It took a bit longer for Auckland, than its official founding day, to become a real city. And it took even longer for Hamish Keith to do a story on it. In 1971, 100 years after its cityhood was established, Keith looked at the greater Auckland area and found it to be full of "booze and butter booms", problematic bridges, and cars and suburbia. Not so different to now, eh?
Then-mayor, Sir Dove-Myer Robinson frets that the future Super City was a city 'in search of a soul'.
Watch Auckland City Centenary – Last, Loneliest, Loveliest here:
By the mid 1980s, Auckland had shifted from the City of Sunshine to the City of Yuppies. Just before the 1987 share market crash, Auckland was in the grip of an unprecedented building boom. Skyscrapers were rising up like mushrooms after a downpour.
This Kaleidoscope special looks at all the mirrored glass that transformed the city in the 80s and there's even a bit of a (polite) stoush when a leading architect calls the BNZ Tower an "insult" to the city.
Watch Kaleidoscope – Auckland High-Rises here:
Is there life beyond the Bombay Hills? For many in Auckland, that's a rhetorical question. In this documentary, satirist Peter Hawes packs as many puns into the show as he possibly can – luckily the term JAFA had not yet been invented.
In his trusty Morris van, Hawes talks to sheep shearers in Cornwall Park, Prime Minister Rob Muldoon, some strip club fashion designers and if that's not enough, there's also jogging.
Watch Beyond the Bombay Hills here:
Speaking of jogging, many Aucklanders are mad for it, and they have been since the 1980s. This film looks at the famous Round the Bays run and comes complete with sweat, slo-mo footage, samba music and some seriously bad fashion choices.
70,000 runners ran the course for this film and it's sobering to realise just how popular terry towelling shorts were in 1980.
Watch The Greatest Run on Earth here:
And while it's true that many Aucklanders regularly run, it's also true that many Aucklanders only ever run down Ponsonby Road to the latest café. But the Ponsonby Road you see here in this TVNZ documentary is not quite the Ponsonby Road of today.
In 1988, when this was filmed, gentrification was just beginning its take-no-prisoners march. There are still traces of the old Ponsonby to be found in the iconic Gluepot and the local drop-in centres, but boy oh boy, the old girl ain't what she used to be.
Watch Real Lives – Ponsonby Road here:
But Ponsonby Road isn't the only street in town. There's Great North Road and Dominion Road for starters, and then there's the notorious Karangahape Road – affectionately known as K Rd.
In this short film, the musical theatre group, The Front Lawn, take a walk down K Rd and play every character that they could possibly meet while the real life pedestrians just amble on by.
Watch Walkshort here:
But who needs walking when you can take a ferry? Given that it's Regatta Weekend, it's only fitting that we should end on a loving tribute to those workhorses of the harbour, the Waitematā ferries.
Archive footage and stills will stoke nostalgia as old-timers reminisce about bygone days on the harbour; a time when ferries were the main mode of transport from downtown to the North Shore and beyond. Ah, those were the days.
Watch Down and Out on the Waitematā here:
You can see more great content here, in NZ On Screen's Auckland Collection.
https://www.nzonscreen.com/collection/auckland
