Notional Significance: Concrete Archipelago

The path, from tilted field down into the motor­way chasm, winds past richly-tagged gar­age walls and rear fences. In my mind, I think that Oak Park Aven­ue was once like this — dark brick, spalling con­crete, crunch­ing gravel, rust­ing cor­rug­ate — but I no longer trust my memory as any­thing oth­er than a syn­thes­is of sen­sa­tions and ima­gin­a­tion. In any case, the con­text is dif­fer­ent, as this was nev­er a bypass-con­demned zone of derel­ic­tion: instead, the vil­las facing  the Ter­race have been long since divided into chi­chi ser­viced accom­mod­a­tion, tar­ted-up apart­ments and upmar­ket tarts.

These drive­ways and rear yards are not quite pub­lic, and it’s with some relief that I turn back into the dingy bush, hulks of sofas moul­der­ing among the kawakawa, down rick­ety steps and onto a nar­row pave­ment beside the motor­way shoulder. The retain­ing walls are mute and mono­lith­ic, the con­crete engraved with inscrut­able pat­terns of squares and grooves. The geo­metry is her­met­ic, May­an ruins and frac­tured planes, the gap­ing portal, tun­nels to nowhere. Someone has scrawled a pentacle and circle‑A on a seem­ingly inac­cess­ible ledge. The asso­ci­ation of anarch­ism and the occult could simply be an arbit­rary com­bin­a­tion of taboo sym­bols to épa­ter les bour­geois­ie, but some anarch­ists have claimed Aleister Crow­ley as one of their own, based on a read­ing of the line “Every man and every woman is a star” as a state­ment of per­son­al liberty and divin­ity. Regard­less, amid the blaz­ing heat and insensate roar of traffic, this seems an incon­gru­ous site for Thelem­ic sex magick.

As the land­scape opens out, I walk beneath the first over­bridges of the high­way so far and past a sign for Kumutoto Lane. It’s a remind­er of the bur­ied stream, but I can still remem­ber my puz­zle­ment when first com­ing across it twenty years ago: the name soun­ded Japan­ese to me, rather than Maori, and I could draw no con­nec­tion.

I walk beneath one more over­pass, and I’m sud­denly in a world that’s a text­book col­lage of Bal­lar­d­i­an imagery: inter­twined car­riage­ways, glit­ter­ing trails of shattered glass, can­ted planes of oil-stained con­crete, glass bal­conies can­ti­levered from steely high-rises, per­versely sleek geo­met­ries of curve and cam­ber. The stor­ies and rumours rein­force the visu­als. Anonym­ous sex under off-ramps, middle-class murders in office towers, com­mer­cial trav­el­lers kept per­man­ently sleep-deprived by the incess­ant clat­ter of tyres across expan­sion gaps, urb­an sub-cul­tures recol­on­ising the sub­ter­ranean spaces (free­style run­ners, aer­o­sol ban­dits).

A man rides a gleam­ing, musclebound  motor­bike in slow circles, weav­ing between con­crete pil­lars and ship­ping con­tain­ers. He wears an open leath­er jack­et but no hel­met: he could be one of Ballard’s “hood­lum sci­ent­ists”, though his blank face betrays no scars. Twin rows of half-for­got­ten pil­lars stalk the tar­mac, await­ing the second com­ing of the motor­way with the age­less stoicism of druid­ic mega­liths. Their ham­mer­head forms also remind me of McCahon’s use of the tau cross, a pre-Chris­ti­an sym­bol of sac­ri­fice and resur­rec­tion. If NZTA has its way with a duplic­ate tun­nel, these Mod­ern­ist rel­ics will come back to life as the dreams of the ori­gin­al plan­ners reach long-delayed fruition.

There’s some­thing almost exhil­ar­at­ing about ugli­ness when it’s this com­plete, this uncom­prom­ising, this all-encom­passing. The cable car (or funicu­lar, to be pre­cise) slices through at an inel­eg­ant angle, caged in chain-link and razor wire; car­park decks are stacked and staggered, linked by jumbled after­thoughts of ped­es­tri­an steps and sig­nage; inad­equate fluor­es­cence stut­ters and flick­ers in the musty dark. If there’s Bal­lar­d­i­an icon­o­graphy here, it’s con­densed in a very Wel­ling­ton way, pressed between the foot­hills and the Ter­race towers rather than spread out among the reser­voirs, run­ways and big skies of Staines or Northolt. If Mait­land crashed through the Armco here, he’d be more likely to land on a startled smoker in an office block load­ing bay than become marooned on a con­crete island.

But these rem­nant spaces do have their own inhab­it­ants. As I climb the bank on the Clifton Tce side, there are the usu­al signs of last-resort home-mak­ing: mat­tresses among the scrawny under­growth; card­board sheets laid neatly across benches; bottles, rags and car­ci­no­gen­ic mid­dens of cigar­ette butts stashed beneath the steel ribs of the over­pass. Con­spir­acy the­or­ists are also out in force among the tag­ging: “9/11 WAS A LIE. FEAR = CONTROL”; “FLUORIDE: THE NEW ASBESTOS”. Traffic slams by just metres away.

This is so much a world-in-itself that it seems futile to con­jure up the pre-motor­way past. Ves­ti­gi­al lanes (Shell, Dalmuir, Ros­ina Fell) have their stor­ies, and there are tales of eel-catch­ing in rem­nants of Kumutoto Stream until sur­pris­ingly recently, but there’s noth­ing to tie them to the exper­i­ence of this place. It’s an asphalt canyon, a cathed­ral of the motor age, and the weather­board days of the res­id­en­tial Ter­race feel even less rel­ev­ant than my dies­el-fuelled ima­gin­ings. There is one geo­graph­ic­al con­tinu­ity worth not­ing: the Clifton Tce car­park ends with a sharp right turn towards Wood­ward St, just the way that the Kumutoto Stream once flowed.

If I were head­ing off in that dir­ec­tion, there would be rich veins of his­tory to tap: Kumutoto kainga, the Wel­ling­ton Club and its mania for demoli­tion, the death of Edward Gib­bon Wake­field (plaques remem­ber him not as a kid­nap­per, jail­bird and swind­ler, but with terse enco­mia and lists of achieve­ments, includ­ing “Man of Vis­ion” and “M.P. for Hutt”). But the motor­way flows on, and the next stretch teems with vis­ible con­nec­tions to the past, des­pite the best efforts of the high­way­men.