Flickring & Whirlng

There are lots more new photos of the Water Whirler on Flickr. When we returned to it in Wellington, the bottom two spouts has already stopped working. Bubble gum in the works?

Windy Wellington

No shit, there’s some blowing going on. Turning each and every corner is unpredictable… you could be walking into a lee or a windtunnel. Sudden gusts can quite seriously impede walking, and it’s always hard to tell what kind of a day you’re having. The sun can be shining happily on shore as a storm whips the harbour into a frenzy of foamy points and ferry sailings are cancelled. Even a day after the weekend’s storm was over, down at Island bay the waves were still banging against the rocks with gusto.

It’s a little calmer (though not always) up the hill at Korokoro on Karen and Alan’s deck. Getting there is a killer — the footpath is a steep series of sharp switchbacks; already I’ve learnt to count the corners on the way up, but the view, even though the sea isn’t included, is pretty spectacular, and at night the stars are out in force. Orion has been flipped through 150 degrees, and with a little assistance from the telephone helpline I can even make out the Southern Cross and its shadowy fifth star to whom New Zealand refuses the diplomatic recognition that Australia offers.

Rather foolishly, when New Zealand was chipped off Gondwanaland and floated away into the South Pacific, it forgot to take any mammals with it. With the exception of seals and bats, the islands’ wildlife consisted almost exclusively of birds when the Polynesian canoes arrived carrying dogs and rats, which promptly made short work of flightless and burrowing birds, as the humans set about eating the larger birds out of existence. At the Karori wildlife sanctuary, an eight and a half kilometre fence has been erected to exclude all mammalian predators and reestablish native bush and avian wildlife, a 500-year project. On a walking tour, many of the birds are elusive (certainly no kiwi to be seen during daylight), though somewhere fluttering about among the trees we see kaka, stitchbird, tui and fantail. Prehistoric hitchhikers from Gondwanaland (NZ has unusually remained a more-or-less stable landmass since quitting the nest) include the spookily transparent amber not-quite-grasshopper weka, and the quietly anaemic not-quite-lizard tuatara. The tastiest part of the bush is kawakawa leaves, normally eaten to lace by caterpillars; grab a whole young leaf and it has a gingery pepper taste. Good for toothache too, apparently.

Over at the film archive they’re celebrating 25 years of existence by showing some of New Zealand’s earliest silent cinema. In Pathe Freres’ stencil-coloured Coasts of New Zealand (1910), tourists cross fords in traps, and Edwardian ladies in bonnets make their jolly way up a glacier tongue, complete with spades and ice picks. A home cinema screening of Once Were Warriors is obligatory; back at the archive there’s moody 80s relationship drama Smash Palace, but funniest of all are the animated Auckland kids in Brotown.

If you’re prepared to climb, good views abound. In the centre of town, Mount Victoria offers up the complicated shape of the harbour and its bays in and out (anywhere lower and the sea is liable to pop up where you least expect it). Over to the west at Makara beach, right at the southern end of the Kapiti coast, you could be a lot further from city life than you are. An hour up to the gun emplacements 200m above the beach provides a spectacular vista back down, and the hills of the Marlborough Sounds, just across the Cook Strait, float on the horizon.

Central Wellington doesn’t have much to recommend it, though. The Civic Centre and Te Papa right on the harbourfront are impressive if a little isolated and cold. Lambton Quay has its world-generic parade of Esprit, Starbucks and other corporates. Things get a little, er, ‘funkier’ out on Manners Mall and Cuba Street, where the bucket fountain is out of order but there’s a small libertarian bookshop. The Big Kumara kiwiana bar has some nice burgers, but when we notice that the bar has a policy of routinely labelling unwatched drinks with a warning that they may be spiked, it’s time to beat a hasty retreat from both the bar and its clientele.

To the south, on the way to the zoo, there’s even a Newtown. Still dominated by furniture shops selling cheap sofas on welfare schemes, there’s a smattering enough of acupuncture clinics, trendy espresso bars and stencil graffiti (generally a reliable sign of a proletarian area with unseemly aspirations) to suggest that it’s struggling to emulate its Sydney namesake.

Japan redux

Spotted on the way to the Zoo and investigated on the way back, a small exhibition of pictures on a Japanese tip by Mollypop in the Malo cafe, So… How Was Japan? I particularly liked the one called Tissue Analysis.

Len Lye’s Water Whirler

On a cold and windy Wellington harbourfront, a clutch of New Zealand dignitaries (including Governor-General Dame Silvia Cartwright) are here to oversee the long-overdue inauguration of New Zealand’s second major public kinetic sculpture designed by Len Lye. A jazz band play, their chairs and instruments dangerously close to blowing away in the wind, as gusts blow water off the surface of the harbour in scudding clouds of spume.

After the speeches, the ribbon is cut, and someone pushes a button bringing the whirler to life. The programmed performance lasts about ten minutes. From twenty holes in the side of a slender pole, water begins to spout. As the pressure of the water grows and the streams are thrown out further to either side, a vibration and wobble in the pole begins, which in turn throws the water out into new shapes and curves, which in turn affects the wobble of the pole, and it goes through a series of dancing phases, some extravagant, some slight…. it’s like watching a liquid firework, a lithely dancing fountain, and a lot gentler and more graceful than the sudden and violent movement of steel in Trilogy and Universe. 

It’s taken twenty-six years since the death of Lye for his 1961 sketch and idea to become a reality. Many of his kinetic sculptures were too complicated to realise in his own lifetime, and he saw some of his work as destined to be realised only in the twenty-first century. Six years in, it’s looking good. But don’t take my word for it. Here are some photos, and also some movies.