From my vantage point I can see policemen forming up into lines. They are wearing double breasted trench coats, visored helmets that give them a look not unlike Star Wars Storm Troopers and in their hands, they grasp truncheons like they are holding sub machine guns. They are set against a backdrop of old villas, some tidy, many peeling paint. The August sky is grey, today there is menace to it, but on another day, we might read it as simply dreary. The officers have an air of towering intimidation.  Everything has the air of a tower from my reclined vantage point. I’m almost 2, my father is pushing me in a buggy with a striped red and blue seat. One kind of New Zealand is about to do battle with another kind in the streets surrounding Athletic Park. Battle in the streets of Berhampore. This is as far back as my memories go, in truth a memory peppered with family tales and documentary embellishments, a magpie revision. It is my first ring.

***

If you were to cut me open and count my rings, the half closest to my core would tell the history of Berhampore in the late 20th century. My tree learnt to stand in the world on a hillside which forms the valley that runs from Te Moana-o-Raukawa in the south to Port Nicholson in the north. That valley knows the wind. It knows gales, both from the south seas and from history. This working-class heart of South Wellington is so full of character that almost every place I have lived since has been grey and mundanely suburban in contrast.
At its southern end sit The Sisters of Our Lady of Compassion, devotees of the Catholic god and Tapu Te Ranga Marae, devotees of gods more plural and nuanced. Coming north there is a bastion to the Romanian god; the Anglicans once had a foothold at the suburb’s centre. In the west the Presbyterians ran abuse filled orphanages which then gave way to a halfway house for those for whom the Edwardian institutions had once abused. In the suburb’s core once sat a salami factory dousing everything in delicious smoke like an incense burner swung in the chapel. I like to tell people I was reared in the southerly whipping off Cook Strait, but it is equally true that I was reared down wind of the bacon smoke house. Both things instruct who I am.
Around the corner from the factory the Satan’s Slaves pad once bore an iron swastika above the fortified gate. What today we refer to as “social housing” is scattered throughout the valley. These blocks of flats have culturally enriched the suburb for a century.
In the north once sat Athletic Park, fulcrum for the national conflict in 1981 as Muldoon’s rugby regime waged war on a more diverse New Zealand. That battle is now curriculum history, the war however still rages.

***

Seven years later and another ring is being laid down. The “Save Our Post Office” meeting is being held as we discover that the labour government is actually hell bent on ripping much of our world apart.  When it was elected in 1984 we welcomed the victory with crates of Lion Brown and flagons of Rochdale cider, bought from the rickety old liquor store which had a sloping floor due to subsidence, upon which a marble would traverse from one end to the other if set down. The air had an aroma that could only be described as “pub carpet”, the essence of adult pleasure past.  
The meeting is a sea of colourful jerseys adorned with “Save Our Post Office” badges and the odd badge bearing Soviet icons. Strategies are formed, protests planned. The inevitable tide of history washes away our post office with its plush crimson stanchion ropes and the national coat of arms. Today it is a pub and most people use email.

I think about this struggle often. From this vantage point it closely resembles tilting at windmills. Today you are lucky to find a post box let alone a post office, or “post shop” as our wonderful passage into neoliberal consumer speak rendered them. The truth is also that for those of us younger than my mother, we are unlikely to need them. But does that mean the battle was for nothing? In 1988 it wasn’t clear the world would be using substance less streams of magic to transfer text, funds, love and fury around the world. At least it wasn’t clear to me, I was only turning 9. Have we lost the urge to fight? I suppose those who laid waste to the lawn at parliament in 2022 would say no. Every fight’s moral justification is in the eye of the beholder.

***

Four years on from the failed bid to keep the post office and a ring is laid down in my wood so deep and vivid I can still feel it settling 33 years later. I am cradling my brother in my parent’s bed. He was born in front of me that morning. Eleven years of being an only child has ended. He is a delicate perfection. The sky outside is a grey folded hesitation. It hangs waiting for this new arc of life to advance forth. We are the center of the universe. That afternoon is as close to the divine as I have been.

This gap between siblings means I am as much an only child as I am one of two. For eleven years I developed alone, and then once my brother arrived I was almost as much a carer for him as my parents were. This means people feel free to voice to me all the unpleasant theories they have about only children, thinking I am not one. Accidental honesty. 

***

Another year on and a ring forms as I step between armed offender squad members as they assemble their rifles on the footpath outside the gang pad. I am on my way to intermediate; they are starting their day busting into the devil’s compound. Years later I will witness a member of the same gang sharing the spotting knives with a policeman. The universe completes its narratives, you just need to give it time.

***

This next ring forms in my liver. I am in a cubicle at Wellington Hospital, just a little north of Berhampore. I have been driven there by a friend’s mother after being dragged unconscious from a cleft of deep bush adjacent to the halfway house under the cliff. Stolen gin and bourbon have fueled my evening, but my engine ran too rich and everything has backfired. There are Smurfs on the cubicle wall. I am neither adult nor child. This cubicle is a liminal space.
Another ring forms 6 years later as I sleep on the grass under the pōhutukawa next to The Parade. I am sleeping off an excess of grog consumed at a BBQ in Island Bay. I am woken by friends who are headed to the now mothballed Athletic Park to salvage memorabilia. How many of my rings are the same lesson marked into me over and over?

***

I can feel the grain of the wood under my palm. The timber reveals its rings in places. I am reclined with a friend in what my father would call an edifice at Berhampore School. A slide slopes away down back to the earth beside us. We are smoking a joint before going to see Portishead play. This is partly an act of late teen rebellion defiling the school playground. But also, it serves the utilitarian service by hiding us from prying eyes, if not from knowing nostrils. When I was at school this was a ghost house, an old decrepit villa that once housed the headmaster and then housed pornography. It was demolished away and replaced by safety approved play equipment, and young men smoking dope.

***

I haul myself up from a foam sleeping mat in the lounge. I no longer have a bed in the family home. I am home as my mother has had a stroke. I drink coffee on the couch. There is a photo on the wall of me as an infant in the same position. The deep windowsill framing me like a precious jewel. The cats used to lay across the top of the couch and groom me. Their own oddly shaped bald kitten. They loved me all the same.

My father is peeling potatoes. The day there is no sack of spuds in the laundry will be the day the pale horse trots down the street. We wait for news as to whether we need to go to Wellington Hospital or Porirua. We are warned we won’t know how much my mother will recover till we know. The absurd logic seems to make sense here and now. Or is it that the common-sense logic seems absurd here and now? Hard to say.
I suddenly feel a little more grown up.

***

I sit on the 110 year old concrete steps in the back garden. I’m drinking a beer. To the south a ridge of golf course shelters us from the worst of the southerlies. To the north a stout block of flats protects us from the northerlies. They now sit empty as they are full of toxic black mould. The Phoenix Foundation song by the same name plays on stereos all over town. They claim it wasn’t written about the flats. I’m not sure Kim Hill believed them.

For so long this was my universe. The bigger my world becomes the more I have to face the fact that I am not at its center.

***

We visit the funeral home up on the hill to make the arrangements. It was once a sheltered workshop for what were then known as the intellectually handicapped. It is now the foyer to the after world. Departure lounge and ultimate travel agents to oblivion, coffee offered to the living waving goodbye.

This ring marks a major step on the life journey. My mother, brother and I choose a casket. My father’s death hits each family member differently. For my mother the overriding emotion is relief. A decade of being responsible for a partner with dementia draws to a close. For me, my grief is peppered with guilt that I couldn’t bring myself to visit him the last year of his life. At 28 my brother’s grief is the most visceral.

After making the arrangements we head to the pub that was once a post office. We make the same walk my father and me made 38 years earlier as the police formed up to tackle the protestors.
For all that has remained the same over that time there is much that is no longer here.
Apartheid has gone, Athletic Park has gone. Muldoon has gone. My father has gone.
But I am still here.

The above creative non fiction piece was written to submit to a journal but didn’t make the cut so I am publishing it here.