Auckland! It’s a pain in the neck – the traffic, the roadcones, Epsom. And yet there is no more beautiful city in New Zealand and my revelation in 2024 is that there is no more beautiful corner of it than in East Auckland. This is a traitorous thing
The 20 best things about Auckland life in 2024 – Steve Braunias
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The best of Auckland 2024: Orca, Polkinghorne, Smith & Caughey's Christmas window and Te Manaaki Christmas tree. Composite photo / NZME
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BEST MALL WITH A VIEW
Mānawa Bay Outlet Centre, 4 Jimmy Ward Crescent, Auckland Airport. Oh. My. Goodness. You turn left just before the airport, drive along a boring, mooing rural road for a bit, and then – BAM, an oasis of space-age retail in the desert in the long, long shape of the Mānawa Bay Outlet Centre. It opened with a hiss and a roar in September and has since been a bit of a fizzer. It looks great from the outside, weird on the inside. There are very few teenagers, hardly any parents, and an almost complete absence of an essential mall population – old people, who come to malls to sit around all day just for the company. But it has New Zealand’s only Lindt chocolate store, and a second ace in its pack is the view from the foodcourt. It looks out onto pines and gums, water, farmland. Mesmerising! And then – BAM, a big old jet airliner will come whizzing down low. I could sit around there all day just for the view.
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BEST FRAGILE ICON
Smith & Caughey, 253-261 Queen St, CBD. Shayne Currie’s exclusive Herald report breaking the news of the imminent closure of that cherished old queen of Queen St, Smith & Caughey, was one of the saddest and most shocking stories of Auckland life in 2024. It felt like a death in the family. Happily, a rescue package means at least the ground floor store will remain open in 2025; but right now Santa is upstairs on Level 6 for the last time, and the store’s famous Xmas window display might be its last, too. Go see it while you can. Three picture windows are dedicated to the set-design telling of the classic 1955 children’s book The Adventures of Hutu and Kawa by Avis Acres. God, it’s beautiful, especially the last window, where angels dangle from the heavens. It’s a happy ending but to gaze upon it is heartbreaking.
BEST USE OF PINK
The Warehouse Albany, 186 Don McKinnon Drive, Albany. Ten Warehouses throughout New Zealand were given a pink makeover in September as part of a promotion to celebrate the 65th birthday of Barbie. But only in Albany – verily, only in Auckland – was the outside of the store painted pink. It was garish. It was fun. It was capitalism having its cake and stuffing itself with it – it was the diet of Auckland.
BEST CAFE WITH BOOKS IN IT
Let’s Ketchup, 1 College Hill, Freeman’s Bay. An eccentricity runs like a volt all throughout this very charming cafe with picture windows that look out and up to the Sky Tower. It’s there in the punning name. It’s there in the complimentary chocolate fish they hand out with every cup of tea or coffee. It’s there in the creative displays of plastic flowers. And it’s there, best of all, in the decision to decorate the tables with books. I love sitting in there and tackling the opening chapters of Joseph Conrad’s A Heart of Darkness, trying to improve my life with Reinventing Your Life by Jeffrey E Young, and memorising great lines of poetry in the Penguin Anthology of New Zealand Verse. Plus it does a burger and a beer for $26.
BEST TOWER THAT WASN’T THE SKY TOWER
The Tower of Ōtara, Johnstones Rd, Ōtara. It was a three-storey shack made by Levi Falé in the backyard of his Kāinga Ora home. It had sheets of corrugated iron in it and a New Zealand flag and a bicycle and bits of wood banged together with a hope and a prayer. It got pulled down in June. It had to go. It was dangerous. But it was a work of savage, inspired art, and will be remembered by those who saw it for the rest of their lives; Auckland is the blander for it. It’s also safer.
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BEST LIZARD
Korowai gecko. Anna Yeoman tells the full story of the discovery of a new species of lizard in her fantastic new book Geckos & Skinks. What basically happened is that in Christmas 2012, 19-year-old Nick Harker, a permitted lizard keeper, was given a sandy-coloured gecko found in the Woodhill Forest; he’d never seen anything quite like it, and it led to a five-year monitoring project for more of the species in Muriwai Regional Park, resulting in the discovery of a population estimated in the low thousands. Residents in the Muriwai township have set about a backyard trapping programme of predators to help the survival of this beautiful addition to Auckland wildlife.
BEST PLANT
Ricinus communis, or castor oil plant. Biodiversity thugs have banned the domestic growing of this spectacular purple-leafed monster but it holds on in the wild, most commonly seen beside railway tracks throughout the isthmus. Its flowers develop into capsules which split to eject large, oval, shiny, bean-like seeds with explosive force. The seeds are poisonous. Oh well don’t eat them then. Safe to at least gaze with wonder and awe upon these illegal Auckland aliens.
BEST COURT
Manukau District Court. Much of downtown Manukau has a space-age look to it, including the courthouse, a thing which looks like it has landed from outer space and is maintained by cleaning and security staff as the cleanest, safest, even actually happiest court in Auckland. The tuckshop is a bit small but there are lovely courtyards. It’s also the backyard of Crown law office Kayes Fletcher Walker, which prides itself on its diversity (solicitors include Aminiasi Kefu, Aysser Al-Janabi, Jong Kim and Tanya Fai’ai) and famously took a chance on hiring a complete nobody who stood out because he had worked as a racetrack commentator for Trackside. It worked out pretty good: Luke Radich was sworn in as a judge during a beautiful ceremony at Manukau court in November.
BEST TRIAL
Polky. There was never a murder trial like it before and surely we will not see its like again. It was tragic. It was sad. It was terribly exciting, an epic morality play that stretched over eight weeks at the High Court of Auckland, where a jury ultimately found Remuera ophthalmologist Dr Philip Polkinghorne not guilty of the murder of his wife Pauline Hanna. He was accused of staging her death as a suicide. His personal life – he developed expensive habits for sex workers and methamphetamine – was paraded in front of a spellbound public. The whole thing was so very, very Auckland. Someone should write a book about it.
BEST CONCERT
Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Bruce Mason Centre, Takapuna. Takapuna after dark! There’s not much of it. I suffered a sports bar on a weekday night before the 50th anniversary concert of a live performance by a crack team of English musicians of the Mike Oldfield prog-rock masterpiece, Tubular Bells. Much of the North Shore is a cultural wasteland but for two hours, the small and perfectly formed Bruce Mason Theatre was transformed into one of the world’s great premises of art. Tubular Bells remains an incredible work, a play of quietude and chaos, and the live performance of it was thrilling, giddy, moving. Afterwards some drunk guy on Hurstmere Rd wanted a fight. Good old Auckland!
BEST COMMUNITY GARDEN
Kelmarna Community Farm, Grey Lynn. It has the worst-sheared sheep I’ve seen in my life – they look like some lunatic went at them with a blunt axe – but my regular Saturday morning visits to the food produce shop are among the best times of my week. It’s an organic wonderland, a Woodstock of volunteers planting and digging and wheelbarrowing, in gardens with lots of flowers among the fields of beets, lettuces, beans, courgettes and other natural yums. You can get back to the land and set your soul free even in central Auckland.
BEST BAR FOR TEENAGERS
Duck Island, 182 Ponsonby Rd. My daughter (17) reports: “It’s a teenage bar.” One of the great Friday and Saturday night rituals for central Auckland teenagers – too young to go out and drink, too old to stay home – is a cheap and cheerful meal at the Ponsonby Food Court, followed by an ice-cream dessert down the road at good old Duck Island. The queues are where the action is: they can stand there for as long as an hour, such is the popularity, such is the scene. It’s a date night thing and also a mates night thing (a $15 Flight order serves eight scoops with wafers) but in essence it’s a yum thing.
BEST USE OF THE HARBOUR BRIDGE
The hīkoi. “It is unlikely to impress Middle New Zealand voters,” scolded Heather du Plessis-Allan, the voice of Middle New Zealand, as broadcast on Newstalk ZB. Oh, whatever. November 13 was a great day for Tāmaki Makaurau.
BEST CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVES
Auckland Transport. Everybody’s always hating on AT but I am forever phoning 09-3666-400, and pressing 2 for a customer services representative to find help for my trip – and every singe time, as in 100%, I get through to someone who is polite, efficient, fast, patient, good-hearted, open, there to offer various options, there to commiserate on late-running services, there to understand that the AT app is sometimes insane in the brain, and always, always there to provide a solution. “Thank you,” I always say, “thank you so much”.
BEST SALT CAVE
Salt City, 22 Jellicoe Rd, Panmure. Yes, a salt cave. I was mucking around the back end of the Panmure shops recently, around by the fabulously named Kung Fu BBQ and Hot Pot, when I noticed a little shop with salt lamps in it. I went in and Kumar said: “But have you seen this?” He walked across the room, and opened a door into the magical kingdom of a dimly lit salt cave – the walls and floor are made entirely of Himalayan salt, and it operates as a wellness therapy meditation sauna sort of thing. Kumar also sells an incredible selection of hanging plants in glass bottles for $25. Absolutely bizarre, absolutely Auckland.
BEST BAY TO SEE ORCA
Castor Bay. Castor Bay! Surely nothing ever happens in Castor Bay, that small, pretty strip of quite rough sand on the North Shore, where the tide mooches in and out slowly, sluggishly, slyly, and the sea is so flat and boring that surely nothing interesting lives in it – but in March, Justin Serville was paddling off Castor Bay beach at around 10am when two orca came to say hi. They swam around him for five minutes and he filmed the magical encounter on his Go Pro. “I just wanted to pat them like puppy dogs, they were so playful,” he said. “There was no reason not to be calm. They are intelligent animals and I am not on the food chain.”
BEST STORMWATER POND NATURE WALK
Tahuna Torea reserve, Glendowie. There are various entrances to this heaven. I chose the shadeless, crescent parking at 347 West Tamaki Rd, and proceeded to amble, to roam, to tread quietly in a tranquil universe. The paths are lined with ngaio and flax. Welcome swallows flit down low and eat on the wing. There are big fat fish gaping in the ponds. There is a dark pōhutukawa grove. It looks over the water to Bucklands Beach. It’s without noise, and, wonderfully, without litter. There are little 3.5km loop walks and longer treks over to Point England; whatever the distance, every second is a natural Auckland bliss.
BEST MAUNGA
Mt Wellington/Maungarei. I took a tramp up this smooth, grassy maunga on one of the hottest days of late summer and something like 30, 40 minutes later arrived at the top feeling just a little bit, you know, shattered, but it was well worth it. The view is stupendous. Good old Rangitoto Island is curled up like a cat. The Tāmaki Estuary winds hither and yon, filling up the dear old Panmure Basin, streaking the isthmus with blue. You can see for miles. You can see the beauty and charm of Auckland. You can also see Stonefields. Oh well!
BEST TREE-LINED STREET
Tamaki Drive. Everyone loves the plane tree avenues of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn, and one of Ellerslie’s best-kept secrets is the cherry blossom trees that line Marua Road, but peak Auckland are the ratas along the waterfront of Tamaki Drive. It’s a Tāmaki Makaurau classic and right now it’s a Xmas classic, a fireworks display of explosive reds set in deep green – Christmas colours in our little corner of the South Pacific.
BEST XMAS DECORATIONS
Te Komititanga Square, lower Queen St, CBD. So the giant 18m steel Xmas tree cost $1.24 million plus operating expenses, with Auckland Council contributing $800,000. So who are we if we can’t splurge out once in a while on something public and incredible? What kind of Grinches have we become if we can’t celebrate Christmas as reflected by over 10,000 LED lights, 4000 pōhutukawa flowers, and more than 200 giant baubles? Where else in New Zealand would go these to lengths, put on a show of this grandeur, consider it a sacred duty to advertise itself in all its gaudy, shining, happy beauty? Only Auckland, only dear old gorgeous Auckland, city of two harbours and 1.7 million people, every one of us actually really thrilled to live here.
