MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

Before visiting Barcelona at Christmas in 2015, I remember going to YouTube to watch the film Bye Bye Barcelona, which is a documentary about the negative effects of mass tourism on the people of the city.

The film is made by a local artist who explores the fraught relationship between Barcelona as a living population and Barcelona as a tourist destination. He interviews fellow residents who complain that the city is becoming a theme park. One laments the city's 'loss of enchantment'.

Part of me can't take these complaints too seriously, given that the people of Barcelona owe much of their relative prosperity to tourism. That's the main reason Barcelona's regional unemployment rate in 2014 was 19 per cent compared to the national figure of 24 per cent.

Yesterday The Guardian published an article about tension between tourists and locals in New Zealand over access to public toilets.

One North Island resident complained that 50 people each night used a toilet block that contained a single toilet. If the queues got too long, the tourists simply use the nearby bushes and contribute to the contamination of rivers and beaches.

One of the towns mentioned in the article was Glenorchy, a tiny community of 363, an hour's drive to the west of Queenstown on the South Island. It is at the end of the road and the end of the lake that makes Queenstown such a scenic tourist destination.

I have two images in my mind of our visit to Glenorchy. One was the thriving dumpling shop that was set up to profit from Chinese tourists. The other was a funeral procession, demonstrating that life in Glenorchy is not entirely about tourism, that there is a living community made up of real people.

Queenstown has a picturesque lake and many adventure tourism assets. There are only 14,300 permanent residents. Our impression was that it was spoiled by the volume of tourists, and we drove straight through.

It's clear that Queenstown's infrastructure can't sustain the tourist boom. The traffic on its congested main through road is slower than what you would expect in peak hour in major cities in more populated countries. But who wants a four lane highway replacing the existing two lane through road that winds around one side of the lake?

Queenstown is just the first of many South Island towns to face an explosion in tourist numbers. On the other side of the mountain is Wanaka, another lakeside mountain resort town that is poised for similar development. I've heard that numbers developers have approvals in hand. 

Meanwhile there is the quirky east coast town of Oamaru, with its many well-preserved Victorian buildings. It is made for tourism but - mercifully? - there are still relatively few tourists.

On Tuesday afternoon, we visited 'Steam Punk HQ'. This is a collection of industrial sculptures and audio visual installations in darkened rooms that reflect what seemed like a particular local hobbyist's interpretation of the steampunk science fiction sub-genre.

But it could have a big future as part of an Oamaru theme park. Within a year of its 2011 opening, TripAdvisor was rating it as one of New Zealand's best new tourist attractions. It fits with the town's Victorian era ambience, and is complemented by retail shops specialising in steampunk clothing and accessories. Numbers will swell suring the Steampunk NZ Festival Weekend at the beginning of June, but essentially it is fairly quiet for most of the time, for now.

Some of the locals want it to stay quiet, according to my friend Nathalie, whom we visited there. But others realise that the industries that sustained Oamaru in the past have gone, and tourism is their big opportunity to return to prosperity.

The choice may not be entirely theirs. The 2016 edition of Lonely Planet described Oamaru as 'New Zealand's coolest town'.

 

I've always been interested in rivalries between cities. I grew up in Albury-Wodonga. Wodonga had long been considered poorer and less attractive. But for many years it has been growing faster than Albury and may one day overtake Albury in size and importance.

In the eyes of many, the two cross border cities are regarded as one. But in recent years they've dismantled certain joint initiatives. They now promote themselves separately to tourists and potential new industries and settlers.

Today we're travelling to Oamaru, which is a coastal city of 14,000 inhabitants. It is an hour an a half north of Dunedin, where we've stayed for the past two nights of our tour of part of New Zealand's South Island.

A further hour north on State Highway 1 is Timaru, with a population of 29,000. We were originally booked to stay there because it was more conveniently situated for our drive to Christchurch Airport on Wednesday.

We switched because a few people said that Oamaru was by far the more beautiful of the two cities. These included our west coast B&B host Sue, and my friend and work colleague Nathalie, whom I'll see today for the first time in 26 years. Nathalie lives in Oamaru and told me that there is no question that Oamaru is more beautiful and has the best attractions.

Of course she would say that. Our vegetarian AirBNB host on Friday and Saturday told us that both cities have their attractions. She said we should take what we hear from Timaru's detractors with a grain of salt because they are probably from Oamaru.

As it happens, Timaru is in the Canterbury region, while Oamaru is in Otago. That suggests the rivalry between the two smaller cities is at least partly a reflection of the competition between Canterbury's principal city Christchurch and Otago's Dunedin.

I have been interested in that since my uncle told me years ago that he had a soft spot for Dunedin but didn't think much of Christchurch.

He's proud of his Irish-Catholic heritage and didn't waste any time telling me that the English had a stranglehold on Christchurch. If you were a Catholic and wanted a decent job, you probably wouldn't find one in Christchurch.

Dunedin was a different matter. With its Scottish roots, the people there were much more sympathetic to their fellow Gaelic cousins.

He has lived in Wellington for many years, but was very happy to be living and working here in Dunedin while bringing up his family about 50 years ago. When I called him yesterday, he told me that his office was in the centre of town and that he had a pleasing view down on to the Octagon, which is the focal point of the city.

I read that when the Octagon was first laid out in the original 1846 survey of the city, the English made covert plans to build their Anglican Cathedral right in the Centre of the Octagon. There was a furore when the predominantly Scottish Presbyterian local community found out, and St Paul's Anglican Cathedral was subsequently built, and still stands, at the edge of the Octagon.

It was a different matter in Christchurch, which was conceived as the model English city. Its equivalent to the Octagon is named Cathedral Square after the Anglican ChristChurch Cathedral, which was built as its focal point, though it is barely standing today due to substantial earthquake damage.

How to make sense of the beauty of nature on New Zealand's South Island. That is what I'm about at this moment, as I look through the window of our AirBNB accommodation bedroom at the clouds hanging over the snow capped mountains.

I can admire the people here on the South Island. Especially their plucky approach to facing the challenges of the natural environment. The Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes of the last few years, and the 'weather bomb', as they call it, that has hit them in the past week, closing roads and disrupting lives.

But its magnificence is another thing.

Yesterday my travel companion Bernard had a word that described his experience of it. Rapture.

I had a mixed reaction to that. What comes to mind is the end of times event from the Book of Revelation in the Bible. According to the prediction, Christian believers who have died will be raised to heaven and those still living will meet them in the clouds.

That doesn't help much. This kind of thing is the preoccupation of those who belong to some very weird branches of Christianity.

But it's a different story when I seek out its various dictionary meanings. A feeling of intense pleasure or joy. | A state of being carried away by overwhelming emotion. | A mystical experience in which the spirit is exalted to a knowledge of divine things.

I wonder where Bernard got this word from. It turns out that it's from the Australian writer Robert Dessaix, describing his experience of the sublime in the highest mountain passes in the world, in northern India.

'All I can see is snow and rock. I am thrillingly unhoused, yet snug. I am nothing, I am the whole world. The desolation is complete, the rapture not just beyond words, but thought. This is what abandonment means.' (The Saturday Paper, 1 Nov 2014).

We stayed in Arthur's Pass last week, the day before it was hit by the 'weather bomb' and isolated from the rest of the world. Then on Friday we drove through Haast Pass on Friday, on a beautiful sunny summer's day.

Were those experiences of the South Island mountain passes rapturous? Not exactly. But they do give me some understanding of what Dessaix is getting at.

We all have our particular moments of rapture. Their intensity varies, but they are still rapture.

For me during this trip, it was the orange rain clouds at sunset in Christchurch on the night of our arrival (some would see an allusion to the end of times meaning in the Book of Revelation!). For Bernard, it was the mirror reflection on Lake Matheson near Fox Glacier on the West Coast.

Being rapt is about being stopped in our tracks. Being suddenly able to see more than the mundane. A glimpse of what the divine is for us.

You don't need to be an afficianado of the Book of Revelation to experience rapture. Or even conventionally religious. It reaches many cultures, including youth culture. This is the Urban Dictionary's definition of rapt: 'Australian surfer slang, means excited. "oooo dude im so totally rapt".'

Tomorrow we reach the half way point of our two weeks travel to parts of the New Zealand South Island and Wellington.

My travelling companion likes to have an itinerary planned and transport and accommodation booked. I like to arrive in a country with my return air ticket and no more than the first night's accommodation secured. We've compromised and made advance bookings for about half the journey.

Last night we were in a motel in Fox Glacier on the west coast. We had no bookings for the next couple of nights. Just the way I like it. We were not tied down and could do anything we wished (as long as all the viable accommodation options were not booked out).

It was well into the evening and we didn't know where we were headed the next day. The word 'farmstay' came into one of our heads. That was an option neither of us had previously considered.

We did a couple of searches and found a sheep station close to the geographical centre of the South Island. It looked good, until we read the user reviews on the accommodation booking website.

It turned out that the owner was a redneck who would make judgmental comments about the life choices of his guests. He virtually told one young university student that his university course was useless.

We looked elsewhere and came up with another possibility further south, with spectacular mountain views, where the owner was a strict vegetarian. With this choice, we would not have to face grilling from a redneck, and it's likely the values of the vegetarian would be much closer to our own.

With AirBNB you need to message your potential host to persuade them that you are worthy to stay in their accommodation. I told our potential host that I liked it that she preferred vegetarians. That was true, but she took that to mean that we were vegetarians. 'Very nice to hear that you are vegetarian!' she wrote.

Would we maintain the pretence that we were vegetarian when it wasn't true? Perhaps it would do no harm. Until we visited a salmon farm earlier in the day and could not resist buying two ultra fresh salmon fillets for dinner in the evening.

When we arrived at our host's farm in possession of the fish, we had to confess that we admired vegetarians but were not actually vegetarians ourselves. We had to negotiate how we would cook our salmon fillets without offending the vegetarian sensibilities of her family. If we were to cook them.

Initially she suggested freezing the fish and taking it with us when we leave. We agreed that would not work and she graciously organised an electric frying pan with an extension cord so that we could cook it well away from the house. She also set up a table and chairs outside for us to avoid us having to eat our non vegetarian meal on her family's vegetarian dinner table.

The salmon was delicious but I did go to bed wondering if I would have preferred to be judged by a redneck rather than a strict vegetarian.

Instead of writing early morning Tuesday, I was heading to Christchurch Station to board the TranzAlpine tourist train to Greymouth on the west coast. We have broken the journey for 24 hours at Arthur's Pass, a small alpine village close to the national park and the mountain pass that bears the same name.

It is one of the rainiest localities on the South Island, and it has rained continuously for all of the 20 hours we've been here. There are excellent walking tracks, but we are not equipped to go bushwalking in the rain, so our break in the train journey has turned out to be a break for rest.

Because the mountain pass was historically such a challenge, the train terminated here for many years until the 8.5 km Otira Tunnel was opened in 1923. A Cobb and Co coach had to ferry passengers over the pass to a connecting train at the other side.

Then until 1997, the steam and then diesel locomotive had to be replaced by an electric locomotive for the journey through the tunnel. Since then, a 'helper' diesel locomotive has done the job of getting the train through the still difficult tunnel, with its 1 in 33 gradient. In these more recent times, the issue has been diesel fumes. They necessitate special measures and precautions, including the closing of our train's open air observation cars.

The Arthur's Pass information centre doubles as a museum, and yesterday it was a congenial place to pass some time. That was where I saw the Cobb and Co coach and also learned about the second most deadly mountaineering incident in New Zealand history, which occurred in 1966, when an avalanche killed a rescuer from a party making a vain attempt to save four young bushwalkers.

A few months ago, the 50th anniversary commemorations included a religious service in the mountain chapel here at Arthur's Pass. The rescuer who lost his life had been married six years earlier in the chapel, which has a fascinating story of its own. Like the railway station, it is built as an A-frame (both pictured).

The chapel was unlocked when I was exploring the area yesterday and so I was able to wander in and read the history of its conception and construction in the 1950s, which was a labour of love for the committee and the architects and builders it engaged.

Last night we had a meal at the only cafe that was open. It doubles as a bar and is called The Wobbly Kea, after the endangered species of parrot that is found in this area. Perhaps their omnivorous diet includes alcohol. The locals are preoccupied with protecting tourists from the kea and the kea from tourists. It is known for its intelligence and curiosity, which means it will stop at nothing to use its large and sharp beak to aggressively scavenge for food from any source including tourists, who are implored not to feed them.

An earthquake registering 6.3 on the Richter scale devastated the centre of Christchurch at 12:51 pm on 22 February 2011. It was one of a series of earthquakes that struck the city within a twelve month period, with a death toll of 185.

Of those who fled the city seeking refuge elsewhere, some were too traumatised to return, and Christchurch lost its status as New Zealand's second most populous city to Wellington. Those who did come back were very much determined to reconstruct the city, and their efforts are only beginning to take shape.

Walking around the city centre on Sunday, I could see that much of the area was fenced off and yet to see significant reconstruction activity. I could sense the panic and suffering that took place in this area and was struck by the relative lifelessness there is today.

The 'green shoot' that was most evident to me was the Transitional Cathedral of the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch, better known as the Cardboard Cathedral.

The NZ$5m A-frame structure was designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and opened in August 2013 on a site located a few blocks from the original cathedral that was destroyed by the quake.

My visit transformed what was for me quite a desolate experience of the city centre. I appreciated the beauty of the construction, the welcome of the volunteer guide, and the pervading hope that the whole city centre will one day come back to life. There was the very unusual and mesmerising architecture, and also simple touches such as the flowers in the garden beds in front of the main doors.

I can't recall ever visiting the scene of a natural disaster in the interim period between clean up and major progress in reconstruction, and I did feel quite paralysed by the experience. But it was a Sunday, and I imagine that it could be a much more optimistic feeling if I go back there today when where will be more activity.

It did make me think about the concept of disaster tourism, which is defined as the act of travelling to a disaster area as a matter or curiosity. This can include 'rubbernecking', or travel with the specific intention of paying respect, or something in between.

I remember being in New York in December 2001, a little more than three months after the 9-11 terror attacks. I had no thought of going to Ground Zero but I did talk to a local who said that residents were disturbed by tourists visiting the scene to take a look. In time Ground Zero has become a destination for those wishing to honour the victims of the disaster.

Two Australian media takeovers have caught my attention this summer. They were both predictable and representative of changes in media culture and values that have evolved over the past decade.

But they are revolutionary in that, over this time, both organisations have, as I see it, made a 180 degree switch from objective reporting to a firm control of the message.

The media outlets of the organisations are the pay TV channel Sky News Australia and the Catholic church news service CathNews. The extent of the parallels is interesting, and perhaps chilling.

The ownership of Sky has shifted to Rupert Murdoch from Australian News Channel, a consortium established in 1996 that already included Murdoch. That of CathNews has moved to the Catholic Bishops Conference from Church Resources, a consortium established in 1997 that already includes the Bishops.

Most Australians do not consume either and have probably never even heard of them, especially the latter. But they do have a very large and loyal following within their respective niches - politics nerds and serious Catholics.

I could go on with this cute comparison, and I will. But first I should mention that I was the founding editor of CathNews in 1999 and continued in that role until the beginning of 2006.

The Jesuit entrepreneur Father Michael Kelly had asked me to devise a mechanism to allow his group buying co-operative Church Resources to communicate regularly with its constituency. CathNews did this daily and turned out to be quite successful. When I moved to Eureka Street, the professionalism of CathNews was enhanced by bringing in experienced personnel from Fairfax (Christine Hogan and Michael Visontay).

But by this time, the Bishops had started to realise that CathNews was effectively competing with them in shaping opinion about Catholic news and current affairs. From the beginning, CathNews' philosophy had been to uphold the values of objective reporting that were evident in the content of overseas Catholic publications such as the London Tablet and the National Catholic Reporter in the US.

However the Australian Bishops' desire was more for a 'corporate communication' model, where they controlled the message. The Vatican used to call this 'propaganda', approvingly. CathNews' editorial policy and practice was subsequently brought into line with these values.

Meanwhile the journalism of the various outlets in the Murdoch empire had evolved from the objective reporting that had long dominated secular media, towards 'campaign' journalism. This is a form of corporate communication where the opinions of the owner are given priority over objective truth, and their publication is sustained and coordinated in order to mould and control public opinion.

In recent years, the content and style of Sky News Australia has evolved to echo Murdoch's The Australian newspaper by day and his US FoxNews TV channel by night. With the change of ownership, the comparison will become more pronounced.

It is not entirely coincidental that the term 'post-truth' has become so prominent at this time. What is most worrying is that what it represents has come to be normalised and that these changes in ownership don't appear to be causing too much alarm.

This week the ABC's 'local' capital city radio stations have been rebranded.

The station that has been known since 2000 as '702 ABC Sydney' has become 'ABC Radio Sydney'. '774 ABC Melbourne' is now 'ABC Radio Melbourne'. And so on around all the capital cities. Except Adelaide.

In a David and Goliath battle, the community station 'Radio Adelaide' secured an injunction to temporarily block the ABC from using the name 'ABC Radio Adelaide'. This is because of its similarity to Radio Adelaide and the potential for listener confusion and infringement against the Radio Adelaide brand.

For at least the next four months, the ABC's station will be known simply as 'ABC Adelaide'.

We'll know if this chink in the ABC's radio brand armour is permanent after the court trial that has been scheduled for April. If the order stays in place, I will regard it as an important marker of difference in an increasingly monocultural mainstream media branding landscape. In any case, I think it's good to see the homogenisation of Australia's media landscape encountering road blocks.

I'm also pleased that there's hope for justice for the smaller, community-based station in face of the might of the national broadcaster.

Coincidentally a similar rebranding has just taken place in commercial radio, though unfortunately it is without any court challenges. The rebranding has affected 60 regional stations owned by Southern Cross Austereo.

The stations have become known as either 'Triple M' or 'Hit'. Names with local resonance have disappeared, as have callsigns that were established as early as the 1930s. Examples include the FM station known as The River (in Albury, proudly situated on the Murray River) and 2GZ (Orange). Now they are both known as Triple M, in conformity with the original 1980 branding of the Sydney station 2MMM.

This is not without precedent. In 2000, the ABC ditched all local callsigns such as 2BL (Sydney) and 3LO (Melbourne) that had been in use since the 1920s.

My personal interest in these matters derives in part from my four year involvement in branding at ABC Radio in the 1990s. I worked in the Marketing department as Localisation Coordinator and also editor of an internal audience research newsletter titled Listener Friendly.

While helping to implement the various see-sawing policies of Radio Management, I was keenly aware that homogenisation removes history and identity that have been part of people's daily lives, in some cases for nearly a century. Branding enables us to identify a product or a service but it is essentially ephemeral until it has built up many years of resonance with local communities.

The loss of local names is an issue that has concerned me since the 1990s, when I was doing my Applied History Masters at the University of Technology Sydney and arguing that heritage orders should be placed on the identity of certain media outlets.

As an idea, it is probably fanciful. But who knows? It would see callsigns and titles familiar to many generations of consumers remain in use in media environment, in the way that heritage protected buildings continue to be part of our built environment. We would still have 2BL, 4QR and 2GZ.

Fairfax Media has reduced the use in its content of longstanding brands the Sydney Morning Herald (1832) and The Age (1854), but at least it seems committed to retaining the branding for as long as the publications themselves remain viable.

My ultimate fear is that, within a decade, international media homogenisation and convergence will kill not just regional Australian identity, but any Australian identity at all in the media we consume. That's a big regulation challenge that the Turnbull Government's Minister for Communications has and must face.

Yesterday Fairfax published an unlikely article by columnist and occasional Catholic Joel Meares. It was titled 'Growing up gay, Catholic school was a haven for me'.

He was thanking the lay teachers at his Catholic school for 'nurturing [his] difference'.

He said: 'These people put into quiet practice so much of what is beautiful about the religion, and did very little preaching as they went.'

With some degree of understatement, he then acknowledged that his story was not everybody's story.

This reminded me of the blog I wrote last month in which I mentioned my personal recollection from 1980s of 'a retired Jesuit preparatory school principal boasting of "sending out" his students to bully peers who were homosexual'.

I put that in the context of a Fairfax report from 2015 that revealed the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart had buried a 2007 report aimed at protecting LGBTQI students in Catholic schools from homophobic bullying.

I don't live in Melbourne and I've only met Archbishop Hart once or twice, but I've heard him characterised as a doctrinal hardliner who is capable of empathy with marginal Catholics.

This is obviously not true of all clerics. Fairly or unfairly, Hart's erstwhile colleague Cardinal George Pell is often regarded as a narcissistic hardliner not capable of showing empathy to marginal Catholics.

Pope Francis has famously shown signs that he wants to 'include' LGBTIQ and other marginal Catholics in the life of the Church. That's what he was about when he proclaimed 2016 the 'Year of Mercy'. But he's also made it plain that he does not intend to change the doctrine.

In other words, the lives of LGBTIQ Catholics will still be 'objectively disordered' in the eyes of Catholic doctrine. But in practice, he wants LGBTIQ Catholics to be encouraged and affirmed, as Joel Meares was in his Catholic school.

Understandably many angry LGBTIQ ex-Catholics are not impressed by this wondrous contradiction. They ask why the Church's doctrine cannot be brought into line with its pastoral practice. They will have nothing to do with the Church until it is, and they will be waiting a long time.

My answer to them is that they should allow themselves to enjoy the blessed duality that is the Catholic Church. The supportive 'haven' Meares' Catholic school was for him as he grew up. Let the actions of the Church's quiet pastoral achievers hold sway over its loud clerics and the declining relevance of particular sections of doctrine.

As I walked through Customs at Japan's Kansai Airport last October carrying just 3.2 kilos of luggage, the officer looked at me astonished. 'How long are you staying?' 'Two weeks.' 'Is that really all you're carrying?' 'Yes I like to travel light.'

We all play games with ourselves. It's fun and it can even be rewarding. The game I'm obsessed with at the moment is taking as little luggage as possible when I travel. I dare myself to leave out something I've always taken before. Soap and shampoo. Spare glasses.

Each trip, I like to take less than the previous trip. I'm flying to Christchurch on Saturday. I don't think I'll be able to get it down to less than 3.2 kilos, as I've got some work and need to take the laptop rather than my iPad mini. But I'll leave out a few other things and enjoy trying.

My secret is to use kitchen scales (not luggage scales) and a spreadsheet on my computer. And to constantly remind myself that every gram counts. I'll pack my door key for my return home - 6 grams - but not its ring and pouch - a further 20.

Most people take anything they think they might use. I leave out anything I believe I might not use.

If I really need it, I can always buy it. In Kyoto I was irritated by long fingernails so I spent $4 on clippers.

For the last couple of trips, I've taken my ultra lightweight plastic pancho style raincoat. It's 70 grams that I've never used, so I won't take it again. I'm tempted not to bring my umbrella. But I always use that, so it's worth 146 grams.

The big one is a change of clothes. Not needed. I've tested this advertising claim: 'Icebreaker merino resists odour naturally, and can be worn for days - even weeks - without washing'. It's true. However I can't quite come at leaving out a second pair of socks and underpants.

The dividends of my smug obsession are obvious. No checked luggage fee on budget airlines and an extra spring in my step when I've checked out of my accommodation and have a few hours to explore the city before my next departure. My total luggage weighs less than the average traveller's daypack.

They're also less obvious. A spiritual sense of detachment from 'things'. Not to be underrated.