KEY POINTS:
It's truly strange to visit a graveyard without any specific mourning or remembering to be done. Even kind of creepy. But one Sunday this summer, I want you to have a good wander around Waikumete Cemetery, New Zealand's largest.
Successive layers of tombstones, ornamental trees, Christian, Jewish and
Islamic denominations all represent so many little communities and broad families from across Auckland. It's a whole world.
On the top ridge you can see plots of Samoan and Tongan and other island groups who have festooned their sites with bright plastic flowers, some fenced with miniature pickets.
On flanking ridges are square mausoleums, mostly to the wealthy Dalmatian and Croatian families. A whole landscape devoted to requiring you to remember.
This great cemetery is like a model of the City of Waitakere, a series of great quarters, spiritual and cultural identities that fade or strengthen through time. There's nothing remotely ordered or regular about it. Perversely, it's alive.
This character to Waikumete Cemetery has taken form really only in the past 20 years. Twenty years is the course of memory that still rings bright in any one person's life.
Further back than that, we can only remember the highlights and tragedies - the births, deaths, the marriages and major fights.
It will take you a good few hours to do even half of Waikumete. When you're ready for a cup of tea, pop on over to Glen Eden.
Town centres are like little cemeteries to the fashions of building and landscaping. We can date each one in the blink of an eye, and in doing so we judge whether the place is going backward or having new life pushed into it.
To get to Glen Eden, walk up from the Soldiers' Memorial. On any Anzac Day you will find thousands of people eulogising something they have lost.
Perhaps they can't define it, but it's about what gives us a Kiwi identity. I really have no idea what that is, except I know what it isn't.
Glen Eden is never going to be Parramatta; no surf or brassy palaces, no quick-crete tropical ornamental ponds here.
Glen Eden is simply a tribute to the thousands who go to school there, catch the bus, go to league and bowls and the library and the train. You can't manufacture memory or identity. You can only respect and honour it, support it along.
Glen Eden used to have its own borough council. Memorials everywhere pay tribute to that. That little borough council took the whole place a certain way forward.
But then in the past 20 years it developed much more strongly. New waves of immigrants, new patterns of home ownership, new libraries and train stations, cafes and shops. Not obliterated as a memory - just built over like a Roman ruin. I've lived there for more than 30 years.
If we are lucky we get to return to where we went to school, our first house where we grew up with the other kids in the streets. But reminiscence is the best way to reflect in the New Year about what we really want to change about our lives.
Waikumete ridge gives you a view of much of Auckland. All those lines of suburban streets are tombstones to our families past.
Perhaps it is only at Christmas and New Year that we really remember what family is for. It's to annoy us with the message that we are not as independent as we want to be. We cannot obliterate our own landscape of identity because family is who we are.
So I have news for people who want to redraw Auckland again. There are 100 Glen Edens in Auckland.
We have all built them with our own hands, lived them for our whole lives. Their shapes carry our lives and our deaths in them.
Waitakere has been in existence for 20 years. Beyond the politics of representation, the constant calls for more motorways, grander civic palaces, or rearrangements of the same old bureaucrats is something far more important. You and me. Our families.
I wonder if we have lost the point of what structural reform is for. We did structural reform to the whole country in the 1990s, including to local government.
You can't bulldoze a cemetery of our previous lives. We need to take a lot more care. Pay a bit more respect to our parents and their neighbours who actually built this place with their hands.
We have to remember Waitakere before we lose it. My best dreams and lives rest there. I want us to take in the view, wander around the tombstones of those families who built this place, gave it that strange thing that pulls us all in, a sense of who we are.
Bob Harvey has been Mayor of Waitakere City since 1992.
