Life in Sarah Daniell\u2019s new urban neighbourhood is characterised by dust, noise and chaos, as disembodied voices deliver messages to no one, machinery grinds and hydraulics hiss. But, she writes, there\u2019s a weird kind of beauty to it, too.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m walking up Karangahape Road when Ed*, rail-thin, heavily inked, stops me. \u201cHey, see what I\u2019ve done,\u201d he says, pulling out two canvases. \u201cThis is my girlfriend, she\u2019s 70.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s awesome, I love the colours, I tell him. The other is more abstract, blue circles on white. He walks off, ecstatic, and I yell after him, \u201cHappy New Year.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAw fuck off,\u201d he replies, then, with a thumbs up, \u201cHave a good one, girl.\u201d<\/p>\n
He has theories, sometimes delivered poetically. One afternoon walking up Pitt Street I scuff the toes of my slides, nearly tripping. \u201cYou know what that means sista?\u201d he says with evangelical fervour. \u201cIt means you\u2019re kicking the demons off. Yeah!\u201d He swaggers down Pitt Street with a wild grin.<\/p>\n
This is my new neighbourhood. A lot\u2019s been going on.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have activated the alarm. Please evacuate the station.\u201d<\/p>\n
A fire alarm sounds. Disembodied voices delivering messages but no one\u2019s there. They are AI-calm and anodyne in the style of the \u201cothers\u201d in the dystopian series Pluribus. But these are real people delivering test messages in real time, says Auckland Transport.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m at No.7 cafe in Beresford Square, having a long black and watching the workers who are behind construction cages and forbidden to comment to an inquisitive observer. Everyone\u2019s on script. At No. 7 they\u2019re playing \u2018No Sudden Changes\u2019 by Billie Marten. \u201cI\u2019m the tugging at your sleeve \u2026 I am begging to believe.\u201d Same.<\/p>\n
First, the karanga in te reo, then English.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a six-carriage train.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTesting, testing one, two, three.\u201d<\/p>\n
Testing times. If Auckland public transport is a desert, the CRL is a mirage.<\/p>\n
The opening was scheduled for early 2025, just after I was set to move into an apartment across the road from one of the key entry points on Pitt Street. It\u2019s now tipped for the second half of 2026, which means it\u2019s probably the end of next year. Maybe. At least the platform announcements will be minted by then.<\/p>\n
Progress isn\u2019t a sprint. It\u2019s a marathon to a soundtrack of wheezing, grinding machinery, hissing hydraulics and discordant beeps of trucks in reverse.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it sounds like an army hauling hundreds of metal spades up a gravel road in an endless mission with no perceivable victory line. Sometimes there\u2019s a truce, a sweet brief moment of nothing, and you open the doors to see a gull catching a zephyr.<\/p>\n
The revamped Beresford Square outside the work-in-progress entrance to Karanga-a-Hape Station on Pitt Street (Photo: Auckland Council)<\/p>\n
It\u2019s early January 2025 when we arrive in this neighbourhood, but we have to wait to move into our new home, an apartment a few floors up in a building with a classic facade. For two weeks my 20-year-olds and I rent a furnished place for $1,000 a week. It has no working appliances, but it does have black mould on the curtains and stains on the furniture. It\u2019s a depressing entry to a new life and in those first few weeks I wonder wtf I\u2019ve done.<\/p>\n
One morning we wake to the sound of a computer monitor crashing on to the road outside our window, hurled from a floor above us. There\u2019s shouting, crying. Later that morning, a woman outside is gingerly gathering pieces of shattered metal and glass from the road. I want to ask if she\u2019s OK but she\u2019s turned in on herself, fortified by invisible but impenetrable barriers. Months later, I\u2019m heading out and she\u2019s standing outside the main doors of the apartment block having a smoke. \u201cOh, you look nice,\u201d she says. \u201cSo do you,\u201d I say. Sometimes life is a battle, dodging missiles not meant for flying. Sometimes it\u2019s a quiet smoke outside on a sunny day.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor your safety, always stand behind the yellow lines.\u201d<\/p>\n
Soon it will happen. Soon we will move up to the new home a few floors up, with views of the towering sky and the endlessly shapeshifting clouds; below, the restless city as it transitions from day to night.<\/p>\n
But, like the CRL, we\u2019re not there yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe next line leaving on Platform 2 is a Western line service to Waitemat\u0101. This is a two-carriage waka.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are much longer journeys. Hape (Tainui) travelled on the Tainui waka from Hawaiki to Aotearoa when his relatives denied him passage. After a karanga to his kaitiaki, a stingray, he journeyed with it to Aotearoa ahead of the waka. These days the karanga to all points of the compass comes from the CRL.<\/p>\n
Looking down to Pitt Street from the apartment at night (Photo: Sarah Daniell)<\/p>\n
We move into the new home in January 2025. The empty space takes on the shape of us, our plants, records, and boxes of books and photos. There\u2019s furniture that won\u2019t fit in the lift and has to be sold online. An outside table that requires six people to carry it up six flights of stairs.<\/p>\n
We get used to the sirens from the firetrucks and the ambulances. I try to be sanguine about the other noises, the machinery building the CRL and the surrounding roads. Soon, it\u2019ll happen, I repeat silently, like a lame mantra.<\/p>\n
Outside, all day and sometimes all night, kanga hammers batter and torture the tarseal to make way for the new, with fresh markings and kerbside gardens where native grasses and nikau palms will grow. I chat with the workers most days. They, dressed head-to-toe in protective layers, stand in the unforgiving elements, doing their thing for the thing that seems to have no end. One night when I can\u2019t sleep I film them road marking and the process is complex, artful, like crane choreography. There is a kind of weird beauty, if you choose to look at it this way and sometimes you have no choice but to, because the alternative is to go loco.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I get to know other neighbours out on the street, the shop owners, the people sleeping rough. Malosi, who often takes shelter under the awning of a nearby church, is tall, handsome, Samoan. Possibly in his 60s. Hard to tell exactly. We often talk and I often wonder but don\u2019t ask: what happened? I stop one day and ask how he\u2019s doing and he replies, \u201cEach day, Sarah, I try to be better.\u201d Aren\u2019t we all?<\/p>\n
His setup is immaculate. A mattress and bedding tidily arranged. A small table. One day I leave a pastry in a paper bag on that table because he\u2019s fast asleep. Later, when I\u2019m heading out I pass him and he\u2019s surrounded by a small group of friends, like a block party.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey Malosi, did you get the croissant?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWas that you?\u201d<\/p>\n
His friend cracks up then whispers, \u201cShe stood over you while you slept and stroked your head and said \u2018there, there, darling, sleep\u2019, and she sang you a lullaby.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are times I don\u2019t see him for days and I wonder if he\u2019s OK.<\/p>\n
Another view from the apartment (Photo: Sarah Daniell)<\/p>\n
My neighbours are friendly, tough, and struggling. They are tired, funny, and sometimes they are mad. They ask for money, they flirt. They wrestle silently and hurl injustices at the towering, godless sky. \u201cYou fucken don\u2019t understand,\u201d comes a cry from the street below. \u201cCan\u2019t argue with that,\u201d says a friend, leaning over the balcony.<\/p>\n
Niki* asks for spare change. She hasn\u2019t seen her kids in years, but she can call them any time. They live with their grandparents. Turns out we come from the same town, went to the same high school, but she\u2019s younger than me. She\u2019s got over her addiction, she says, from her seat on the ground outside the Auckland City Mission op shop.<\/p>\n
They sleep in a concrete cradle and walk among the dust and chaos every day.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlease mind the gap.\u201d<\/p>\n
The dust, noise and chaos never seems to move on. For months it takes hold and clings. Neighbourhood cafes, bars and shops cling too, at the edges of battle lines defined by orange cones, cranes and machinery. Signs and messages outside shops and cafe chalkboards are heavy on optimism, announcing \u201cwe are still open!\u201d, or, \u201ccome inside!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe next train to Maungawhau is leaving on Platform 2. This carriage is in service.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not, actually.<\/p>\n
The station buildings are magnificent, with detail and designs, says the CRL website, \u201cto reflect the identity of T\u0101maki Makaurau\u201d. Dappled paving across the square represents T\u0101ne Mahuta.<\/p>\n
An Edwardian public toilet that became a late 90s \u201csupper club\u201d where clubbers on benders would go on the munt in the early hours has been destroyed, its bacchanalian heritage pulverised into another identity, as part of the CRL forecourt.<\/p>\n
Some nights when it\u2019s impossible to sleep it\u2019s not always because the road works. It\u2019s a helicopter hovering right outside my bedroom window. It\u2019s 2am and I pull back the curtains and it\u2019s so surreal and so loud it feels as if my windows will shatter. I watch as a shadowy figure rappels from the hovering metal beast onto the roof of a neighbouring building. The Air Force NH90 doing \u201cexercises\u201d, says a neighbour in the lift the next day.<\/p>\n
Mokomokai performing outside the Pitt Street methodist church and Marlon Williams performing at Flying Out, also on Pitt Street (Photos: Sarah Daniell)<\/p>\n
Some days it\u2019s like heaven. On the pavement outside Flying Out records, musicians play to passersby sitting kerbside. The Green Dolphin bookshop has secondhand treasures. At the Lebanese Grocer, jars of pickles line the shelves, and they make labneh, garlic toum and kebabs. Buana Satu has been on K Rd for nearly 35 years. It\u2019s one of the oldest shops on the strip, along with Verona cafe and the recently closed Sri Penang. At Merge, there\u2019s food for street wh\u0101nau but anyone can show up.<\/p>\n
Living here means there\u2019s always noise of some kind, but there is always something happening, too. An urgency and a pulse. There are quiet moments, staring at the painted sky.<\/p>\n
\u201cMalosi\u201d means strength and power in Samoan. He\u2019s sitting outside the church, watching the world go by. It\u2019s a beautiful windless day.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah,\u201d he says, wistfully, looking skyward. \u201cIt is. I feel like I\u2019m back in Samoa.\u201d<\/p>\n
Testing, testing, cries the disembodied voice.<\/p>\n
*Some names have been changed to protect identities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Life in Sarah Daniell\u2019s new urban neighbourhood is characterised by dust, noise and chaos, as disembodied voices deliver…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[51,60597,48580,492,16148,156,32518,111031,111,139,69,2935],"class_list":["post-249368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-auckland","tag-auckland-cbd","tag-city-rail-link","tag-comments-enabled","tag-crl","tag-entertainment","tag-essay","tag-karangahape-road","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}