brainchild of an outstanding architect like Ian Athfield did not mean that we should cave in to his genius.’
Crighton was not one for caving in: ‘I enjoyed a good difference of opinion, even a battle,’ she writes, ‘provided it did not become ad hominem.’ (Resource consent for the museum redevelopment was declined, but a new redesign by Athfield Architects is currently underway.)
Despite a working environment marred by bullying, low staff morale and ‘vicious name-calling’, she describes with justifiable pride the budget increases for art and heritage and the retention of a slew of buildings, including the Kaiapoi Woollen Mills and Addington Gaol and, post-earthquake, the historic Shands building and former Trinity Congregational Church.
Such successes she puts down to ‘sheer bloody-mindedness, determination and hard work’. She locates herself within a tradition of radical women city councillors ‘who were part of the crusade for equality’, but there is too a brazen resolve shaping this self-portrait. It is there when she sits her heavy vehicle driver’s licence test ‘dressed to kill’, when she gives up her 30-year two-pack-a-day smoking habit, when she celebrates her 50th with an ‘understated yellow rose’ tattooed on her shoulder, and when she opens her laptop in a hospital bed following a craniotomy. That tenacity and her commitment to art and heritage put her in a powerful position in the city.
As well as chairing the council’s Environmental Committee and the short-lived Arts Culture and Heritage Committee, she served on a number of arts-related boards, including that of the Arts Centre, Canterbury Museum and the Theatre Royal. She established the Christchurch Heritage Trust in 1996, organised the formation of Historic Places Aotearoa following the 2010 review of the Historic Places Act, and chaired the Canterbury Earthquake Heritage Buildings Fund Trust.
As a councillor and inaugural spokesperson for the Art and Industry Biennial Trust (later Scape Public Art Biennial Trust), she became ‘the go-to person to sanction any art or heritage initiative’. She gives little consideration as to whether consolidating so much decision-making power in one person, especially in the high-profile arena of public art, is a precarious proposition. Again, she doesn’t flinch. When people complained about the commissioning of a trio of life-size bronze corgis to commemorate the Queen’s 50th jubilee, ‘Have a laugh, have some fun,’ was her flippant riposte. When Christchurch sculptor Andrew Drummond won a major competition for the design of a new footbridge across the Avon River, ‘negativity by a few,’ she writes, ‘scuppered it in the end’. It’s a shoulder-shrugging synopsis of a shabby outcome.
Shining through this story is Christchurch (and, briefly, Dunedin and Wellington) in the 1950s and ’60s. Warm school milk and fish and chips on Fridays, navy bloomers for PE, ‘Night Beat with Randy Stone’ on the radio, Elvis Presley on the jukebox, movies in Cathedral Square, Saturday night dances, winkle pickers, Ray Columbus, the big old colonial homes carved into flats by legendary Christchurch landlady Ma Clifford.
Crighton is there. Drinking, partying, sunbathing, lighting candles in chianti bottles, working as a go-go cage dancer at the Plainsman Nightspot in mini-skirt and knee-length boots, building a career driven by a love of heritage and a prevailing don’t-mess-with-me attitude.
In describing this book, she says, ‘There is probably a bit of “My Way” in it, though I hope I have enough humility to avoid saying “Je ne regrette rien”.’ Some insight into those regrets would temper Crighton’s well-fitting armour, but the Still Standing rejoinder of the title shows the author, now in her eightieth year, is still firmly in charge of the armoury.
SALLY BLUNDELL is a freelance journalist and writer living in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She holds a PhD from the University of Canterbury. She was formerly books and culture editor for the NZ Listener. She has contributed essays to a wide range of publications, including Extraordinary Anywhere (Te Herenga Waka University Press) and Once in a Lifetime (Freerange Press).
Leave a Reply