Originally Published 1996 © Peter Diprose, and Leonie Johnson
Text by Peter Diprose, Photographs by Leonie Johnson
Dorothy gazed enchantedly at the gleaming city of Ours. Beyond the inner suburbs she could see the Great Hara's Tower . She exclaimed with excitement "surely a good wizard lives there. We must set out to find a heart at the centre of that city." So Dorothy and her merry band set forth on that golden road Dominion. When they came upon a gate house, they found the Queen of Hearts playing Wheel of Fortune with Alice, a sultry croupier from Vegas. Alice welcomed Dorothy to the royal court, requesting that she put on tinted glasses, because the Good Witch of Waitakere insisted that all visitors to Emeraldland must believe that everything is green. So Dorothy, who was really just an ordinary little girl from Kansas (with shiny Oroton shoes and green Oakley glasses), checked into the Great Hara's Hotel hoping to fulfil her wildest desire.
Towers are what fairytales and fantasies are made of. From Babel to Camelot, of all elements in the built environment, the tower is perhaps most symbolically powerful, often identified as central to community inspiration. 'Casino' is also laden with meaning . Symbolically complementary to 'tower', casino denotes opportunity, risk, hope and desire, of fortunes being won and lost. There you can be a star at least for a little while as Knofler says, "money for nothing and the chic's for free".
In Auckland it was a stroke of genius to combine the elements of tower and casino. By bringing them together, the aura and mystic of both are raised. The construction and marketing of tower casino is engulfed in unconscious and implicit references to 5000 years of mythology.
One doesn't have to look very hard to find examples of myth-making. For example a parallel can be drawn between the tale of Oz and the television promotion of Skycity. Just as the fairytale suspends reality, a trip to the casino is advertised as a world of fantasy beyond the daily grind. The Wizard of Oz, written by L. Frank Baum at the turn of the century, is the wonderful tale of an orphaned little girl who lived in a countryside parched from drought. Dorothy's Aunt Em's lips, cheeks and eyes had turned grey from the heat of the sun. Em was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, and Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. A cyclone came and whisked Dorothy away to the land of Oz. There, she travelled to meet the Wizard who lived in the Emerald city - 'a mass of towers and steeples behind green walls, and high up above everything [were] the spires and dome of the Palace of Oz'. After a grand and successful journey our little hero returned home to a freshly built farmhouse, and to the embrace and kisses of her loving Aunt. On the television advertisement for Skycity Casino a man toils away in tones of grey dotting the 'i's' and crossing the 't's', until he visits the casino tower which puts the colour back into his cheeks. 'Work is dull. Play is fun!' Similarly, Dorothy's life was dull until she visited the city of towers, and when she returned to her normal life everything was better.
Mixed Metaphors: A brief history of tower symbolism.
An examination of tower mythology beyond that of the Wizard of Oz throws up a range of interesting tales and associations.
The Egyptian Obelisk of Luxor, constructed at the time of Moses, was erected as a monument to sun worship. However, its hieroglyphic decorations which were added afterwards are commemorative of battle victories. Three thousand years later Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel designed a 300m tower for the world exposition of 1889 in the belief it symbolised the century of industry and science. Eiffel's masterwork was at first so disliked that the writer Victor Hugo ascended it every day, in the knowledge that the tower was the only location in Paris that he did not have to look at the 'repulsive column made of screwed-together tin'. Like the Obelisk of Luxor, the Eiffel Tower is commemorative of an ideological 'battle', celebrating the French Revolution of 1789 which heralded the age of liberty, equality and fraternity.
New Zealand is not without its own indigenous celebratory tower of sorts - the hakari stage. These were constructed up to 30 metres high, and upon which food and gifts were placed during celebrations.
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