Review: Come back to Mona Vale: Life and death in a Christchurch mansion

Most of us familiar with Christchurch will have wondered about the origins of the grand house Mona Vale, which stands in parklike grounds on Fendalton Road. In the late 1970s, it was purchased by the Christchurch City Council and since then has had various uses as a function centre, restaurant and tearooms. It suffered in the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 but has been mended and is once again open to the public.

Come Back to Mona Vale: Life and death in a Christchurch Mansion is an extensive history of one of the families that owned the property for some decades. McKinnon is descended through his mother to the Goughs; it was his wealthy great-grandfather, Tracy Gough, a well-known entrepreneur through the ‘40s and ‘50s, who bought the house with his first wife, Julia, in the 1930s.

This is McKinnon’s first book, extended from a prize-winning essay on the same subject that won the 2020 Landfall Essay competition. He begins conventionally enough with his mother’s family history, describing another big Christchurch house. Readers may be confused at this point – Mona Vale comes later. It may seem odd that so many words have gone into describing a house that is not the subject of the book but it becomes clearer later on.

This “large white house surrounded by lawns” was the residence of McKinnon’s maternal grandparents, Owen and Avenal, whom McKinnon was devoted to as a boy. He recalls the eulogy he gave when Owen died, in which he described his grandfather as “courtly.”

The same adjective could be applied to McKinnon - or at least his voice throughout this book. Although he is in his forties, it reads almost as a work of last century or even earlier. This is not a negative: the old-fashioned, highly educated and richly descriptive voice well suits the subject.

McKinnon’s devotion for his grandparents was mutual. There were boating holidays in the Sounds and lots of welcome weekend stays as relief from boarding school. Owen and Avenal were in possession of deep Anglican faiths and had taken to heart the Christian message of gentleness, love and honesty – although the latter quality did not extend to shining light into the dark corners of Owen’s family.

Owen was the only brother in a family of four. After his mother died, his father, T.T. Gough, married again and presented him with a half-brother, Blair. Blair may not in fact be called Blair, because as McKinnon cautions on a fly-leaf, “The names of almost all the living have been changed.” This dynasty is disputatious; there have been many court cases over the past 70 or so years and all of them to do with money.

McKinnon is honest about his enormous privilege: secondary years at Christ’s College before tertiary education at Cambridge, England and then at an unnamed university in France. Come Back to Mona Vale blows open lives of great wealth and ease: expensive cars, lots of overseas travel, enormous houses and valuable paintings.

Gough owned several Goldies and Mona Vale had one of the first heated swimming pools in New Zealand; he brought in the first bulldozers, which were where he first made his fortune. He also manufactured the first E.C.G machines to be used in our psychiatric hospitals.

It is not often in a review of a non-fiction work that care has to be taken not to spoil the plot. The story of Gough, his wives and children is worthy of a blockbuster mystery/horror movie – and that is as much as it is safe to say without ruining the suspense.

There are some standout sections of writing, particularly McKinnon’s description of life in Beijing, where he lived and worked after leaving university. His cosmopolitan understanding, intellect and humanity are to the fore.

By 2007 he and his partner had returned to Christchurch, where they moved into the late Owen and Avenal’s house, which hadn’t been occupied for eight years. This is another signal of wealth; most of us would have had to sell or rent it out. It was museum-like, with all their personal and intimate belongings still in place and jammed with furniture. McKinnon’s appealing eccentricity is demonstrated in his refusal to empty his grandfather’s desk but instead work standing up with his laptop on a packing crate. The sections of the book detailing the September and February earthquakes are as consummately written as those describing life in Beijing.

Hamstrung as this reviewer is by the decision not to blow the gaff, I do wonder how different the account would have been if it had been written by a female descendent. It is possible to go so far as to wonder if McKinnon missed some signs of further horror – perhaps he instinctively backed away from it. The book is thick with the process of its creation, the almost ten years it took McKinnon to investigate, research and write. Some of this aspect is perhaps too thickly laid on – but this is a minor criticism.

Come Back to Mona Vale is a highly enjoyable example of our own national genre, New Zealand Gothic — but non-fiction, this time.

Reviewed by Stephanie Johnson