Things Change

While this is Tom’s first visit to New Zealand, I have been here a couple of times before, when my family was living in Australia. I still have vivid memories of those trips, so I was really looking forward to coming back to Wellington, which had enchanted me as a teenager.

Our approach to New Zealand’s larger cities has been to pick one museum we want to see and spend the rest of the day wandering and getting a feel for the place.

In Wellington, we were headed first for the cable car, which would take us to the hill overlooking the city. Along the way, we came upon the old government building, looking every inch a classical stone edifice, and were astonished to discover that it was constructed entirely of wood—kauri wood, to be more precise.

It’s an amazing piece of architecture, and although no longer used by the cabinet and premier, has been lovingly cared for since 1876, when it was completed.

It is now used by the law faculty of the University of Wellington, but inside are several rooms devoted to displays of New Zealand and Wellington history, including one detailing the fight for women’s suffrage, which New Zealand was the first country in the world to grant, back in 1893.

It has the most amazing ‘floating’ staircase and some lovely late 19^th century stenciled wall décor. We spent a good deal of time there, Tom having fallen in love with kauri wood and being extremely impressed by it all.

We eventually made our way down Lambton Quay to the cable car, which reminded us very much of similar ones in Bergen, Norway and Bilbao, Spain.

Once at the top, I experienced my first, but by far not my last, wave of disorientation as I took in the view, which was not at all how I remembered the city. I recalled Wellington as a quaint, pretty city full of white Victorian era houses perched on the hillside above a curved bay, like a picturesque version of San Francisco.

This is not how Wellington looks today, with its built up waterfront, skyscrapers and ‘Beehive’ parliament building, all constructed since I’d been there.

As I voiced my disorientation to Tom, expressing a little dismay about the city not appearing as I had remembered it, Tom reminded me that it had been nearly 50 years since my first visit, and ‘things change’.

We’d purchased a round trip ticket for the cable car, but decided to stroll through some of the Botanical Gardens, at the top of the hill before going back down. As we began descending through the various botanical landscapes, however, it became patently clear that there was no way we were going to retrace our steps uphill just to use up the other half of our tickets, so we made the decision to walk the whole way back down to the waterfront, and a great decision it was.

The botanical gardens were vast and beautiful, ranging from incredible succulents to kauri forests to an amazing greenhouse full of splendid begonias, water lilies and air plants.

We made our way out of the botanical garden through Wellington’s oldest cemetery, which included a Jewish section, and was cut in half by a motorway sometime in the 1970s.

Down at the revitalized waterfront, a sizeable number of people were stolling, cycling and enjoying the gorgeous day, for we had been told by several people that it was unusual to have a such a warm, sunny, calm day like this in Wellington.

Finally, we made our way to the highly regarded Te Papa Tongarewa—The Museum of New Zealand. And what a museum.

In a beautiful modern building, the museum, which is free to enter, houses several floors of fantastically designed exhibits devoted to various aspects of New Zealand history and culture.

On the top floor was a fascinating art exhibition focused on power, and featuring historic portraits of New Zealanders, White and Maori, renowned and anonymous, with interactive screen detailing every aspect of the paintings and their subjects. I could have stayed there for hours.

On a lower floor was a really excellent exhibition examining New Zealand’s history of immigration with a critical and challenging narrative and an entire eye-catching exhibit devoted to the Treaty of Waitangi.

An entire wing held a vast exhibit of Maori life and history, with several full scale waka and both a  traditional and a reimagined marae.

But the most compelling for both of us was a ground-breaking exhibition called Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War that tells the story of New Zealand’s participation in that ill-fated WWI campaign through the eyes and experiences of ordinary New Zealanders, which was monumental in every sense of the word.

As we entered behind a guarded wall, we got the shock of our lives when we were confronted with a 2.5 times life sized hyper-realistic sculpture of grimacing, wounded Lieutenant Spencer Westmacott pointing his pistol at us while his own words about the battle he was involved in were projected along the black walls and read aloud.

As we moved into the next room, Westmacott’s battle and life story were interwoven with the story of the first month of the Gallipoli campaign, and in the same way, each month of the eight month battle is explored in detail by examining the experiences of an individual who is depicted alone or with companions in a similar colossal sculptural format.

It was a state of the art exhibition of staggering impact, and I was completely emotionally drained when I emerged over an hour later.

By the time we left the museum in the early evening, Wellington’s famous wind had kicked up, and chilly and tired from a long day of taking in the city, we made our way back to our apartment, where I reflected on the day.

Things change. Memory and nostalgia, for this is a bit of a nostalgia tour for me, are fragile things. There’s a certain comfort in saying about a person, or a place: ‘That’s exactly how I remember it.’ But nothing is exactly as we think we remember. My idealised, teenaged picture of Wellington vanished in an instant, replaced by the vision of a vibrant, modern city with a world class museum–and that is not a bad thing to change into.