‘A palace of white and gold’: Remembering the strange, dreamlike fair announcing New Zealand to the world

Tuesday, 9 April 2024

For six months in the early 20th century, a magnificent palace was built in Hagley Park for the largest event held in the city. CHARLIE MITCHELL reports.

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The eastern edge of Hagley Park: where the Avon pleasantly winds towards the sea; where giant, leaning willows scrape the water’s surface.

Today, it’s open grassland with a path for cycling or walks. But for one glorious summer more than a century ago, it was home to a “palace of white and gold”: a soaring monument to the city of Christchurch, the nation of Aotearoa New Zealand, and the empire of Great Britain.

The International Exhibition of 1906, held in Christchurch, was scarcely believable in scale and ambition.

There was a sprawling palace at its centre, the largest structure built in New Zealand at the time, flanked by towers with views from mountains to sea; a recreated Māori pā and kāinga where some people lived for months; intricate recreations of the lush New Zealand rainforest and the bubbling mud pools and spitting geysers of Rotorua; a wonderland of rides and games; seals and penguins captured from the subantarctic; thousands of lights switched on at night, blazing in the darkness.

Over less than six months, 2 million visits were recorded at the exhibition; double New Zealand’s population at the time. It was equivalent to every Christchurch resident going 30 times each.

The country was in a mood of relentless optimism, which official chronicler James Cowan described as “a national ego”.

The land wars were over, and the economy was recovering from a slump due to the development of refrigerated shipping.

Women had won the right to vote, and the union movement was gaining greater rights and protections for workers. Pākehā settlers saw themselves as benevolent overseers to Māori, practising what they saw as a more humane form of colonialism.

All of this had emerged in just 50 years - a person’s lifetime. What better way to celebrate than through a world’s fair?

Revisiting the exhibition more than a century later shows a remarkable snapshot in time.

New Zealand at the dawn of the 20th century was - for the Pākehā settlers, at least - about as good as it would ever get.

Some of the kids who spent that summer riding camels, peeking into the camera obscura, and rattling down the helter-skelter would go on to die in the bloodshed of World War I. Others would be killed by the influenza pandemic.

After that, a severe economic downturn was followed by World War II.

No-one depicted in the surviving images, or who witnessed the exhibition at the time, could have predicted the coming turmoil. They instead saw a nation with limitless potential arising from the Canterbury plains.

So, for now, let us join them in that moment - a brilliant Canterbury summer heaving with joy and optimism - and recall one of the grandest, strangest events ever staged in New Zealand.

King Dick

Richard Seddon was considering retirement.

“King Dick”, the autocratic premier, had been running the country for 13 years, and was unwell as his relentless energy and work ethic caught him up.

It was mid 1906, he had won a landslide election victory and was ending a rapid-fire tour of Australia to return home for the keenly anticipated event.

Seddon came up with the International Exhibition idea himself. He had been preparing the Government’s budget in 1903 and noted plans for New Zealand to send an exhibit to the 1904 world’s fair in St Louis, Missouri.

These fairs were an outward sign of a nation’s progress: to show its wealth, both economically and culturally, and to demonstrate the health and happiness of its citizens.

Seddon announced an Intercolonial Fair for New Zealand: One “on a scale unprecedented south of the Line”, he told Parliament, to mark the country’s transition from colony to dominion.

When Seddon’s idea was approved by Cabinet, only three facts were known. It would be the largest event ever held in New Zealand; It would take place in Hagley Park, Christchurch; and it would open soon.

Christchurch was the emerging economic centre of the country, and with the relatively untouched Hagley Park within walking distance of the central city, a pleasant climate, and a network of electric trams connecting the outer suburbs, it was perfectly situated.

The Government committed to pay for the whole event and absorb any losses. When officials wondered how ambitious they should be, they received a curt reply from Seddon in a telegram: “I thought I made it clear when I said it was to surpass anything hitherto held in the colony.”

And so on a summer’s day in 1905, thousands of Cantabrians gathered in Hagley Park to watch Seddon speak and lay the foundation stone.

From then, the palatial main building, built in a French renaissance style and painted a snowy white, rose from the park. Beside it were two 50m-tall observation towers, one with an electric lift that gave visitors sweeping views of the city. Like the other buildings, it was lit up at night and shone “like a great lighthouse”, Cowan wrote later.

Including the other buildings - the Machinery Hall, the Concert Hall, and the Art Gallery - the covered area spanned 45,000m², about three-quarters the size of The Louvre in Paris.

The building’s framework, which used rimu timber from a West Coast sawmill, consumed 160km of wood and up to 50 tonnes of nails. To get materials to the site, train tracks were laid through Hagley Park, a rare breach of what has otherwise been undeveloped parkland.

By November 1906, it was ready to open.

One man wasn’t there to see it. On his trip back from Australia, Seddon collapsed into his wife’s arms and died of a heart attack. The exhibition was dedicated to his legacy.

With a large sign above the entrance blazing the words “Haere Mai” in brilliant gold, the world was invited in.

Haere Mai

Any fears that Christchurch would choke under pressure were put to rest on opening day.

“If the result of the International Exhibition could be gauged by the opening day, success beyond even the most sanguine hopes would be assured,” The Press breathlessly reported.

About 37,000 visitors crossed the temporary bridge over the Avon at Kilmore St and passed through the turnstiles.

Upon entering the main building, capped by a large dome, visitors were met with an ornate fountain and more than a dozen marble sculptures. They could walk the maze of cavernous hallways and narrow corridors to the sound of music from blaring gramophones.

The covered main street had displays from around the world, as well as regional New Zealand exhibits. Southland sent a small house made of fern-tree trunks; the West Coast sent giant lumps of coal. Canada had the largest exhibit, advertising maple syrup and timber.

Many of the exhibits were meant to promote New Zealand’s technological advancement. In Machinery Hall, visitors could see models of a proposed national rail network, and a model underground coal mine, complete with swirling coal dust and haulage ropes. They could wander through refrigerated rooms and look at a working electricity plant.

One exhibit, dedicated to the “sweated industries” of Great Britain, was an unsubtle attempt to show how well New Zealand’s workers were treated. It showed objects said to have been made by British workers, with tags noting how much the worker was paid, and how long they had worked, in contrast to the better conditions for New Zealand workers.

It was all meant to convey New Zealand as abundant in resources, technology, and empathy, although for many visitors there was another more compelling attraction: Wonderland, the section holding the rides and games.

It was like a fairy tale. Kids could ride camels, or a machine dragon with gleaming black eyes gliding along tracks. Katzenjammer Castle, a mazy haunted house with mirrors and slides and special effects, was a vaguely scary and entertaining sideshow.

Most popular was the water chute. Long lines formed to “shoot the chute”, in which riders would sit in a small boat and fly down a slide into Victoria Lake.

Lord Plunket, the governor of New Zealand, was seen hurtling down the chute upon his visit - “never was Lord Plunket less like the Governor of the colony as he sped down the cascaded way to the lake at seventy miles an hour,” the Free Lance newspaper reported.

The same newspaper had seen the Speaker of the House, Sir Arthur Guinness, gleefully enjoying the ride, speeding into the lake “with a hard, point-of-order look in his eye”, clutching onto his tall black hat. He immediately rode it again.

On carnival night, when visitors were encouraged to dress up, a mysterious masked stuntman named Demos was doused in petrol and set alight before riding a bicycle down the chute, soaring across the sky in what was meant to resemble a flaming meteor.

Part of the lake was penned off as a makeshift zoo. Before the exhibition, the government steamer Hinemoa had been sent to the subantarctic region to collect animals for display.

It brought back a sea-lion (Jumbo), two black seals (Bully and Lady Nelly), and a fur-seal named The Sneak. A cluster of penguins joined them.

“The seals in the Lake have stood the tropical weather during the last month well and seem to be quite reconciled to their surroundings,” The Press reported on January 9, 1907. They were later released at New Brighton Beach.

Native birds were shown in an aviary, and fared less well. Five kiwi were “rather indisposed”, the Lyttelton Times reported, and when two kākāpō arrived, they “moped all day” before huddling together in a corner to escape the glare of the sun.

Wonderland wasn’t universally beloved. The purpose of the exhibition was to sell New Zealand to the world and promote its products and services, however instead of buying products or learning about the country, many visitors went simply to enjoy the rides and other attractions.

“The much puffed exhibition has been turned into a collection of penny shows and other tomfoolery common at every fair, and the dignity of the whole thing is being dragged down to the lowest level,” one exhibitor complained to The Press, signing their name only as “A VICTIM”.

The orchestra’s conductor, Alfred Hill, bemoaned this phenomenon in a later interview - “even serious-minded people were to be found on the toboggan and water chute and not in the Concert Hall,” he said.

It highlighted the exhibition’s contradictions. What was meant to be a high-minded display of social progress was, for many people, a way to blow off steam.

New Zealanders could, for the first time, hear an orchestra play Beethoven and see an oil painting by an English master. They could also, for the first time, see a bubble machine or a black pug.

For every well-crafted exhibit showing overseas products and services, there was a trivial sideshow.

One day, elite chess players would be battling it out at the finest tournament of its kind ever held in the southern hemisphere. On another, visitors would gawk at Wilfrid from Foxton, who at 9 was the “tallest, heaviest and most beautifully-proportioned boy in the world”, the Lyttelton Times reported.

Te Āraiteuru

The exhibition was meant to reflect the supposed superiority of Pākehā settlers, but the way the exhibition dealt with race inadvertently revealed how far they had fallen short.

One of the most popular exhibitions was “geyserland”, a thorough recreation of Rotorua, which at the time was the country’s best tourist draw. Geysers burst with steam amid sulphur craters; a mud volcano was topped with a cone of bubbling sludge.

There was also a bathing pool with warm water. It was primarily occupied by Māori children, who scrambled for pennies thrown by Pākehā visitors. Māori were highly visible at the exhibition, a decision that drew from other worlds’ fairs, where indigenous and non-white people were put on display.

A major attraction for the exhibition was the pā - named Te Āraiteuru - constructed on the shore of the lake. With delighted squeals from nearby Wonderland in the background, visitors would wander around the village, watching costumed residents carve waka and strip flax, experiencing a romantic view of the pre-colonial past.

Its location was noteworthy. While works of colonial art and commerce were kept in luxurious halls in the main building, the pā was a sideshow attraction, out the back with the rides and games.

Over the course of the exhibition, about 500 Māori spent time at the kāinga, some for the whole five months. Even a child was born there.

Despite being populated by Māori, the exhibit was designed and managed by Pākehā. Ngāi Tahu, which was in a dispute with the Government over land, had little to do with the exhibition. Instead, Māori were recruited from Whanganui and Rotorua and brought south.

The kāinga was a mishmash of styles, largely drawn from paintings and other nostalgic visions of Māori life - while Māori exhibition-goers would walk around in suits and other modern attire, Māori at the pā wore traditional clothing and were tasked with conveying “the semi-barbaric life and colour” they once lived, as Cowan later wrote.

Although treated by organisers as a sideshow, Māori in attendance were said to have embraced the exhibition.

“Māori participation at the xhibition had a very different and much more serious meaning for Māori themselves,” wrote historian Jock Phillips about national identity at the International Exhibition.

It was a rare opportunity for inter-tribal contact to discuss common issues, Phillips wrote, and a way for Māori to present themselves favourably to an international audience - to control, at least in part, how their culture was portrayed.

“Māori were able to define a place for themselves within the New Zealand colonial order, and also within the British imperial family, where they saw themselves as worthy members.”

Other Pacific peoples were also invited to the exhibition, again as a kind of novelty.

They included men from the Sawau tribe of Benqa, known for their ceremonies that included walking on hot embers, as well as some Cook Islanders and a handful of people from Niue. For some, it was the first time they had left their birthplace.

Tearing it down

After less than six months, the exhibition shut up shop.

It had an unceremonious end. Rather than preserve the buildings in Hagley Park, locals watched as the towers were pulled down by a tractor.

Whether the event was successful is a relative question.

Its attendance of 2 million visits exceeded expectations, but the event lost millions of dollars. While billed as an international event, the vast majority of its exhibits were from New Zealand.

It was, for the most part, well-run, and showed New Zealand could hold significant events. If nothing else, it kept Christchurch entertained for a summer - and yet, despite its grandeur, little public evidence of the event remains.

It was later overshadowed by a 1925 world’s fair in Dunedin, which received proportionally more visitors, and a 1940 centennial in Wellington. It has largely been forgotten by history.

There is one exception.

In Hagley Park, if you walk along what would have been the promenade in front of the exhibition entrance, you will see a bin.

Stretched around it is a blurry, unlabelled image of the International Exhibition. The legacy of the palace of white and gold lives on, wrapped around rubbish.