Civilisation

by Steve Braunias

  Phyllis Goodall, 58, sat on the front porch of her rented home on Collingwood Quay and looked at the river. She was a seamstress but at the moment was on an invalid’s benefit. ‘I sit out here quite a lot,’ she said. Dave Humphries, two doors down, had built a good business in Nelson, recovering and selling parts from wrecked four-wheel-drives and Japanese utes. A few days before, a young boy had crashed into the bridge and gone over the side in a $2,000 Hilux. Dave said, ‘I got a crane to pick it up and went home with it.’ He strips the wrecks for the gearbox, wheels, tyres and window regulators. ‘I deal with people all week long,’ he said, ‘and it drains the life out of you.’

  The life was drained out of Collingwood all that lovely quiet Sunday. Whitebaiting season was over. Someone had once counted 200 baiters from the mouth of the river up to the bridge. Out at Cape Farewell, black kelp twitched and trembled on top of boulders. The kelp was actually seals. Cape Farewell was the beginning of another end: it was named by Cook to mark the last sight of New Zealand before the Endeavour sailed back to England with news of a fertile, stunted land. In 1774 a version of Cook’s map of New Zealand was produced in France. Cape Farewell was written as ‘Adieu’.

  ‘Hi!’ said a kid’s voice. Two of Callum’s mates rode past on their bicycles. The boys looked to be about six years old. One was Huck Finn and the other Tom Sawyer, probably. Were they going home? ‘Nah,’ said Huck, ‘we’re gonna buy some lollies and take them back to our friends.’ They rode their bikes in wide happy circles on the main street of Collingwood, that golden New Zealand town built on a narrow peninsula of sand and river gravel, perfect.

  Wainuiomata

  Lost City of Fitzroy

  Harry Martin, the former mayor of Wainuiomata, in fact the only mayor of Wainuiomata – that smoky glowing wonderland cut off from the rest of New Zealand as though it were an island – spoke of a peculiar thing. He was sitting with two other veterans of public service in a café opposite a fruit shop and a Dollar Discount Store. A sign in the Dollar Discount Store advised customers: WE DO WINZ QUOTES. ‘Tomatoes are going through the roof,’ said Paul Crowther, owner of Mammas Fruit & Veg, ‘and apples and bananas are going out the door.’

  It was a dismal winter day. Wellington Harbour looked as hard as concrete. The sky was dark. The hills were dark. The temperature fell below zero before nightfall. Wainuiomata, the most obscure suburb in Wellington’s hinterland, shivered in the shade of the hills surrounding it on three sides. Every chimney smoked. Smokers queued in the Discount Tobacco store. One man queued behind himself: he had tattooed a face on the back of his shaved head.

  The tobacco shop was inside the mall. The mall also had a sushi bar, Hedz for Hair, The Warehouse, McDonald’s, two supermarkets, Coin Save, an optometrist, an eyebrow-shaper, a chemist, a bakery, PostShop, 4 Elements Urban Clothing, and Crackers Coffee Lounge. ‘It’s… it’s a lot quieter than we expected,’ said operations manager Dave Tomkins. He worked in a small office opposite the public toilets and had been in the job four months. He was from England, a Liverpool fan; he talked buoyantly about the signings made by manager Kenny Dalglish, about the bags of goals Andy Carroll and Luis Suarez would score at Anfield. He came back down to earth as he said the mall had three vacant stores, which added up to 600 square metres unoccupied. But it wasn’t the few vacant stores that gave the mall its loneliness. It was the fact it seemed to hardly ever have any people in it. You could have turned it into a skating rink or a firing range. Dave said, ‘The way I see it, a mall should be vibrant and full of life.’ He had some ways to go. ‘Well,’ he conceded, ‘the challenges it poses are very exciting.’

  College students had painted a mural at the entrance to the mall. Their art posed a challenge: they had painted the Grim Reaper standing next to urban gangsta dudes wearing hoodies and wraparound glasses. Abandon jewellery, all ye who enter. The artists were from Wainuiomata High School, which made headlines that winter when it was revealed that students held boxing matches in the school toilets, lit fires in basins, and there wasn’t any soap. ‘It’s really unhygienic. … They’re in such a state,’ said Year 13 pupil Hayden Yeats, tutting and disgusted. ‘I go home if I need to go to the toilet.’ Others didn’t have that option: one kid defecated inside a rubbish bin rather than use the toilet.

  The rest of New Zealand hears only unpleasant things about Wainuiomata. Example: the 2011 kidnapping and torture of a guy who was walking along the street one night. Two other guys drove past. Believing the man was responsible for a house burglary, they got out of their car and drove him to a house, where he was beaten up and locked in a room overnight. In the morning they drove him to another house, where he was tied to a chair and set upon with razor blades, screwdrivers, darts, a whip and a blowtorch.

  Most famous example: in 2009 a Palmerston North motel owner banned the whole town. He said people from Wainuiomata were pigs. The ban came after allegedly vile behaviour from two sports teams who had stayed as guests. The motelier said he’d not visited Wainuiomata personally but had heard about it. His quote to the newspapers: ‘I believe it’s somewhere close to where God would put an enema.’

  Trevor Mallard said the motelier was talking out of his arse. The local member of parliament was sharing a table at the café with Harry Martin and city councillor Ken Laban. The three public officials spoke of Wainuiomata as a vibrant community. Harry, a retired bookbinder, had a walking stick. Trevor, who had come off his bicycle at speed, had a pair of crutches. Ken had a moustache: he was a former cop. He was from Samoa. Harry had spent time in South Africa. Trevor lived on Planet Labour. The greying Samoan, the crippled MP and the little old one-time mayor had all long ago set down roots in Wainuiomata. Trevor and Ken grew up in the suburb, population about 16,000, which was 65,000 less than first expected when the place was settled in the 1950s and ’60s.

  Harry arrived in 1953. He talked about the old days. ‘A peculiar thing happened,’ he said. ‘New Zealand decided to build two new cities. Holyoake’s government. One city was to be built somewhere in the South Island and one here. Right here in Wainuiomata! It was going to be built in Moores Valley – there’s a lot of land out there, acres and acres of flat land – and it was going to be called Fitzroy. I saw the plans. Hospitals, movie theatres, the whole works! I thought it was fantastic. But it never happened. It arrived out of the blue, and it died very suddenly…’

  O lost city of Fitzroy – named no doubt after Captain Robert Fitzroy, New Zealand’s second governor, who took charge of the new colony in 1843. Christian and liberal, he had the best of intentions but arrived in the worst of times. He had few troops to combat the rampaging Te Rauparaha or that dedicated axeman Hone Heke; more damagingly, he dared to slow the progress of laissez-faire European settlement. He was burned in effigy, mocked in bad verse, and finally sacked. The humiliation pinched the tender nerves of this gloomy depressive. He put himself out of his misery in the bathroom of his home in Crystal Palace, London, locking the door and cutting his throat while the maid prepared breakfast.

  His legacy in New Zealand is here and there – Fitzroy Beach in New Plymouth, Governor Fitzroy Place in downtown Auckland, Fitzroy Bay in Wellington – but not in Wainuiomata, the city that never was, with its hospital and movie theatres and the whole works. There still are acres of vacant land in Moores Valley. From a ridge, you look over mud and fern and gorse, unpretty and good for nothing; on a cold dismal day a horse stood stock-still with a long face, and New Zealand birdlife showed itself in the raucous presence of Australian spur-winged plovers.

  O folly of naming a city after a suicide. Even as a minor subplot, though, the strange episode conformed to the apparent wider theme of Wainuiomata: promise unfulfilled.

  A visit to Harry Martin’s house revealed a sad souvenir. He kept it in his study among other bits and pieces – an African face mask, a carving of a giraffe. The desk nameplate, about the size of a blackboard duster, read HIS WORSHIP THE MAYOR HJ MARTIN. It was only in use for a year, when Harry was the f
irst and only mayor in Wainuiomata’s history.

  Harry unearthed a November 9, 1988 copy of a defunct weekly newspaper, The Wainuiomata Advertiser. The front page headline said WAINUIOMATA STANDS ALONE. After more than twenty years of agitating for independence from Lower Hutt, Wainuiomata had finally been granted status as a borough. The newspaper reported on a public meeting where the matter had been put to the vote. One person had voted against independence and said, ‘With the attitude that is shown here tonight I will be moving away as soon as possible.’ Everyone applauded. For sale in the classifieds: a piano, a wringer washing machine and a Remington rifle.

  Harry unearthed a fat ring binder stuffed with green pages, the minutes of the Wainuiomata County Town Committee from 1968. It was evidence of how long Wainuioimata had fought the war for independence. Harry was quoted as saying, ‘The future of Wainuiomata is going to be decided by the people of Wainuioimata.’ And he’d scribbled an angry note: ‘It seems incredible but the chairman stated under questioning that he agreed Wainuiomata must become a borough at some time in the future – but he would not allow this to appear in the minutes, and continues to publicly argue against Wainuiomata’s claim to independence!’

  Many of the green pages contained records of earnest discussions about hydatids and ragwort. The committee met at eight p.m. on Mondays. All those Monday evenings, the cold winter nights, the lovely summer twilight – and there sat the selfless servants, with Harry continually burning for the freedom of Wainuiomata. He said, ‘It was the priority: we needed to take control of our own destiny. Wainuiomata grew very, very quickly. We couldn’t develop the land fast enough. The population grew by a thousand, two thousand a year for many years. We actually projected a population of 81,000 by the year 2000. We were well on the way to bigger things.’

  The boom years rolled on. The bust years got in on the act. Calls and petitions for independence continued to be ignored. Harry unearthed a December 20, 1982 copy of another defunct Wainuiomata newspaper, The Weekly Courier. Harry, then chairman of the district community council, had penned a rather lachrymose Xmas message. ‘It is with some dismay that I write … It was your council’s expectation that … we would by now have been a borough, or perhaps a city.’

  Almost as an aside, he also wrote, ‘The past has produced many strains on the lifestyle and aspirations of our residents, many more are now jobless and it is with much uneasiness that many people face 1983.’ Advertisements for Farmers in Wainuiomata Mall featured cool Xmas presents such as CHiPs pedal cars for $51.50 (‘blowmoulded plastic with sure-grip wheels’), and a Sanyo transistor radio with watchstrap ($17.95, or $1.80 deposit and 37 cents weekly layby).

  Major industries closed down. Population growth stalled. When independence finally arrived in 1988 was it too late to do any good? ‘Wainuiomata would have grown,’ argued Harry. ‘We’d have looked after our interests.’ The following year the government intervened and forced Wainuiomata into an amalgamation with Lower Hutt. The dream ended as quickly as it began. ‘Amalgamation killed Wainuiomata,’ Harry said. ‘It was the worst thing that ever happened. Lower Hutt wanted to be the boss. That was when it crashed completely. We lost it all. It stopped development stone dead.’

  O lost city of Wainuiomata.

  But there was another deeper, more enduring theme in Wainuiomata. It was there right at its very beginning, there all through the boom years, and there now, in the rising of the sun, in the whisper of the trees, in the thunder of the sea. ‘Love is in the air,’ sang some Romeo on the intercom playing endless love songs in the mall. He was right. Love surrounded Wainuiomata on all sides; the town was like a precious stone held in the palm of the low-lying land.

  It was a strange sensation to stand at the top of the summit of Wainuiomata Hill and look across to Wellington, the harbour, the Hutt Valley, and then back to the town. Wellington looked massive, important, sophisticated. Wainuiomata looked modest, flat on its back, not up to a hell of a lot. The story goes that when the town was growing in the 1950s and ’60s, homeowners could choose from only five floor plans. It seems likely they had a choice of even fewer pots of paint. Many of the houses look like each other – squat weatherboard, painted magnolia cream, and all in the same state of decay. Houses that get built together fall apart together. It can present as a depressing sight. A more direct way of putting it is that Wainuiomata can perhaps, in haste and bad light, be mistaken for a dump.

  A dump built on a swamp. It was known as the Lowry Bay swamp when European settlers first made the journey up and over the hill on foot tracks, having to carry all their goods and possessions on their backs. The first person to cross on horseback was Captain John Mowlem. He was 25 years old, and master of the Electra, a vessel that brought to Wellington large numbers of passengers – including Agnes Sinclair. The story goes that he fell in love at first sight. He made inquiries. He found she had gone to settle in Wainuiomata. He viewed the Wainuiomata hill without wild surmise, bridled his horse, and duly rode in on it. John and Agnes had five sons and four daughters.

  ‘Tonight I celebrate my love for you,’ sang some Romeo on the intercom playing endless love songs in the mall, ‘and the midnight sun is gonna come shining through.’ At dawn, the surrounding hills were white with mist, big gorgeous shrouds of it rising and smoking from the deep green hills. At dusk, the lights on Wainuiomata Hill looked like fires, their gold flames trembling in the rain. The rest of New Zealand was somewhere over the hill. Wainuiomata was another Collingwood, defined by its hill, even though it took only three minutes to drive from the bottom to the top, or less in the whizzing red rocket driven by Trevor Mallard. A few hours after he shared a café table with Harry Martin and Ken Laban, he could be seen testing the hill road’s skid-resistant bauxite and the sure-grip wheels of his Labour Party car as he flared through traffic.

  Wainuiomata is the largest New Zealand community dependent on a single road for access. Trevor said, ‘I really think it benefits from a perceived isolation. The barrier of the hill has built a community.’ There were once plans to open a hilltop restaurant – only one tender was received and nothing came of it – but the biggest red herring in Wainuiomata’s history is its tunnel. There was a serious effort to drill a tunnel through the hill in 1932. It was ambitious, and doomed: work closed down two years later, during the worst of the Depression. The entrance on the Wainui side has been concreted over; its exit on the fabled other side is probably covered in gorse. It lies up Tunnel Grove, a dead-end street in Gracefield, an industrial subdivision devoted to hard labour: the local massage parlour is called The Quarry Inn.

  The world on one side, Wainuiomata on the other, inviolate, unto itself, not a dump. Working-class, definitely. ‘Hard working-class,’ corrected Paul Crowther at the fruit shop. Terangi McGregor, 32, volunteered at Wainuiomata Community Centre and looked for work as a data processor. ‘Wainuiomata’s main employer,’ he said, ‘would have to be Work and Income.’ The WINZ offices were packed that Friday afternoon. No one talked. A fat barefoot woman wearing green trackies with the legend BOSTON 34 sat with a pair of ug boots in her lap. A few jobs were advertised on the noticeboard. ‘Yard worker to empty rubbish and clean drains.’ There were more specialist positions. ‘Picker and packer to work for a local beauty care products company. Ideal applicant will be fluent in Mandarin.’

  Ken Laban said, ‘There is more affluence here than people give us credit for.’ Trevor Mallard said, ‘There are more freehold houses here than anywhere in New Zealand.’ Corey Hemingway said, ‘I own my own home.’ He was 21, bruised, and had Popeye arms. He was heading into McDonald’s in the mall on Sunday afternoon for breakfast; he’d partied ’til six a.m. ‘A few beers and good sounds.’ What sounds? ‘I idolise Vinnie Paul from Pantera.’ Up all night with a metal drummer banging in his head; that was after he took a few blows to the head in a wrestling match. ‘I’m a professional wrestler.’ That was by night. By day he worked at ACC as a debt account manager. Good job, his own home, wrestling
and metal, among a gang of two mates and three girls about to grease their blood at McDonald’s – he was a picture of happiness. He said, ‘Wainuiomata is the best place on Earth.’

  In the old days no one was old. ‘Everyone was young,’ said Harry Martin, talking of Wainuiomata’s halcyon time in the ’50s and ’60s. ‘There were no old people here at all.’ A town made up almost exclusively of newlyweds, Wainuiomata was a kind of couples’ resort, Club Med without the Med, or a Club. Romantic love thrived in the brand new houses painted magnolia cream, gleaming in the sun that shone upon the town and made it glow. ‘They say in heaven love comes first,’ sang some Romeo on the intercom playing endless love songs in the Wainuiomata Mall. ‘Oooh we’ll make heaven a place on Earth.’

  Heaven, set beneath the bright green ring of gorsey hills. Heaven, with Black Creek running through it. Heaven on Honey Street, Hair Street, Best Street. In the old days, the streets rang with children’s laughter. ‘There were 37 kids in ten houses on my street when I grew up,’ Trevor Mallard said. ‘When we closed the schools, there were only seven.’ But the streets still rang with children’s laughter. Dreadlocked Māori Rastaman Awatere, at 28, was a father of five: Tahlia, Jahkaya, Zahria, Zion and Jamaica.

  He was around the corner from the mall on Queen Street, drinking a milkshake from Ziggy’s Dairy. He was a man on the move. ‘Got to go and dig a hāngī for a mate’s fiftieth.’ He’d also contribute a pig. He loved hunting, was always up in the hills with his crossbow. ‘Pigs. Deer. The normal. It’s all food to me. I’ve got a big family.’ His wife Treena had another one on the way.

  ‘If I have children,’ Jason Burt said, ‘they’ll be brought up in Wainuiomata.’ He was a 22-year-old butcher’s apprentice at New World. ‘My mum, brother and partner all work at New World.’ He said, ‘I’ll always love this place. I love the hills, mate. It’s the best thing about Wainuiomata. Nothing like it. They’re so green! I went down south once, Blenheim and that. The hills were brown, mate. Nah, Wainuiomata’s the place.’