Notional Significance: Up and Under

[See all Notion­al Sig­ni­fic­ance posts]

The path sidles away from the road. To my left, and indeed to almost everyone’s left, is Wellington’s rad­ic­al headquar­ters, 128 Abel Smith St. It’s well over three years since the shat­ter­ing dawn when police smashed down the door, seek­ing evid­ence of so-called “ter­ror camps”, but the Urew­era 18 are still to face tri­al. It’s the sign of an aston­ish­ingly arrog­ant dis­dain for nat­ur­al justice that they may nev­er be tried by a jury. But 128 remains, and remains defi­ant. Signs of con­stant and mul­ti­far­i­ous struggles still cov­er the high­way-facing elev­a­tion of the house, from the faint and faintly pat­ron­ising appeal to bypass labour­ers (“Grow kumara, catch fish, but don’t pull down our homes”) to the bloody splat­ter of the cur­rent obses­sion (“March to end fact­ory farm­ing”).

Fur­ther on, the bypassed vil­las are clean and empty, and mit­ig­a­tion creep­ers are begin­ning to soften the noise bar­ri­ers. It strains the ima­gin­a­tion to remem­ber the old Oak Park Aven­ue: a tight and sham­bling lane, the backs of stables and small factor­ies, lov­ingly neg­lected spaces where people made art, music and ginger beer. Odessa named a song after the place, and sung of the loss: “Every­where evic­tion signs/They’re pulling down this part of town and call­ing it progress/But that’s a word rich people use”. I was nev­er more than an addendum to Te Aro bohemia at the time, and as I struggle to recon­jure the brick and ivy − “infes­ted with the memories/faded hopes” − I won­der wheth­er my own memor­ies are at least partly second hand. “For­get the life you nev­er knew”.

Oak Park Aven­ue (far from an aven­ue, and with only des­ultory attempts at oaks and parks) reaches Vivi­an St. Only it’s no longer Vivi­an St, but Buller St, ever since someone decided that a street that is now con­tigu­ous for ped­es­tri­ans but not cars could not pos­sibly be a single street. The taxi drivers were get­ting con­fused, poor darlings. But it beats me how renam­ing this short stretch after a street that already exists, so that we have a T‑junction of three streets with the same name, could be any less con­fus­ing. Names divide and names join.

Not that “Vivi­an St” has any claim to a time­less con­nec­tion with the land. On nine­teenth-cen­tury maps this was still Ingestre St, and where it now leads up the steep­en­ing slope to The Ter­race, it once joined Whit­combe St, as the south­ern end of The Ter­race was then known. Names slide and names fade.

Up above that inter­sec­tion (Ingestre/Whitcombe, then Vivian/The Ter­race, now Buller/The Ter­race), the dark exot­ic trees beside Te Aro school have long exer­ted a strange power on my ima­gin­a­tion. Their silent loom­ing seemed to want to mark some­thing more sig­ni­fic­ant than play­grounds and a short­cut for stu­dents, and my sub­con­scious cast it as a wait­ing place, a gate­way; a moment­ary catch in the head­long fall from quiet hills into the riot­ous town. For a while I was vaguely aware that it was the site of the Ter­race Gaol, but it wasn’t until I saw Ann Shelton’s photo bill­board “Cap­it­al” (recently at Bartley + Com­pany gal­lery in Ghuznee St) that I found out that this was once an exe­cu­tion ground.

A con­tem­por­ary account stated primly that “the little plot in front of the gaol con­tains but sev­en mounds, of which all are neatly pre­served and labelled with the ini­tials only of those whose remains lie beneath”. Were the bod­ies dis­in­terred before the site switched its atten­tion from the end of life to the begin­ning? Were these con­ifers wit­nesses to the gal­lows? It would be easy to believe that I had sub­con­sciously picked up a grim aura, the psych­ic trauma of the earth, but ration­al­ity sug­gests that a com­bin­a­tion of topo­graph­ic­al emin­ence (along with the Mt Cook Gaol, it would have cast a com­mand­ing glare across Te Aro Flat) and the European ambi­ence of a path wind­ing through pine and oak would have been enough to trig­ger my Ang­lo­centric ima­gin­a­tion. If there’s any con­nec­tion to be remarked upon, it would be the sym­metry of the Buller/Vivian/Pirie St align­ment: cent­ral Wellington’s longest east/west street, ter­min­at­ing each dis­tant vista with a steep rise into dark green secrets.

Rather than detour­ing up the slope, I carry on along Buller St. That’s the oth­er Buller St (do keep up). There’s some­thing unheim­lich about a one-sided street, which makes sense if one fol­lows Georges Perec’s defin­i­tion of a street as “a space bordered, gen­er­ally along its two longest sides, by houses; the street is what sep­ar­ates houses from each oth­er”. Without the oppos­ing houses, the space is not bordered, and it can­not hold: space sloshes out from the car­riage­way; pours across par­al­lel park­ing, orna­ment­al flax, angle park­ing; spills over the noise wall and down into the deep moat of the bypass. A few stray splashes dribble weakly against the obli­vi­ous backs of Wil­lis St office and hos­tels, but the power of the space has leaked away, drained into the heed­less trench of the motor­way. Without bor­ders, there is no space; without space, there is no street.

The dis­lo­ca­tions con­tin­ue at Ghuznee St. Robert Jesson’s Star­fish, once appro­pri­ately loc­ated on Feath­er­ston St above former seabed, have washed up far inland on the dry fringes of Te Aro Flat. Spiked up, trussed up, glossed up, they are reduced to trophies, art rudely taxi­derm­ied and nailed to the wall to prove a hunter’s prowess.

The street itself is half in limbo. A redund­ant offramp, that might oth­er­wise have become a park or a build­ing and returned to the city’s grid, is now a kind of gypsy camp for road­ing con­tract­ors. Skips and scis­sor-lifts, porta­coms and porta­loos, slum­ber behind chain­link fences await­ing their noc­turn­al, sub­ter­ranean pur­pose. Each night the camp awakens into an orange scurry of hi-vis vests, road cones and flash­ing lights, machines and men hur­ry­ing into the Ter­race Tun­nel to com­plete the long emer­gency safety upgrades In Time For The Rugby World Cup.

These works have thwarted my plan of fol­low­ing the high­way right up to the tun­nel portal and then up the green hill as close to the tun­nel align­ment as pos­sible. I nev­er (well, per­haps only briefly) con­tem­plated an illeg­al dash through the tun­nel itself: only lun­at­ics and those in charge of small chil­dren would attempt such a thing. But the NZTA bar­ri­ers now force a detour, right back to Wil­lis St, and then up a lazily curving path beside a sul­len brown fence. This is stu­dent coun­try, ori­ent­a­tion sea­son, and the shards from their alco­hol­ic rites of pas­sage lit­ter the gut­ter in oddly orderly rows.

Up on Mac­Don­ald Cres­cent there’s a house once asso­ci­ated with someone who could have taught them a thing or two about booz­ing. Num­ber 26 was the house that James K Bax­ter called Fire­trap Castle (“Where the rats run free and the grots are smashed/And the leaves grow thick at the win­dow”) when for a few weeks between Jer­u­s­alem sojourns he set up a small com­mune here. He and his tribe “cooked on the fire­place and wrote slo­gans on the walls”, and it was one of the salti­er inscrip­tions that helped the muck­rak­ing Truth report­ers bring an end to the squat’s brief life. Baxter’s fierce rejoin­der “Bal­lad of Fire­trap Castle” sar­don­ic­ally thanks the press, bur­eau­crats and police for “com­plet­ing [his] Marx­ist edu­ca­tion”, and one sec­tion ends with “Roll on the Revolu­tion!”

A year later Bax­ter had suc­cumbed to heart dis­ease, years of alco­hol abuse and self-imposed poverty. It was the road that kept rolling on, and the tun­nel ripped through the hill­side on the oth­er side of the Cres­cent six years after that. Though divided into flats, num­ber 26 now looks respect­able, impos­ing and almost stately, set high above yet anoth­er one-sided road. From here you can almost make out 128 Abel Smith St, still work­ing on that revolu­tion, still fight­ing the fuzz and the men from the Min­istry.

Up on the Ter­race, the mix of smart vil­las and stu­dent dives is famil­i­ar, though the vis­ible stu­dent pop­u­la­tion looks remark­ably fresh-faced and wide-eyed − baby­boomer par­ents help­ing them shift fur­niture from sta­tion­wag­ons into hostel rooms − and there’s no sign of Baxter’s dro­pouts, 128’s anarcho-syn­dic­al­ists or even the hun­gov­er first-years who pre­sum­ably left the trail of bottles up the hill­side. They’re pre­sum­ably hid­ing from this shim­mer­ing late sum­mer sun­shine, a sens­ible option which I’m begin­ning to wish I’d fol­lowed. Even the graf­fiti is smil­ing, with the insides of gar­ages dec­or­ated with grin­ning birds and sunny faces, while the rec­ti­lin­ear meth­ods of the anti-graf­fiti squads have left bold Supre­mat­ist com­pos­i­tions on the block­work walls.

I turn along Mount St, now a pecu­li­ar ped­es­tri­an­ised stump of a street, but once the main path into Kel­burn before Sala­manca Rd slithered through. The motor­way is dir­ectly beneath my feet. A little fur­ther on, just about oppos­ite McK­en­zie Tce (once inform­ally known as “Grave­yard Lane” since it skirts the Mount Street Cemetery, a remind­er of when the loc­als still clung to the blunt Anglo-Sax­on heft of “grave­yard” over the refined clas­si­cism of “cemetery”) there’s a white sign­post that her­alds steps down into the bush. Though the post has lost its sign, I remem­ber that this leads through a net­work of paths to the top of the north­ern portal.

The bush is scrappy, and over­run by a nox­ious weed that, if one tries hard enough, can take on mul­ti­far­i­ous sig­ni­fic­ance. Tra­des­can­tia flu­min­en­sis is its Lat­in name, though it was long known by the reveal­ingly hate­ful name Wan­der­ing Jew, and is now more sens­it­ively referred to as Wan­der­ing Willy, though even that makes it sound like a nick­name for Bill Clin­ton. But it’s the Lat­in name that gets the likes of Iain Sin­clair excited, due to its con­nec­tion to John Tra­des­cant the Eld­er, with his cab­in­et of curi­os­it­ies, pur­loined Ark and links to mys­tic­al trick­ster Eli­as Ash­mole. Tra­des­can­tia achieves its smoth­er­ing invas­ive­ness through its abil­ity to set down roots wherever its stems, even when broken off from their source and car­ried by humans across the land, touch the ground. But the psy­cho­geo­graphy of the Tra­des­cants belongs in Lam­beth, not Kel­burn. Its story does not belong in these hills, though that in itself could be read as a botan­ic­al meta­phor for colo­ni­al inva­sion.

One oth­er prop­erty of Tra­des­can­tia, also men­tioned by Sin­clair in Lights Out for The Ter­rit­ory, evokes an equally tenu­ous but nev­er­the­less intriguing con­nec­tion. A related spe­cies of spider­wort shows micro­scop­ic muta­tions when exposed to even minute levels of radi­ation, and has been planted near nuc­le­ar power plants by act­iv­ists to reveal leaks that would oth­er­wise be denied. Across the road, the neo-Goth­ic Hunter Build­ing housed the university’s phys­ics depart­ment back in the 1960s, and it appears that the good old Kiwi Num­ber 8 wire approach also applied to radi­ation safety. The res­ults were creep­ing con­tam­in­a­tion, bum­bling clean-up attempts, a dead phys­i­cist and a half-hearted cov­er-up. The story was bur­ied until the ’80s, and the con­tam­in­ated mater­i­als bur­ied more lit­er­ally at the Wilton tip, though not after spend­ing some time half-for­got­ten in attics and gar­ages. I won­der wheth­er the creep­ing green mat of Tra­des­can­tia hides its own subtle muta­tions, a secret his­tory coiled with­in its very DNA?

I’m not here to search for mutant weeds, but a water­fall, the only above-ground mani­fest­a­tion of the oth­er­wise long-bur­ied Kumutoto Stream. I’d found it once before, but my men­tal map is out of align­ment, and my attempts to head dir­ectly towards it keep lead­ing me into dead ends choked with rub­bish and brambles. I listen for the sound of fall­ing water, but all I hear is traffic and the deaf­en­ing chor­us of cica­das. I have to stray fur­ther from the trace of the sub­ter­ranean high­way, all the way to the squash club car park, but even­tu­ally I find a steep set of stairs and fol­low them down, through a rich­er, older stand of forest and towards the ves­ti­gi­al stream. It’s a sad and lonely orphan, trick­ling past cor­rug­ated iron and over a slab of con­crete into a shal­low pool choked with garden offcuts, then through a few metres of slimy banks and into a battered cul­vert. Rust, cob­webs, web­forge, creep­ers. But it’s a stream, a real, live water­course open to the sky, and it’s the only one left this close to the city.

Then I’m out into the sun, blaz­ing and glar­ing after my stumbles through the shady bush, and on the edge of a clipped arti­fi­cial mead­ow. Its topo­graphy is awk­ward, no longer a nat­ur­al val­ley yet not quite flat enough to invite hab­it­a­tion, and it’s hemmed in by dense veget­a­tion on one side and the backs of houses on the oth­er. I feel for the thrum of traffic beneath the turf, but noth­ing comes. A dis­carded white plastic sheet lies like a shroud upon the grassy slope, but oth­er­wise there’s just the green land and the blue sky, with towers in the middle dis­tance lead­ing the way for­ward. I fol­low their lead and walk north, towards the highway’s rebirth.