She has geckos behind her bread board, long-tailed bats and eels on her property and she drives an electric all-terrain vehicle. Is Celia Wade-Brown the perfect Green MP?
Celia Wade-Brown, the former mayor of Wellington and the Greens’ newest MP, is emphatically not a hippy. I had made the mistake of saying she looked like a hippy. I’d been looking at pictures of her when she was the mayor. She had a short, sensible hairdo which, heavens, may even have had a passing acquaintance with a bottle of dye, and sensible suits. She wore a smidgen of makeup. She was doing a good impersonation of a member of the Wellington establishment, albeit a Green one. Now, she wears her hair long and grey and sometimes a bit wild. Honestly, she looks like a different person. “Oh,” was all she said then. About 40 minutes later, she said, apropos of nothing, that she couldn’t be a hippy. She doesn’t wear dozens of clinking bracelets and what’s more, she’d brushed her hair nicely. So there. She’s not a hippy. What she is is funny. She has a talent for drollery.
At the end of our interview, she asked whether I’d found anything surprising about her. She’d have to wait to find out, I said, while thinking: How about almost everything? Including her sense of humour. I asked her age and she said, “The same as Gerry Brownlee.”
She arrived to pick me up at the gate to her 250ha property bordering the Tararua Ranges, an entrance signalled in advance by a chug, chug, chugging. She splashed across the river in Peggy, a bright-yellow electric all-terrain vehicle. Peggy is cute, but I look at her in trepidation. “Have you got your seatbelt on?” she says. This is not reassuring. She assured me she had off-road-driving training. Somehow, this was also less than reassuring. I had already travelled down the most terrifyingly narrow gravel road, which consisted mainly of blind corners and hairpin bends, just to get to the gate.
You’d have to be intrepid and adventurous to live the Wade-Brown lifestyle. She likes tramping and cycling and kayaking. In 2016, she and her husband, Alastair Nicholson, walked the 3000km Te Araroa trail in three stages. In total, they walked for five months. So what’s a few stomach-clenching bends and a bumpy Peggy ride? I think she’s part mountain goat.
She gives no warning that you are going to put your life in her hands before you get a cuppa. I’d imagined we’d have a country-side meander to the tiny house, across gentle meadows say, to the tunes of native birds and the trickle of gentle streams. Oh, ha ha. Across the river we went. Up, up, up we went. At times vertically. At times Peggy balked. We stalled. The driver was visibly enjoying herself. I was hanging on for what felt like dear life. On our return journey across the river, she “forgot” to warn me to put my feet up so that I wouldn’t get soaked. I got soaked. She got a good laugh. She has a wide streak of mischief. That might have come as a surprise. She didn’t say I was a wimp. But she might as well have. Serve me right for that hippy jibe.
I ask about what she thinks her public profile is, and although she says she doesn’t give it much thought, she thinks the one thing most people know about her – “the most famous thing, which is not the most important thing” – is that when she was mayor, she cycled to Wellington Airport to greet Hillary Clinton. Clinton didn’t know she’d done this because, no, the mayor didn’t turn up wearing Lycra. “If you really want to know, I had a pair of bike pants on under a very polite dress. Which did not stop everyone imaging that I had arrived hot and sweaty in Lycra to meet one of the more important women in the world.” She did, by the way, like Clinton. She is warm, she says, which doesn’t translate through TV. “But in person, you felt that you were the only person in the world that she wanted to talk to.” She will also drag out some of her Wellington clothes now that she’s an MP. I forgot to ask whether she’d be wearing her bike shorts underneath. She will wear make-up “sometimes”. She draws the line at high heels. You couldn’t hoon about in Peggy in high heels, though it would be good fun to see her try.
Easy to be green
She’s greener than a frog. Home is a cosy tiny house, off-grid, on what was formerly cow and sheep farmland in West Taratahi. About half the land is regenerating native bush. She and Alastair, who works in IT, have two sons whose private lives are just that, private. The couple spend their time here farming carbon and killing pests – with gusto. There is a picture of her on the RNZ website holding up two dead rats by their tails. She is grinning broadly.
She is not squeamish about much, you surmise. There are, much to her delight, geckos living behind her bread board. There are long-tailed bats on the property. There is a pond where the eels live. She feeds the dead vermin to them. She keeps an old bone-ladled butter knife on Peggy’s dashboard. It is for smearing peanut butter on the rat traps. Does she eat the eels? “No. I say hello.” She is, of course, mostly vegetarian, although she will eat a bit of fish, and pig and deer shot on the land. Waste not, want not.
She is frugal by nature and by nurture. She grew up in a Greater London Council flat in Paddington which was “one of those lovely Georgian terraces. It looked a lot more elegant outside than inside.” They shared the loos on the landings with other tenants. They never had a car or a telly or a fridge. When she was about eight, the family managed to buy a house in Berkshire.
What they did have, or more precisely what her father Paul Wade-Brown had, was secrets. Later in life, when she was mayor, she discovered she had a half-sister in Austria where her military major father was based after World War II. She had earlier learnt that the “adopted” daughter of her paternal grandmother was, in fact, her half-sister. Her father had two other children to two different women. I think. Blimey.
I suggested she might email a family tree because all of this was nigh-on impossible to unravel. “It’s quite difficult because my half-sister’s mother had four children by four different fathers.” It is amazingly complicated. Her half-brother Anthony, who was killed on a pedestrian crossing in Rome aged 44, had three other half-sisters. “So it’s not so much a family tree as a sort of … unpruned shrub.”
Paul Wade-Brown served in Egypt in the war. “It wouldn’t altogether surprise me if something turns up in the DNA that I’ve got another half-brother.”
After her mother Paula’s death, she found letters written to her father. Which is how she discovered her mother had had an abortion before they married. Paul was the father.
Her dad certainly had charm, she says. He was terribly handsome. “The other thing I’d say about my dad is that his father abandoned the family when he was 18 months old.” Which might account for a degree of abandonment: it runs in the family. Also, she says, these were different times – contraception was iffy, abortion was illegal, having a child out of wedlock a scandal.
Paul charmed the socks off her physiotherapist mother at first sight. They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary together.
After her mother died, Paul moved to New Zealand for the last five years of his life. “He had a new partner within a year. So, yes, you could say he was quite charming.” She has inherited his charm. Hers has a casual, unforced appeal.
What does she really feel about those secrets and lies? It would be natural, surely, to feel some degree of anger and betrayal.
She is generous about this. She acknowledges that one half-sister may well have some valid anger towards their father. She got the good father; the dutiful father: he taught her photography and chemistry and drove her and her tipsy teenage mates home from parties. She knows she got the “happy” times.
Paul, with one of his partners (I long ago lost track), was active in the Communist Party in London in, she thinks, the early 1950s. Which might account for her left-leaning genes. But, she says, her wider family was a mix of “sort of High Church Anglican Tories”, her communist father and “some of his cousins varied between Tories and Labour”. Her mother “wasn’t particularly political”. Another way of putting it might be to say that her early political upbringing was, like her family tree, an unpruned shrub, with unruly offshoots.
Nature calling
She began her career as a systems analyst but she has always been Green, really. She has “always felt part of nature, been distressed about the extinction of so many species and the loss of wilderness. Seeing poverty and homelessness makes me want to be part of the solution …” Oh, nicely done; she has just delivered a textbook Green Party answer – we can care for the environment and social justice issues.
Could she stand for co-leader now that James Shaw is quitting? That is a bit of mischief too far. She sent an email: “I’m proud of what James has achieved, especially the Zero Carbon Act. Green Party members will elect a co-leader in line with our commitment to democratic decision-making.” Tick. Tick. Tick.
Well, she is a Green. The general perception of the Greens – to wildly generalise, obviously – is that they are earnest, prone to being a bit lecturey, a bit judgey and not given to humour, at least publicly. Wade-Brown is none of those things and all of the opposite of those things. She says she always tries to find common ground with people.
It is hard to imagine she could find any common ground with NZ First leader Winston Peters, I suggest. She is uncharacteristically, if momentarily, stumped. She sighed and thought and eventually said, valiantly, “I’m looking forward to discovering it.”
If paradise is your idea of living in a tiny house on rugged terrain with reels and geckos and bats and birdsong and regenerating bush, why would you want to go back to the political world that is back-stabbing and sniping and insult-chucking? She can do sniping, she says. She tries not to. “You do breathe before you speak.” But no guarantees, she adds.
She is, of course, no “political virgin”. She was mayor of Wellington for six years. She was the boss. She will have to be mindful of not being bossy. Or mayoral? “Same thing!”
There was an almighty kerfuffle about the Island Bay cycleway she promoted. Cyclists, motorists, residents —just about everyone hated the thing. Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency released a report which heavily criticised the council’s handling of the cycleway. It was perilous, and consultation had been confused, at best. Wade-Brown later said it had been “a mistake”.
She was that rare beast: a two-term Wellington mayor but she found herself being booed at an Island Bay Festival. “A few boos at the height of debate … weren’t a surprise.”
How important is being liked to her? “As long as I’m loved by my family and close friends, I can cope with a bit of political dislike.”
I’d wager that she has a pretty tough political skin. She emailed: “As above.” Which I’ll take as a yes from the rhino’s mouth.
She has entered Parliament under peculiar circumstances, of course. At No 15 on the Green Party’s list, she was first in line after the resignation of Golriz Ghahraman over shoplifting allegations. “I would prefer to have surfed in on a Green wave in November, of course. But I’m there and I’ll do my best.” She won’t, obviously, say anything about Ghahraman beyond that she has been “in touch” with her and that she has “great sympathy for her”, which is exactly what you’d expect. She adds, “I will also want to uphold that concern for refugees and ethnic communities. I’ve been teaching refugees English.”
She might be a perennial do-gooder. That is even more outrageous than calling her a hippy. She can be crisp. “I have volunteered for a number of causes. But I’ve never seen myself as a do-gooder. It’s a horrible label.” She just likes doing different things, as befits her adventurous spirit, and if those things happen to help other people along their way, well, why not do them?
The most surprising thing about her? Maybe that she is not a hippy. But if the DNA test she has recently had done revealed that she is indeed part mountain goat, this would come as no surprise whatsoever.