Wood pile ... houses rise above Oriental Bay.
The renewed charm of the 'wooden city' works upon Hamish McDonald, who revisits his adolescence.
You would wake uneasily as the house shuddered. Was it just one of the frequent southerly gales battering the place side-on? Or the start of one of the really big earthquakes that every generation or two devastates a city or town somewhere in the country?
New Zealand never quite provides the terra firma we're used to in Australia, the odd exception in Newcastle aside. It's geothermally active, riddled with fault lines and, especially around Wellington, full of steep and newly formed hills held together by grass, gorse bushes and stunted ngaio trees.
For that reason, the little capital city (with a central city population of about 184,000) shares with its better-known counterpart San Francisco an engaging characteristic: it's a wooden city, or at least the older, original parts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are. Wellington even has a cable car, though it runs on its own track rather than up the middle of streets.
The jolts in the night in our family house at Cashmere Avenue, Khandallah (fancifully named by a nostalgic India hand after a warmer and lush hill station in the Western Ghats near Mumbai), caused a mixture of alarm and reassurance. Except perhaps in a really big quake when the house was safe - built entirely of timber so it would flex and ride out the tremors.
Much has been written about the multiplicity of stylish restaurants, bars and small entertainment venues that have flourished in Wellington since it abandoned the wowserish ways of the 1960s. I endured these for most of my teenage years, care of my father's posting here with the Bank of New South Wales. This new-found style needs to be placed in context: wood.
To appreciate the timber-framed, weatherboard-clad look of Wellington, try to arrive in the teeth of a strong southerly when your aircraft will have to fly in low across the harbour. Then look right at the white weatherboard houses climbing up the slopes of Mount Victoria and Kelburn (behind the city offices).
Better still, arrive by the inter-island ferry from Picton in the spectacular Marlborough Sounds of the South Island (a three-hour journey, worth a day trip if the weather is calm) and see Wellington open up as the ship slides through the narrow entrance and turns into the inner harbour.
Install yourself in the heart of wooden Wellington. The mid-priced Kingsgate Hotel, for example, is not made of wood but faces the all-weatherboard Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club and its marina (with a lot of wooden yachts) and backs onto the side of Mount Victoria, which shelters the little city beach of Oriental Bay from the southerlies. It has tiers of fine Victorian timber mansions behind its row of small, weatherboard cafes.
The nearby Freyberg pool offers a chance to gaze at the city through large windows from its hot spa pools. A short walk in the opposite direction is the famous Te Papa Tongarewa, the waterfront national museum, which includes an "awesome forces" geothermal exhibition and a rather sobering earthquake simulator.
To see the wooden foundations of New Zealand society, a short walk around the old suburb of Thorndon is in order. Across from the masonry buildings of Parliament House and the attached "beehive" ministerial offices is the all-timber 1876 government office building, disguised cunningly in faux stone.
That's the state. Now for the church. Walk northwards into Mulgrave Street and on the right, surrounded by red-flowering pohutukawa trees, is the grey-painted wooden exterior of Old St Paul's Cathedral, a rather hunched version of English Gothic with a spire that's stunted to cope with the wind. It was started only about 15 years after the first European settlers came to Wellington in 1840 and consecrated in 1866, a year after the colony's capital was shifted from Auckland to its current, more-central location.
The Anglicans moved their cathedral to a ghastly modern object of masonry in the 1960s but the old building is preserved lovingly. Inside, it is a marvel of fine stained-glass windows and dark kauri, matai, totara and rimu timbers, hung with old battle ensigns including those of the US Marine Corps, who stayed in Wellington on the way to Guadalcanal in the Pacific War. A little round window, featuring a white dove on a pale-blue background, was a favourite of mine when the Sunday sermons lost my attention.
Continue down Mulgrave Street, turn right at the end and you find the literary beginnings. At 25 Tinakori Road is the Victorian house where writer Katherine Mansfield spent her early childhood from her birth in 1888. Open for visits every day except Monday, it's been refitted with period furnishings, wallpaper and fixtures as well as many of Mansfield's possessions. It's all wood too, even the period kitchen.
Another expedition into old timber architecture is by the cable car, which cranks up its wooden-trestled track from a small alley off Lambton Quay (the main business street), crosses the winding streets and terraces of Kelburn, passes by the campus of Victoria University (alas, brick and masonry) and ends near the botanic gardens at the top. You can ride it back down, or walk down the streets and steps between the fine old houses.
The now-trendy cafe precinct of Courtenay Place and Cuba Street brings back some mixed memories. A restaurant now occupies the old menswear store where my mother used to take my brother and I to be kitted out for the rugby games that always seemed to be held somewhere in the bleak hills.
People in black now chat over fusion food and pinot noir in haunts around the old Presbyterian church where our Scots College ranks were summoned for special sermons by the Reverend Kingsley Fairbairn, a man fond of pronouncing, "Scotland's greatest export was character!"
One day of our visit, we take the same route from Courtenay Place out to Seatoun our red school bus used to take. Not much has changed in 40 years, when boys in rain-soaked worsted short-pant suits and gaberdine raincoats kept up a raucous din all the way.
John Clarke would be up the back, working noisily on the prototypes of Fred Dagg and his other characters, while Peter Robb would be deep in the reading that would later be distilled into books like Midnight In Sicily and A DeathIn Brazil.
The old school was not and never had been made of wood, except for a World War I hut that had served as the gym. But further on we come to Scorching Bay, a strip of small beaches (where the water is actually freezing, rather than scorching) and a string of weatherboard and corrugated-iron homes and boathouses built ingeniously into the cliffs.
Across the road from the beach, with waiters dodging traffic to the outside tables in fine weather, is the Scorcharama cafe (formerly known as the Chocolate Fish), a haunt of Peter Jackson's production crew when they were working on The Lord Of The Rings trilogy at his nearby film studio in Miramar. The Scorcharama is also made of weatherboard, painted in pale shades of pastel.
Jackson's Weta Workshop is named after a repulsive-looking insect that lives in the rotten bits of native trees around Wellington. The woodwork of Wellington contains a surprising number of subversive, creative elements.
Qantas and Air New Zealand fly non-stop to Wellington for $198 from Sydney and $201 from Melbourne. Virgin Blue is $145 from Sydney and $155 from Melbourne, with an aircraft change at an intermediate city. You can fly into Wellington and back from, say, Christchurch. (Fares are one-way excluding tax.)
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