Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
I've been intrigued by this building on Wyndham Street for years. Still looking dignified - I suspect it has always looked this way - despite various neighbours coming and going over the years, adult shops, bars, massage parlours and now various Asian restaurants. The brass plaque and strange old-style wooden screens inside the windows announce 'Thorne Thorne White Clark-Walker Barristers' and enough books and papers clutter the upstairs windows to confirm a thoroughly 'analogue' business.
Passing recently I noticed the plaques and screens have been removed and the building for lease - time to sketch it before it gets made over into a noodle shop or massage parlour!
From what I can find online the building appears to have been under almost continual* use as a legal chambers since the 1870's with the departing business being founded in the early 1900's by William Thorne, I presume the founder of what is now Thorne Thorne White Clark-Walker Barristers. There wouldn't be that many Auckland businesses that have survived that long, let alone occupied the same building for so long! Is this some sort of record?
* The building was for a short time in the 1880's, home of the Evening Star newspaper and housed homing pigeons in the roof. The pigeons brought news from the Thames goldfields and international news from ships arriving in Russell.
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