[See all Notion­al Sig­ni­fic­ance posts]

I weave through con­crete islands and met­al bar­ri­ers to the edge of the Basin Reserve. Just inside the fence is a monu­ment to Wil­li­am Wake­field: as an abduc­tion accom­plice, mer­cen­ary, prin­cipled duel­ist and city fath­er, he was the mar­gin­ally more respect­able of the Wake­field boys. The memori­al is sup­posed to sug­gest a Gre­cian temple, but on a shrunken scale, and the geo­metry could just as well evoke rur­al water towers or ali­en octo­podes. Far from sym­bol­ising time­less dig­nity, its his­tory is as dubi­ous and peri­pat­et­ic as its name­sake. After ship­ping out from the moth­er coun­try, it lan­guished for dec­ades in the cor­por­a­tion yard before its first install­a­tion, and has con­tin­ued to shift in and out of the grounds ever since.

The William Wakefield Memorial

The Basin itself is a site of com­prom­ise and thwarted ambi­tions. The 1855 earth­quake kaiboshed any hopes of a grand inland har­bour sur­roun­ded by docks and factor­ies, and ever since the Mt Cook con­victs drained the rem­nant swamps and and flattened them into play­ing fields, the reserve has been sub­jec­ted to shrink­ing and nib­bling, as the noble ideals of civic recre­ation adjust to the demands of move­ment. The sharp edges have been shaved off, first to suit the turn­ing radii of trams, then to appease the ever-hungry high­way that now encircles it in an asphalt tour­ni­quet.

The changes have not all been smooth, and the Basin has seen its share of revolt. The grounds were stormed by uni­on­ists dur­ing the Great Strike of 1913, mak­ing it a brief sym­bol­ic centre for res­ist­ance — in a away, the wharves did come to the Basin for a while. Side-street graf­fiti con­tin­ues the struggle, though the words seem more strident than effec­tu­al: POWER CORRUPTS! SOD THE STREETS! CAPITALISM CANNOT LAST. Is the bar­ren site behind, ear­marked for a brand new super­mar­ket, a sign of capitalism’s fatal stumble? Or is the great weary beast just tak­ing a breath­er before get­ting back to its feet and back into tramp­ling mode?

Capitalism cannot last - Basin Reserve graffiti

The road keeps snak­ing on, leav­ing an awk­ward geo­metry of con­cave tri­angles and apo­lo­get­ic land­scap­ing. Among the fumes, the sticky, shim­mer­ing asphalt and the brazen archi­tec­tur­al mediocrity of motels and hos­tels, a small crenel­lated build­ing strikes an anom­al­ous note of embattled whimsy. The defens­ive archi­tec­ture seems at odds with its his­tory as Moth­er Aubert’s Home of Com­pas­sion, but per­haps it will indeed have to dig itself in for anoth­er siege. While NZTA are tight-lipped about cur­rent fly­over options, it seems likely that this bijoux castle will be (lit­er­ally) in the road. As St Pat’s col­lege got the elbow in the 60s, exiled to Kil­birnie to make way for a still­born motor­way, per­haps this last rem­nant will also be shoved aside. With its con­text so mut­able, what’s to keep it rooted to this par­tic­u­lar piece of earth?

Buckle St unbuckles, straight­ens, and brings itself to a stop at the Tory St inter­sec­tion. This is the first inter­sec­tion of the jour­ney that retains the geo­metry of Wil­li­am Mein Smith’s ori­gin­al town plan: since the tun­nel, every oth­er corner has been tweaked and twis­ted to unkink the high­way. Now I’m stand­ing at the edge of the Te Aro grid, the rec­ti­lin­ear order that marks the begin­ning of the true city. A grid plan is at the heart of most planned cit­ies, not just from the ration­al­ist Greeks and Romans to the spec­u­lat­ive sub­di­viders of the New World, but in Babylon, China and ancient Mex­ico as well. Occult psy­cho­geo­graph­ers scour maps for earth magic, ley lines and cab­bal­ist­ic align­ments; medi­aev­al towns reveal traces of old graz­ing paths and hill­top defences; but for planned set­tle­ments on flat land, the geo­met­ric DNA of the future city is most often con­ceived by a sur­vey­or with a set square.

Per­haps there’s more to it. A grid is a giv­en, but why this align­ment? North-south streets don’t quite run north to south, and the shad­ows in the west-east streets often catch you unaware when the sun sets fur­ther south than you’d ima­gine. For Mein Smith, crouched in his leaky hut, try­ing to cram the man­dated town acres onto a con­fined and fol­ded land, cer­tain fea­tures must have set the ground rules. To the west, the base of the Ter­race escarp­ment run­ning north to Clay Point; high to the east, the long ridge of Tangi Te Keo; Wait­angi Stream run­ning from New­town to the sea along the line of what was to become Cam­bridge and Kent Ter­races. Once the y‑axis was set, the rest of the grid fell into place. But what cre­ated that arrange­ment of par­al­lel geo­lo­gies? As usu­al, the answer is seis­mic: a series of small, inact­ive faults run across Te Aro, par­al­lel to what are now the major streets between Wil­lis St and Kent Tce. Who needs the ima­gined forces of ley lines, when we have the very real force of fault lines defin­ing the skel­et­on of the city?

Anoth­er fault now defines the east-west align­ments — ten­sions com­pound­ing over dec­ades — with signs that the pent-up energy is finally ready to burst: the high­way. The north edge of Buckle St now bristles with sheds, machinery, heavy met­al fences. The earth­mov­ing is about to begin, attempt­ing to bring at least tem­por­ary res­ol­u­tion to the con­flict between two incom­pat­ible vis­ions of “Nation­al Sig­ni­fic­ance”: the tra­di­tion of defin­ing our nation­hood by remem­ber­ing those who died for us in dis­tant lands; and the the hun­ger for move­ment, the cease­less drive towards else­where. The still­ness of memory versus the motion of com­merce. Each of them in its own way eludes the here and now, yet the con­cepts of memori­al pomp and diurn­al com­mut­ing seem irre­con­cil­able. No-one’s being told the even­tu­al res­ol­u­tion. Will the street buckle north­wards, will it be sub­duc­ted beneath Memori­al Park, or will the high­way, almost incon­ceiv­ably, be hushed a few times a year for pre-ordained rituals of remem­brance? For now, the cracks will be plastered over with lime chip and phalanxes of tem­por­ary nurs­er­ies: ten­sions unre­lieved.

This corner abounds with such con­tra­dic­tions. To the north: Mt Cook School, divorced from its eponym­ous moun­tain; and block or so away the former milk depot, a remind­er of the days of benignly pat­ron­ising muni­cip­al social­ism when a Coun­cil-owned dairy farm in Otaki would provide for the fat and cal­ci­um require­ments of urb­an urchins. To the south: the Police bar­racks with their tell­tale pris­on bricks, a remind­er of the old Mt Cook Gaol that used to lour over Te Aro. Among its pris­on­ers were the “plough­men from Pari­haka”, rewar­ded with deport­a­tion and incar­cer­a­tion for their peace­ful res­ist­ance to colo­ni­al encroach­ment.

The tangled cur­rents swirl on down the street. The benign insti­tu­tions of uni­ver­sity, museum and memori­al hide unmapped air-raid shel­ters, a botched pan­op­ticon, forced labour, a decap­it­ated moun­tain and long-lost Pukeahu Pa. Streets now dec­or­ated with gentle knit­ted graf­fiti once saw machine-guns sta­tioned on bar­ri­cades to intim­id­ate strikers, and in St Martin’s Square rioters smashed the win­dows of Muldoon’s SIS snoop HQ. Unknown war­ri­ors.

Statue inside the National War Memorial

Arthur Street provides a res­pite from the dens­ity of his­tory. It may be grim (“tem­por­ary” gravel traps, segreg­ated sli­planes, Chinese canteens, light-indus­tri­al brothels), but it allows the psychogeographer’s over­heated brain a time to decom­press from Buckle Street’s mil­it­ar­ist­ic over­load. One step after anoth­er; sun and asphalt; the vehicu­lar pulse. It’s a wel­come breath­er before the tangled knots of the Cuba Street corner.

Thistle Hall announces that it’s “look­ing to the future with pro­gress­ive ideals”, but the names of the new (second hand) shops that are slowly re-inhab­it­ing this dam­aged inter­sec­tion betray a more ambi­val­ent atti­tude to time’s arrow: Aeon, Particles of Time. Eras­ure in the guise of pre­ser­va­tion: shops and cot­tages were shunted, refur­bished and in some cases rebuilt to form a “her­it­age pre­cinct”, but it’s a blinkered “her­it­age” that cel­eb­rates colo­ni­al­ism while white­wash­ing liv­ing his­tory. Transit’s twee little pot­ted his­tor­ies, now van­ish­ing from the win­dows as urb­an life returns, petered out in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, passing over the polit­ics, cul­ture, art and struggles of the Upper Cuba most of us remem­ber. Only the former Free­dom Shop retained signs of that res­ist­ance: on an interi­or wall that was yet to be sanded clean, a few stick­ers remained, includ­ing the infam­ous black bloc chant “Cap­it­al­ism? No thanks! We will burn your fuck­ing banks!” That too is now gone.

On the oth­er corner of what was once Tonks Ave, graf­fiti has been painted over in brown, only to be swiftly re-tagged in white. Few now would recog­nise the graf­fito that stood here for years, except as the name of a new band: “WILL TOBIAS”. Few­er still would remem­ber the full text, extend­ing down across the road. Not a name but a ques­tion — “WILL TOBIAS DEFECT?” — won­der­ing wheth­er “token” black Spring­bok Errol Tobi­as would make a run for it in 1981. The words lingered long after the ques­tion had been answered (in the neg­at­ive), and though the text and its mean­ing have finally van­ished, the walls still con­jure the lan­guage of the streets.

Karo Drive takes off on its arrog­ant bend, slash­ing through the grid of all this Loc­al Insig­ni­fic­ance, send­ing houses scut­tling away from its jagged edge. Marooned between an empty nano-park and the atav­ism of Tonks’ Well (bricks and weeds fes­ter­ing below glass), Regan Gentry’s install­a­tion Sub­ject to Change is more aptly named than its cre­at­or could have ima­gined. Ori­gin­ally inten­ded for the Arthur St corner (unwanted by Thistle Hall), and then for Wil­lis St (rejec­ted by Trans­it), it ended up here after a long chain of com­prom­ises. Which just under­lines the sub­vers­ive­ness of this inten­tion­ally skewed pas­tiche of loc­al archi­tec­tur­al tropes: empty, func­tion­less, skelet­al, subtly yet fatally fail­ing to con­nect with either van­ished grid or new-hewn path — in a place such as this, what could be more site-spe­cif­ic than a sculp­ture that was inten­ded for else­where?

Karo Drive

The Drive passes acous­tic bar­ri­ers, barely-exor­cised ghost towns, the gut­ted shell of an incon­veni­ent cot­tage. It’s still a raw gash in the urb­an flesh, and the sky pours in through its breach. The arter­i­al open­ness is ali­en to Wel­ling­ton: it could be the out­skirts of Taur­anga or Christ­ch­urch, a peri-urb­an flat­land. Where the half-arsed high­way col­lides with Vic­tor­ia St (Wellington’s ori­gin­al Franken­stein St, bodged togeth­er from the severed limbs of unre­lated streets) the res­ults were always bound to be messy, and the carnage has reduced parts of Wil­lis and Abel Smith Streets to bleed­ing stumps. Behind the rem­nants of a com­munity garden, a sten­cilled Darth Vader puzzles over Rubik’s Cube.

After a day’s hot trek togeth­er, the high­way and I have to part. As the bypass swoops down into its con­crete trench, those trav­el­ling under mere human power are nudged out onto side paths. From here on, it will be a mat­ter of weav­ing around, over and some­times under the road, strik­ing a bal­ance between the des­ig­nated Nation­al Sig­ni­fic­ance of State High­way 1 and the unsign­posted sig­ni­fic­ant notions that gath­er around its mar­gins.