The Kiwiana clothesline – why are our fences wearing bras?
If you’ve spent enough time driving the back roads of Aotearoa, you’ve likely done a double-take at a wire fence. Sometimes, you’ll find hundreds of colourful bras, pairs of boots, or even the occasional row of toothbrushes flapping in the breeze.
It’s a very Kiwi phenomenon: the random roadside gallery.
One of the most famous examples is the Cardrona bra fence on the South Island. It’s a long stretch of rural wire covered in hundreds and hundreds of bras.
You’d naturally wonder: how did this happen? The bra fence started spontaneously around 1998, when a group of travelling ladies decided they hated their bras (understandable) and pulled over to leave them on a fence. This started a domino effect of more and more passing travellers doing the same. Before you could blink, the collection grew, and the fence became legendary.
Today, it’s a popular local attraction, and it now hosts a donation box for the Breast Cancer Society of New Zealand.
The bra fence isn’t the only rural barrier full of random items. You’ll find a fence covered in gumboots just outside Whakatāne, and the “toothbrush fence” on a roadside in Te Pahu, made famous by HBO’s Flight of the Conchords.
So, to return to our initial question – why? The most fitting answer might be, “Why not?” Or perhaps, “Dunno, just felt like it.” If there’s one thing Kiwis are good at, it’s not taking life too seriously. If we see something silly, we join in, and we make it a national landmark.
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