Hometowns

TE WAIPOUNAMU is the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand
ŌTAUTAHI is Christchurch
ŌTEPOTI is Dunedin 
RAKIURA is Stewart Island

In Ōtautahi everything is so bright and new it seems fake. It’s beautiful but weirdly empty and looks like it spawned from the architectural renderings yesterday. My nerves still vibrate a little when I visit here, that might be a lifelong thing. In some ways it’s a clean break from the city I lived in as a pre/teen, which ended with the 2011 earthquake. I had moved away by then, doubly removed from the old Christchurch. The buildings I used to walk past on my way to town fell down and killed people and the places I lived in are mostly gone. The light is the same though, long Canterbury shadows across flat grass and a lot of deciduous trees putting on their warm colours.

Rauora Park / Latimer Square

There’s quite an expansive Mecca. I go in to put on hand cream and smell the candles on my way to the art gallery. This is the respectable face of retail; the old hole-in-the-wall places are long gone. RIP internet cafes and party pill shops. Te Puna o Waiwhetū has really good exhibitions at the moment and I regret not having time to look at it all properly. I linger to watch a Sarah Hudson video that’s so beautifully shot I can’t stop taking photos of the screens. Later I watch my friend opening for the Bats in Lyttelton, where it feels like everyone else is over 50. The only Bats song I know is North by North and it goes hard when they play it as an encore.

I notice a lot of Vietnamese places have opened around the city. The next day I introduce my dad and stepmum to bánh mì, which is a success. I feel quite good about my visit with them until they start fighting about something stupid. My dad shows me the garden and gives me a tangerine. Everyone drives here, but I don’t want to accept his offer of a lift because of the fuel crisis, and also his memory is going so I don’t want to take him out of his usual environs. I take the bus across town for an hour.

It’s late March and still so hot in the sun. My friend says summer was unusually damp; his garden would normally be brown by now. We go for a run beside railway and river through Ferrymead and Woolston, formerly industrial suburbs in the southeast of Ōtautahi. The Port Hills form a broad, striking amphitheatre around the area. We talk about running and work and therapy. Castle Hill rises before us in benediction.

Kura Tāwhiti (Castle Hill)

In the last of the evening sun I go on a date at Smash Palace. There’s a lot to like about the guy I meet, but we probably won’t be in the same city again any time soon. I run again after, just on the hotel treadmill, and again the next night along the Ōtākaro (of which I'm a documented superfan). It's quite a bit of running, but I need it because work has been demanding.

The flight to Ōtepoti is calm and perfect. Further south all kinds of familiarity creep up on me. The way the plants grow dark and full, the way the air feels, the Scottish names everywhere. The way people talk and look, men with ruddy faces and ginger or sandy hair. Sheep truck smell and Arcoroc mugs.

We’ll leave it at “Ōtepoti is really romantic” so that I don’t have to interrogate why heritage buildings make me faintly horny. Around every corner there are more interesting things to look at: lions and leadlight glass, brick and stone and alleyway and arcade, streets intersecting at irregular angles. The big famous buildings are like heavy and formal cakes, square edges trimmed with thick almond icing. I find a cute wine bar where I take myself out for dinner for the first time in my life (I don't drink wine but I think that the food will be good, and I am correct).

Bacchus

The lights are beautiful in the clear evening, I can see the moon rising next to Otago boys’ high from my hotel room. The Dunedin office has the quirk where you enter the building at street level and then look out the back and you're three stories up. The location is superb for proximity to lunch spots and I get a huge sandwich from a trendy vegan place. It's another full work day and afterwards I need to have a boring evening of walk-podcast-gym to decompress. I stop at the anticapitalist co-op café, but they're only selling bread tonight. The man tells me it’s not fully operational at the moment because everyone got too burnt out. I buy some decent sourdough and he replies sláinte to my goodnight.

I cross the train tracks to see what the harbourside is like. The area is fully industrial and the only sign of life this evening is grunting from an MMA gym. There are some quite lovely utilitarian brick buildings here too. The hotel fitness room is the best I've seen yet, but I'm too tired to do very much in it.

Yours / Bakehouse on Bond

Lunch the next day is a middling vege pie and starchy custard square from a non-trendy bakery. I know that they won't be great but it's part of the experience. I talk with a coworker about how we both lost our accents - he's from Invercargill. Southlanders are known for pronouncing every “r”. I stopped doing it because it was embarrassing and people didn't understand me sometimes. Two summers ago I dated a man who I got attached to in no small part because of his slow southern burr that tranquilised me somewhere deep. The same cadence was disgusting when he dumped me via voice note.

I haven't been back to Gore since my family moved when I was 8 or 9. I’ve looked up the satellite view of the house I grew up in, which is gone, but the marae down the road is still there. I wonder if I'd feel anything closer to my birthplace. I'm not embarrassed by it anymore, but I never really think about it. Gore is actually more to the west of Dunedin, but in my mind there's a vector pointing south and backwards through time. Maybe something primal lurks in Bluff. Maybe I could do past life regression on Rakiura.

When I'm on the mainland I tell everyone that I’m from here because I need them to know that I’m like them, dairy-fed and trustworthy. I say I'm from Gore or Christchurch or both, depending on who I'm talking to. My mum’s family is from Dunedin and my Dad’s family is from Christchurch. When I'm in Wellington I say nō Te Waipounamu ahau.