Allow me to intro­duce, not myself exactly, but the little series of posts that the Wel­ling­tonista people have kindly allowed me to pub­lish here. “Notion­al Sig­ni­fic­ance” will be some­where between travel writ­ing, his­tory, psy­cho­geo­graphy and per­son­al reflec­tion, based upon walk­ing the length of Wellington’s stretch of State High­way 1.

The concept may sound famil­i­ar. I was primar­ily influ­enced by Iain Sinclair’s Lon­don Orbit­al, where he walked around the M25 explor­ing the hid­den his­tor­ies, lost land­scapes and reveal­ing minu­ti­ae of the spaces adjoin­ing that infra­struc­tur­al tour­ni­quet around the cap­it­al. Wel­ling­ton has no orbit­al motor­way, so instead I settled upon the so-called “Roads of Nation­al Sig­ni­fic­ance” pro­gramme, and decided to try divin­ing the deep­er sig­ni­fic­ances of the high­way that runs through the heart of our region.

Iain Sin­clair is not the only touch point. W.G. Sebald’s quasi-fic­tion­al walks through Suf­folk (dir­ect walks, indir­ect nar­rat­ive, loc­al details with inter­na­tion­al mean­ings) were anoth­er influ­ence, and it’s hard to ignore the ori­gin­al psy­cho­geo­graph­er, Guy Debord. Georges Perec’s concept of the infraordin­aire is intriguing, but don’t worry: I’m not going to get all Fran­co­phile philo­soph­ic­al. Not too much, any­way. And there are loc­al inspir­a­tions such as Wel­ling­tonista Robyn Galla­gh­er, whose ongo­ing recon­tex­tu­al­isa­tion of Maurice Shadbolt’s 1968 travel guide teases out the deep, the ordin­ary and the deeply ordin­ary aspects of pro­vin­cial and sub­urb­an New Zea­l­and.

But I hope that this won’t just be Sin­clair without the dead­pan mock-occult­ism, or Sebald with less Holo­caust. To state the bleed­ing obvi­ous, Wel­ling­ton is not Lon­don. Walk­ing along Wellington’s road of nation­al sig­ni­fic­ance will, I hope, bring out our region’s own sig­ni­fic­ant insights and passing notions. I’ll gen­er­ally try to walk as close as pos­sible to either the exist­ing SH1 or the pro­posed new routes, with occa­sion­al detours in search of stor­ies (or lunch), writ­ing about the his­tory and poetry, quirks and viol­ence, secrets and sur­prises that I find along the way.

On the road

The jour­ney begins with a bus ride.