Notional Significance: Crossroads

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Anoth­er bend; anoth­er end­ing. I cross into Tawa, which was a sep­ar­ate bor­ough until 1989, when in the words of a former May­or it was “just tacked on” to Wel­ling­ton. Topo­graph­ic­ally, and per­haps in sen­ti­ment, it still leans more towards Pori­rua than to Lamb­ton Har­bour. But as the old track changes names from Middleton Road (with the mil­it­ar­ist­ic bag­gage of its eponym­ous stock­ade) to the bucol­ic cadence of Wil­low­bank Road, on paper I remain in Wel­ling­ton City.

Not exactly sub­ur­bia. Mill­houses and gorse; rick­ety bridges; high ten­sion lines. Com­pounds for the con­tain­ment of dogs and way­ward women. And beside me all the time, that unwhole­some botch of raw earth still rear­ing up across the river. Flax­en mit­ig­a­tion scrabbles across the hard-scraped clay, but the razored hori­zon evinces unspeak­able crimes against the land­scape. It’s a battered slope, in every sense; a shal­low grave as seen by an ant; a bar­row where the entombed is the earth itself.

At the cross­roads, a topi­ar­ied wel­come. The let­ters T A W A bloom forth in trimmed flora, but this geo­graph­ic­al remind­er is redund­ant beside the trun­cated con­i­fer­ous cone known as the Buck­et Tree, which ranks just below Dress­mart in the pan­theon of Tawa sig­ni­fi­ers. These sym­bols of fussily-ten­ded domest­icity look almost appeal­ing in the weary heat of late sum­mer, but my task is to shad­ow the high­way, so I head east across the river.

I nego­ti­ate round­abouts, look­ing for the track that will take me down to the stream and then on to my planned route. But the mon­strous earth­works exert a per­verse pull, and I drift across the road and up a stub of a track towards the top of the man­u­fac­tured mesa. I pass between con­crete cubes and enter a for­got­ten world that goes by the name of Takapu Island.

While that might con­jure images of a lonely isle lapped by calm waters, its insu­lar­ity is a symp­tom of the more hec­tic cur­rents of mod­ern life. It is a teardrop of land, wrenched from its con­text by motor­ways, inter­changes and rail­ways. Flattened and pum­melled by years of earth­works (of vary­ing degrees of leg­al­ity), this desert(ed) island resembles one of those “lost world” table­lands that pre­serves fabled eco­sys­tems. But there are no car­ni­vor­ous plants or uni­corn skulls to be found here, just the famil­i­ar edge­lands spe­cies: pylons, gas pipes, Armco and gravel. Reeds and cracked clay delin­eate the sites of dried-up ponds; some have the uncanny lin­ear­ity of ley lines. Thou­sands of pinecones lie strewn through the resur­gent gorse­fields, evid­ence of some for­got­ten arboreal atro­city. Infant gorse crunches men­acingly under­foot, and I muse on the role of gorse as the landown­er­’s bio­lo­gic­al weapon against squat­ters and ram­blers: there’s no right to roam in a coun­try where any aban­doned land rap­idly trans­forms into an impen­et­rable mass of thorns.

The pen might be migh­ti­er than the sword, but the bull­dozer is migh­ti­er than my key­board. Since my excur­sion the aban­don­ment has ended, and the end game for this defeated land is in sight. A super­mar­ket has sprung from the gorse, its red-slashed rough­cast look­ing less invit­ing than the curi­ously domest­ic form of Aro­hata pris­on across the val­ley. The rest of the island awaits its fate: an asphalt tomb with tilt-slab head­stones.

I make a des­ultory cir­cum­nav­ig­a­tion of the island, paus­ing to savour the roar­ing prox­im­ity of the motor­way that defines its east­ern shore. Bey­ond, a tar­mac knot of ramps and under­passes, the lazy curves of the inter­change defined by the phys­ics of decel­er­a­tion. Bey­ond that, Gren­ada North, with its boxy con­crete ram­parts; then the long ridgeline of Horokiwi shim­mer­ing in the burnt blue heat. A bill­board reads “Now in CBD”, and I rather wish I was.

I traipse back down the access road, then east again towards the inter­change. Oppos­ite a caged tangle of pipes, I fol­low a rough track down to the val­ley. In the rel­at­ive cool, anoth­er inter­sec­tion: the con­flu­ence of the Takapu and Kene­puru streams. This also marks the point where the Korokoro-Pori­rua track met the Old Pori­rua Road; a cross­roads for hun­dreds of years. Now it is quiet and still, the din of today’s cross­roads lost in the leafi­ness over­head.

The place exudes an ancient, long-settled feel­ing, a very un-Wel­ling­ton sense of deep and calm belong­ing, rather than the hard-won tenacity of cling­ing to a hill­side in a gale. A bene­vol­ent geni­us loci over­looks this Arca­di­an vale: homely, and yet for that very reas­on unhomely to the gust-accus­tomed. Wil­low­bank Reserve, with its soft lawns and weep­ing eponyms, is a rem­nant of the Boscobel orch­ard, and nearly 150 years later its bosk­i­ness remains in the form of rare apple cul­tivars.

But even that was pre­ceded by Māori cul­tiv­a­tion grounds. The con­flu­ence of streams became a con­flu­ence of paths and then a place to grow crops; today, the con­flu­ence of motor­ised paths still brings people to this cross­roads to seek food—though now their pataka is a con­crete box and their kete have four wheels. Like the mul­tiple trunks of the Buck­et Tree that some say have now fused into a “nat­ur­al graft”, phys­ic­al, cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic imper­at­ives coalesce into a liv­ing, deeply rooted entity that we call “place”. It’s just that now, we trim it into unnat­ur­al shapes.

A track leads through the woods and up the hill. It opens onto a drive­way, which opens onto the bulbous cul of a dis­ten­ded sac: Taylor Ter­race. I am now in Tawa prop­er. The sub­urbs.