Ben Schrader, We Call It Home: A History of State Housing in New Zealand, Reed Publishing, Auckland, 2005. 272 pp. $39.99 (paperback). ISBN 0-7900-0997-8.
Reviewed by Louise Shaw
The box-shaped state house of the 1940s and 1950s with its perceived ‘good bones’ is a New Zealand icon. Its true worth in both social and material terms has recently been reappraised; first, during the 1990s as government signalled its ambivalence as landlord, and then as young homebuyers snapped up ex-state houses, spurred on by a myriad of home renovation advice in the media to transform functional into funky.
Now, this proverbial house is once again in the spotlight, this time as the subject of a timely history commissioned by Housing New Zealand Corporation to mark the centenary of state housing. Written for the general reader, We Call It Home: A History of State Housing in New Zealand, by historian Ben Schrader with photographs by Victoria Birkinshaw, is a new departure in the general literature of the history of domestic architecture. Previous works in this field, such as Jeremy Salmond’s Old New Zealand Houses 1800–1940 (Reed Methuen, Auckland, 1986), Di Stewart’s The New Zealand Villa Past and Present (Penguin, Auckland, 1992), Jeremy Ashford’s The Bungalow in New Zealand (Penguin, Auckland, 1994), William Toomath’s Built in New Zealand: The Houses We Live In (Harper Collins, Auckland, 1996), and the recently acclaimed Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins’ At Home: A Century of New Zealand Design (Godwit, Auckland, 2004) all concentrate on the material fabric and aesthetics of domestic dwellings.
Schrader’s We Call It Home builds more on Gael Ferguson’s Building the New Zealand Dream (Internal Affairs/Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1994), which remains the most comprehensive resource regarding government housing policy. Schrader’s contribution, together with its accompanying website (www.nzhistory.net.nz/Gallery/housing/index.html), complements and extends Ferguson’s work and offers new insights into state housing. Although Schrader discusses design and mechanisms for delivering state housing, he also poses the question, ‘What was/is it like to live in a State house?’
This results in a much more human story that is also reflected in the book’s wide-ranging illustrations. While reproducing a number of images that had previously appeared in Building the New Zealand Dream, the book also contains a striking number of photographs that contain people. These include contemporary publicity shots which, while posed, do give us a rare glimpse into the interior. Family snapshots, and Birkinshaw’s recent colour portraits of tenants, reinforce the close relationship between the state house and the nuclear family, and remind us that this is as much a story about people as it is about houses. Birkinshaw’s recent colour photographs of a variety of state house styles also remind us how well most of these have stood the test of time.
Schrader, who in the early 1990s wrote a thesis on the post-war development of the Hutt Valley suburb of Naenae, draws not only on his previous research but also on numerous state house stories he collected during this project. Sixteen highly personal stories are interwoven through the book. They represent those who married in the late 1930s and early 1940s – a time of a severe housing shortage, especially in Auckland and Wellington – and those who grew up in state house areas in the 1960s; there are refugees, working-class immigrants, widowed and divorced women with dependants, and families with serious health issues. Most aspired to own their home and some subsequently bought a state house, although one was declined ownership on the grounds that it was not appropriate for a single woman to buy a state house.
Schrader rightly notes in his introduction that this is not a truly representative group of state house tenants. Yet this somewhat biased group still serves to reinforce some of the important themes of the book. They are the ‘deserving poor’, those who uphold and espouse mainstream values, the kind of people that the state had originally envisaged as ideal tenants: poor yet respectable, self-reliant, and deserving of a hand up. Unlike Schrader, I was not surprised that he received few stories from South Islanders. This isn’t to deny the existence of housing issues in the South Island, but reflects the greater pressure on housing in the North Island in terms of affordability. While much of the book concentrates on the Wellington and Auckland regions, there are also vignettes of life in the state houses of other parts of the country including Hamilton, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Palmerston North and Christchurch.
Schrader does not shy away from the more unpalatable aspects of the more recent history, although he has to draw heavily on diverse sources including church and social agencies to expose them. Those who have long been stigmatised by society, such as the mentally ill, the long-term unemployed, ‘problem’ families, and ex-prisoners have, until comparatively recently, been excluded from state housing. With changes in government policy towards helping those most in need, some who could be labelled as less-desirable tenants lurk as shadowy figures behind drawn curtains, and here in the text. (And if one respondent is to be believed, curtains tell us a lot about the neighbours.) While Schrader may argue that public perceptions of state housing areas are coloured by a small minority of tenants, the more respectable neighbours (and housing officials) testify that anti-social behaviour and violence is, in some areas, a disturbing reality.
The book is divided into six thematic chapters. The first three chapters cover the familiar territory of policy background and state housing styles. While dealing mainly with events post-1935, the failure of the earlier Liberal state housing scheme is also placed in the context of the times. Given that Schrader quotes a British visiting expert who, after visiting Orakei in the late 1930s, described New Zealand’s housing scheme as the finest in the world, it seems strange that Orakei is only mentioned in passing (pp. 39, 52, 59, 73, 210–12). An overview of this model housing scheme may have added another perspective, especially as the few state houses remaining in Orakei today are a source of contention.
Chapters 4 and 5 draw on Schrader’s previous research on Naenae and explore the original emphasis on housing nuclear families (and the later move away from this), as well as the vexed question of how a sense of community takes root. The final chapter explores changing public perceptions of state housing, from a favourable image in the 1930s to a less than favourable one in the 1990s.
This history allows us, like the curious of previous generations, to take a peek through the state house window into the lives of some of its inhabitants. Schrader has succeeded in telling a complex story through a collection of stories that are sometimes entertaining, sometimes moving, and sometimes just plain quirky. At the same time as peopling this most ordinary of houses, he has also produced a thought-provoking book that deserves our attention. It should be recommended reading for all would-be politicians, bureaucrats and talk-back listeners who believe in easy answers.
