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Illustration: Lena Lam
Illustration: Lena Lam

The Sunday EssayJuly 10, 2022

The Sunday Essay: In memory of Waitākere City (1989-2010)

Illustration: Lena Lam
Illustration: Lena Lam

Rebecca K Reilly remembers growing up in Waitākere City, back when it still existed.

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand

Original illustration by Lena Lam.


The further you travel away from the place you’re from, the more diluted and amorphous it becomes. I have let an Albanian taxi driver believe I was English, I have awkwardly told an American woman at a Girl Guides event in Mexico that New Zealand is not part of Europe. I have been from the sheep place, the place where someone’s parents went on a caravan trip, the Lord of the Rings place and, for two years in the mid 2000s, the Flight of the Conchords place. When I moved to Wellington, I was from the city it’s still socially acceptable to make fun of, where everyone has boats and went to King’s and the only thing to do is go up the Sky Tower. Last year, suddenly, I became a resident of the walled-off virus zone, which was not a good place to be from at all, something I realised most acutely when my friend nervously told the elderly couple working in the Oamaru Four Square that we were all from Dunedin. To myself, I am not from any of these blurs of ideas of places, not really, but somewhere very specific that doesn’t even exist anymore. I am from the former Waitākere City (1989 – 2010).

Being a child in West Auckland in the 90s and early 00s was a real pick’n’mix of delights and horrors. Our representation was in the form of Ewen Gilmour at the Comedy Gala and Piha Rescue, a show about how only some of us are good at swimming. We only had one mayor for eighteen years, Bob Harvey, who wore Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts and who everyone had met somehow. It was a treat to make a phone order at the combination KFC and Pizza Hut on Lincoln Road, but a bigger treat to see the mermaid sculpted out of butter at Valentines. Everyone kept towels on the windowsills to soak up the morning condensation. There was an annual event called Elvis in the Park that regularly made the front cover of the Western Leader. Beatrice Faumuina could often be seen driving around in a car with her face on the side. People were always getting attacked by loose dogs and P houses were always exploding, which annoyed the adults because it backed up the traffic.

Recently I was thinking about whether my mum would have gotten me vaccinated straight away if the pandemic came 20 years earlier, or if she’d have waited to see more research, and then I remembered all the mornings I spent on the school playground staring up at the planes spraying for painted apple moth. We were so sticky. I felt sorry for the girls with stay-at-home mums who got dropped off at 10, after the spraying was over, flicking their hair and saying their sister has asthma. The same ones who got their MMR jab at the doctor’s instead of in the school hall followed by a Mr Bean video. They missed out. It was all honestly iconic.

I rarely left the West, aside from a school holiday pilgrimage to Borders or a trip to the Shore for the beaches where you don’t have to fight for your life against the surf. One time I insisted on being taken to Ōtara Market after seeing it on What Now? and I once got my hand stuck in the automatic door at Greenlane McDonalds. I also got electrocuted at MOTAT. And my gran was a clown every year in the Queen Street Santa Parade. These were my experiences of the rest of Auckland. We had everything we needed in the West – a wave pool (West Wave), a mall (West City) and many Burger Kings with free refills and roast shops where Croatian men would sell paper bags of deep fried potatoes. Then, in 2004, when I was 12 or 13, I found out there was one thing that was not available in Waitākere City where I had lived all my life: a good high school education.

Of course, as a woman of the world living in a post-modern post-viral tomorrow, I don’t think that there are good and bad schools. There are schools in different communities with access to different resources and funding, of different sizes with different focuses and styles of teaching. But in the view of the parents of pre-teens in West Auckland in 2004, there were only good schools in Auckland City that would get you into university and bad schools in Waitākere City where everyone was selling drugs and getting pregnant. Some of them went so far as to not even have uniforms. As we know, teenagers who wear their own clothes to school are also all drug dealing fertility gods.

So I would be sent to the city, to a school that was somehow both single sex and co-ed, in that the school was co-ed but the junior classes were single sex except for Year 10 options. This was seen as the best of both worlds, as there were a lot of reports in the media at the time that teenage girls love acting stupid to impress boys, but if they never saw boys at all they would end up socially stunted. We had not heard of other sexualities or genders or of young women being capable of independent thought at that time. My mum took my Year 8 report to the school enrolment evening, which showed that I was a Māori student who exceeded expectations in all subjects except PE and wood technology, and the associate principal winked and said not to worry about the out-of-zone ballot. He went on to be in the news for alleged workplace bullying at another school.

To get to the new school, I had to catch the train, thus joining the legions of Auckland commuter children, with a different coloured ten-trip punchcards representing how far they were being sent each day for their better education. If you were lucky, the conductors wouldn’t click the ticket properly and you could push the cardboard back in and get a free trip. If you were even luckier, the train would be so crowded that the conductors couldn’t even get around to clicking tickets in the first place, and would remain jammed in the doorway until the next stop. The trains were often overcrowded because this was when there was still only one track west of New Lynn, and they turned up whenever in whatever direction, sometimes with only one carriage. This was hilarious to the commuter children, when the train turned up half an hour late with one carriage stuffed with people. It meant you got to wait for the next one, sauntering into school sometimes well after form class, not having to sign in late at the student centre because maybe a hundred students would be on the same train. You had to walk at the right pace to show up in the middle of the late group: walking too fast gave you narc energy and walking too slow would get you into trouble.

The train gave a special camaraderie to the students from the West. Not the ones from Titirangi, who were fancy and had their own bus service but couldn’t do Free Txt Weekends because their houses had no mobile reception. We had our own train-related slang: are you training it, how many clicks you got, what a three-stage guy. This now seems incredibly lame but at the same time most of the slang from that era was just homophobic slurs, so take what you can get. There were many dramatic incidents that only we knew about, like the day the overcrowded train randomly stopped and all the doors opened and everyone had to grip the ceiling or walls to not fall out and when someone jumped on the station roof and a mysterious disgruntled voice came over the loudspeakers and said, “Get down, Spiderman.” It was funny to have someone from Central come over after school and hear them awkwardly ask the conductor how much to G-Town. Which was good, because school itself was often not that funny at all.

We heard a lot in assemblies about the school’s reputation. The school’s reputation was very important and couldn’t be tarnished by students being seen in public listening to iPods or with non-uniform shoes on. What if a parent of a Year 8 student who’s thinking about where to send their child next year, drives past you with your socks down? And what if that child would have been the star player on our first fifteen? We would side-eye each other. Who cares about the first 15 and which bizarre parent is deciding which school to send their child to based on sock height?

The school cared about the first 15, a lot. We had two fields we weren’t allowed to walk on because they were just for rugby, and sometimes football. Everyone wanted to walk on those fields so badly, to touch the special soft grass that was much more green than regular grass. Apparently a Year 13 had once driven over the barrier and did donuts on them for a prank. We did PE on the bottom fields where the girls’ cricket team played and the grass was rough and yellow in summer and a quagmire in winter. The school banned out-of-school trips and activities right before Polyfest, citing them as distraction, but everyone said the first fifteen were still going to Les Mills in class time. The school was in the news for poaching boys from other schools for the teams. The prefects were tasked with catching students wagging assembly and going to the mall for a popcorn chicken snack box. The school had a reputation to maintain.

The other thing we would hear about in assemblies was academia. Academia was very important, and always spoken about in the noun form only. Academia, credits, NCEA certification. The magic number to remember, 15. Fifteen credits to pass a subject. That should be your priority, the dean of senior boys would tell us. It’s not all about sports, it’s also about getting those credits. He would say this at a lectern in front of a wall where names in gold paint stretched all the way from ceiling to floor under the title National Sporting Honours, and on the other side, a few names under National Academic Honours that really tapered off by the 1970s. To get your name on the wall, you had to represent the country in sports or do something with academia but no one really knew what. Maybe be the national chess champion, we thought.

Most of the responsibility for maintaining the school’s reputation in academia was on those of us in first stream. In my year there were five streams for girls and 10 for boys, which made all the first stream boys tell us that logically, if you thought about it, we were twice as stupid as them. In primary and intermediate, I had been in extension classes where we had debates based on the Six Thinking Hats of Edward de Bono and learned how to make an image a link on a website, which was difficult because the only time I’d really ever used a computer was playing Age of Empires at my uncle’s house.

At high school the extension was just doing everything really fast. Doing Year 11 assessments in Year 9, doing two years of maths in one year, resitting things all the time to try and bump up to an Excellence. I don’t know if this helped anyone on an intellectual level, but it certainly bred an unhinged level of competitiveness that mainly came out during PE, where girls routinely sprained their wrists in dodgeball or near drowned each other in waterpolo just doing the absolute most. We were strongly discouraged from doing any ‘non-academic’ subjects by the deans, and we discouraged each other by calling anything that wasn’t physics or calculus a bum subject. Getting three Excellences doesn’t count if it was in a bum subject, like geography or chemistry. You wouldn’t talk about doing a BA after you finished school, that was a whole bum degree.

I was so jaded by the time I was in Year 13. I would go to the library after school to study with the others but I couldn’t get any books out because I only had a Waitākere City Libraries card and I only did bum subjects like German and art history anyway. No one from out West caught the train anymore because they all had a friend who could drive but only had room for one passenger. We couldn’t do theatresports any more because the teacher who unlocked the room for us moved to India, where he said the students would be a lot more well behaved than us. I had become extremely suspicious of the school administration when the headmaster gave a victory speech the Monday after the 2008 general election. I thought I was a bad and stupid person because I wasn’t taking stats scholarship and I didn’t like cool stuff like LMFAO’s ‘Party Rock Anthem’ and I was the only person in Level 3 drama who’d never done a sex act at the movies, aside from Tim who was weird and called his pyjamas his “sleeping uniform”.

I would walk home the two kilometres from the train station by myself, wishing every house I walked past was mine so I didn’t have to walk anymore, while men yelled slut at me out of their cars, even though it didn’t even make sense because I was wearing an ankle-length school skirt and I wasn’t even cool enough to have done a blowjob at The Spongebob Movie like everyone else had. I hadn’t even seen Spongebob because it took me so long to get home from school all the cartoons were over and it was time for Deal or No Deal. The only solution to all my problems that I could see, was to move away from the West and begin a new life as a person who lived in Central and caught the purple Metro buses. Which I did.

I don’t know which officially happened first, that I left Waitākere or that it was absorbed into the Supercity. They both happened fairly simultaneously in 2010. Some elements of the city dissolved and some I left behind and it’s hard to say which is which. I moved to Mt Albert and got a new set of rubbish bins. We had to vote in a new Supercity mayor who didn’t wear cargo shorts like Bob Harvey but, you know, did other stuff. I never got an Auckland City library card because you could get books out of any library and they made new cards you could tag on any bus or train with. I made new friends from the Shore who had previously yearned to be Central people, who had been embarrassed on the bus only having a Birkenhead card and asking how much to “Glynn”. They had never been on a train where the doors flew open and everyone had to try not to fall out, but they’d been stuck on the wrong side of the bridge with no money so we understood each other. I stopped thinking I was bad and stupid because not one person I’ve met in the 13 years since I finished school has ever said that art history is a bum subject or asked me to stand and applaud a rugby team.

The West is different now, it has apartments and two train tracks and cafes that aren’t corrugated-iron themed. When I go there it doesn’t really feel like a place that I know. My favourite fruit shop burned down and the Valentines is now Gangnam Korean BBQ. If I wanted to show someone where I grew up, I would have to say to imagine that this Christian rock venue is a library where I read an unnamed New Zealand book about a talking horse that I hate until this day, and that this vaccination centre is The Warehouse where I bought my first tape (a ‘Give Me One Reason’ Tracy Chapman cassingle when I was five). The West City movies is exactly the same for some reason. It would not take much imagination to picture where I saw White Chicks.

I like to think that I can help the city live on, in every time I explain to someone that in Waitākere you can’t buy alcohol at the supermarket, but sometimes the Trusts gives everyone a free torch or survival blanket instead, and in the disappointment I feel when I give an interview and have to tell my friend from Massey that it’s not for the Western Leader. And I know that no matter what happens and how far away I go and how gentrified the Glen Eden shops gets, I am from Waitākere City and to some of us that means something, even if the something is a combination KFC and Pizza Hut that isn’t there any more.

Keep going!
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The Sunday EssayJuly 3, 2022

The Sunday Essay: For Keri Hulme

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For Becky Manawatu, and maybe for Keri Hulme too, the sea is a church. 

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Original illustrations by Pounamu Wharekawa.


We were in Rakiura in December when I learned Keri Hulme had died. I took a can of Haagen Strong beer from the fridge at our accommodation at Horseshoe Bay where the kākā swooped to, and ate fruit from our hands. Took the beer to the wharf where my tāne, Tim, was shucking the pāua he and my son got that day from Ringaringa Beach. Poured some beer onto a rock for Keri Hulme. Does death draw us to the water? I think so. Or at least I’m pulled there, to the salt-white church, to acknowledge loss, a passing, and other things too.

In the beginning, it was darkness, and more fear, and a howling wind across the sea.

After learning Keri has died I go to my books and see if the bone people is with me now, I always travel with a book I’ve read – a pou – a new book, as well as a collection of short stories or poetry. The bone people is not in my bag, stink one. We go to the pub, my brother, my sister-in-law and Tim. We order big glass bottles of beer. We search the walls filled with photos of fishermen and women, people who lived their lives here, for my grandfather. Listen to the men at the leaner, and look out the window at the cod boats on the still water. I search my memory for Keri’s bar scenes in the bone people. I replace my old image, with this image, of this pub. Imagine them here, those troubled people, those hurt and healing people, those bone people: Simon, Kerewin and Joe, and all their sentences which start with “If only…”

They have, too. Barstools ranged round them in a semicircle, the man and his boy in the middle. Joe grinning like a hyena, and Simon showing off.

Ah, here they all are, for a moment. And yes, of course, take a big glug on the big brown bottle of beer, and look out to Halfmoon Bay, the sea will always be a church, and maybe it was Keri’s too.

A day or two later I pack a sandwich and a nectarine and make the hour walk through Rakiura National Park to Māori Beach. Walk all the way to near the place where bright blue freshwater spills into the moana. I want to find a shell to put in the locket my tāua gave me for my 21st birthday. Māori Beach was my pōua’s favourite beach and Ringaringa, hers, Dad told me. Pōua is a perfect ghost to me, and I want to find a perfect shell small enough to fit in my locket, but there are none. Just fragments. This frustrates me, I want something whole to put in my locket, something perfect, complete, undamaged. Transcendent thoughts for dead ancestors, dead children, dead aunties and uncles, my pōua, and even for Keri Hulme. But this obsessive search for a perfect shell, a sign that Pōua loved me so much he could calcify and wink up from the enormous expanse of grey sand grains, then sit symbolically in a locket for me forever thwarts the experience. Eyes cast to the sand, searching and searching, my attention and aim singular, all energy drawn to the brain, I have forgotten my feet, hardly feel the ache in my calf muscles from the walk, barely taste the nectarine. Needed too much, from everything, every dusty photograph, and each dried seahorse corpse, but especially ghosts.

If only was the tapu phrase. 

If only I had

If only I hadn’t

It’s Matariki weekend now, half a year has passed since Keri died, and our trip to Rakiura where Dad showed us the home he grew up, overlooking Halfmoon Bay. The island where we ate fried cod livers for breakfast around a big table with our Rakiura whānau, and my tāne and son coming in from the water, with grins on their faces, pāua in their catch bags and a kina each, light, in their hands. Tim dripping with water, face flushed with sea-joy, telling us my favourite diving story ever: “I saw a seahorse behind the kelp babe, and I waved to son. I pulled back the kelp, and it was still there, and we could see the shape of tiny seahorses in the dad’s pouch.”

My hair is almost dry, after going into the sea, on this bright, cold winter’s day. For the past three days the sea has been the calmest I’ve ever seen it on this coastline. From here in the distance, you can see the rainforested mountains, the Papahaua which tower over State Highway 67. I keep waking too late to go and look for the rising Matariki, to be honest lately I almost miss seeing morning all together. I wake when the fire is already lit and the pot of plunger coffee is already brewed, and then, when everyone has gone to school and work, I take my dog to the beach. Bro’s life is sleeping punctuated with sprinting down the beach. He’s with me now. We are here for Keri. Before I went into the water I lit this small fire, and kneeled beside it to read from Te Kaihau/The Windeater. Flipped through the pages and chose a story at random: Unnamed Islands in the Unknown Sea. 

I used to love reading about islands as a child. Being shipwrecked on one would be heaven.

We are here on this West Coast beach for Keri, but also to feel shipwrecked, just the romantic parts though, the parts you like to think would make up the lion’s share of what it means to be shipwrecked. The lack of distraction and overwhelm of choice, the abundance of time and sky and source of, and appetite for, kaimoana. It’s hard to keep pretending I am shipwrecked though. A couple passes with a small shrieking dog. Two men are cutting wood, or one is while the other eats a pie with one hand and scrolls through his phone with the other. A family arrives armed with rods – though they hover near the beachgrass, and don’t make it to the water.

Still in my swimming shorts and bra, because maybe go back in? Put my book down, and sprint across the sand and take another dive into a cold curl of water. My ribcage contracts and I gasp and leap up. Run back to the fire and my book and my towel. Another man drives up smiling out the window, and then says, “I thought you were someone else”, and he’s right, we are someone else, we’ve been in the sea, have no data, this book and towel are our only possessions, we’re shipwrecked, so piss off.

Porotītīwai, you whispered, porotītīwai and I never thought to ask you what that means.

Don’t say piss off though, and he parks between my small scaly fire and the water, not blocking the view but blighting it. I become angry, like a leopard seal, and the line from my sunning place and hunting place has been cut. I want to go tell him now, cause far out. It’s low tide and there are heaps of places for him to watch the sea from his shiny four-wheel drive truck with a kayak or whatever it is strapped to its top. Would I park between a person with a fire and the water? I will go say something, I decide, almost, but then he starts his engine and drives away. Open Keri’s book again, and land on a story called Planetesimal.

It’s a story about a man who meets a woman at a party, and she shows him she has a universe opening in the cup of her elbow. First, she refuses his roach because she thinks she is going mad, and weed would make it worse, and he says that if you can think it, you’re not going mad. She winces and tells him she can think what she likes, and then shows him the cosmos, the blinking starry void in the cup of her elbow. He had thought her plain, a wallflower. She invites him to touch the void, near the bone, and something like what’s happened to her, happens to him too.

My hair is wet again, but gonna dry it here, with the sun and the wind and the light heat coming off my near flameless fire. Put on some more driftwood. Read Planetesimal again. I must look up the word when I get home, I think. The thought of going home makes me sad because then I can’t be here anymore. Maybe I am a very boring person, so easily soothed by being outdoors, especially when we can read this book, and listen to the water, and remind ourselves everything is OK if the way between us and the ocean is clear.

We are here for Keri, because among other things Matariki is a time to mihi to the dead, remembering those who had passed between the new rising and the last.

My hair is dry now, and smoky, it has that soft crispness only saltwater can create. Bro licks my hand. I close Te Kaihau, and go to stand. The only two karakia I know off my heart is one mō te kai and one mō te ata, as well as some of The Lord is My Shepherd. None of these suit the moment of course. Still, I stop myself from just walking away without some form of ceremony. I am here to acknowledge Keri for Matariki despite there being no stars out now and probs I will sleep through seeing them again tonight. On Instagram the maramataka tells me this is not a time to be lazy, but 12 hours moe is just barely cutting it at the moment. The sky is a powdery blue and the sun is low but distant. We mihi to those stars made invisible by light of day, and to Keri and another friend on their haerenga. As I leave I see the two men who were collecting wood sitting close beside each other on a large log, talking. I like seeing friendship. Yeah, nah, that’s the goal, eh, who wants to be shipwrecked.

At home I have wifi, and I look up the meaning of planetesimal; the explanation on Universe Today makes the most sense. 

Universe Today explains that a planetesimal is an object formed from dust, rock, and well, other stuff. The word is rooted in the concept of infinitesimal – or objects too small to see or measure. Planetesimals refers to small celestial bodies which are created when a planet is born. 

In Keri’s story the woman with an opening to a universe in the cup of her elbow never arrives home that night after the party, and she is presumed to have walked into the sea, “rendered herself bodiless”.

Later he says, “I have wondered. If you sat among heartless strangers with a universe within your reach, would you always stay, a wallflower at the party?”

We still have Keri Hulme’s words to read here, and this Matariki I read more of them. Her short prose feel like karakia within themselves, hymns, or rosary beads made of pounamu and bone and feather and starlight on a string of vivid human life for me to sit with and welcome in te tau hou.

I go to sit next to my dog, who’s sprawled over the couch. His snoring is freshly heavy, like sand being tugged down the shore. The home fire is glowing bright. I make a cup of cauliflower Maggi Soup in a Cup. It is so quiet in the house, and like my place on the beach, from fire to sea, I like my line of sight between my sitting spot and my bookshelf to be clear. It is my hunting ground. I pick up Te Kaihau again, and I flip to a page. I begin One Whale, Singing. I read a line twice:

Something small jumped from the water, away to the left. A flash of phosphorescence after the sound, and then all was quiet and starlit again.

Don’t know why, but this flash of life and colour makes me think of a line in a friend’s manuscript I not long finished reading, which got me crying which was actually embarrassing because I was in a public place, but fortunately one where I did not see anyone I knew. It’s too soon for me to quote direct from her mahi, I think, but it was about living, just wanting to live – not needing to be loved. I consider the sentence probably not entirely separate from her meaning in her manuscript. Needing to be loved is a sickness I understand, and in not needing it, it can come in unexpected waves anyway. And like I said, yeah I was a big ol tangiweto when I read this simple sentence, because of all that had happened to my friend before it, and all that we brave after, and so on.

I make my intentions for te tau hou patting my dog, holding Keri’s book, the salt still on me from my winter swim. My intentions are not achievement-based or goal-oriented, they are happiness-based and connection-oriented. They are about language, and love and friendship, and they do not care how my body changes between this Matariki and the next, or what time it gets out of bed, or if it accomplishes anything. Yes, my intentions are about language, yet they refuse to be manufactured into a list of words. Maybe they are planetesimal in essence.

I close Keri’s book and look at the home fire. Say something to her, again, but it’s just for her. He kaituhi!

Say something for all she’s done for us, and continues to. The book, with Planetesimal, and planetesimal inside it, remains alive with meaning. And so do we e hoa mā, so are we, whether we stay by the bookshelf or go to the sea, the beads are there, these tiny planets, to pull through our fingers, while we search for the porotītīwai, the phosphorescence lighting up our hunting grounds, where we spear the gold and green and red and purple flashes, we spear and snare and treasure and possess, we make our bodies heavy with our catch, these silver fish, these reasons to be brave, these reasons to return to the page, the church, te hā.

But wait there's more!