Notional Significance: Asylum

[See all Notion­al Sig­ni­fic­ance posts]

After my detour, I head back to the motorway’s edge. My route takes me along Mexted Terrace—a name that is engraved across Tawa’s skin, and with its twin asso­ci­ations of car deal­er­ships and rugby it encom­passes two dimen­sions of the sub­urb­an myth­os. On the corner of Tre­mewan Street, with the high­way traffic in sight, is the home of the Tawa Art & Craft Soci­ety. It is not a grand edi­fice. The low-gabled house sits among shape­less lawns, with only a battered ver­andah and lam­in­ated Com­ic Sans sig­nage to dis­tin­guish it from its domest­ic sur­round­ings. Art knows its place.

The nature of domest­icity changes as I walk along Tre­mewan Street into a rare (for Wel­ling­ton City) tract of state hous­ing. These are neither detached house­holds (the Anglo­form mock-vil­la­gery of famil­i­ar famili­al state houses) nor bold uto­pi­an struc­tures hero­ic­ally for­ging com­munit­ies in the sky, but awk­ward, self-deny­ing half-way houses, lost between the two vis­ions. Once you stretch out a weather­board box to these dimen­sions, giv­ing it a hipped roof no longer con­notes cosi­ness; it speaks of the bar­racks and the dorm, of pater­nal­ism and the loss of agency. They stand to atten­tion around a sunken car­park, back­ing on to scrub, armco, and the relent­less motor­way. And behind that, the dark plant­a­tions bide their time, await­ing their trans­form­a­tion into the asphalt knot of the new Keneperu Inter­change.

The street des­cends, to the con­stant accom­pani­ment of dron­ing traffic. As the road curves away to the left, it reveals a small park, and I cut across the patchy grass. A group of chil­dren watches me and my cam­era war­ily from the edge of a play­ground. One of them gives me a quick upwards nod. “Sup, Grandad?”

Silently, I nod back, while walk­ing down the hill towards the rail­way. From here, I glimpse a wide, elev­ated plat­eau across the val­ley: the former Pori­rua Lun­at­ic Asylum. Kene­puru Hos­pit­al still func­tions here, a tim­id sub-Bru­tal­ist cluster set amid pla­cid lawns, but the rest of the grounds resemble a post-apo­ca­lyptic autonom­ous zone; a land apart; a land of for­get­ting and renew­al, of decay and rein­ven­tion, of exploit­a­tion and res­ist­ance. The men­tal hos­pit­al teemed with stor­ies, stor­ies that haunt me but that I shy away from telling. They are too raw; too con­tested; too entangled. Not my stor­ies.

The park turns ragged where it backs onto Keneperu sta­tion. A lonely, lop­sided plat­form. An orphan. Threatened with aban­don­ment because it served the abandoned—state house kids, des­ultory industry, a hos­pit­al that many would rather for­get. I climb the long ramp of the rick­ety over­bridge, and des­cend towards a gravel track squeezed between the tracks and the Pori­rua Stream. The paths con­verge as Tawa Flat is com­pressed between the hills and ter­races. The val­ley that began with a pris­on ends with an asylum. Soon the motor­way is again an aud­ible pres­ence to my right.

On the oth­er bank, industry and amuse­ment cohab­it among the con­crete. Hulks of clas­sic cars await res­tor­a­tion; weeds sprout defi­antly from the cracks in a des­ol­ate go-kart cir­cuit. Bal­lard in micro­cosm. Oth­ers have found their own enter­tain­ment, as the brightly-bombed tilt-slab attests. Swirls, skulls, sig­na­tures. The lan­guage of the unheard.

Some­where near here, there will be a bridge, span­ning stream and rail­way to con­nect Kene­puru Drive to the new inter­change. Tellingly, it will duck beneath the exist­ing high­way to meet the Trans­mis­sion Gully route, dodging any con­tact with the road that’s cur­rently State High­way 1. The motor­way that I’ve stalked for most of my jour­ney will no longer be nation­ally sig­ni­fic­ant: it will be merely a loc­al com­muter route for a string of coastal towns and sub­urbs. I almost feel sorry for it.

I have now offi­cially walked out of Wel­ling­ton. At least, the Ter­rit­ori­al Author­ity of Wel­ling­ton City ends here, as I step into Pori­rua City. This could be a nat­ur­al place to end the trail of Notion­al Sig­ni­fic­ance, and my weary bones and even wear­i­er prose would wel­come that. But the wider Wel­ling­ton region holds many more stor­ies, along both the exist­ing and pro­posed routes, and I’m com­mit­ted to mak­ing the jour­ney. Walk on.

Above the bluff on my left, I catch glimpses of Pori­rua cemetery, and I think of Meg Campbell’s lines: “From the win­dow I see a hedge/between hos­pit­al grounds and cemetery./A fallen jam-jar spills its dead/gladioli on a grave.” Once more, I’m temp­ted to divag­ate through the extraordin­ary psy­cho­geo­graphy of that world with­in a world, but I could not do justice to its ter­rors and con­tra­dic­tions. A sanc­tu­ary for some; a pris­on for oth­ers. Kathy Dudding’s gla­cial, heart­break­ing doc­u­ment­ary Asylum Pieces says more than I ever could or should.

The stream; the track; the rail­way; the high­way: now all in align­ment, run­ning due north, aspir­ing towards the sun and the allure of dis­tance. Surely it’s coin­cid­ence that they all point to the ghostly iron trace of Titahi Bay trans­mit­ter? The country’s second tallest struc­ture, beam­ing out the voice of the nation, looms at the apex of these paths like an obelisk on a ley line. I feel an inex­or­able pres­sure northwards…or that might just be the barely tan­gible pull of grav­ity, the same subtle slope that sends the stream tum­bling over its last few weirs towards the sea.

On my oth­er flank, the motor­way traffic seems cap­tive to the same desire. The nar­rat­ive of the road is so often the myth of free­dom, but the relent­less, rest­less tor­rent reminds me of a tread­mill. A motor­way is nev­er a place to be: it is a means to an end, and the end is “else­where”. I briefly con­sider com­par­ing the drivers to vol­un­tary inmates, will­ingly sub­jug­at­ing them­selves to the mad­ness of a sys­tem that wor­ships motion and den­ig­rates place, but then I real­ise the shal­low glib­ness of that com­par­is­on. The need for escape—even for move­ment for its own sake—cannot be so eas­ily dis­missed.

I can only leave the last words to Meg Camp­bell, from her poem Sol­it­ary Con­fine­ment: “A bird sang in the hos­pit­al garden/and out­side the unbreakable/glass win­dow the flowers grew/without super­vi­sion, and the sun/lifted into the sky of its own voli­tion.”