The Kiwi Bach – New Zealand vernacular architecture
The Kiwi Bach
Photos and text by Janet Abbott, art historian and bach historian, Christchurch, NZ
“Build them yourself on land you don’t own, out of things you’ve pinched from somewhere.”
(Paul Thomson, The Bach 1985)
Huts, cabins and shacks are most commonly called baches in New Zealand. Pronounced ‘batch’ as in bachelor, these tiny holiday houses, often by the sea, are held close to the hearts of many Kiwis. There is nothing so fine as to travel over a winding, dusty road with the kids in the back, a stop to pick up fish and chips, and then arrive at your bach. The door opens to that particular aroma that belongs to the ancient furniture and musty magazines, and together with the sounds of sea, the birds, the wind in the trees, this transports you back to the carefree living of endless golden summers past. You can feel the sun on your skin, the sting of the sunburn and the ever-present sand in the sheets of your bed. The excitement of catching a fish, climbing the cliffs, boating into sea caves and tobogganing down grassy slopes plays at the edge of memory. This is the kiwi bach.
Lights on the world of baches
Many of the older baches began as simple dwellings built by men eager to overnight at their favourite fishing spot around 1900 (the first four ships of European settlers arrived in Christchurch in 1850). Here we encounter the essential quality of kiwi ingenuity. Built in remote places, they were crafted from whatever was at hand using the labor of friends and family. Many baches around the crimpled coasts near harbors, were built of dunnage, exotic hardwoods discarded as ships left port and washed up on the shore. Others required journeys of epic proportions to build and furnish them. A piano was lashed in a dinghy and rowed around a headland (on a morning when the Pacific Ocean was holding its breath) and hauled up the inaccessible cliffs using a system of pulleys to a cave bach in 1912. Once there, the music would drift over the sea to the late-night fishermen out in their dinghies. This was however only the warm-up; a grand piano was shipped into the neighboring cave bach the following year.
Through the roller-coaster of the first half of the twentieth century, the bach provided a place of respite for the soldiers who returned from World Wars One and Two, and a plentiful source of sea-food and rabbits for the hungry families during the depression. Two quirks of Kiwi legislation also add to bach history. Possibly as a result of Kiwi women getting the vote in 1893, for 50 years from 1917 pubs closed at 6pm, encouraging men to drink up and go home to their families (compromising with a rigger of beer under their arm). Also, from the advent of the 40-hour week in 1945 until 1980, New Zealand is said to closed for the weekend. No shops opened, and so work stopped and families filled the baches during weekends and holidays. Bunk rooms were added as mum, the kids and their friends arrived for the long summer holiday and dad went off to work over newly sealed roads. These are the summers of memory. Time was measured by the placement of a tea-towel over a railing calling children in for tea or the curfew the street lights coming on. The summer lasted forever and children learnt independence and the value of real things.
Cave bach interior
The baches, squatting on tiny plots of land just beyond the high tide, have been the bane of council and government officials for a century, and whole settlements have been lost to pedantic planners who couldn’t spare a 40 square meter footprint (44 square yard) on our 15000 kilometers (9300 miles) of coast line. They are Kiwi icons and their histories intertwined with that of this country. And it takes only the whiff of a beach bonfire and we are back there.
Coming to NZ? Want to stay? Check out Bookabach and track down something remote and wild. Warning, baches now include extensive, newly built dwellings near sea, river and mountain, check the photographs.
Want to see more about the historic baches of Taylors Mistake: Instagram: taylorsmistakehistoricbaches and bachtherapy