Welcome to Auckland’s original ‘Municipal Destructor’. Everyone, like me, know it as Victoria Park Market – a super popular open air market through the 80's to 2000's – a great place to buy your crystals and tie-dies etc! I've always known that it was originally the city rubbish dump – when the city was waaaay smaller). There is more to the story, of course. It was originally created in reaction to a bubonic plague scare in Sydney. For sanitary reasons it was built to burn Auckland’s rubbish and waste while using the heat generated to provide electricity to power the city. Sounds pretty clever eh, and I guess we were plague free. However, we must have been breathing some seriously toxic smoke fumes! That 38 metre tall chimney must have helped a little but don't forget all the horse manure and night carts, they were definitely smellier times. The municipal destructor is now a gentrified place that's home to restaurants and businesses, like the superb Milenta restau...
I’ve lived in this city a while and I thought I knew everything about the Auckland Domain; the museum, the Wintergarden, the annual ANZAC Day commemorations, the duck ponds and cricket matches. Then occasionally you scratch the surface a bit deeper.
Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, the first Māori king, lived in a cottage on a hill in the Domain. I was a bit skeptical because Pōtatau was a Tainui (Waikato) leader. We’re talking mid 1840’s before he was coronated and things had ‘gone south’ quite literally with the Crown heading south to claim as much Tainui land as they could.
There are no signs of the cottage today but if it were still there it would have a clear view of the museum, the hospital and the Sky Tower.
In it’s place grows this tōtara tree planted by his great granddaughter Princess Te Puea Herangi in 1940 on the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
Comments