Steve Braunias: The soul of the West side

Auckland sunset over the Waitākere Ranges. Photo / Getty Images

Steve Braunias farewells the left of the map.

West stays in bed and lets East do all the heavy lifting at sunrise. It doesn't care for getting up in the dark and putting on an early-morning face. The West is too cool for that s***. I have lived these past 10 years in Te Atatū, translated as The Dawn; from my front windows, I face North, watch East heave the Sun above the horizon and bathe the harbour with its solar reds, and think: I love living in the West, where the day gets brought in on a tray.

West stays up late. It gets the last of the Sun. East is wrapped up inside, quivering in the shade, a bat pinned to a cave; West is outside, an outdoor plant feeding on the smoke of evening barbecues. From my back porch, I watch the Sun fall behind the Waitākere Ranges, Auckland's Blue Mountains, its dark and formidable wall of fern and earth and moss. You can't actually step inside the ranges because of the rāhui. The ranges now exist to all those who live in the West as something more powerful than experienced reality: a state of mind. As such, I always figured I'd have to be out of my mind to leave.

West in New Zealand is the West Coast, Westland, Westport, West Auckland. All of them states of mind leaning towards the coarse black sands of the Tasman Sea, and a surf that takes deep breaths before it crashes to earth, lunging at the shore and wanting a fight. Everyone who lives in these Wests clings to a special sense of belonging. We think of those in the East with a kind of pity, as soft creatures dulled by white sand and the Pacific. We prefer it out on the left. We're magnetised to this side of the map. I have hung on in here and hung on in here and hung on in here.

West Auckland is great big pylons blazing with electricity and skipping rope along the banks of the Whau River, the twin towers of the two radio masts on Lincoln Road (one in a horse paddock, the other at the back of an unoccupied but fully functioning Radio New Zealand studio housed in a beautiful Art Deco mansion), mangrovial territories of mud and creek crawling with eels and herons and mullet and crabs and the ancient remains of supermarket shopping trolleys – I could sing these hymns to the West all day, the stations on the Western train line (Swanson, Rānui, Sturges Rd, Henderson, Fruitvale, Glen Eden, Sunnyvale) are like verses. But the music is beginning to fade.

West Auckland's capital – its nerve centre, its metropolis – is Henderson. It's kind of nerveless and not very metropolitan, really it's a bit of a dump, down on its luck, crowded, dirty, violent (the day we moved out West, we saw a broad-shouldered woman in Henderson wearing a T-shirt that read IF YOU TALK S***, YOU GET HIT); in short, it has character. It's got the most creative train station in New Zealand and by that I mean opera and classical music is piped into the station 24/7, a constant soundtrack of high art in a low suburb built around a creek. Apparently the music discourages tagging. The idea, inevitably, came from former Waitākere mayor Sir Bob Harvey, who continues to have approximately 73,500 ideas a day, and only about 25 of them are terrible. Bob has become a dear friend these past few years. I think of him every time I experience the Henderson train station concert. Shame that when I leave the West next week, it's not by train.

West is best. I love it to pieces but the pieces got broken and I'm sweeping up my life and taking it not that far, actually just across the water. Strange to think I'll soon be looking back the other way, just across the water, at the low Te Atatū peninsula, at the vague line of the Waitākere Ranges, at the twin towers like two match sticks (one on fire at night, flashing red), at the thin lines of the electrifying pylons, in the direction of a fabled land wet with creeks, smelling of citrus fruit, funny, vocal, honest (IF YOU TALK S***, YOU GET HIT), a motorway running through it, on two flight paths – the heavy grey shapes of the Hercules 130 and Boeing 757 trundling to and from the RNZAF base at Whenuapai, and the far more regular sight and sound of the bird of the West, the police helicopter. I'm looking forward to it. Happy days ahead. I'll take the pieces with me, stored in my heart.

Next week: Diana Wichtel