Heritage Lost
Who decides what we protect and what we leave up to volunteers and the market?
Meet Residence 147 Sturges Road. Not a very attractive name but she is a looker. I’ll call her Sturgy for short. Sturgy is an early 1900s Edwardian villa that was given a category III heritage status by the Waitakere City Council. Sturgy was moved onto her current address in 1987 and in 1990 she underwent a restoration.
In 2022 the Auckland Council who had inherited all of Waitakere City’s heritage listings re-evaluated those old listings. Mahshid Ezbarami was the person in charge for Sturgy, here what she states.
The residence is considered to have no historical value
The residence is considered to have no social value.
The residence is considered to have no knowledge value
The residence is considered to have no technology value
The residence is considered to have little aesthetic value.
The residence is considered to have no context value.
147 Sturges Road does not meet the threshold for scheduling as a Historic Heritage Place. It is recommended that the place is deleted from Schedule 14.1 as a Category B place.
Well some of these make sense, I don’t think this villa does have ‘technology value’, but it certainly has more than just a little aesthetic value, and most Kiwis would agree.
Ezbarami’s reasoning for the removal is based on the fact that the site was renovated and it was relocated. An utterly absurd statement that praetermits the many historic Auckland properties that have been renovated and relocated, with some relocations adding to the historical and heritage value such as Couldrey House.
Who even is Mahshid Ezbarami? Well she hasn’t even lived in New Zealand for beyond a decade at the time of writing this, so she almost certainly wouldn’t have held any citizenship for New Zealand. She was born in Iran and worked in Malaysia before coming to New Zealand.
So why is she in charge of deciding what does and what doesn’t hold historic and heritage value for New Zealanders? Why have we entrusted a rootless Persian to do this for us?
I could forgive her if she had demonstrated some actual appreciation of Auckland’s heritage and culture, but she hasn’t. Guy’s Homestead is a historic Auckland building that was destroyed in an arson. Who rebuilt it, retaining the historic design, original elements that could be saved, and used it for a purpose that serves both the common weal and will continue to be appreciated by Aucklanders? Messers JP and Kuljeet Singh, two property developers from India.
Ezbarami has no interest in my heritage and culture, New Zealand is nothing more than a ticket to a better and more profligate life for her, and in doing so we are allowing our heritage and culture to be lost. I won’t be surprised if we see Ezbarami in Australia once her citizenship has been rubberstamped by an immigration drone.