1939: St Andrew’s Blaketown

June 29, 2022

By AHNZ

What has happened to Blaketown, Greymouth, and its Anglican Church is a study in how towns die.

St Andrew’s Anglican Church (est. 1939) was the accomplishment of a congregation, including a Sunday School, achieved over many decades. Blaketown itself has a claim to being the original center and name for what became Greymouth but which instead, as per usual, was “gifted” the name of a politician. Blake, the pioneer, was relegated to the name of a side-settlement by the port when Governor George Grey visited in 1866 and the whole show was called Greymouth for him.

As we have seen, the same thing happened in the case of Invercargill when hard-working local Captain Kelly had his home re-named to flatter politicians passing through. Ref. 1856: Invercargill

Blaketown was once a vibrant Middle Class part of Greymouth with the church and the community hall next door at the heart of it. The hall was taken out (c.2014) by one of the gale-force windstorms this part of the coast is historically prone to. These days it has fallen into decline and started to rot both socially and structurally. The rot attracts crime and gangs and Queer Cult Leaders.

Where once the Blaketown community held their funerals, sung their hymns, celebrated their weddings, said their prayers, and baptised their babies, now Sam Duckor-Jones lives. Grotesque sculptures, chains, ropes, and garish pink shades now haunt the once holy place. In a profane attack on the sacred he calls the church he purchased in 2020 for $105,000¹ ‘Gloria’. It’s astonishing to imagine what the Coaster congregation of over 100 years would think of the Wellington homosexual living in their church if they were still around today! Where once the children of Blaketown learned their Sunday School Lessons, Duckor-Jones now facilitates ‘Rainbow Storytime’ for children with Transexuals in drag.

“My Mum and Dad got married here, and had their reception in the hall next door. Sadly the hall is no longer standing due the recent winds. Oh and you can also see the Blaketown Bowling Club, where my Grandfather played, and the roof of the Guide hall. Memories!!”

“Our old sunday school. My kids were baptised there. Made the trip back specially. Went to playcentre in the hall. Mum and dads wedding reception was in the hall too.”

“I used to like Sunday school.Miss Spender was the teacher. Mum used to dress us up in frocks and hat and gloves. They had a harvest festival there once and I took some veges from our garden” – Comments from West Coast History, Facebook (2014)

The Social Capital of the Blaketown community, especially their Christian heritage, passed away some time ago and this is what remains. Perhaps there are some elder members seeing what has happened who are yelling at the wall in their retirement homes but their New Zealand, and their Blaketown, is gone now. If they were still around today they’d probably march Duckor-Jones down the beach to the Seaview Mental Asylum for treatment.

Instead of being treated for mental health trauma, Sam is celebrated by his community for what he has turned St Andrews into. This includes great and sympathetic media coverage and promotional funding from the Mental Health Foundation. If that’s not ironic enough in itself, the Mental Health Foundation enjoys government-protected charity status whereas the likes of Family First New Zealand (also advocates about values) is denied it. Ref. Family First does not qualify for charitable status, Supreme Court rules, RNZ (June 2022)

 The Anglican Church community turned their back on St Andrew’s in about 2000/2005 when they gifted it to their Maori sub-sect. The Maoris promptly flipped the church for a few thousand dollars profit to, I think, an off-shore European man who rented it out for a while before Duckor-Jones came along. This is a similar laundering cycle as we have seen with St James Presbyterian Church in Auckland which was handed over to Cook Islanders to eventually decay and burn. Or, the old Balmoral Church which became Asian-Presbyterian, then Hindu, and is now (I think) a political office disguised as media called The Indian News. Take his sacred places quickly and obviously and the Anglo Saxon might wake up and notice what’s happening to him but take your time and a holy place can become a vibrant transvestite night club on national TV and nobody will say a word against it.

Duckor-Jones has not saved the church at all. He was quick to tell a visiting TVNZ reporter that it’s art not restoration. Damage and decay is filled in with tinsel, pink paint, and expanding foam. The church continues to decay and perhaps faster than ever. He means to leave it a desecrated shell but in the mean time the self-declared Cult Leader makes it a shrine to himself with numerous self-portraits about the walls. One day, the Queer visitor says, he will walk away and leave the now pink church full up of sculptures, abandoned. At that point, surely, one of the gang associates living across the street will burn it to the ground?

“No. I AM the cult leader.”

“This is not a restoration project is it?” reporter asks. “It is not,” the double-barreled name from Wellington adamantly replies. – Seven Sharp, TVNZ (May 2022)

Because there is no wrong, there is no right
And I sleep very well at night
No shame, no solution
No remorse, no retribution
Just people selling T-shirts
Just opportunity to participate in the pathetic little circus

It was a pretty big year for predators
The marketplace was on a roll
And the land of opportunity
Spawned a whole new breed of men without souls
This year, notoriety got all confused with fame
And the devil is downhearted, baby
‘Cause there’s nothing left for him to claim

He said it’s just like home
It’s so low-down, I can’t stand it
I guess my work around here has all been done

And the fruit is rotten
The serpent’s eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine
– The Garden of Allah, Don Henley (1995)

In May 2022 Duckor-Jones told the Mental Health Foundation, “And so far no homophobes have risen to attack me, if they’re out there…Bullies are so boring.” Within weeks, perhaps days, his public challenge had been accepted when two young men attacked with graffiti. They also, apparently, had access to a Rainbow Flag which they burned outside the ex-Church. This, of course, is the lashing out of low-self esteem members of a dying New Zealand culture backed into a corner that can only resort to force. Ref. Homophobic, antisemitic graffiti left on Greymouth’s pink church, 1News (June 2022)

Towns or organisms that are born, live, and die just like any other life form. The West Coast should know that as it is littered with the bones of once prolific communities that are now Ghost Towns. For example, Charleston.

An entire lake and the ecosystem it supports can die in a pink toxic algal bloom. There’s an easy analogy here with what’s frothing out of DJ’s paintbrush onto the carcass of a religion he couldn’t kill only denigrate.

The gangs moving in to fill the Blaketown vacuum where civilisation and productivity once made its home are a sign of decay. So are the run-down houses and pavements, the boarded up shops, the bog that used to be a park. Sam Duckor-Jones was attracted like a fruit fly to the cheap and vulnerable, staggering, animal that used to have a strong identity and spirit. When it’s used up he’ll fly away again, still running from his mental health problems, as he says he plans to. In the meantime the dead house of the holy has become a warning beacon not to invest in or visit Blaketown. It’s in such disrepute that people like this can do things like this. It’s so disposable it can be mocked and used to mock art itself. If the tattooed gang members prowling about don’t set off the alarm then the gaudy desecrated church will. Don’t invest here, don’t bring your family here. It’s now a self-described Cult HQ where children are coaxed inside to have Queer and Transvestite Culture imprinted onto them with the blessing of our media, government, and current mainstream.

—
1 Ref. Oneroof.co.nz

Image ref. Anglican parish of Greymouth and Kumara handed over as a gift St Andrews Blaketown to the Maori Anglican diocese of Te Wai Pounamu, (c.2005); Damer Farrell, Alexander Turnbull Library

Image ref. Transvestite Daniel Lockett performing on what was once a Christian pulpit

Image ref. St Andrew’s Church for sale, Ray White (2020)

Image ref. Chair of the Grey District Youth Trust and Greymouth LGBTQIA+ Youth Group, Chris Efford. Signs of the times. Coasters Club, Facebook (2021)

Ref. Child-grooming comes to Greymouth, Rainbow Storytime NZ, Facebook (May 2022)

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