Auckland, the patchwork city

Do we share more than a phone book? A major new work on Auckland's history prompts TIM WATKIN to find out what it means to live in the City of Sails.

There's only one Auckland, but it means different things to each of us. To some it's New Zealand's pulse, to others New Zealand's big head. Some see it as vital - and full of vitality - others as eminently dispensable, some as their turangawaewae, some as a stop along the way.

Some see Auckland in High St, some in the Otara markets. On the western beaches, round the eastern bays. In the Domain, at Ericsson Stadium.

The question of just what defines Auckland and Aucklanders, if such a unified entity exists, has been raised by the publication of From Tamaki-Makau-Rau to Auckland, the first in a multi-volume history of New Zealand's largest city by University of Auckland emeritus professor Russell Stone.

Reading about who we were then prompts the question: Who are we now? Do we share anything other than a phone book?

Time to talk to some prominent Aucklanders, and who better to start with than the Minister for Auckland, Judith Tizard, who seems to have lived in just about every eastern or central suburb.

"Auckland is a very attractive city and it has the confidence of the beautiful and successful," she says from her mobile phone somewhere on the Southern Motorway. "It's a city that tends to look outward to Australia, the Pacific, the world. It doesn't feel it needs to look back into New Zealand much. Some of the rest of New Zealand sees that as shallow and vainglorious, but I see it as wonderfully confident."(Well, as an Aucklander she would, wouldn't she?)

In Dunedin, she says, locals want to know what university you went to. In Christchurch, it's what school. In Wellington it's what job you're in. "In Auckland it's what are your interests and where do you live?"

Not how much you earn?

"No, not at all."

So what does it mean to be an Aucklander?

"It's being dynamic, but being laidback at the same time. It's a sense of openness," Tizard replies. "There's a muscular edge to Aucklanders. They assume you'll be up-front."

Daryl Collins is of the same mind. A 7th former at Tangaroa College in south Auckland, Collins says he's different from his Polynesian mates in Palmerston North and Wellington.

"Even their accents [are different]. Aucklanders are more open, more confident when we speak. They're softer spoken, but us Aucklanders are more direct and to the point."

"It's simply brassier," author and Devonport devotee Kevin Ireland says of the city. "It's more commercial and in a way it's big enough not to care. It's a question of size, style and space."

Auckland has always been New Zealand's financial and commercial kingpin. Stone points out that for much of its history it has been outside the mainstream of New Zealand economic development - pastoralism. A rebel, it relied more on commerce.

A good time to visit Tony and Shona Caughey. A fifth-generation Aucklander, it was Tony's great-grandfather who opened Smith and Caughey in 1882.

He sees a long heritage in the city - the retail tradition of Queen St, the law firms in Shortland St, the old school rivalry on the sports fields - and feels loyal to it.

"For people born and bred in Auckland, many of them wouldn't want to live anywhere else and remain because of family, friends and opportunity, both commercial and cultural."

Shona, a third-generation local, thinks our mass public events hint at what we have in common. The Ellerslie Garden Show, Christmas in the Park, Round the Bays - they're all outdoors, active and informal.

Ask artist and lecturer Michael Parekowhai what visual image he'd choose for Auckland and he volunteers speed. "Not just how fast people move around. I'm talking about the lack of time to think."

He'd represent Auckland as one of those blurred, time-delayed photographs.

Says Shona Caughey, "Aucklanders live full lives. Wellingtonians aren't as busy."

Tony nods, "Here, people are always heading off."

Which is a funny thing - Aucklanders spend a lot of time away from Auckland. The Bay of Islands, Coromandel, Raglan; they're an extension of the city. The hinterland where we love to play.

And boy, do Aucklanders love to play, says Waitakere City mayor Bob Harvey. Here there's a spirit of, if not hedonism, then at least resolute pleasure-seeking.

"We are a very indulgent society in Auckland and we indulge a lot in ourselves. We are totally in love with the pleasures of the place. It truly is Tamaki-Makau-Rau, the place of numerous lovers."

But while Aucklanders like playing, they're also players. This is the city with the most head offices and the most stock-exchange registered companies. It's the main entry point for overseas capital, and with the port and airport has the country's two biggest ports (in terms of export and import value).

It has always been a professional city - look at the university for a glimpse of its priorities: law, engineering, medicine, business - with an entrepreneurial way about it.

Ireland believes Auckland, then and now, has a sense of freedom missing in the rest of New Zealand. It's been less bound to state, religion, the rural backbone, free to do its own thing. With ocean on either flank, it's horizons are far and wide.

"You can't ignore the water," says Auckland Regional Council chairman Phil Warren, born and bred in Kingsland. He's right. Aucklanders like living on the edge in more ways than one.

"That's the one thing Aucklanders across the region love," says this man who has spent many years taking the public's pulse. "If you attempt to tamper with their parks or beaches they will come down on you like a tonne of bricks."

(Conversely, it's traffic they hate most).

Everyone interviewed spoke of the sea. Auckland's not the city of sails for nothing. It whispers that commitment to freedom and openness.

Warren says despite Auckland's northerly geography, it's the point of New Zealand furthest from mother England. It has by far the biggest Polynesian and Asian populations and it appeals to those keen to try something new.

"I think they like the excitement here. If you want a quiet life you'd go and live in Timaru."

Considering the other main centres - Dunedin and Christchurch with their respective Scottish and English church ties and Wellington with its New Zealand Company foundation - it does suggest Auckland would have appealed to the free spirits, perhaps the bounders and rogues. They set the tone.

Look at what the father of Auckland, Logan Campbell, wrote in 1840, within months of the city being founded by Governor Hobson: "The whole and entire objective of everyone here is making money, the big fishes eating the little ones."

Typical, non-Aucklanders north and south will say, heads shaking. So they have always said, says Stone.

"Christchurch and Dunedin thought they had a better class of settler because of their church endorsement."

And Wellingtonians were grumpy with Auckland from the beginning, he explains. First, Hobson chose Auckland as the initial capital when those in Wellington thought their settlement the obvious choice. Then he put the boot in by advertising there for skilled settlers to move to Auckland, stealing those who had sailed out on New Zealand Company ships from right under the company's nose.

Over 160 years the rivalry hasn't abated.

"There has always been the feeling that Auckland was somehow shady."

The tension isn't unique to New Zealand, he adds. In Australia there's hostility towards Sydney, in Canada towards Toronto, in the US towards New York.

"There is always suspicion of the big city; that somehow because of their urban environment they're losing the values of the country and the support of community."

But, he says, the Tamaki isthmus has always been a meeting place, even for iwi, before colonisation. It's a natural node, a melting pot.

Others criticise Aucklanders for being arrogant, Stone says. "They're not arrogant. They're crueller than that. They don't worry about the rest. They're forgetful of it. I think this is the source of much of the resentment."

Gil Hanly has seen this as she travels the country taking photographs. "South Islanders in particular have a chip on their shoulder about Auckland. Aucklanders shrug and just get on."

She moved here with her husband, artist Pat Hanly, 30 years ago. "One of the things we liked was that people leave you alone to get on with your life. You are very free to be yourself, you're not necessarily categorised."

But with this freedom comes Aucklanders' much derided lack of loyalty.

"There's not a common sense of civic purpose," Ireland says. "Aucklanders tend to do their own thing."

Stone ponders this in the foreword to his book. Perhaps, he writes, the city's "inhabitants lack a sense of belonging and just do not care. It has been said - and though I know of no statistical proof of this, intuitively I feel it could be close to the mark - that as many as 40 per cent of those [adults] living in Auckland were born elsewhere ... Consequently, the emotional roots of many who live there seem to be embedded in other places."

In person Stone adds that even after 55 years in Auckland, his Central Otago-born wife knows more about that region than this.

So why do they come here? Caughey was probably close when he said, "Family, friends and opportunity". For opportunity, read jobs.

Parekowhai feels he couldn't "get away with what I do" anywhere else. "It's a place I couldn't do without," he says, but in almost the next breath adds, "It's a necessary evil, it's like money."

The answer to "Where do you come from?" will depend on who's asking him. He has lived in Auckland 27 years, but was born in Wellington and has his Maori roots in Gisborne. Gisborne is his turangawaewae, his place to stand. "I don't feel like that about Auckland."

Without wanting to be touchy-feely, he says many Maori feel a similar displacement, their roots far from where they live.

If Stone's figure of 40 per cent is anywhere near right, they're not alone. Ireland calls Auckland a city of refugees. This disconnection may be a mark of the city. The 77-year-old historian recalls as a child going to an Auckland-Wellington rugby match with his dad.

"After a while Wellington started to tear this Auckland team to pieces and the Aucklanders were just applauding the Wellington side. I said to dad, 'What are they applauding the other team for?' He said, 'They're just bloody Aucklanders. They're all the same'. This very lack of loyalty to their own city is regarded as a count against them."

Warren laughs and confesses. "We are very good supporters when we're winning. Aucklanders love winners. They direct their interests to whoever's winning."

Stone says many Aucklanders don't feel a sense of belonging to their city because they don't know its stories. The last general history of the city was written in 1922.

Cesare Beccaria, an 18th-century Italian reformer, claimed: happy is a city without a history. "But it's wrong," says Stone. "There should be a sense of identity."

Ireland sees it differently. "Aucklanders aren't burdened by a sense of history. It's a plus. My point about Auckland being the repository for refugees from its days of foundation in 1840 is that Aucklanders came here to get away from something. And I think it's the sense of civic commitment."

No civic commitment, he muses, also means no civic grievance and no parochialism. "I think that's grown-up. Overall, I think it's a good thing." Ireland goes south once a year "to restore my sense of belonging. But it's a relief to get away again and return to Auckland's indulgences and pleasures."

As time passes, however, we may be doomed to care. Young Daryl Collins is proud to call himself an Aucklander.

A cousin of Wellington-based All Black Jerry Collins, Collins is a Hurricanes fan. But if they play the Blues, he says, "I'll always cheer louder for Auckland."

Born in an ambulance outside National Women's Hospital, he says he feels much closer to the city than his Samoan-born parents.

Maybe things have changed since Stone's childhood. It sure has in one way - the city's multiculturalism. Before the Second World War fewer than 2000 Maori lived here and the Pacific Island numbers were even smaller. Now, it's one of the features that most distinguishes it from anywhere south. The Maori renaissance and immigration of Islanders have revolutionised the city in the past 30 years - nearly everyone would agree for the better. And their influence will grow.

But, Collins also points out, there are distinct suburban divisions within the city.

True. Whether you call it diverse and cosmopolitan or splintered and heartless, Auckland is different. Different from the rest of the country, yes, but also different within itself.

Tizard, Warren and Hanly all describe Auckland as a series of villages. Hanly did a project once photographing council-funded community houses in different suburbs. In Devonport they held keep-fit classes and a kids' programme, in Remuera activities for older folk, while in southern suburbs there was more for young families and vege co-ops.

"Everybody's very petitioned up here."

Caughey agrees many Aucklanders only know the city through their small part of it. He says the heart of Auckland isn't defined in one place. "There are so many hearts of Auckland."

Stone: "There's a formlessness to it. Christchurch has an epicentre in the square. But Auckland's all over the place. There are distinct cultures. There's a distinct culture on the North Shore and some of the most ardent anti-Aucklandism is to be found there."

Auckland - a magnet town itself - lacks a magnetic centre. And like the city, it's hard to find its inhabitants' shared core.

"A typical Aucklander?," mulls Stone, "I doubt there is such a thing."

Harvey insists there's no such thing as Aucklandness. He jokes, rather pointedly, about the west as "a struggle country", while North Shore people "have worn well. They've never done any physical labour.

"And I never get into Auckland. Have they finished the Sky Tower yet?"

He gets more serious. "We have split into different cultures ... I think that [sense of Aucklandness] was lost in the 60s with the building of the malls and the creation of the sub-regional centres."

Those internal divisions aren't limited to where we live; they're also a matter of how we live. Auckland City Missioner Diane Robertson feels like an Aucklander after only six years here.

"Auckland's a fantastic city with huge potential ... but for the people we work with, I think they find it's often a difficult place to live. They feel isolated and often rejected.

"We have families with kids who have never been across the harbour bridge or to the beach. If you don't have a car, you're on a low income or benefit and are in one of the outer suburbs where you can get cut off from all the city has to offer."

She has found, despite the "big, mean city" stereotype, that Aucklanders are overwhelmingly generous. "That says to me that we do have a sense of belonging and a sense of care for people."

Perhaps we're a bit like the quilt that artist Zac Waipara has drawn to illustrate this article - separate, but stitched together by geography. Perhaps all we have in common is our diversity.

Still, Stone makes a good point to end on. "Something that has to be taken into account is that people like living in Auckland. They might not feel loyal to it or think of themselves as part of an urban community, but they'd be most reluctant to live elsewhere."

* What does being an Aucklander mean to you? Send your thoughts in 300 words or less to: Aucklanders, Weekend Life, New Zealand Herald, PO Box 3290, Auckland.

We'll print the best and give away five copies of From Tamaki-Makau-Rau to Auckland.