Old Bucky & Me: Dispatches from the Christchurch Earthquake

Description

Title: Old Bucky & Me: Dispatches from the Christchurch Earthquake
Author: Jane Bowron (Foreword by Pauline O’Regan)
Publisher: Awa Press, 2011
Format: Trade Paperback
Condition: Very Good — slight discolouration to pages

Out of print. First edition.

Description:

On 22 February 2011, journalist and television critic Jane Bowron was living in central Christchurch when the city was struck by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake — five months after a 7.1 quake that had shaken buildings but left no one dead. This time, 185 people died. The CTV building collapsed. Suburbs liquefied. The CBD was cordoned off. And Bowron found a phone and called her newspaper.

Over the next six months, she continued to file — 41 dispatches published in The Dominion Post and The Press, from February to August 2011, documenting everyday life inside the cordon zone. Old Bucky & Me collects those dispatches. “Old Bucky” is her characteristically deflating nickname for the earthquake itself: jocular, affectionate, slightly defensive, and entirely in keeping with how she writes.

The tone Bowron established from the first dispatch is what makes the book exceptional: under-emphatic, wry, sometimes playful, and immune to the bullshit and platitudes that disaster reporting too easily reaches for. Peter Wells described it precisely — “she doesn’t big-note emotionally but the pain, bewilderment and determination to keep on going are all there.” Guy Somerset in The Listener was blunter: “Bowron was uniquely placed… game (setting forth on her bicycle), wry, witty, and wonderfully observant, immune to bullshit and platitudes.” Paul Little in North and South called it “an intelligent, articulate and moving record of one of the major events in our history.”

The foreword is by Pauline O’Regan, who was Mayor of Christchurch throughout the earthquake and recovery, and who compares the book to Samuel Pepys writing about the Fire of London — the kind of document that future generations will reach for to understand how it actually felt.

This is the first edition (2011), covering February to August 2011.

Why We Stock It:

The Christchurch earthquake is the defining civilian disaster of modern New Zealand history, and this is one of the most significant immediate accounts of it — written from inside the cordon, in real time, by a journalist with exactly the right eye. It belongs on the Gravy’s Social History shelf alongside the documents of other moments when New Zealand had to reckon with what it had lost.