A strangely popular Dunedin Facebook site is collecting the memories of a small southern city. David Loughrey meets the collector.
The past is a messy place.
The past nurtured and sustained us, it made us; but it contains moments of unbearable shame, moments of unspeakable rage, everything from vague and fading memories of innocent joy, to the torment of jealousy, to the indelible stain that is the corruption of adulthood.
It contains some faded truth.
It exists, but it is gone.
Gone, but for the photos.
Owain Morris, in his state-built Pine Hill home, is a collector.
He collects the memories of Dunedin.
He collects school photographs: photographs of buildings; businesses; fire engines; parades; royal visits; wrestlers; machinery; cars, and lots and lots and lots of people.
He puts them on his Facebook site ''Growing up in Dunedin in the 60s, 70s, 80s & 90s'' (perhaps a misnomer - it doesn't stop at the '60s), which has 10,102 members - not just likes, but members who have asked to join.
The site has 8670 photos and articles and it gets about 100 comments a day.
And it's all about Dunedin.
Born and bred in Ravensbourne, the former Speight's worker says his work on the site takes ''about 20 hours a day''.
''It's a passion - I just enjoy finding pictures and posting them.
''I get stopped in the street and people talk to me about it.
''They say they love it, so . . . oh well, that's good.''
Mr Morris has his own idea about why a site that contains the memories of a city might be so popular.
''I think people like to go back to their childhood.
''The younger ones want to see what it was like - the older ones to remember their childhood.''
Mr Morris runs the site from his home, in a small front room full of his collection of the sort of drinking glasses one was left with after consuming a Sanitarium peanut butter or jam.
''Some of them had jam in - and that's a sundae dish afterwards.
''Very flash to have a sundae dish, especially a glass one - not those plastic parfait dishes.''
He also has 10,500 singles, and yes - they are mostly from the 1960s.
''I collect cereal cards, cereal toys, I collect retro stuff - it reminds me of my childhood I s'pose.''
And with posters of Jimi Hendrix, Elvis and Beatles on the wall, he knows a thing or two about the unbreakable connections between a man and his youth.
''Woodstock [the 1970 documentary of the Woodstock festival] - went to see that at the Octagon.
''Marvellous movie - they'd just got the quadraphonic sound, and you could hear noises there, and there, and all of a sudden it was behind you: all of a sudden you were surrounded.
''Yeah, I'm a bit stuck in the hippie era.''
Of course the past is a place perhaps best viewed in two dimensions.
A recent post this week on the site was a picture of the number 66 tram travelling to Andersons Bay.
''They were called Takapunas,'' comments Clark on the site.
''I think ex-the railway at Takapuna from the '20s.
''Somebody else here may know more.
''They could really go though.''
The past is best viewed in two dimensions because the tram is full of people with people issues, depression, anger, joy and desire.
But all those things are washed out of a black and white photo stripped of context, and replaced with our own imagining of a past somehow more romantic than our own.
And what debates the past can spark on this Facebook site - debates only Dunedin could understand.
Those included ''where the Little Hut was and is; actually there were two Huts'', Mr Morris says.
''The one we've got now is downstairs; the other one was on the street level, above the stairs.
''I can't remember the upstairs one, but apparently it's true, because somebody said so.
''There was a debate about a clairvoyant that I never actually got into, but that went for quite a few comments - a couple of hundred.
''I just let them go.''
And then there was the wrestling.
The wrestling was a big deal at the Dunedin Town Hall in the 1960s and '70s.
Who from those heady days could forget the time Abdullah the Butcher (all the baddies were somehow of ethnic origins - Tojo Ono from Japan, and the German Waldo Von Erich were two baddie greats) came to town?
And who could forget the fine fellows sent to battle him?
There are plenty of photos of these great men on Mr Morris' site.
''My mother was a friend of Powerhouse Joe Komene,'' he says.
''He was a gold medal winner in the Empire Games, then he went to wrestling.
''He used to get us tickets and the family used to go.
''We were also friends with John de Silva.''
Of course memories can trick the unwary, and proof is locked in a photograph.
''Nobody - unless you put a picture up - nobody believes you.
''But that's the fun of it.''
