Meandering metaphors partially executed

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To the south and west of the city centre here is a dryness that is as literal, as in the ground, as the cultural aridity of which our northern friends sometimes accuse us.  It is a dryness that has been fought over politically for some time now, most recently — and, to my mind, most troublingly — at the highest levels.

Canterbury matters because, as a dry place, facing uncharacteristic dairy expansion, it exemplifies wider threats to our national environment that are looming large right now. “Threats” is a pejorative word. Let’s say: it’s an example of the clash between us who love New Zealand just the way Nature made it, and do not want it to change; and them who pursue growth at much cost, by turning any and all productive land into mines and dairy farms.

And politically, Canterbury matters because it fits another piece into the jigsaw of this government’s character. The government’s handling of ECan is another example, as in Auckland, of their approach to local government. Like the Schedule 4 mining stocktake, it is another thin justification for preconceived ideas.

I find myself suddenly with a lot to say about this present government, at such a volume and in such a fashion that I can at present only gesture to my thoughts indirectly.  At the local level, nothing seems to me better to exemplify the misguided, misdirected spirit of its proposed reforms than the spectre of this dry place transformed into what can but should not be: dairy plains irrigated by their own rivers.  This is a strange inverse in nature of a far more immediate austerity, an aridity, proposed against the nation’s human resources.  Neither the land nor its people deserves this treatment from its elected leaders.  It is a poverty of imagination and spirit that defines us by a lack:

What the last few months have shown is that New Zealand society isn’t any less hollow today than it was before the nine years of Clark’s government; it has no more texture. It is a fairer society, and in some areas significantly so, but it lacks in institutional and organised civil society barriers between the rapid implementation of further reforms and its most vulnerable citizens, who are bound to bear their brunt.

I should be able to do better in my own analysis and prose than huff and puff in this fashion, and perhaps I can at some future date; it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of writers out there with whom my own responses chime.  I’m sidetracked at the moment, however, by staring at my front lawn in the thirty-degree (April) heat and thinking about the history of this neighbourhood and its water.

The whole of Sockburn sits on a series of dry river beds around the racecourse area, with a stormwater drain that, extensively landscaped by the council, now looks like a native creek and which runs from Broomfield Common west of Hei Hei to one block or so west of here.  You can see its eastern extent by selecting “map” to view here.  It forms the official boundary of one side of my parents’ property, which itself is raised on a deep bed of greywacke fill above the dry riverbed.  The extensive vegetable garden they planted according to traditional mores when we were children belied the proximity of that creek-drain; root vegetables dug from the fill were small, crooked and sparse, and anything flowering refused to thrive at the edges of the back lawn, the offered water draining away into the rocks below.

The home I share with the señor, not far from where I grew up, is similarly dry if more level and with greater volume of topsoil (although the harvestparents have since rehabilitated their own garden with additions of fertile earth over many years).  I have given up on much except a fairly brutally Darwinist approach to planting, not least because plants’ capacity to survive in the dry is further compromised by the dogs’ talent for digging up the dust around them.  This is all fine by me; I live here for its history, privacy  and closeness to family, not for its contributions to the garden city.

Along our street, there is one house that irrigates its entire front lawn.  It is a vivid patch of what I would call rude green, which was dug up and resown midway through the dry summer of 2008-9.  It falls for me into the category of that which just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, but I imagine it is also a source of satisfaction for its owners in a neighbourhood where the rest of us live calmly enough with the predominating dry.

It’s in winter that terrain like this neighbourhood’s comes into its own, avoiding the subsiding bogginess of the higher water table just one or two kilometres north-east of here, and beyond into the swampy north and eastern suburbs.  The fruit trees all along the street shed their leaves and we live in dry, quiet austerity through the cold, cultivating, at least as far as I am concerned, a minor suburban version of Wallace Stevens’s mind of winter.

These tangentially connected thoughts of governance, management and landscape sat alongside each other last night during a splendid evening at the house of @Ghetsuhm, recently relocated with her family from this neighbourhood to the eastern suburbs.  Their new home is in a neighbourhood that at first glance looks like Sockburn’s doppelganger: residential streets branching off light industrial roads, not far from major through-roads and infrastructure (in Sockburn’s case, the old abattoir; over there, the water treatment park).  It took a while before I realised the difference: the abundance of flowering shrubs, the green lawns, the fog.  The water-table is high, to the point of sink-holes even in summer, explained @Ghetsuhm.

Following the señor’s allusion to the spreading notion that Christchurch is at present draining too well, we imagined a future in which the western and southern suburbs sit high on dry rocky outcrops while the northern and eastern neighbourhoods become something  like Tuvalu without a coast.  It’s the black humour of friends but it goes some way toward analogising my feelings at the moment about the state of the nation: high and dry or sinking below sea level.  This is not the right way for policy to continue.