[See all Notional Significance posts] The stream is now fully canalised, a tame channel running arrow-straight towards the harbour, as subtle as an engineer’s ruler. It once meandered across the broadening valley, softly folding into the estuarine flats. On its left bank, the colonial forces built Elliot’s Stockade to oversee the new road, but the […]
[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 […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] I set off along Taylor Terrace, and into the slow, steady heart of the suburbs. So far my path has traversed urban, edgelands and rural landscapes, with occasional tangential encounters across suburbia’s ragged edges. But here I am engulfed, flanked on both sides, striding out its loose domestic rhythms: hip, […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] 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 […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] In memory, my feet are weary as I leave the Halfway. My present tense seems strained now, an affectation of immediacy undermined by the distance between walking and writing: years since I was here in the flesh; almost as long since my words last travelled this road. But I must […]
So you happen to live out west in the faulted hill-folds. One day a kākā lands on your deck railing and winningly bounces along and back. It is looking at you. It is looking for food. Its head bobs up and down. It knows you have some. Do you: A) put out a saucer of […]
If you think the restaurant that sits on the corner of Cuba and Vivian Streets, alongside Frutti, and opposite Logan Brown serves a) food and b) Mexican food then you are sorely mistaken and should get yourself to La Boca Loca asap. Don’t even finish reading this. Get in a car, a bus, on a […]
You know what’s a nice thing to do? Buying pottery to give to people as gifts. You know what else is a nice thing to do? Pimping your mother out. Awww yeah. It just so happens that my mother is a potter, and she’s having her annual pre-Christmas open house at her studio/gallery this weekend […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] On one side: the beige of townhouses; the hermetic whiteness of Fletcher Construction’s offices; the twee comforts of a garden centre. On the other: a wall of greenery, smugly settled exotics looming over dense indigenous undergrowth and the raw-cut clay below. Hard-won colonialism congeals into aspirational heritage, but with a psychogeographical […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] My narrative has been marooned in Johnsonville for over eight months, a fate that, if not actually worse than death, is perilously close to it. In fact, it is exactly a year since I walked this section of road, and last week’s remembrance was the spur I needed to get […]