Interest in port spawns history | Canterbury News | Local News in Canterbury

As a youngster Geoffrey Rice was entranced by all the activity at Lyttelton when he crossed the hill to catch the inter-island ferry for holiday trips.

Later as a student he worked there in the woolstores and as a seagull.

Now Rice, associate professor of history at the University of Canterbury, has written a history of the port, Lyttelton: Port and Town.

It's the fourth book on Christchurch history produced by Rice outside his academic specialties of 18th century history and health history, and gave him a lot of satisfaction to write because of his fond memories of the port.

But he says a youngster today would be unlikely to be captivated like he was, with the public no longer having access to the wharves and the inner harbour "a bit bare and barren.

"It used to be so busy, full of rakes of wagons and the passenger trains coming and going all the time. You could just stand there and watch things when I was a kid, but you could stand there for an hour now and nothing much would happen."

However, Lyttelton had a really vibrant community and was a great place to take visitors because it was such a visual contrast to Christchurch, he said.

The port would always be a major port and the town had been revitalised the last 10 years or so, with people moving over by choice to live there.

Although he had some sponsorship from the Lyttelton Port Co in production of the book (published by Canterbury University Press), Rice examined the often fractious relations between the Port Co and the local community in last decade or so, and felt as "someone from over the hill" he could take a more detached view. The Port Co probably went a bit too far in a hard-nosed, commercial, corporate approach initially, he said.

"And a lot of people are still very angry that they sold off the crane Rapaki and the dredge. They were features of the port for years and years and with them gone and the old (wharf) cranes gone, the whole place looks totally different than what it did 20 or 30 years ago."

However, the present board and management seemed a lot more sensitive to local issues, he said.

Rice said he loved doing books like this, and "returning history to the community that made it.

"I think too many academic historians nowadays are writing just for each other," he said.

He is also finishing a book on 18th century British foreign policy and working on an update of his first book Black November, a history of the 1918 flu epidemic.

But he's just as excited about his next spare time project, a history of Victoria Square. The square had changed dramatically several times, he pointed out. It began as a quarry, and later had immigration barracks, the provincial council's works department yard, and markets.

"All my books like roof tiles, they overlap!" said Rice, who also has the first major biography of Prime Minister Bill Massey among his upcoming projects.