I was heading out to Seatoun today for lunch, and made the mistake of jumping a bus. Instead of getting to Seatoun, I ended up in state house hell in Strathmore. For those of you who don't know Wellington, don't feel bad. I had no idea there were places like that this side of Johnsonville either. Personally, I thought I'd lived in all the near-slums back in the day during my time as a student, but apparently not.
Part of the problem was the bus driver. This dickhead gave me the bum steer. When the bus stopped I'd asked from the street, 'does this bus go to Seatoun?', to which I received the answer, 'it goes near Seatoun'. More fool me. 'Near' Seatoun meant stepping out into Strathmore and walking down some streets I'd never seen before, finding my way through a suburb or two I'd never been in, and all in the freezing cold wind and occasional bit of rain.
I assume.
I parked my backside in another bus on its way back into the city and made a mental note to send that driver a series of evil thoughts. Near Seatoun my ass... Bad karma be on you, buddy...
Strathmore. What can I say except that let's hope these places go over to market rentals, because the locals will probably pay less than they already do. The place is up on a hill, exposed to the southerly wind, and mostly speckled with these mildewy old weatherboard places built waaaay too long ago. Nice views of Cook Strait but.
The state house I grew up in, and I mean actually grew up in, from the time I was eight till I left home, wasn't too bad. We lucked out and were pepper-potted into a suburb in Mount Maunganui with at least some non-welfare-bludging neighbours.
One thing to note is that Arataki these days is a heck of a lot more flash that it was back then. In the 70s the local pub was the kind of place a whitey like me didn't show his face, the local cop came round to Arataki primary one time and told us a delightful story about getting kicked in the head by the Mongrel Mob during a Friday night dust-up.
Excellent.
Still, the bottle-store there sold me a keg for my sixteenth birthday party, so they weren't all bad.
These days houses all over the Mount sell for heaps, but then, you had to drive half hour just to reach Tauranga, and the place was a quiet hamlet of 16k.
Anyhow, I digress (just for a change). Wasn't too bad a house really. It had this great stuff called 'insulation', where the heat stayed in the place, a free-standing range we used to fuel with off-cuts from the number of houses being built around us, and we never owned more than one dog, and never had more than one half-clapped out car in the yard at a time.
Although one summer we did have a couple of the guys from what became the Headless Chickens and their mates playing a gig on the front porch, on account of them all being mates with my uncle. Does that still make us white-trash?
The only real shit about being in a state house was the uncertainty. One of those things kids like is stability. As it was, whenever a decision was made by any of the governments in power during the nearly twenty years my family lived in our house, it always seemed to reverse our expectations about eventually buying the place.
More often than not, it seemed like we were just cattle to be eventually herded out of the property of someone else. All I can say about that is, at least it wasn't a private landowner, who could have put even less money into maintaining the housing stock, and might have been even less caring.
To be honest, the whole experience of helplessness is likely to have pushed me into studying politics, just to gain some kind of understanding of the distant place that had so much control over our day to day lives, in the form of an absolute say over our income and accommodation. Pays not to be the child of a widow I suppose.
And that's what I saw in Strathmore. The same kind of people dressed in odd combinations of second-hand and ware-whare clothing, run down, paint-flaking houses adorned small symbols of that need to escape, usually flash cars.
People of all kinds of backgrounds, all united only by their common disenfranchisement from the truly equal New Zealand we all keep hearing so much about. The kind of place where owning small objects of worth becomes so much more meaningful, because you know you'll never be in a position to make things, or people, disposable.
Yeah, she's a tricky one to understand, that poverty mentality. The way in which people cling to things they think grant them dignity?
Sometimes people in that kind of 'space' hold onto the crappiest, most unusual things because they remind them of a better time before they were forced to wade in the glue that is bone-crushing poverty. I've known people reverently hold up to the light things a wealthier person would have thrown away years ago, but to whom that object holds huge significance. A piece of furniture they actually made themselves. A found pair of sunglasses they get to pretend they bought.
Objects become the certainty it seems. Objects become the substitute for the lack of control you feel over your life, and you cling to them and the memories they evoke.
And that's what a state house all boils down to. It's a bit like living on borrowed time, so you garner smaller things that mark your passage in the world, and give it and you meaning, regardless of whether the roof over your head will disappear because you can no longer afford the rent.
A life only half-lived, I suppose.