Long stigmatised as an undesirable place to live, Dunedin's hilltop state housing suburb Brockville is undergoing a quiet revolution. Bruce Munro reports on the fresh winds of change which, say those who are fanning them, could be a harbinger of community renewal throughout New Zealand.
Something good is stirring, deep in the heart of Brockville.
Darkness and quiet took hold here on the western edge of Dunedin an hour ago.
Streetlights struggling against the semi-rural blackness reveal frost spreading icy fingers across car windscreens up and down Brockville Rd on this wintry Sunday evening.
On a corner section, light spills from the glassed doorway of the concrete-block ecumenical community church. Three people huddle outside, finishing off a quick "puff" before pushing through the church hall doors to be engulfed by light, movement and dozens of voices.
Up to 100 Brockville residents of all ages are gathered around trestle tables for a monthly community dinner hosted by the church.
A trivia quiz is being held in the break between macaroni cheese and apple crumble.
Standing below a screen halfway along the wall, the Rev Andrew Scott is trying to make questions heard above the hubbub of people chatting, tending to children and calling answers to their table's nominated scribe. He breaks into a smile, calls for order and has another go.
"It's Britney Spears," Lisa Sullivan says in a loud whisper to Terence Maloney, whose felt pen is hovering over a numbered piece of paper.
A single mum with two children, Sullivan has lived in Brockville for 16 years and has bought the state house she was renting.
The sense of community is the best thing about the suburb, she says.
There is nothing she dislikes about living here, but the one thing she would change if she could is outsiders' perceptions.
"They call it skid row and scumsville," she says.
Gemma Ross, Terence's partner and a Brockville resident for the past three years, nods as she tends to her baby.
"As soon as you say you're from Brockville, people give you a look and go 'ohhh'," she says.
But people take care of each other here, Ross adds.
"We have a bartering system going between about eight houses in our street. If anyone runs out of anything or someone's sick, we all pitch in and help."
This monthly meal, which has been hosted by the church for five years, is a microcosm of Brockville.
The suburb's 900 households and 3400 inhabitants include a higher-than-average number of youth under the age of 15, nine out of 10 people earn less than $40,000 a year, 25% of households are headed by a single parent, almost 75% of adults have no qualifications beyond secondary school, and unemployment is 28% higher than the national average.
State housing construction got under way in earnest in Brockville in 1959.
Eventually, about half the properties would be state-owned rentals.
In those early days, the Brockville Improvement and Amenity Society was instrumental in ensuring roads were sealed, bus services started, and playgrounds and lighting installed, Syd Adie, a tireless Brockville public relations campaigner, says.
The school opened in 1962 and, at its high point, had 27 classes. A strip of shops, including a grocery, pharmacy and butchery, came later. The Little Sisters of the Poor aged-care home and hospital shifted to Brockville from Highcliff Rd, on Otago Peninsula, in 1978.
Everyone spoken to who grew up here during its first two decades had nothing but praise for the area and its people. The suburb's highest profile export of this era was musician Shayne Carter, most notably of Straitjacket Fits, who toured his Last Train to Brockville retrospective show last year.
But as happened throughout New Zealand, when the focus of state housing shifted from providing good-quality social housing for working families to subsidised rental accommodation for welfare recipients, problems crept in.
Gang patches and police sirens were Brockville fixtures in the closing decades of last century.
Bounded by Kaikorai Valley Rd to the east and Dalziel Rd to the west, edge-of-town, hilltop Brockville was not a suburb you passed through but a destination you chose.
And that is what Mr Scott did seven years ago, when he moved his family into the church manse and began working with local youth.
By then, the gangs were falling off the radar and a new generation of young families - a number of whom were former Brockville children - were moving in.
But young people could still point out to Mr Scott the local "tinnie houses" and he was discovering a "tremendous amount of need", ranging from social isolation to not enough food "and everything in between".
His work with youth and their families soon came to the attention of local Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) staff who encouraged him to apply for community development project funding.
"At the time, I said 'No I can't'," he says.
"It took no selling by the DIA to see the value of it ... [but] the task was just too big for me to imagine how we could do it."
When approached again in 2008, he began dreaming and planning.
By March last year, under the auspices of the West Dunedin Youth and Community Trust, an application for an ambitious community development plan had been developed, submitted, community hui held, the plan rewritten, resubmitted, the Brockville Community Support Trust resurrected, and $90,000pa DIA funding for three years approved.
"When we arrived, with the exception of buying a few bits of groceries, most people went out of the community for everything they needed including schooling," Mr Scott said.
"My underlying goal is to develop in people the skills and resources and passion for Brockville so that they don't need, or want, to find what they need outside of this suburb."
Public hui have been important in deciding the project's objectives and getting community buy-in.
Representatives of the Brockville Community Development Project, the two trusts, DIA, church, school, kohanga reo and kindergarten meet regularly to discuss and plan.
The project enters its second year next month.
As well as the community dinners, initiatives include monthly pot-luck meals featuring a speaker tackling skill-building topics such as family communication and valuing children. A group has been formed to give educational support for Pasifika children, a community garden is being developed and home insulation schemes are being pursued.
"Already we are seeing people thinking about how they can do things in the community," Mr Scott says.
"The sustainability group is really starting to pick up a head of steam ... and there have been a range of events taking place. Seven community events have just been held to mark Matariki."
Mr Adie is aware of the community development project. While he maintains the only "bad patch" the suburb experienced was in the media's imagination, he thinks the project could be "very good for Brockville" and "could expand into other suburbs".
Mr Scott thinks it will have to.
From where he stands, with his feet planted firmly in a suburb which the New Zealand Index of Deprivation lists as an eight on a scale of one to 10, Mr Scott sees a global economic system that "increasingly favours the wealthy over the poor", an eroding welfare system that "makes it harder for people to get the resources they need to survive", and "the increasing inability of politicians to provide solutions to the problems we face".
"I believe communities like Brockville will be increasingly left to their own ... So we will have to be able to look after ourselves and the people in our community."
Late last year, born-and-bred Brockville local Marie Laufiso was appointed the project's co-ordinator.
"Growing up here we were fiercely parochial about Brockville, because we knew the negative perceptions that were out there," Laufiso says.
"I want to see the people here believing they can do things for themselves. Not just surviving but thriving and enjoying what they are doing."
She has been spearheading a suburb-wide survey to broaden consultation and participation.
One of the biggest challenges is engaging with as many of the suburb's residents as possible, she says.
"There is a significant chunk of the community we are not connecting with yet."
Mr Scott hopes it will not be long before a "youth forum" emerges.
"It's important to resource the young people, but let them make decisions about what's important to them ... what they want." Further ahead, he would like to see small businesses setting up in the suburb and employing locals, and even energy-generation schemes established.
"I would love to see us put an electricity generator on the Fraser's Gully stream and maybe a wind turbine or two on the hill."
Perhaps that is "blue-sky dreaming", he says.
"But then perhaps we were dreaming to think we could get $90,000 a year out of the Government for three years."
