2 June – 7 August
Exhibition Opening 17 June, 6-8pm
First Floor Galleries
This exhibition is part of the Auckland Festival of Photography 2022
Tony Nyberg is a photographer, videographer and co-founder of back_space_books, based in Tāmaki Makaurau. The subject of this series is Oakley Creek / Te Auaunga Awa, a significant Auckland urban stream, flowing from Hillsborough to the Waitematā Harbour.
Oakley Creek / Te Auaunga Awa is within walking distance of Tony’s former home in Pt Chevalier. This provided him with the access and opportunity to continuously photograph the environmental and cultural changes of the creek and its surrounds throughout the seasons, over a three-year period.
Growing up in Ōtautahi / Christchurch, summer holidays were spent at the many rivers in the region. Being a local urban waterway, Oakley Creek was a place for exploration that was reminiscent of these early childhood years. It was also a place of solace, a welcome retreat from the busyness of city life. Tony’s attentiveness to this local ecology over several years highlights the richness of life around this urban waterway.
Oakley Creek / Te Auaunga Awa is one of Auckland’s longest urban streams, flowing from Hillsborough through Mt Roskill, Owairaka and Waterview to the Waitematā Harbour. The creek’s rich Māori and European heritage and abundance of native and exotic flora and fauna makes it an important natural asset.
With colonial settlement, many of the ancient wetlands in Puketāpapa / Mt Roskill were drained for farming and lengths of the stream were channelled in the late 1930s; however, the lower reaches of the creek have remained relatively natural and unmodified.
Recently, in the Wesley / Mt Roskill area, concrete channels for the stream have been replaced with a wider, naturalised stream channel to prevent ongoing flooding issues. This work, initiated through the Puketāpapa Greenways Plan, has restored native ecologies and improved water quality with landscaping and planting while also adding walking trails and cycle paths, building an outdoor classroom and a playground.
ESSAY EXTRACT BY DR ROBIN KEARNS, PROFESSOR OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT, UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND.
Read full essay here:
https://www.photoforum-nz.org/blog/2021/2/22/tony-nyberg-featured-portfolio
I often exit the shared cycling and walking path that runs along Great North Road and walk onto the trail that skirts Te Auaunga/Oakley Creek. Doing so is to step through a portal into a corridor of imperfect beauty. The path is broken but the land is being healed. Here, for almost two decades, volunteers have weeded, planted and cared for this place. Gradually its mana is being restored. I too have planted and plucked rubbish from the riverbank. But more commonly I have just walked.
The waters of Oakley Creek have become part of my place. I know each bend and I am not alone. A friend tells me he cannot stay away: the Creek has become his Walden Pond. In its presence, the stream speaks to those who listen.
We are drawn to water if we allow it to beckon us. It is as if we are attracted by a centripetal force. The stream forges a curvature to serve its gushing artery. There is a pulsing energy from the heart of the isthmus, contesting attempts to contain its course. Straight lines, by contrast, are the city’s motif: lines mark the middle of roads, edges of buildings, the geometries of boundaries. But streams have their own reasoning, carving a course of least resistance; passing mossy rocks and through gaps between them. The flow knows its own compass, seeking out the sea.
Biography: Robin Kearns
Until recently, Robin Kearns lived in Mt Albert, not far from Oakley Creek. His affection for the Creek was heightened when a dog joined his household and a shared canine-human affinity for the walkway developed. A further layer of connection is a research interest in the adjacent Carrington and Oakley Hospitals, now occupied by Unitec. These sites feature in his book The Afterlives of the Psychiatric Asylum (Routledge, 2016). Robin is a Professor of Geography and Head of the School of Environment at the University of Auckland. He has contributed to international scholarship on the links between places and human wellbeing . His most recent book is Blue Space, Health and Wellbeing: Hydrophilia Unbounded (Routledge, 2019).
