Essay by Keith Rankin.
A great academic campus? But note the roof of the Concentrix building.
A Green Way?
Or was it the 1990s’-built Languages Building?
Whoops, there goes Concentrix!
Hard Yakka. Auckland’s answer to the Christchurch Cathedral
Two days before present
The Martians have landed:
One Day before present: going, going, …
Unitec Stadium and Gymnasium (and there were state-of-the-art Squash Courts with a café popular with business staff and students). Once the home of Auckland basketball and netball. And the Auckland Blues – and business staff – trained at the gym, not so long ago.
Back to today:
Ouch, from late 2006 to early 2014 that was my modern state-of-the art workplace and teaching place!
Literally the home of the Schools of Communications and Business. Over those years, I had three offices in that building, and many great memories; and sad memories, too, losing two colleagues.
Near the Carrington Campus main entrance on Carrington Road South; erasing 1900s’ as well as 1990s’ history.
Penman House; only the pine tree remains.
(Who today knows where ‘norfolk pines’ originated? Hint, it’s a place not far away which been erased from our travel maps, despite being a Unesco World Heritage site. I was lucky enough to fly there from Auckland in 2024, when it was still possible. One of these trees is the signature tree at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds.)
See this and other easily googled material about Robyn Hyde’s 1930s’ sanctuary. Fortunately, local MP Helen White was able to save a few heritage mementos from the house, just in the nick of time.
Oakridge House in June 2024 and in October 2024
Is that an oak tree? Sadly the Unitec Arboretum and Sanctuary Gardens have also gone. At least there are still oaks and norfolks in the Carrington precinct.
Oakridge House became the main sanctuary (especially 2017 to 2019) for the School of Business in the years after Unitec’s flagship business building was tenanted to IBM (in 2012, in an opaque high-level deal) and soon after was abandoned by IBM and became the Concentrix Call Centre. (I understand that the aim of the 2012 eviction was for Unitec to make money through renting out some of its key assets to lucrative high-tech tenants; the template was the University of Ballarat in Australia, with QUT Kelvin Grove being the template for a high level tertiary campus without being ‘saddled with’ heritage and green spaces which government accounts would construe as a ‘lazy asset’.)
There are very few photos of Oakridge House in the public domain; Unitec itself has been remiss in this aspect of the documentation of its past. Here is one poignant photo that I found, in an advertisement labelled “chimney demolition”.
Finally, below, is the former Childcare Centre and another former workplace. (My son attended the demolished childcare centre in the foreground. He was proud to have been a ‘Unitec student’. My 2016 office was in the former building in the distant background.)
Unitec has now formally merged with Manukau Institute of Technology. It is reputedly going to become a site for city edge tenement housing; some of it, but not all, ‘social housing’. The precinct will need schools, given that nearby schools Gladstone Primary and Mount Albert Grammar are amongst the most oversubscribed schools in the country. It takes little imagination to see that the remnants of Unitec at Mt Albert eventually will become a school (or schools), and that the ongoing Unitec presence of the new Tamaki Institute of Technology (it will probably be called something else) will be at the Henderson ‘campus’, a highrise sandwiched between the Waitakere District Court and the Henderson Library.
Q How do you acquire a small Polytech? A. Establish a large Polytech, then wait.
See Unitec’s extreme financial distress detailed in documents, RNZ, 4 September 2018. Unitec punched above its weight, when it could. Let’s hope that it has not been completely forgotten, by 2050.
And see my yesterday’s photo-essay on Scoop: Carrington: a site for sore eyes.
————-
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
