Ours is a land strewn with remembrance. Memorials to successive wars, hundreds of them, stand in our cities and our smallest rural towns. But for some time, as Jock Phillips has noted in Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand, “there were few functional memorials”. Especially in the wake of World War I, we tended to prefer obelisks to libraries. The Auckland War Memorial Museum, conceived in 1918 and completed in 1929, stands as an exception.
The Mt Albert War Memorial Hall came much later, after World War II and, more importantly, after the first Labour government established a policy favouring “living memorials” – structures that would provide amenity to the communities in which they stood. It made a subsidy available for such projects, and if you have a local hall or community centre with “war memorial” in its name, it was probably built then.
The subsidy was a pound-for-pound one and in Mt Albert that meant the local community was tasked with raising £35,000, about $2 million in today’s money.
The idea of funding civic construction with fairs and dances seems unlikely now: public buildings can’t be erected with cake sales. (The National Erebus Memorial’s long, sad search for a site in Auckland also suggests we may have generally cooled on remembrance building.)
Mt Albert’s hall opened in 1961, relatively late in the memorial boom, and it stands out as a remembrance building with an eye on the future. The neoclassical museum building was modelled on antiquity, but for Mt Albert, architects Wilson Moodie and Gillespie designed a remarkable reverse hyperbolic paraboloid roof that swoops over the functional space inside. Six years later, the local Lions Club extended the concept by building a space-themed playground we still call Rocket Park.
In 2025, I can testify that the hall is a magnificent place to play a few records. From the stage, where the turntables were set up last Saturday, the ceiling billows down to the rear corners, where it sits only a couple of metres from the wooden floor. It feels a little like a church, which in some ways it was for the people on the floor.
Several tribes gathered in Auckland over the weekend: the Auckland Writers Festival ran through the week and the Voyager Media Awards were held in a hotel ballroom the night before. Saturday was the Mt Albert Record Fair – the busiest anyone could recall.
I had volunteered for the slot that apparently no one else wanted: the first hour from 8.30am. It was a delight to be able to move up from spiritual jazz, through The Clean and into the lithe Ghanaian funk of K Frimpong. No, I smiled to the gentleman who asked, that record is not for sale.
I clambered down afterwards and joined the crowd of diggers. I don’t want to sentimentalise too much, but I found albums by Jenny Lewis and Laura Cantrell that Fiona and I had long loved. But we’d had them only on CD. I’d never seen them on vinyl before (the latter was pressed once, in 2005, the year that vinyl sales bottomed out at US$35 million globally) and, the vendor and I agreed, I was unlikely to see them again. I’d have gladly paid more than I did.
While kids played outside in their space-themed park, the kind of people who love to fossick for records flowed in and out of the hall, chatting, making space for each other and digging in the hope of gold. There’s an optimism about flicking through bins of records in search of right-priced treasure that seemed to suit the spirit of the building itself.
In a world where all the news is bad and troubling, it seems fitting that we should seize on a little optimism as if it is the rarest of pressings.
