Victory deserves its big break

BY ALAN CLARKE

I guess we all have our Victory Square stories, opinions and ideas. For some – primarily those who've never lived there and can't see through the fog of their own prejudices – Victory remains one place never to visit after dark, unless it's to make a purchase at your favourite tinny-house.

Some see it as the all-night party zone; the tattoo capital of the top of the south, the main breeding ground for skinhead activism and family violence, a place where P-manufacture is the primary industry and burglary and benefit abuse the main occupations.

There is often some underlying substance to our jaundiced pictures of people and places, however insubstantial. But I'd guess that more dope is grown, sold, shared and smoked in Golden Bay and Motueka per head of population than anywhere in Nelson – and I feel safer wandering across the Victory Square sportsfield at night than through the Buxton carpark or the Church Steps area.

So it is fantastic that the rest of the country has now been given another picture altogether of Victory, with its inaugural Community of the Year Award. The significance of the award might even penetrate fogged minds much closer to home, and help remove some of the stigma that remains attached to Victory Square among Nelsonians themselves.

After serving a three-year Nelson apprenticeship in Wakefield, we shifted to the square in early 1987.

Having moved up from Invercargill and renting while we tried to sell our southern villa (we eventually got $39,000 for it), a $55,000 home near the shops on Toi Toi St was a perfect fit.

As for many a young family before and since, Victory Square represented our first break in the Nelson housing market.

It also offered a terrific school, even then, with its current visionary principal, Mark Brown, on the staff along with some other inspired and committed teachers. (He still remembers our daughter's name even after nearly 20 years and the thousands, of kids who must have come his way since then).

Yes, there were some sad cases in the neighbourhood. It's not appropriate to mention specifics, but a number of the playmates our kids brought home had various "issues". Whether that is a commentary on Victory or our own children's attractiveness to struggling souls is another matter.

The main point is that the school was just starting to develop sensible programmes aimed at dealing with social problems common to most schools but surely heightened in lower income areas: bullying, racism, poverty.

They made good use of mentoring systems – our daughter learned a little about what it must be like to be handicapped when she was teamed up with a little girl with spina bifida. With a Maori grandfather our kids had grown up knowing to look beyond skin colour, and in Victory Square they also learnt when it was appropriate to share.

Diversion warning: two nights after we shifted in to Toi Toi St, there was a knock on the door and a couple of guys stood nervously on the back porch.

They introduced themselves as former tenants who'd been booted out so the landlord could sell – and asked to harvest their hooch plants in the tomato patch beside the back door.

I'd noticed three or four halfgrown plants there as we'd carried in the cardboard boxes, beds and heavy old fridge, but hadn't had time to do anything about it.

Though my friends in blue would no doubt be aghast, I told them to help themselves – they were theirs, after all.

I was actually quite impressed – they could just as easily have wandered in during the small hours and grabbed them anyway ... and I was soon to be very relieved that they'd claimed them.

The next day, a cop followed me for a couple of blocks and wandered up to the door. He had suspicions about my little green Yamaha – it had no rego or WOF, and he asked to see my licence. I invited him to find a seat, if he could, among the "stuff" while I searched. I explained that we'd just shifted, I wasn't sure where my licence was but if he wanted to wait while I searched for it he was welcome.

Of course, I'd never bothered to sit my motorbike licence and he probably suspected that but, rather than throwing the book at me, suggested I get on to registering and warranting the bike asap and left.

He didn't even require me to produce my licence at the cop shop within the next week or so.

Times were gentler then – but I'm sure he'd have been in a different mindset if the dope plants had been in the vege patch right beside the door where we had our little chat. True story, by the way. Diversion ends.

Though Victory's revival might seem to be almost an overnight sensation in terms of the life of a community, the foundation for its current growth was being laid around about the time we were there. You could sense that a few people – like Brown and some of his colleagues – were positioning themselves to plot, push and lead significant change.

Having seen the first stirrings of the revival – even if too caught up in my own world to be a part of it – I find it hugely encouraging to see the accolades flowing now.

Even if urban renewal is often cyclical and once seedy and faded areas become trendy and cool, it is hard to see Victory Square ever becoming Nelson's leading suburb – largely because of its geographical handicaps.

The lack of winter sun in some parts remains an issue. The close little valley will probably always be a smog trap over winter, despite the NCC's determined push to clean up the air (the winter of '87 brought home to us why housing was cheap there – just opening the door at night felt like a significant health hazard, and was the leading reason we headed for a cleaner air zone at our first opportunity).

But there is more to a community than over-priced real estate.

I always find films dealing with transformation and growth the most moving. How much more inspiring when they are true, and set in a place you once called home.

- © Fairfax NZ News