Murray Cockburn - Born to draw

A multi-award-winning Kiwi architect in New Zealand and Fiji for 56 years, Murray Cockburn’s survived sharemarket crashes and coups, his unique rustic schist, timber style now iconic in Queenstown.

When Murray, who’s just turned 87, opened his own architecture business in his hometown of Oamaru in 1966 as a 27-year-old Auckland School of Architecture graduate, he had “a phone number and a P.O.Box”.

While classmate Sir Ian Athfield accepted twice the normal salary to work for Structon Group, Murray opted to get his designs built, opening his Oamaru office instead.

It was a struggle in those early years with business acumen not part of the architecture course.

“A letter took a week to arrive from Auckland, and you’d wait and think for a few days then write a letter back.”

A keen skier, Murray opened a Queenstown branch in the Mall in 1967. “There was one taxi driver and one building inspector here then.”

The young bachelor, also a fan of classic cars, soon became renowned in architectural circles, opening offices in Fiji and elsewhere, awarded a dozen Fijian architectural awards for everything from poolside resorts to a Hari Krishna temple.

A Fijian citizen by 1979, Murray married Adi Cakau from the Chiefly Island of Bau in 1980, her lineage making her quite a catch for a Kiwi boy. “I’d be bailed up at parties by big Fijian chiefs, thumping me on the chest saying, ‘Your wife was meant to marry my son!’,” Murray grins.

Murray’s also won several NZ Architectural Awards – renowned in his early years for winning a NZ Architectural Competition for Dunedin’s Church of the Holy Name in the late 60s.

However, a quick redraw of another architect’s botched pub plans for the Oamaru Licensing Trust manager at a party landed him plenty more pub designs, kickstarting his business.

Born in Oamaru in 1939, Murray, an only child, remembers his dad being shunted off to war at the Oamaru Railway Station around 1942. “My mother cried every time she heard, ‘Now Is The Hour’ after that.”

It would be two or three years before Murray saw his dad again, who he barely knew, he and his mum temporarily living in Alexandra, a drier climate for her health. “We were waiting for the bus and I kept saying, ‘Mum what will I say to him?’”

A day boy at Waitaki Boys’, Murray endured his fair share of caning. They had military training every Wednesday afternoon. “As a platoon commander, I marched my loyal platoon to the rifle range where we all proceeded to smoke on the basis that we would win the annual marching competition, and we did.”

In his 6th form year he narrowly escaped death after a severe stomach bleed which doctors said would leave him disabled in a wheelchair for life. However, after two months in hospital and nine months recuperating, Murray was able to finish his schooling.

“I’d always wanted to be an architect. I was drawing two dimensions as a kid which an artist told Mum was very rare that young.”

Murray worked hard on the wharves and at an Auckland pub to put himself through university. The Austin Gordon he and a university mate spotted on a bus ride one day, paying triple its value – 90 pounds, still takes pride of place in Murray’s collection, alongside an AC sports car, Bentley, Fiat Abarth and an E-type Jag.

A year at Dunedin’s Ministry of Works as a cadet draftsman didn’t foster a good work culture, Murray instead awarded a scholarship for uni, later told he was the only Kiwi student to ever pay back a bursary.

An international architectural competition win in 1963, still a student, saw him flying to Havana, Cuba, to accept his prize, shaking hands with Castro and chatting to guerilla leader Che Guevara. “That still gives me goosebumps.”

Despite losing his papers in Moscow en route to Cuba after a big night out, on arrival in Havana Murray went from police car to chauffeur-driven celebrity once they realised he was the competition winner, catapulted to hero status.

By 1968 Murray was getting some attention as a young architect and convinced his parents to move to the higher socio-economic heights of Oamaru and designed them a house which won a national NZIA award.

In 1969 Murray raced his Mini Cooper in the NZ Saloon Car Championship, before leaving for Fiji, opening his Suva office in 1971, followed by Auckland in 1975 and Honiara in the Solomons in 1979, while still operating a Queenstown office.

Millbrook founding owner Sir Kenneth Fung’s offer to design Millbrook Resort here came right in time, just after the 1987 sharemarket crash. “Architects around the world were without work and we’d had two military coups in Fiji.”

Architect Michael Wyatt was brought in as local partner on that project.

Murray recently survived a brush with cancer, and loves travel, once fluking a prize in a celebrity golf tournament in Beijing netting a $14,000 prize trip to Zurich, the envy of his mates. Founder of the Queenstown Gentleman Spoofers Club (coin game), he’s been ‘Spoofing Champion’ in Aussie, Fiji and NZ.

At almost 90 he’s only “semi-retired”, currently designing a 7-level apartment building at Ultiqa Fiji Palms in Pacific Harbour, near where he and Adi Cakau built a villa in 1999.