Then and now: What Carlaw Park used to look like, and how it looks now
Then and now: What Carlaw Park used to look like, and how it looks now
Auckland’s council is considering a controversial stadium reshuffle. It is nothing new. Dylan Cleaver takes you behind some of the great moments to have occurred at some of the city’s most famous, long-lamented playgrounds.
DES WHITE looked over his right shoulder, past the No 2 ground, across Stanley St and up the hill to the University clock tower. The big hand was pointing at the 3, the little hand 4. A 2.30pm kickoff usually meant a 4pm finish, but this was no ordinary game. Two Kiwis, Jimmy Haig and George Menzies had fractured facial bones, the victims of French headbutts. Play had also been held up for some time when Martin Martin, the French hooker, for minutes that seemed like hours refused to leave the field after being sent off.
The 11 men of the Kiwis, no injury replacements in those days, were trailing the French 12 by one. Time was not on their side. White had a penalty attempt from the sideline. His opposite, the brilliant and irascible Puig Albert, tossed him the ball and with a Gallic shrug of his shoulders said, "No chance." The boys sitting in the trees at the Parnell end of the ground were the first to tell White that his kick was good. The rest of the stadium followed. The Kiwis had beaten France, in 1951 indisputably the best team in the world, 16-15.
To replicate the kick now, White would have to negotiate a big obstacle, namely a student village housing some of the best and brightest at Auckland University, but if you're a league fan who once worshipped at Carlaw Park, it will never truly leave you.
Kiwi rugby league legend Des White, stands where the posts used to be, at Carlaw Park, Auckland. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Stand, as White, 87, does now, and you can still 'feel' the roar from the old railway grandstand, which shook as the freight trains rattled past. You can hear the cans clanking on the concrete seats of the utilitarian stand on the domain side of the ground as the wharfies enjoyed their big day out. You can smell the stale urine as decades of punters ignored what were known as "the toilets from hell" for the convenience of the back of the stand.
There was the famous corner, at the Parnell end, that rose sharply. You can picture novice players believing that kicks would go dead, being embarrassed as the ball stopped rolling up the slope and watching helplessly as those with local knowledge pounced.
White surveys the scene. The Ponsonby stalwart now lives in Pukekohe. He hasn't been to the site of the old park for some time.
A view from one corner of Carlaw Park in 1974.
"When did all this happen?" he says in amazement at the student village. "It's disappointing because this was a great place for spectators. At no other ground could you get as close to the game as you did here."
"Great... when you won. Not so good when you lost."
It wasn't all Lion Red and skittles for White at the park. Great Britain centre Doug Greenall, famous for playing with plaster casts and throwing stiff arms, split his spleen in half with one tackle and, just to show how ephemeral glory can be, White played for Auckland against France two days after the famous test, missed a couple of shots and suddenly wasn't so clever anymore.
"My father-in-law said, 'C'mon Henry,' - he always called me by my middle name - 'we're going for a drink.' I didn't really drink then but decided to go. We walked up to The Exchange in Parnell. We were standing next to a couple of Maori boys who'd been to the game and I heard one say to the other, 'That White can't kick for s***.'
"'There you go,' said my father-in-law, 'You've lasted in the hall of fame for all of 48 hours'."
Back in the glory days of Auckland club league, when City-Newton v Ponsonby would attract crowds of 10,000, Carlaw Park was a focal point for the mainly blue-collar community. It meant a lot to White. It's not trite to say he felt a spiritual attachment to the place. Now his eyes scan left and right, looking for clues and reminders of the park.
Kevin Tamati leading the victory haka after a convincing win over Australia at Carlaw Park in 1985 with Joe Ropati, Hugh McGahan and Olsen Filipaina.
"Progress, I suppose," he says of the kitset village in its place.
White is not long removed from a nine-hour operation to replace a hip. He's owned seven hips now, four on the right, three on the left. The walk can sometimes resemble a shuffle, but it's a proud shuffle, a purposeful one.
The end of his playing career did not mean the end of sport. He became an award-winning broadcaster on league and had more time for his other great sporting love, bowls. Not much than a kilometer from Carlaw Park in a straight line once stood bowling nirvana.
IF YOU talk to the walls of the greenkeeper's house they might whisper back. They've got plenty of stories to share.
Come in close. Shut your eyes and imagine a stunning timber pavilion with a balcony fit for royalty. Imagine four of the flattest, most immaculately manicured bowling rinks in the country; an oasis of green that never failed to catch the eye as you drove over the concrete ribbon of the Newmarket flyover.
"A truly charming spot, where prospect pleases and even man is not vile," gushed the editor of Bowling News in 1912.
Men play on the Carlton Bowling Club green, Newmarket,
1939. Herald archives
Imagine crisp whites, fresh cut sandwiches, cups of tea and listen as these walls recount the time, in the summer of 2004-05 when Ivan Marsic and Petar Sain went head to head in the Carlton Bowling Club's singles final.
The final end, it's 20-all. With his penultimate bowl, Marsic draws shot. Sain, pronounced Shane, the Croatian way, reaches for his last Henselite, polishes it for luck and drives, taking out the shot bowl to hold one. Marsic draws again. The crowd waits, the bias kicks in, and: "He couldn't draw the shot - I win," says Sain.
It was the last final ever played at the club. The property was sold to a developer. Nothing but weeds and dereliction followed. It was resold to Chinese businessman Donghua Liu, most famous for his association with former minister of the crown Maurice Williamson.
The pavilion is gone. Demolished. The greens are rubble and weed; a makeshift cemetery for road cones and debris at the back of the uninviting Boulevard Hotel.
It breaks my heart every time I travel on that motorway.
Just the greenkeeper's cottage survives, home to ghosts of bowlers past. But the memories of the greats who called it home are harder to destroy: like Sain, the Marsic brothers Ivan and Wally, Ivan Kostanich, Gary Lawson and "the brilliant" Connew brothers.
The land today, where Carlton Bowling Club used to be. Photo / Brett Phibbs
"It breaks my heart every time I travel on that motorway," says Sain, a five-times national champion. "We did alright, got a good price, re-invested it. But sometimes I think, 'Silly bastards'."
The club still exists, in amalgamated form, with Cornwall. They have a lovely facility on a corner of Cornwall Park. There's honours boards and beautiful black and white photos that glorify history, while the faces of past club presidents stare down from the walls.
Most of the pictures would have made the short journey form the old headquarters. It is easy to believe they'd be turning in their graves if they knew where they were now hanging, but the dead know no better, I suppose.
NOT FAR from the old Carlton Bowling Club, in a nice triangle with Carlaw Park, stands Duncan Ormond, on Newmarket Park, near a copse of trees in between an apologetic looking duck pond and a grassy knoll.
It is around about the spot where, after Brian Turner had thumped it up field and "some good kid from Christchurch with an Afro whose name I forget" had nodded it on, the ball squatted for Ormond.
The kid's name was almost certainly five-cap All White Johan Verweij, the opposition was Australia, the score was 0-0 and it was Ormond's international debut.
First day of soccer at Newmarket Park in Auckland. Auckland City warming up before kickoff 01 June 1964.
Ormond, now 65, shapes to kick again.
"Were you left-footed?"
"No, but I've got skills," he laughs.
New Zealand scored a rare win over Australia that night, Ormond's goal to nil. A month later, in July, 1979, the park was no longer, with a good chunk of the field and the Eastern Grandstand (which made a lie of the 'grand' part) having disappeared down the gully.
A horse grazing at Newmarket Park in 1980 nearly a year after a slip destroyed a stand and damaged part of the playing surface. Photo / Paul Estcourt
It is difficult to imagine an international ground, one with the best floodlights in the country, there now, let alone a park that at various times hosted Spurs, Sunderland, Bournemouth, Rangers, Hearts, Norwich, Stoke, Aberdeen and Manchester Bloody United.
The western side of the park, where once stood 42 rows of concrete terraces, is now a nondescript bank and a walkway to Sarawia St and Broadway, where worshippers of Mammon gather for the latest designer labels.
To the east is the gully that swallowed the ground and beyond that 115 Bassett Road, where Ronald Jorgensen and John Gillies brought Chicago-style murder to New Zealand.
In front of where the Auckland Football Association offices were is now a children's playground, with views of Hobson Bay to the north.
This is a park that is going out of its way to hide its past. On a sign at the entrance much is made of the site's pre-European history and the fact it was a tip before a Depression-era relief scheme turned it into a park. It then reads: "Since then the park has seen a variety of uses including athletics, midget car racing, a golf driving range and," afterthought coming, "a major football venue."
Perhaps it is dismissive for a reason?
"To be honest, I was never that fond of Newmarket Park," Ormond, a right-sided midfielder for powerhouse clubs Blockhouse Bay and North Shore United, said. "It was a shit ground, full of sand because they'd play two games there every Saturday and it was the only way they could keep it from completely chopping up."
Duncan Ormond, stands on the spot where he scored the goal against Australia, in 1979, Newmarket. Photo / Brett Phibbs
IT WAS also a ground that, in the general scheme of things, had not even been the home of Auckland football for that long.
Those long of memory and tooth, believe that the spiritual home of football in New Zealand's biggest city is Blandford Park, a ground you're going to have some difficulty finding unless you're the owner of some serious earthmoving equipment.
In Grafton Gully, near the tennis courts and the interlocking junctions of Grafton Rd, Wellesley St and the motorway system, once stood the park, about 10m below the road level.
This hosted football, Grafton Cricket Club and had a cycling track around the edge for velo enthusiasts. The beauty of it, says Ormond, that like Melbourne, "you could go for a drink in the pubs in town then wander down to watch the game.
"People did not like football shifting out of town to Newmarket Park."
But in the 1960s that is what happened, as Auckland burghers began their neverending quest to accommodate its rapidly growing population and their beloved cars.
Auckland playing Tottenham Hotspur at Newmarket Park, May 3, 1976. Spurs won 5-3. Picture supplied
In many respects, the disappearing parks and sports ground shuffles shine a light of Auckland's uniqueness, or what historian Professor Emiritus Russell Stone calls "exceptionalism".
A century ago, Auckland's population was 134,000, about one-tenth of what it is today. After WWII in particular, it started growing at a rate that was far outstripping the rest of the country.
"One of the fundamental problems was always where to distribute the people and where to locate the sports grounds," Stone said.
Sport was no less popular than it is today, although it was far less of a business. For many Aucklanders, there were only three reasons to leave the house in the weekends - church, the movies or sport. All three had comparatively far higher attendance in the days before television and home-entertainment systems.
They didn't mind walking. Auckland was, says the professor, a pedestrian city, so those in Ponsonby, on the city's western fringe, would have thought little about walking 8km to Potter's Paddock to see the All Blacks play their first test in Auckland, against the Anglo-Welsh in 1908.
Potter's Paddock, not to be confused with Potter's Park, which sits on the corner of Balmoral and Dominion Rds, is on the modern-day site of Alexandra Park where, incidentally, the Blues will move their headquarters next year.
"The earliest big rugby games in the city were played on private property," Stone says. "People would come from town to Greenlane and play on farmer's paddocks. Dilworth farm, which is now home to the school of the same name, was one."
Eventually, Cabbage Tree Swamp was drained, renamed Eden Park and became home to Auckland rugby and cricket (and was protected by law, no less), but for most other sports, the city has provided, quite literally, a constantly changing landscape.
An aerial of Blandford Park in 1965. Photo / Supplied
THESE CATHEDRALS are gone now. Some, like Blandford Park and Newmarket Park, mostly forgotten, others, like Carlaw Park, still lamented.
As Auckland twists and bends to accommodate more people, more cars, more houses, it would be foolish to think that where we go to worship now will still be there tomorrow.
