The world-renowned Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) designed and oversaw the construction of these delightfully eccentric public toilets, situated on the main street of this small town. The toilets attract busloads of curious visitors. Perhaps these are the only toilets that are a tourist attraction not so much for their obvious purpose as for their unique design. Congruity is forgotten here as colourful curves meet unlikely combinations of tiles of all dimensions. The toilets are lit naturally through an odd array of coloured bottles cemented into the wall. The public toilets that put Kawakawa on the map were Hundertwasser’s final creation.
Gillies Street
Kawakawa
Bay of Islands
I’ve had many an enjoyable pee in Kawakawa: great admiration for Herr Hundertwasser (hundred waters!)
First time, I was walking end to end of the north island of New Zealand pushing my wheelbarrow George, raising money for melanoma research from which my wife Myfanwy died on October 20th 1999.
That’s why we set up the Charity, the Myfanwy Townsend Melanoma Research Fund.
But it’s all on the website: and the Kawakawa public toilet gets a big mention in my soon to appear book Harry the Wheelbarrow Man.
A personal objective is to build my NEW downstairs toilet here at home in this style!
I’m a ‘toilet connoisseur’ myself: at Te Kao (further north in NZ) there’s a beautiful primitive mural on the outside wall.
Along State Highway 1 in New Zealand, there are a number of single cell circular toilets sponsored by businesses: one is sponsored by McDonalds, which makes it the smallest drive through McDonalds I’ve ever seen. If you come across one, don’t go in! They’re awful: but they satisfy a need.
Another is sponsored by the Avoca Hotel, in Wanganui on State Highway 4 (we played rugby in Wanganu8i many years ago, in 1984, I can feel another book coming on!), and bears the slogan ‘You’re only 80km away from a good bastard’s beer’.
Lots of great unisex toilets along the Pilgrim Trail (the Camino) in northern Spain, which I walked (and wrote a book, The Slowest Pilgrim) as another (unsuccessful) fundraiser for Myfanwy’s Charity.
When we climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, there was a beautiful box like toilet (like yours in, I think, Namibia) with a wonderful view through the window of the high snowcapped mountains. I could have stood (or sat) and admired it for hours, but people were getting restive outside!
Spain, the squatters often have’gripping handles’ for the elderly: came across one with holes on one side where the handle had obviously pulled out of the woodwormy wood, giving somebody a less than happy landing.
At Wakehgurst Place in Sussex, where I used to work, there was a wonderful toilet in the mansion with a big impressive square wooden seat over a porcelain long drop toilet, positioned almost above the main exit from the house to the gardens: everything dropped in to a big stone tunnel beneath the paved ‘patio’, about 18 inches tall and wide, and smaller side tunnels fed in to this carrying drainage from the roofs of the two wings of the mansion, with the entire package washed down beneath the gardens path when it rained to discharge in to a ditch in the fields.
We visited on holiday the wonderful Palace of Knossos in Crete, which two thousand years ago had flush toilets etc, with water being brought by aquaduct from the White Mountains many miles away.
It is a marvellous place: but a couple on the hotel terrace next day reduced it to a more basic level when the husband said at breakfast ‘We went to the Palace of Knossos yesterday. What a rip-off, just a hole in the bloody ground’
Yes, I’ve got pictures of them all: and I show them at talks, with the centre piece being Herr Hundertwasser’s magnificent opus in Kawakawa: and it’s amazing how often a member of the audience will have shared in this experience (not at the same time, of course!)
Better stop: lots of work to do, and many apologies for boring you with my reminiscences
Harry Townsend