Notional Significance: Concrete Archipelago

The path, from tilt­ed field down into the motor­way chasm, winds past rich­ly-tagged garage walls and rear fences. In my mind, I think that Oak Park Avenue was once like this — dark brick, spalling con­crete, crunch­ing grav­el, rust­ing cor­ru­gate — but I no longer trust my mem­o­ry as any­thing oth­er than a syn­the­sis of sen­sa­tions and imag­i­na­tion. In any case, the con­text is dif­fer­ent, as this was nev­er a bypass-con­demned zone of dere­lic­tion: instead, the vil­las fac­ing  the Ter­race have been long since divid­ed into chichi ser­viced accom­mo­da­tion, tart­ed-up apart­ments and upmar­ket tarts.

These dri­ve­ways and rear yards are not quite pub­lic, and it’s with some relief that I turn back into the dingy bush, hulks of sofas moul­der­ing among the kawakawa, down rick­ety steps and onto a nar­row pave­ment beside the motor­way shoul­der. The retain­ing walls are mute and mono­lith­ic, the con­crete engraved with inscrutable pat­terns of squares and grooves. The geom­e­try is her­met­ic, Mayan ruins and frac­tured planes, the gap­ing por­tal, tun­nels to nowhere. Some­one has scrawled a pen­ta­cle and circle‑A on a seem­ing­ly inac­ces­si­ble ledge. The asso­ci­a­tion of anar­chism and the occult could sim­ply be an arbi­trary com­bi­na­tion of taboo sym­bols to épa­ter les bour­geoisie, but some anar­chists have claimed Aleis­ter Crow­ley as one of their own, based on a read­ing of the line “Every man and every woman is a star” as a state­ment of per­son­al lib­er­ty and divin­i­ty. Regard­less, amid the blaz­ing heat and insen­sate roar of traf­fic, this seems an incon­gru­ous site for Thelemic sex mag­ick.

As the land­scape opens out, I walk beneath the first over­bridges of the high­way so far and past a sign for Kumu­to­to Lane. It’s a reminder of the buried stream, but I can still remem­ber my puz­zle­ment when first com­ing across it twen­ty years ago: the name sound­ed Japan­ese to me, rather than Maori, and I could draw no con­nec­tion.

I walk beneath one more over­pass, and I’m sud­den­ly in a world that’s a text­book col­lage of Bal­lar­dian imagery: inter­twined car­riage­ways, glit­ter­ing trails of shat­tered glass, cant­ed planes of oil-stained con­crete, glass bal­conies can­tilevered from steely high-ris­es, per­verse­ly sleek geome­tries of curve and cam­ber. The sto­ries and rumours rein­force the visu­als. Anony­mous sex under off-ramps, mid­dle-class mur­ders in office tow­ers, com­mer­cial trav­ellers kept per­ma­nent­ly sleep-deprived by the inces­sant clat­ter of tyres across expan­sion gaps, urban sub-cul­tures recolonis­ing the sub­ter­ranean spaces (freestyle run­ners, aerosol ban­dits).

A man rides a gleam­ing, mus­cle­bound  motor­bike in slow cir­cles, weav­ing between con­crete pil­lars and ship­ping con­tain­ers. He wears an open leather jack­et but no hel­met: he could be one of Ballard’s “hood­lum sci­en­tists”, though his blank face betrays no scars. Twin rows of half-for­got­ten pil­lars stalk the tar­mac, await­ing the sec­ond com­ing of the motor­way with the age­less sto­icism of druidic mega­liths. Their ham­mer­head forms also remind me of McCahon’s use of the tau cross, a pre-Chris­t­ian sym­bol of sac­ri­fice and res­ur­rec­tion. If NZTA has its way with a dupli­cate tun­nel, these Mod­ernist relics will come back to life as the dreams of the orig­i­nal plan­ners reach long-delayed fruition.

There’s some­thing almost exhil­a­rat­ing about ugli­ness when it’s this com­plete, this uncom­pro­mis­ing, this all-encom­pass­ing. The cable car (or funic­u­lar, to be pre­cise) slices through at an inel­e­gant angle, caged in chain-link and razor wire; carpark decks are stacked and stag­gered, linked by jum­bled after­thoughts of pedes­tri­an steps and sig­nage; inad­e­quate flu­o­res­cence stut­ters and flick­ers in the musty dark. If there’s Bal­lar­dian iconog­ra­phy here, it’s con­densed in a very Welling­ton way, pressed between the foothills and the Ter­race tow­ers rather than spread out among the reser­voirs, run­ways and big skies of Staines or Northolt. If Mait­land crashed through the Arm­co here, he’d be more like­ly to land on a star­tled smok­er in an office block load­ing bay than become marooned on a con­crete island.

But these rem­nant spaces do have their own inhab­i­tants. As I climb the bank on the Clifton Tce side, there are the usu­al signs of last-resort home-mak­ing: mat­tress­es among the scrawny under­growth; card­board sheets laid neat­ly across bench­es; bot­tles, rags and car­cino­genic mid­dens of cig­a­rette butts stashed beneath the steel ribs of the over­pass. Con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists are also out in force among the tag­ging: “9/11 WAS A LIE. FEAR = CONTROL”; “FLUORIDE: THE NEW ASBESTOS”. Traf­fic slams by just metres away.

This is so much a world-in-itself that it seems futile to con­jure up the pre-motor­way past. Ves­ti­gial lanes (Shell, Dal­muir, Rosi­na Fell) have their sto­ries, and there are tales of eel-catch­ing in rem­nants of Kumu­to­to Stream until sur­pris­ing­ly recent­ly, but there’s noth­ing to tie them to the expe­ri­ence of this place. It’s an asphalt canyon, a cathe­dral of the motor age, and the weath­er­board days of the res­i­den­tial Ter­race feel even less rel­e­vant than my diesel-fuelled imag­in­ings. There is one geo­graph­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity worth not­ing: the Clifton Tce carpark ends with a sharp right turn towards Wood­ward St, just the way that the Kumu­to­to Stream once flowed.

If I were head­ing off in that direc­tion, there would be rich veins of his­to­ry to tap: Kumu­to­to kain­ga, the Welling­ton Club and its mania for demo­li­tion, the death of Edward Gib­bon Wake­field (plaques remem­ber him not as a kid­nap­per, jail­bird and swindler, but with terse enco­mia and lists of achieve­ments, includ­ing “Man of Vision” and “M.P. for Hutt”). But the motor­way flows on, and the next stretch teems with vis­i­ble con­nec­tions to the past, despite the best efforts of the high­way­men.