Notional Significance: Reclamation

[See all Notion­al Sig­ni­fic­ance posts]

Kaiwhar­awhara is a node, a knot, a tangle of paths and his­tor­ies. It’s where the eponym­ous stream meets the har­bour, though quakes and reclam­a­tions have long since nudged the mouth sea­wards from its ori­gin­al pos­i­tion at the fault line, engulf­ing fore­shore, ship­wrecks and shell­fish beds in the pro­cess. It’s where vari­ous incarn­a­tions of the Old Pori­rua Road peeled off from the Hutt Road, first lurch­ing steeply up a pre­cari­ous bridle track that fol­lowed the old Māori trails (keep­ing to the spurs and ridges where the bush was thin­ner), then clam­ber­ing labor­i­ously up the side of the gorge at a gradi­ent bet­ter suited to bul­lock carts. True to ety­mo­logy, much of the infra­struc­ture is sub­ter­ranean, pumps and trans­formers reveal­ing the con­flu­ence of pipes and wires that gurgle and hum beneath the sur­face.

It’s also a place of broken con­nec­tions. The John­son­ville line, twist­ing wear­ily up the gorge, was once part of the main trunk line, but rail­way arbor­ists hacked the trunk back to a branch when the main line was diver­ted along the coast. The motor­way rushes past, nev­er stop­ping, but there are remind­ers of a junc­tion that nev­er was: the severed stumps of still­born onramps. The river was once the edge of Wel­ling­ton, where a hated toll­booth caught rev­en­ue for Hutt County until a muni­cip­al revolt led to the form­a­tion of the short-lived rebel bor­ough of Onslow. Mil­it­ary his­tory is also fugit­ive and redund­ant: the rem­nants of Fort Buckley skulk unseen on a spur, hav­ing nev­er seen a Rus­si­an or a Ger­man ship; the Kaiwarra gun­powder magazine was Wellington’s old­est stone build­ing until 2000, when a secur­ity van was torched after a botched heist, and it now lies in ruins.

The latest build­ings and activ­it­ies seem uncer­tain: trans­ition­al, tem­por­ary, place­less. Slick show­rooms jostle with dis­tri­bu­tion hubs, mute retail boxes with pet­rol­head enter­tain­ments, Ori­ent­al rugs of dubi­ous proven­ance with fine wines and over­priced sand­wiches. A mis­shapen car­toon hound slob­bers and gib­bers above an inter­sec­tion, keep­ing sight­less vigil. Brick ware­houses crowd around a nar­row stream in a scene more at home in a Mid­lands canal dis­trict that a Wel­ling­ton gorge. Revis­it­ing the early days of dense set­tle­ment, houses of heart­break­ing mediocrity scrabble up the ridge, a venal feed­ing frenzy, raven­ous for mar­ket­able views. In a move that is dumb­found­ingly crass even by developers’ stand­ards, the streets are named after some of the writers that did the most to forge a dis­tinct­ively New Zea­l­and lit­er­ary iden­tity: Brasch Way, Sargeson Way (I won­der wheth­er there’s a Frame Lane tucked around the back), Curnow Way. If this is the trick of stand­ing upright here, maybe it’s time to sit down and think for a while.

But before I do that, I have some explor­ing to do. On the map, the Kaiwhara­ha­ra Reclam­a­tion seems noth­ing more than a for­got­ten appendix on the high­way’s flank, but it’s always intrigued me because it’s always eluded me. This time, I’m going to find a way there … even if it’s illeg­al. Rail­way and motor­way form a seem­ingly impen­et­rable bar­ri­er, but the stream seems to offer a way through, a weak­ness in the defences. From the deser­ted cent­ral plat­form, I walk south into the chunky car­a­mel-brown gravel. Signs make me para­noid, but guards and cam­er­as seem mys­ter­i­ously absent, so I exchange my faux-non­chal­ance for a quick dash across the tracks, over pipes and low bar­ri­ers, and into the filthy dark­ness beside the river, just before the sky­way meets the ground.

The under­croft is sur­pris­ingly spa­cious, but then again, there are not only six lanes of traffic but two aban­doned ramps above me. I keep my eyes out for trolls and trog­lo­dytes, but all I find is signs of their passing: piles of damp rags, tag­ging, a graf­fito that reflex­ively defends its own cul­tur­al status (“this is art”) and a sus­pi­ciously clean moun­tain bike, com­plete with hel­met, pad­locked snugly into an alcove. I notice pentacles for the first time since The Ter­race portal, and the cod-Satan­ic imagery extends to pitch­forks and the fierce grim­aces of half-formed demons.

The stream is rank and shal­low, trick­ling defeatedly between con­crete abut­ments, barely aud­ible over the arrhythmic whoosh and clunk of the traffic over­head. When it emerges, it makes a fair attempt at emu­lat­ing a nat­ur­al river mouth, and the ducks, gulls and swans seem con­vinced enough by this ersatz estu­ary. But noth­ing is nat­ur­al. Cables, pipes and rebar writhe out from the gravel, con­crete slabs, asphalt shards, weathered bricks and drift­ing ash that con­sti­tute this Franken­stein’s pen­in­sula. The land itself is treach­er­ous under­foot — it shifts and crumbles, sinks and tilts — as if still bit­ter at its aban­don­ment. It’s an arbit­rary mélange of sur­plus mat­ter, earth and rock and demoli­tion detrit­us trucked from dis­tant sites and dumped into the sea for some all-but-for­got­ten pur­pose, and now this land in exile has become an oubli­ette for the decay­ing leftovers of the trans­port industry.

Flak­ing gantries and charred tim­bers. Rails, ties and sleep­ers. Bald tires and burst boil­ers. Rust-streaked cuboid cham­bers the size of small apart­ments. Con­crete blocks like toppled mega­liths, fall­ing into the slow embrace of fra­grant weeds. All that effort went into reclaim­ing this land — the very word “re-claim” betrays our anthro­po­centric hubris, as if the seabed is right­fully ours and we have to claim it back from an ocean that out­rageously absconded with it — and now it’s a land ded­ic­ated to for­get­ting.

Even these few acres of arti­fi­cial promon­tory are enough to gen­er­ate their own nano­cli­mates and a dense web of mini­atur­ised eco­sys­tems. Bijoux aca­cia forests, pock­et deserts, clifftop colon­ies of flax and toe­toe, lawn-sized mead­ows fringed by fen­nel and gorse. It’s an archetyp­al edge­lands envir­on­ment, neither urb­an nor nat­ur­al, and the veget­a­tion has attained the status of a crypto­forest: part self-seeded, part delib­er­ate plant­ing gone fer­al. Wil­fried Hou Je Bek defines them thus: “Crypto­forests are side­ways glances at post-crash land­scapes, dia­gram­mat­ic enclaves through which future forest cit­ies reveal their first shad­ows, … psy­cho­geo­graph­ic­al cam­era obscur­as of prim­al fear and wan­ton desire … What starts with weed ends with a crypto­forest, and in between there is sur­viv­al­ism, with plants eking out a liv­ing against all odds, slowly but determ­inedly cre­at­ing the con­di­tions for the emer­gence of a net­work of bio­lo­gic­al rela­tion­ships that is both flex­ible and stub­born, unique and redund­ant, fra­gile and resi­li­ent.”

The sun slams down, and the wind can barely muster the strength to rustle the dry grasses. I slope back through the musty cool­ness of the motorway’s under­world, trudge across the tracks and make my way through car­parks and lanes in search of a long-over­due beer. A bill­board mut­ters “One second faster/One litre less”, then crows “Efficient/Dynamics//Sustainability for the real world”. Evid­ently, the “real world” is one in which sus­tain­ab­il­ity comes not from rethink­ing our cul­ture of excess, but from pur­chas­ing expens­ive Ger­man cars that are minutely less prof­lig­ate with fossil fuels, yet still sat­is­fy our lust for get­ting some­where else as quickly as pos­sible. Wake up, dream­ers! The “real world” is one defined by lazi­ness and short­sighted­ness, cupid­ity and stu­pid­ity.

Look­ing back across the sim­mer­ing asphalt of the car yard, across the rust-red tracks and the rest­less traffic, I can just glimpse the bluff at the north­ern end of the Kaiwhara­ha­ra Reclam­a­tion. On that crum­bling arti­fi­cial cliff, there once lan­guished a bill­board advert­ising the immense, yawn­ing fail­ure that was the Ses­qui 1990 Car­ni­val. Months passed; the hoard­ing gathered cob­webs and graf­fiti; and for a while the gate­way to the cap­it­al was marked by this aching, hol­low scrawl: “Spasqui: and I laughed and laughed and laughed”.