Around the country, enthusiasts and bureacrats - work to save
racetracks under threat of extinction in the face of decline in support for their
traditional use.
Trentham
tote after its renovations. Photo: Matt Morris Photography,
Wellington
Despite recent tax changes to the
racing industry, bringing it into line with casinos, racing clubs in New Zealand
find it hard to keep afloat, and I don’t mean a horse box. Racing clubs
operate on a handful of dates spread thinly throughout the year, and many struggle
for survival. While the land the clubs own has gone sky high in value, making
them asset rich and cash poor, the holdings and upkeep of buildings are hugely
expensive to maintain. Turf racing may have waned in popularity since its heyday
around 1900, but try to wind up any one of the remaining 52 racetracks in New
Zealand and it’s not just diehard punters who start squealing.
New
Zealand is a country where attendance at the racecourse is an institution; where
the populace would feel aggrieved if it couldn’t, at the drop of a cup day
hat, frock up in their best finery and go down to the local meet to watch silked,
bandylegged goblins thunder some of the world’s best-bred racehorses down
the track.
Trentham
tote as it was. Photo: Morris Communnications
Throughout the year, there are 780 race meetings, 150 race days
that have a community leisure theme, and, when the racetracks aren’t pounding
with the thud of horses’ hooves, the track plays host to a multitude of community
events.
Some clubs have had to bow to development pressure and sell off
great chunks, or all, of their land, and then there is the problem of what to
do with the paraphernalia of buildings. Some of them date back to the 1880s and
are recognised as heritage through registration and protected from the bulldozer
through district plan listings. Even if the grandstands, totes, stables and jockey’s
rooms aren’t recognised or protected it’s not as if they can be sold
off and relocated in between the tomato plants in the back garden. Try loading
a grandstand onto the back of a truck and you’d have to put a Very, Very
Wide Load sign on the preceding pilot vehicle.
Not all developers have a
scorched-earth policy about racetracks. David Meban, developer of the Makaraka
Downs estate near Gisborne, is keeping the existing racetrack and grandstand and,
if resource consent is granted, he will fork out $300,000 to turn the crumbling
tote into a community convention centre while retaining the integrity of the original
building.
Meban has a fondness for old buildings, wants to preserve them
and can see the benefits of keeping the racetrack going.
“Everyone’s
a punter in this life,” says Meban, “and the residents on the estate
will be able to use the racecourse when it’s not racing to walk the dog along
the green belt and havesomewhere to go when they’ve had an argument and need
to get out.”
Former president of the Hokitika Racing Club Jim Keenan rues
the day the club had to sell “our jewels” and say goodbye to the land
outside the racecourse, which was turned into a residential subdivision. The Hokitika
course, known as “the Ellerslie of the south” because it is the only
right-handed track in the South Island – and they want to remain that way,
thank you very much – is used by athletes for training, houses a Boys Brigade
gymnasium, hosts the A&P Show and has fought against centralisation tooth
and nail for more than a hundred years. It’s expensive for the country tracks
to get up to metropolitan standards but the community gets in behind and makes
it happen because, the way Jim Keenan sees it, racing needs country racetracks
in the same way rugby needs to be played in every school.
“If you
take away small racetracks and the country clubs aren’t flourishing, then
the trainers give up and there goes some of the best race horses in the world.”
Hokitika
is hoping to have its six-sided, peaked-roofed tote, which is the last of its
kind, restored.
Claudelands
racetrack in the Waikato. Photo: Courtesy of Hamilton
City Council
A dream scenario for the restoration
and relocation of a grandstand has been played out at Claudelands in Hamilton.
The Claudelands grandstand has a Category II Historic Places Trust registration
and still looks out on what used to be the old racetrack. The grandstand is not
on its original site, having first been built at Gynnelands near Cambridge in
1879 and relocated to Hamilton in 1887, where it was moved a further 15 metres
in 1926, when it was used by the trotting club and the A&P Association. Waikato
District Council bought the land off the trotting club in 1999, after it went
bankrupt, so Claudelands would not be sold to developers.
A large conference
centre is now planned for where the racetrack was, and the problem of what
to do with the grandstand has been solved by the council and the Trust working
together to have the stand moved to the opposite side of Jubilee Park and turned
around so it will enjoy a new life overlooking and providing seating (500) for
an outdoor community events area.
Gail Henry, Trust area manager for the
Lower Northern region, says it’s not normal practice for the Trust to
support relocation that takes a building away from its original context.
The
proposed refurbishment plans for Claudelands. Photo:Courtesy
of Hamilton City Council
But, in this case,
both the council and the Trust felt the stand would be better if it was distanced
from the planned conference centre while still remaining within the boundaries
of its original site. Henry says it was extremely important the building retained
its use as a grandstand.
Henry commends the council for seeking early discussion with
the Trust and giving it time to gain valued input from branch members, so when
the conservation plan was presented it contained no surprises.
Mark Christie,
event facilities manager at Waikato Council, says the stand will be refurbished
to its former glory with the ground access floor used for a café and
ongoing displays of the history of the area.
On the West Coast of the South
Island, the continued upkeep of the Kumara grandstand has become a symbol of
the tiny club’s fight to keep in the race. Perish the thought if New Zealand
Racing tried to rationalise Kumara for, any time the call for centralisation of
small tracks to the main cities is raised, Kumara is held up as a shining example
of the little racecourse that could.
An
aerial view of Kumara racetrack. Photo:John McCoombe
The population of Kumara is only about 400, but come race day four
generations of the same families will travel from all over New Zealand and across
the Tasman to attend. The grandstand is a landmark structure on the western approach
to the township, which was once a teeming gold town. Even today, the hugely popular
January race meeting’s main event, the Kumara Gold Nuggets, is paid out in
gold nuggets. The 1887 grandstand is lovingly cleaned and maintained by the community
and has been the subject of paintings by many local artists. The addition of a
115-year-old band rotunda, found rotting and facing demolition at the nearby Omono
racetrack by the late Cushla Martini, has become a central feature for picnickers
who congregate to listen to the popular coastal Kokatahi Band.
The club
was threatened with closure on more than one occasion. One R.D. Muldoon stepped
in to save it from extinction back in 1970. Today, the fate of the club rests
with the Racing Authority, which holds that, if a club is funded and maintained
locally, it will not oppose its existence.
The old tea house at
Riccarton Park racecourse, built in 1903 to commemorate the Canterbury Jockey
Club’s golden jubilee the following year, is about to be restored to its
full glory. Originally designed by the architects S. and A. Luttrell, it fell
into disuse in the late 1970s.
Excavation to provide fill for the front
of the main grandstand was used to create an island on which the tea house
was built. A belt of trees formed a ring around the island, and the moat’s
water came from the Waimakariri River and was stocked with gold fish. The grounds
featured swans, and the tea house was accessed by a rustic bridge covered in white
roses.
The idyllic Edwardian venue hosted the 1903 wedding of the Riccarton
Jockey Club’s president, and, like many racecourses during the great wars,
housed World War II troops who slept on the straw-filled verandah.
Riccarton/Wigram
community board member Lesley Keast, who is now involved with the restoration
of the tea house, often took tea there herself when she was a girl and remembers
that anyone who was anyone would make a bee line for the pretty pavilion with
its twin turrets.
Keast got involved with restoration plans when Labour
MP Mick Connelly died shortly after forming a charitable trust to restore
the tea house back in 2001. The moat, the bridge, even the white roses, will
all hopefully be brought back after the work on the tea house’s interior,
estimated to cost $700,000, has been completed.
Prince
Henry, Duke of Gloucester, centre, in the Royal Box at Trentham in 1934, flanked
by Wellington Racing Club president Eric Riddiford and Mrs Riddiford. Photo:
Wellington Racing club collection
This year’s
Wellington Cup Day was the best attended race day event in the country. To mark
the centennial of Trentham Racecourse, the crumbling tote, which was looking very
down on its uppers, was restored.
Trentham’s commercial relationships
director, Gerry Morris, saved the tote from the claw of the bulldozer and arranged
sponsorship from Dulux to donate a whole swag of paint named Trentham to spruce
the old girl up.
The Royal Suite behind the Royal Box, complete with the
toilet the Queen once graced, was also refurbished. Morris laughs as he points
out that Royal Ascot decided to demolish all their royal toilets lest someone
could lay claim to a piece of porcelain that had no degrees of separation from
royalty.
The bar that was in the Royal Suite is now incorporated into
the Roy Reed Memorial Lounge, which commemorates the lives of New Zealand’s
fallen jockeys. Roy Reed, a hugely successful jockey who won six Wellington Cups,
an Auckland Cup and the Melbourne Cup, died on the Trentham racetrack in March
of 1936.
Like museum pieces, these buildings evoke the charm and grandeur
of an earlier era in racing. Hopefully, the will of communities, the generosity
of individuals and the decisions of public institutions to keep these buildings
preserved, alive and kicking is appreciated by the present day punter.
Places to Visit
Learn
more about the historic sites located in and around
the regions of New Zealand
Learn
more about the historic sites located in and around