The state of some student flats in Dunedin is a shock for first-time parents. Photo / Gerard O'Brien
Jane Phare spends a shell-shocked four days in Dunedin’s grungy student zone helping a couple of teenagers settle in.
It’s the piles of shattered glass that shock me most. In Dunedin’s student zone no-one seems to notice. Students, wearing slides or sneakers, step over the jagged pieces, or scrunch through it. No-one goes barefoot in the zone.
The glass will have to wait. We’re putting together a flatpack bed with an Allen key and a borrowed screwdriver for a friend’s daughter. Written instructions and a video are helpful but still, it’s a mission for first timers. Two students from upstairs lend a hand. They’ve already done theirs.
The flat, rented by six young women, is scungy and the promised vacuum cleaner is missing. We buy a second hand one from the Sally Army op shop and dash to the supermarket for cleaning materials. By the time I’ve vacuumed one bedroom alone, the container is full of months, possibly years, of grime.
A row of sash windows covered in dirt and mould take more than an hour to clean inside and out. Students passing by on the street look at us with bemused expressions. ‘You must be parents’ their looks say. Nobody cleans, certainly not the landlords, some of whom charge high rents for dumps. This is squalor central. It bothers us more than it does the students.
In the girls’ kitchen, the power goes off when someone tries to make toast. They’ve moved the toaster and sandwich maker to the floor of the lounge, by a bricked-up fireplace. In a small room crammed with couches there’s nowhere else to put them.
The smoke alarms are beeping, some of the girls’ keys won’t lock the front door, and the stairwell carpet is dangerously loose, which someone has tried to fix with staples. The group has been paying rent since early January but the landlord is slow to respond.
My husband, who I’ll call Older Dad because we’re both in our 60s, goes to Mitre 10 to buy batteries, a smoke alarm, a toilet brush, and a hammer and carpet tacks to fix the carpet.
Outside on the street, bed-length pieces of cardboard and debris build up in hallways, porches and forecourts as more students take delivery of their most precious possession, a bed.
The FlatPack Co, started by Otago University mates Cameron Leigh and Angus Syme, is flat out delivering. It was a business they dreamed up in Dunedin when they saw a gap in the market: well priced, flat-pack beds with do-it-yourself instructions.
Now based in Mt Maunganui, with a warehouse in Auckland, Leigh and Syme will sell 2500 beds to uni students around the country this year. That’s just half of their business. They’ve since expanded to include bedroom furniture for older people in flats, or parents wanting to furnish a spare room.
Leigh laughs at my first impressions of flatting life in Dunedin.
“It’s horrid, isn’t it? My flat was disgusting in my third year so it was good to get home. Some of those houses shouldn’t be lived in.”
Older Dad, who’s finished fixing the carpet, loads piles of cardboard into his rental hatchback after students point vaguely in the direction of The Marsh (study centre) in Castle St where the university has a recycling centre. He offers to take the next-door flat’s cardboard too. They shrug their shoulders and accept; the pile they’re stepping over in the doorway doesn’t seem to bother them. Some of it might well be there when we next visit.
Older Dad is back with a new broom, a brush and shovel, multi-plugs and extension cords. We spend a couple of hours sweeping up piles of glass-and-gravel from the shared driveway and forecourts. Bottle tops embedded in the tarmac won’t budge.
The inside of the boy’s flat next door is like a set from a grunge movie. There are still glimpses of what must have been an elegant two-storey 19th century villa, with its lofty ceilings, strips of oak panels and carved banisters. Now it’s bastardised with crude 1960s and 1970s renovations - rooms cut into two or three spaces, ceilings lowered, panels covered, toilets built in hallways, and holes in walls that no-one’s bothered to fix.
An ancient cast-iron stove is wedged in the back of the kitchen next to an electric stove. There is mess all over the floor and I doubt the boys even know whether their vacuum cleaner is missing.
Two stainless steel fridges look like they’ve rolled down a rocky hill, their doors covered in joined-up dents. Students will proudly point out their punch mark, like laying claim to a piece of graffiti. But hey, the fridges still keep the beer cold which is the point of them.
The day suddenly turns puffer-jacket cold, causing the students to take up positions in which they will spend most of the winter months – huddled close together on saggy couches under thick hoodies and blankets, trying not to turn on the heater until the free hour-for-power times.
Scottish comedian Billy Connolly remarks on Dunedin’s weather in his autobiography Rambling Man, My Life on the Road. He talks about the Presbyterian Scots, with those “wee disapproving mouths”, landing in the sunny north of New Zealand, being spooked by welcoming Māori with their tongues out, moving further and further south until they reached Dunedin.
“Horizontal drizzle – excellent! Let’s stop here! Settle down. We can whine for f*****g centuries!” Connolly writes gleefully.
Older Dad dashes off to the Habitat for Humanity op shop to buy a bedroom heater.
He’s back with organic weed spray, guaranteed to act within hours. The waist-high Black Nightshade and thistles growing out of the concrete have got on his nerves. He mutters: “Where is the landlord? Do they have no pride?”
He sweeps up more piles of freshly broken glass on the driveway and forecourt. A window has been broken in the boys’ flat next door and they look suitably puzzled; no idea how that happened, they say. Had a bit of a session last night.
I ask the boys to stop chucking empties out the window of their top floor lounge, a room crammed with couches on tiered platforms, a TV, and wall art too explicit to reproduce here.
It’s dangerous, someone will cut their feet I point out. And the cars will get flat tyres. They’re polite lads; they nod in agreement. But then they shrug as if to explain something that hasn’t dawned on me. This is Dunedin, there are impromptu gatherings of students in their big, old house. They can’t really stop people chucking bottles out of the window or off the back roof, another popular gathering spot. What can they do?
Older Dad is attacking the now-limp weeds and heading for a row of wheelie bins, one with a torn-off lid, another with a knackered wheel. But the bins are already full of flatpack debris, pizza boxes, bottles and cans.
There’s a fresh pile of broken glass on the forecourt. Older Dad looks at it, shrugs and moves on. He knows when he’s beaten.
Instead, he wrestles for 20 minutes to prise the rubber wheel back on the wheelie bin. That, too, has him beaten and he leaves it to its lop-sided victory.
We move our son’s clothes into his room at Knox College, high up in peaceful grounds framed with roses and hydrangeas. It’s a world away from Castle St.
The inside of the solid wardrobe door is signed by years of students before him, the window opening out to more engravings on the stone flashings.
The dining hall has a towering vaulted wooden ceiling with, oddly, three large stags’ heads staring down from the walls. Mac ‘n cheese is on the menu but so is mandarin and quinoa salad, southern fried drumsticks, guacamole, Greek salad and, for Sunday breakfast, eggs benedict.
The radiators will keep him warm, the power won’t flick off when he makes toast, and there will be plenty of hot water.
However, we know what’s ahead. Flow week, the warm-up, and then O (orientation) week. Otago University seems to think O week is about preparing for university life. The students have other ideas, mainly around non-stop partying and drinking. Young people with no connection to the University or Otago Polytech flood the city to take part, camping in friend’s flats.
The parties often involve hundreds of students, sound systems on overload. They’ll clamber on roofs and on top of verandahs because no-one’s mum is around to tell them not to. They’ll get to know the names of the rundown houses - Deathstar, House of the Rising Sun, The Embassy, Debacle, Cold Street Hotel, the Greasy Beaver and Peasmouldia.
The shenanigans have already started. Word on the street is that two flats in Castle St are at war, firing fireworks at each.
I know our son and his mates will be drawn to the student zone, to those parties, that joy, that fun and silliness. They’ll probably witness a couch burning, scrunch through layers of broken glass, and most likely climb on a roof. They’ll drink too much and won’t get enough sleep. This is Dunedin “culture”; it’s about freedom, friendship and fun.
And, in years to come, they will look back with nostalgia, despite the grottiness and the miserable winters. It was where the band Six60 was born, back in 2008, when the band members gathered at 660 Castle St to make music and jam.
Six60′s Dunedin nostalgia runs deep. The video of their hit song Don’t Forget Your Roots features scenes from Castle St and the band named their fourth album after the infamous road. When it toured New Zealand, including Eden Park in Auckland, in 2022 they played in front of a replica of their old 660 flat.
Their attachment to the house reached new heights in 2021 when they reputedly paid $1.7 million to buy 660, renovated after a fire in 2016. Partnering with Otago University, they’re funding $10,000 scholarships for four performing arts students to live and work in the house, which will include mentoring from the band.
Six60′s lead guitarist Ji Fraser summed up the Dunedin experience in an interview.
“Even though [Castle St] was a terrible place to live – it was freezing and probably mouldy and all sorts of unhealthy things – I remember it fondly as the birthplace of something incredible. We had lots of great friends around us and we had such a rich life on that street. It’s created this crazy life. It was heaps of fun.”
We’re fussing too much. The son wants to be left to make his own decisions, his own mistakes, organise his own drawers.
We slink off to the airport where we mingle with other anxious parents swapping stories about grotty flats, appalling landlords and whether our teenagers will survive Dunedin.
Back in Auckland, a friend texts anxiously, knowing we have said goodbye to our only child.
“How are the empty nesters feeling?” she asks.
“Just fine,” I reply, striding barefoot around my tidy house with a toaster that works in the kitchen. “Happy to leave them to it.”
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
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