As if it were not bad enough that Christmas seems to follow Christmas in just the blink of an eye these days, how can it really be half a century since the Christchurch Commonwealth Games were held?
Fifty years. Schoolchildren then are knocking on the door of retirement now. Parents then may well be great-grandparents now. Food you could buy with $1 then would now cost about $14, according to the Reserve Bank’s inflation calculator.
If anything in recent New Zealand history is worth getting all nostalgic about, the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch that summer seems a prime candidate. With the marvels of modern technology which would have blown people’s minds back then, we can revisit the Games and the past any time we like.
What do we see when we delve into that sunny, breezy summer at the now-gone QEII Stadium and other sporting venues around Christchurch? A lot of smiling faces, happy people competing purely out of love for their sport, garish clothes, wide ties, wide trousers, short skirts, the Queen and Prince Philip doing a lap of the stadium in a Land Rover, poplar trees bending before the insistent afternoon New Brighton easterly.
That wistfulness of better times now long gone cuts even deeper for Christchurch folk, whether or not they were actually at the Games. The September 2010 earthquake damaged the QEII complex but it was deemed fixable; however, the February 2011 earthquake wrecked it.
Very few people in that city have not at some time or another been at the complex, either watching sport or competing themselves, or taking the kids swimming at the weekend. Its loss in the quakes was probably one of the bitterest collective pills the city had to swallow.
When one thinks of the 1974 Games, it is hard not to feel a shiver of sadness for what was or appeared to be. Down the distance of so many years, the event seems to encapsulate a more innocent, carefree time, one unencumbered by the speed of life today, not bogged down by addictions to smartphones and social media, nor to the wackier aspects of misinformation and disinformation in a Trumpian world.
While we feel, quite intensely, the pangs for the past, we need to remember New Zealand was a totally different country in 1974, almost unrecognisable in some ways to anyone born in the last few decades. Many things weren’t really any better then.
For a start there was only one television channel. The Commonwealth Games that year was the first time colour broadcasts were produced, although the NZBC could only provide colour coverage for athletics, boxing and swimming, with everything else still in black-and-white.
The Labour government was led by ailing prime minister Norman Kirk, who died seven months later, arguably hastening the arrival of Robert Muldoon’s nine years of insular rule in 1975.
Chauvinism was alive and well in this country as was racism, underlined by the appalling Dawn Raid crackdowns on Pacific Islanders. Homosexuality would still be an illegal act for another 12 moralistic years. Inflation was running at 12% and heading higher, and there was carnage on the roads, with 843 deaths the previous year, the worst ever in our history.
The Games came only 18 months after 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by terrorists at the Munich Olympics. Around the world there was much violence, bombings, hijackings and kidnappings galore.
In the midst of all that, nothing can ever tarnish the fact the Christchurch Games were a high point of the first half of the 1970s. But as imperfect as our world is today, it’s always good to remember that it never was unflawed.
It’s difficult to read the face of that ticking stopwatch accurately when you are wearing such heavy, thick, rose-tinted spectacles.
