Leah McFall: Wellington is taking a battering, but we’re still here
The death of Wellington has been greatly exaggerated. I opened my curtains this morning and guess what? We’re still here. So what, the human slop in the water? The road cones, burst mains, drain covers flipping like coins in foul weather? The cold fronts and freezing mansions, rattling windows and black mould? The marginal shops in lonely malls, failing restaurants and where the condemned Gordon Wilson flats – a fine example of mid-century modernism, 21st-century graffiti and pigeon turd – became a bitter metaphor for a city in love with its past, at odds with its future?
A shining city on spongy land, holding back the bush and sea by sheer force of will and the work of statutes; a whipping boy for all the nation’s problems.
Wellington: forced to swallow the country’s medicine, hollowed out by public service cuts and the scapegoating of the lanyard class. As broke now as everybody else; that’ll teach us to put on airs.
Cuts! More cuts! Cuts to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, its resident band! Cuts to RNZ, its flagship Saturday Morning show to be refashioned in Auckland, by Aucklanders! Cuts to Creative New Zealand, which until now, mostly did the cutting! Soon, there’ll be nobody left to knife, although The Post’s new editor has previously expressed disdain for the city and its hopeless, lefty sheeple, and will likely find a way.
What do the regions care for Wellington’s problems? What pleasure did we ever bring them, except for one weekend a year with the World of WearableArt? All they have in common with us is a dislike of Auckland, a soft-bellied city of sharing plates and open-toed sandals.
Yes, we tend to be smugly progressive. At the Lōemis midwinter arts festival, several hundred of us sat in the Michael Fowler Centre as a Mongolian-adjacent throat singer ululated for a solid half hour, punctuated by yak bells and a squeezebox. Was it art? The audience, pleased with our own generosity, decided it was, as barely anyone gave up and went to the bar.
Sometimes, Wellingtonians strain so hard to be the national tastemaker, we risk forming haemorrhoids. But we can’t reason with our critics; explaining that we’re doing the reading so they don’t have to.
What can we tell them, except that the lights are still on? The boom of the docks, the call and response of the ferries, cranes swinging behind the Beehive – however thin our gruel, we can’t be stopped. For some dumb reason, we’re staying, toughing out the cratering job and property markets and the cost of living, even as the wind lifts our hair by the roots on Lambton Quay. Perhaps it’s blind faith or principle. Perhaps it’s out of love.
We choose to trust this place, reclaim it, because look at everything it’s given us over the years: friends and neighbours, babies and children, weddings, birthdays and funerals, argument and agreement, pōwhiri and pealing karakia, ribbons around degrees, early games played in mist, a floodlit stadium full of singing, statement glasses and cotton totes, door swipes and name tags, library books, families in white, their harmonies filling the church to the corrugated roof, kettles boiling, dinners cooking, squares of yellow light all over the hills, the wet, green bush and the sea.
Aren’t we the only city in the country designed to serve others? Whose core business is hope? Where do historic marches end, if not in Wellington? There’s only so much mockery we should take.