A view of the Waterview Expressway from the Howlett Reserve walking track. Photo / Nick Reed
A view of the Waterview Expressway from the Howlett Reserve walking track. Photo / Nick Reed
Ants. Ants, in their hundreds at least, crawling inside and across and all around a crack in the pavement besides the viewing window which overlooks the incredible $1.4 billion motorway tunneling project in Waterview, that liquid, obscure suburb of Auckland on the shores of a pretty mangrove swamp.
The construction of the biggest and most complex roading scheme in New Zealand has provided a fantastical spectacle these past couple of years. Waterview is the central hive, with its subterranean pit and its underground tunnels connecting Auckland's northwestern and southwestern motorways; above ground, the Te Atatu causeway is being widened and lifted above the tidal mudflats, and huge concrete pillars are marching in a fascinating matrix towards Pt Chevalier.
It's a work in progress, history in the making, and I wanted to see it in its unfinished state. I put on sensible shoes. I wanted to see what the whole motorway thing looked like on foot. I wanted to inspect the nuances of the epic build, and talk to passersby who lived in its shadows. Two years ago, I walked much of the length of the Great South Road, about 30 kilometres of that amazing 19th century path which brought the British war machine to Maori strongholds; its 21st century successor also demanded close attention. Very close, microscopic even.
The ants were black, and quite large. They were likely the common black ant, Lasius niger. New Zealand has a - wonderful word! - depauperate ant fauna, meaning we are species poor; there are only 11 endemic or native species (Australia has over 600), most still rooting around in scrub. City ants are introduced, and it looked like the black ants in the Waterview pavement were competing with a few of the honey-brown Argentine ant, first detected in 1990. The Lasius niger colony was large and spectacular. By sitting a while, and making rough counts in grid sections (standard practice in counting bird populations), there looked to be over 2000.
They dragged a stick. They disappeared into exit holes, marked by fine scatterings of soil. They moved with tremendous purpose and ambition in the hot sun.
Their intense activities were on Herdman St beside Waterview Primary School. The school was a dismal sight. Its original buildings were demolished in the summer of 2012 to make way for site work at the Waterview tunnel, and replaced with a dowdy row of long, low prefabs. They looked like military barracks. The school's sign proclaimed: "Forward together." I looked up from the ants and saw two teachers lead a class of about 20 kids to a gate. The gate was padlocked. The children were locked in; their barracks began to look like cheap little jails.
Waterview Primary School shares its territory with a driveway for the motorway's construction site. Photo / Nick Reed
The children had to wait. The school shares its territory with a driveway for the motorway's construction site, and a truck was coming. It was a Prestige Loos truck. Its sign declared: "We're number one in the number two's business!" It was transporting three portaloos, one of them painted a fetching powder blue.
It drove past. The teacher unlocked the gate. Another teacher was on hand; she took down the children's names off a chart, and let them through the gate one by one, where they were told to wait until everyone had come through. Forward together, slowly. The gate was padlocked again, and the two teachers escorted the children along the side of the school. Their destination: morning assembly.
It took about 40 seconds for them to walk there but the entire choreography of that tremendously boring piece of high security, which takes place every day, took about 15 minutes to execute.
I went back to the ants. The stick had disappeared. The manic levels of industry continued; the pavement was warm to the touch, and the sun described interesting shadows of the hydraulic crane lowering something into a massive hole in the ground. You could look into it through plastic viewing windows created in the wall surrounding the motorway project. The hole was where Alice lived, and clawed out the centre of the Earth.
A view of the Waterview Expressway from Eric Armishaw Reserve in Point Chevalier. Photo / Nick Reed
In one of its many popular touches, the Well-Connected Alliance - the preposterous, self-regarding title of the consortium involved in building the motorway - asked 500 Auckland schoolchildren to give a name to the excavation bore which has created the 2.4 kilometre tunnel 40 metres beneath the earth. Branden Hall, nine years old, from Everglade Primary in Manukau, came up with Alice. He told reporters: "When the tunnel is finished it will be wonderful because it will be faster to get to my cousin's place where I love to play, which is cool."
A whole army of children have been recruited by the Well-Connected Alliance. The surrounding wall is gaily decorated with lovely murals by schoolkids. Through the viewing windows, the project looks like a kind of giant and demented sandpit, with a lot of big toys. Alice is the biggest toy of all. It's already dug the southbound tunnel; it's now making the return journey, digging out the northbound tunnel, to create five kilometres of six-lane traffic.
Every narrative about the motorway comes with gaga stats - 400,000 square metres of spoil was excavated to build the first tunnel, Alice moves at 80 centimetres per minute, etc. But the most thrilling stat to be had was on a sign beside the edge - don't look down - of the unholy crater. It advised workers, CHIN STRAPS MUST BE WORN 1M OF THIS EDGE.
'Nice little earner, that Alice'
The ant colony included winged males flying in swarms with the queens. Their wings were shiny in the sunlight. I stepped over them, not wanting to disturb their life and death pastimes, when I was escorted to the viewing windows by Iris, 78, in a white cardigan and grey pants. She lived locally and had taken an abiding interest in the tunnel. I asked her for directions to the viewing windows, and she said she was happy to show me. "Otherwise I'd just be sitting around at home playing Patience," she said.
We had met that morning in a Russian shopping container. It was delivered to Daventry St in Waterview in 2013 and set up as a café, the Waterview Coffee Project, with bare light bulbs and a communal table. My timing was bad. The previous barista, who had created a kind of mystique and legend about himself, had left the previous day. A friend of his, a large man from Titirangi, was at the café when I arrived. He was filling in the Herald crossword - six down, unventilated, seven letters. He said of his friend; "Where do you start? He's an enigma surrounded by a mad person." I asked where the former barista was now, and he said, "I believe he's taken to gardening with a vengeance."
Justin Newcomb and Anna Subritzky, part owners of the Waterview Coffee Project on Daventry St. Photo / Nick Reed
Iris sat across from Titirangi Man at the table. The two had often seen each other in the container, where locals routinely discuss the latest developments in the motorway project. Iris said later, "I can never remember his name. He goes on and on." She was annoyed by his cynical opinions. Iris is a fan of the tunnel - "Alice itself is two rugby fields long!", she marvelled - and all its implications of progress. "That's exactly what it is. I certainly look upon it as progress."
She said it could only be good for Waterview, give it a boost. She said, "I had a baby late in life. My husband was a lot older than me and wanted somewhere with everything in reach. So we came here and there was a butcher, a greengrocer, a hairdresser, a post office, and a general store. It was well set-up.
"It was very quiet, although the madhouse at Carrington was still open then, and we'd hear a buzzer, a loud honk, whenever anyone escaped. But then everything started closing down. Carrington, the shops. And a lot of refugees and Islanders started moving in..."
Waterview is almost a suburb of central Auckland, but it quietly disappears from view as soon as you approach it. It's the suburb that isn't quite there. It's private, neglected. It backs onto a mangrove. It's working-class, also under-class. There used to be shops in Daventry St; the only one still open is a Laundromat. I looked in. There was an unlikely stack of paperback fiction to peruse during the spin cycles, including Livingstone (1970) by Nadine Gordimer, and Uranus (1948) by French writer Marcel Ayme. A large man with dreadlocks was sitting on a plastic chair. He wore dark glasses and earphones, bro.
Iris continued, "I think Waterview has done quite well out of the motorway project. We've got the motorway right on our doorstep now! It can take you anywhere! It's really going to open Waterview up."
Her good cheer was interrupted by Titirangi Man. He looked up from his crossword, and said, "As a PR job, it's superb. You couldn't get better." Iris looked away. He said, "There's an ulterior motive behind all this, and it's to get the Alice machine here in the first place. It's a nice little earner, that Alice. Fletchers are making big money on this. Waterview - it's just a practice run."
I asked him whether he was saying that Fletcher Construction was running the show, and he said, "Absolutely. Well-Connected Alliance - hahaha! Well connected is right. There's no way they'd get Alice in just for this little tunnel. They'll be saying, 'Well, it's here now, so let's use it for the harbour tunnel.' I can't see why they'd bring it to New Zealand to do just a short little run like this unless they had another idea for it."
He went back to his crossword - 17 across, agronomic, 12 letters. The barista, Nick Davis-Goff, who'd come up from Taupo to be with his girlfriend in Auckland, washed and dried a cup. Sitting inside a Russian shipping container has its charms but they are very short-lived and I asked Iris for directions to the viewing windows of the construction site. When she took me there, and turned around to walk back home, I waited till she'd gone around the corner, and crouched down to study the ants.
'Awed by engineering feats'
A woman was let out of the padlocked gates of Waterview maximum security primary school, and walked to her car. Colleen Sinclair, 75, had been volunteering with a reading programme. She was in excellent spirits; as president of the Avondale Gardening Club, she was about to take 28 members to the annual rhododendron show in New Plymouth, where they would stay the night in the Flamingo Motel. They would stop on the way at Piopio, a small town south of Te Kuiti, for a barbecue.
I thought of the happy 28 on their bus trip, destined for the showy rhododendrons of New Plymouth, the midday barbecue in Piopio, the rooms at the Flamingo Motel with its rock garden and outdoor pool. Visitors from Auckland, who were travelling by road. The road gave them their freedom, and liberty; the road led them out, brought them back in; their happiness depended entirely on the road.
Joan wound down her window and talked about the trip while I leaned against the car door. In that instant I understood the point of the entire $1.4 billion motorway project. Its essence was revealed. It was being built for the Avondale Gardening Club's annual run to see the rhododendrons of New Plymouth. If we can't guarantee that right, then all is lost.
The government places such importance on the motorway that it hauls out capital letters whenever it refers to it in policy documents. It is known as a Road of National Significance. As such, all the gaga stats and thrilling geographies - Alice is digging the tenth largest diameter tunnel in the world and the longest road tunnel in New Zealand - refer to the Road of National Significance as something that releases, that spells freedom.
The custom-built Earth Pressure Balance Machine - dubbed Alice - which has bored twin tunnels on the Waterview project. Photo / Dean Purcell
But there was little joy at the prospect that morning in Waterview. "Aw well," said Donna Minia, 50, "life goes on, eh." She was the first person I met when I arrived on my travels. She was sitting on her front step. She appreciated the fact it was one of the last times she could just relax at home, because she was being forced to leave.
She said, "Our house and the two next door are being bowled. They're putting in a new housing development. We got to go sometime before Christmas. They're gonna relocate us. I don't know where yet. Out west somewhere I think.
"We've lived here 12 years. I got a son who has special needs. He goes to school in Green Bay. We been happy here. it's nice and quiet. You get only get the odd car hooning up the road. Probably on P or something. And there was a murder once, on this road. Somebody cut someone up. They found the guy, and he went to jail. But the victim, they died. I think it was a lady. I think so."
She mentioned she grew tomatoes and capsicums, and would I like to see her garden. Yes, please, I said, and we walked around the back of the house. There was a plum tree, and a grape vine. Her husband Noel was mowing the lawn. "I'll do the front lawn when he's finished," she said.
We walked around to the front of the house again and Donna said, "See that lady walking along? She always seems to know everything around here." I chased after Anna Subritzky, 41. She was moving at a fair pace, and picked it up again after she agreed to talk at her home. She was a very chatty person, lively and intelligent, a mother of two undoubtedly active children (Jasper 13, Greta 10), and her house, too, was animated - there were chickens in the back yard, a mural on the front wall, the kitchen was painted a shade of purple. The blackboard read: MOLASSES. HERBAL TEA. SMOKE ALARM.
Anna said, "Justin, that's my partner, and I have actually been making a film about the motorway. Because it's such a thing here! People have come from Panmure to look at it. And almost everyone talks about the progress. That's the word they use. They're awed by the engineering feats, the technology. But somewhere along the way I think an important conversation has been lost."
What conversation is that, I asked, and she laughed, really hooted, and said, "Oh, you know what I'm talking about!" I said I didn't. She said, "Yes, you do. Good tactic! Playing dumb so I'll talk! Okay, so it's the ideological conversation about why we are building roads like this, and what sort of city we are creating for the future. As you know!
"That conversation is just not being held here. You either accept it, or you leave. What can you do? The motorway's here, and it's a happening thing. It's just so easy to get seduced and taken in by the PR. Look!"
She picked up a beautifully produced leaflet published by the Well-Connected Alliance. Its logo, which is all over the walls surrounding the motorway project, is a rainbow. "The little rainbows! So cute! God. But the reality is that the Well-Connected Alliance are like a conquering army. They come into the community with their little logos, and they win hearts and minds."
The Waterview Connection tunnel project has made good progress over the past few months, with some of the motorway ramps looking more complete. Photo / Nick Reed
She accepted they had won, and that the motorway would be a joy or curse for all eternity. "It's changed the face of Waterview forever. It's put it on the map, hasn't it! We might even got the name Waterview on the motorway signs. You wouldn't know it was here. It's been invisible up until now.
"But it's such a great community. We absolutely love it. Although when we bought here, we thought, what've we done? The shops were in their death-throes. There was an awful general store that hardly sold anything, and everything had passed its used-by date - you'd only buy catfood in there if you were desperate. It was run by a big massive fellow who wore a cable knit jersey. Then it was a Pacific Island grocer, but I think there was a power struggle with the man who owns the corner dairy. The grocer moved out, and the dairy owner turned it into a Laundromat..."
I suspected Anna was behind the Laundromat's strange range of paperback fiction, although her own bookshelves were conventional - The Luminaries, Wolf Hall. We moved outside. Her back garden was sumptuous, a bountiful and fecund delight, and it also featured a really ambitious climbing frame for melons. It was another example of the household's sense of invention.
All was revealed when I asked about Justin, and she said he was Justin Newcombe - the DIY genius who used to write a brilliant column in the Weekend Herald. I was incensed when it let him go. He had a boundless enthusiasm for his many and varied projects around the home, and his house was proof that he walked his talk.
Justin emailed a few days later with a good story: "Just had to tell you about the moment when Waterview became my home. I left home one morning in my little white truck, heading past the state houses on Daventry St, when I saw a traffic warden who was officiously applying a bright red sticker to the rear window of a car with no wheels and no plates, obviously abandoned.
"When I came home the car was completely overflowing with old mattresses, tyres and general rubbish. Here was this community who knew a good opportunity when they saw it - ie, a pop-up inorganic collection. At that moment, instead of thinking I'd spend three years in Waterview building up some equity in my house so we could move to Grey Lynn, I knew I was already at home. I've been here 18 years."
It was after visiting Anna, and walking to the Waterview Coffee Project to meet Iris and Titirangi Man, that I went with Iris to see the viewing windows and then to watch the ants, those Larius nigers with attitude. They raced onto my hands and feet. I brushed them off, gently, and took my bearings.
I was like stout Cortez in the Anericas, looking around with eagle eyes at a new world. I mentally navigated a journey into the Waterview interior and beyond. The need to walk the earth and inspect the motorway project at even closer range was strong, so I set off, across a playground - two new mothers were strolling along with their babies in pushchairs, and smoking - and onto a track in Howlett Esplanade, alongside the swamp.
It was a mangrovial wonderland just around the corner from the epicentre of the $1.4 billion etc. The tide was in, and the grey-green waters caressed the shore. There were kingfishers on low branches, and tui in the flax. There were welcome swallows skimming the water, and fantails in the pines. A breeze shook the white manes of toetoe. Above everything was the heavy scent of wild jasmine. It was overpowering, a perfumed zone.
It was lunchtime. Chris Broadbent, 26, and Stan Rotorangi, 36, from tree removing company Asplundh, had just finished cutting up a fallen gum, and were lying on the reserve and feasting. Chris was beginning work on a gigantic lasagne. "It's unbelievable how much he eats," said Stan, who meticulously went about preparing his own lunch. He opened a tin of pink salmon. He unscrewed the lid of a jar of Duke's mayonnaise. He sliced an onion. He opened a bag of potato chips. Finally, he poured and layered the whole range inside a large bun, and opened his jaws.
I walked on through the esplanade, which dropped down through pine trees to the shore. I sat for a while and looked out over the water - the watery views of Waterview - towards Pollen Island, and Traherne Island, those two discrete patches of wetland. In the 1850s, shells were extracted from Pollen Island, and crushed to produce lime; it reverted after that to its current state of uselessness, a barely accessible island surrounded by mullet, flounder, rays.
I emerged on a street where National Radio broadcaster Wallace Chapman lives, and walked to the corner dairy. I met the famous owner, Divesh Kumar, who opened the Laundromat. He said: "Wallace Chapman comes in here!" I crossed Great North Road, and headed into the Waterview reserve - I was on a mission to see the Oakley Creek Falls, a 6m waterfall in the city, chief among the secret pleasures of the natural world of Waterview.
Oakley Creek Waterfall - "Chief among the secret pleasures of the natural world of Waterview." Photo / Nick Reed
Soft afternoon sunlight fell through the branches of the oak trees and flame trees onto the falls, and on the length of narrow Oakley Creek. I turned back along the track towards Pt Chevalier, past the mossy stone walls built in the 19th century by inmates at the old Whau Lunatic Asylum. Further along, towards the exit, were the high security units of the asylum's modern successor - the Mason Clinic, a forensic unit catering for the criminally insane.
A patient was walking around in a loop outside one of the units. I hid behind a tree and watched the poor devil. He shadowboxed, and touched a windowsill when he completed each circuit. The motorway was not built for his freedom or release.
But it was almost on the clinic's front door. I turned out of the secluded Oakley Creek walkway onto Great North Rd, and the motorway project loomed large. I was in the matrix of its giant concrete pillars, built to support the elevated roads of an underpass and fly-over. The roads haven't quite been connected yet. Pillars reach for the sky, and there's nothing but space in-between.
History in the making...They were an exhilarating sight when I looked up directly beneath those monoliths. I had arrived at the bicycle track beside the motorway going to Te Atatu. I live on the Te Atatu peninsula; it was a distance of about 8km from the Oakley Creek waterfall to my house, most of it alongside the four-lane causeway that was being widened and lifted above the tidal mudflats.
The tide was going out. For the next 90 minutes I walked beside a brown, sticky planet of exposed mud, with occasional channels of deep water - a shag arrived, and ducked underwater for 32-second fishing expeditions. There were white-faced herons, their yellow legs elegantly stepping over the thick mud. There were black-backed seagulls, resting on rocks at the water's edge. And everywhere there were enormous road building machines hard at work - the CAT 312D and 3200, the Hyundai 235LCR-9, the Sika 09X, the flatteners and the grinders, the diggers and the scrapers, there to create the extra lanes for the traffic which barely moved as rush-hour approached.
I kept walking. I was free. The sun was in my face and I was in no hurry, loving the walk, the proximity to one of the great engineering projects in New Zealand history. I crossed the Whau River, and looked back at Waterview, with its cranes hovering above that incredible 40 metre crater. I thought of the ants of Herdman St. Their sense of purpose, their incessant manoeuvrings. Their work would never finish.
