Notional Significance: Halfway

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On one side: the beige of town­houses; the her­met­ic white­ness of Fletch­er Construction’s offices; the twee com­forts of a garden centre. On the oth­er: a wall of green­ery, smugly settled exot­ics loom­ing over dense indi­gen­ous under­growth and the raw-cut clay below. Hard-won colo­ni­al­ism con­geals into aspir­a­tion­al her­it­age, but with a psy­cho­geo­graph­ic­al trace linger­ing at the edges of con­scious­ness — this is one of the old ways, a track tra­versed for gen­er­a­tions before the Europeans arrived.

A cal­cu­latedly rough-hewn sign tells you that this is Glen­side, then com­plic­ates the issue with the text “The Halfway 1840 – 1928”. While “Glen­side” has the whiff of a cyn­ic­al developer’s coin­age — the sort of instant nos­tal­gia often cooked up on the spot to lend quasi-rur­al des-res ambi­ence to the latest tranche of place­less sprawl — its ori­gins are more demo­crat­ic. When the former name “The Halfway” proved too ambigu­ous for the post office, they held a com­pet­i­tion. A home­sick Scot­tish set­tler thought it reminded her of the glens, and there must have been some­thing in the gentle hills and trick­ling burns that res­on­ated with the loc­als.

For a phys­ic­al remind­er of The Halfway, I walk past the garden centre, ignore the bar­rage of “Private Road” warn­ings, and head for the pic­tur­esque husk of a house at the end of a nar­row met­al road. This is the last of sev­er­al Halfway Houses that once provided wel­come shel­ter and pos­sibly even more wel­come booze for trav­el­lers, halfway between Pori­rua and Wel­ling­ton. At the moment it looks halfway to ruin, and a long way from a decent drink. Ply­wood win­dows, tum­bling pil­lars, weather­boards lost in lichen, a chim­ney crum­bling back to clay.

Behind the house, past the pop­lars and ubi­quit­ous mac­ro­car­pas, there’s a glimpse of time­less bucol­ic Kiwiana. Horses amble along well-worn dusty paths, shel­ter belts and broom step up the rolling slopes, streams wind lazily through what by Wel­ling­ton stand­ards has always been a gentle and well-watered hol­low, and which must have seemed a per­fect place to settle or just stop for the night.

But beneath the sur­face, lit­er­ally and fig­ur­at­ively, the land is layered with a dif­fer­ent, tough­er his­tory. It has been a camp for rail­way work­ers and sol­diers, a sale-yard for sheep and cattle, a golf course and a sewage treat­ment plant. It is in fact a typ­ic­al edge­lands land­scape: used, abused and degraded, bear­ing the cost of humanity’s baser needs for eat­ing, killing, mov­ing and shit­ting (I’m not quite sure how the golf course fits into this, but bear with me). It now mas­quer­ades as a rus­tic idyll, a sup­posedly pub­lic reserve fenced off and leased out to a rid­ing club. The graz­ing is no longer for work­horses but for play­horses.

Back to the road, where the Halfway is still a place of con­nec­tions. The Pori­rua Stream is to the left now, hav­ing met the Bel­mont Stream among the pad­docks, and it soon gath­ers rein­force­ment from the Stebbings Stream down in the gully below. Middleton Road swings back towards the low rumble of the motor­way, and Westchester Drive begins its swoop up the scrubby hill­side to meet and cross it. There are no foot­paths, so if the vil­la­gers of Gren­ada want to walk to the Halfway they will have to take their chances with the gorse and the growl­ing traffic.

Westchester Drive’s young­er broth­er (for some reas­on, while cars seem to share the con­ven­tion­al­ised fem­in­ine gender with ships, I can only see roads as mas­cu­line) winds inex­or­ably down the Stebbings Stream, gnaw­ing away at the hill­side as it seeks an arter­i­al uni­on at this inter­sec­tion. It will link Churton Park, which is still meta­stas­ising across the hill­side in sickly tumor­ous shades — Sev­en­ties shit-brown, liv­id Eighties puce, jaun­diced Nineties ochre, the nec­rot­ic grey pal­lor of the Nought­ies — down through the trau­mat­ised val­ley and on to the motor­way. Here I am at the inter­sec­tion, forever the halfway. Nev­er quite a place, but a mark­er between places.