True to form it was windy in Wellington, but it was also a breath of fresh air. The city was absolutely Absolutely positively.
It helped that the International Festival of the Arts was on. It did not go unnoticed that there was a top triathlon in the harbour and around Oriental Bay. After a day or so, the diverse and engaging public sculpture became just another vibrant part of the scenery.
And the waterfront boulevard, bustling with skateboarders, joggers, cyclists, walkers and lovers, radiated a contented nonchalance.
I am old enough to remember a different kind of Wellington. Windy Wellington, with none of the fringe benefits: bleak and grey and cold and drab, the harbour a berth for tall, unstable interisland ferries and not a lot else.
How the city has reinvented itself in 35 years, since we ventured brazenly into town, like outlaws, selling a rival university's capping magazines.
It is a city that exudes confidence, a can-do spirit; its denizens amble around its public spaces; they use its waterfront, its museums, its galleries, its theatres, its sports grounds, its cafes and bars.
All of these things engender a feeling of community and place. Wellington today has a relaxed self-assurance about it and an adventurous, inquiring sense of the possible.
I've never set much store by those city slogans beloved of branding agencies and marketing gurus and I'm not about to start now.
But if you're going to get into the invidious business of city comparison, they do carry a certain curiosity cachet - a bit like horoscopes.
I am Dunedin always struck me, a newbie just gone five years in residence, as a curiosity - in a good way. It was quirky and kind of original. It was a state of mind and it required ownership, but there was a ring of confidence about it. Absolutely positively . . . seemed positively fake by comparison. I'm not sure I'd see it that way now.
I am Dunedin seems to have sunk into a depressive torpor of indifference and negativity of late. I enjoy living in this city - but as much for what it has been and what it could be than for what it is right now.
It has as much if not more natural beauty in its physicality - the way its suburbs hug the hills, the horseshoe arms cradling the harbour, the long tawny foam-flecked curves of St Kilda and St Clair - than any other New Zealand city.
It has an illustrious history full of spirited pioneers, visionaries, entrepreneurs, architects, politicians and town planners. It has a rich artistic, musical and cultural heritage. Mention Otago and sport in the same breath and people begin to say, ‘‘Remember when . . .'' And of course it has long been a venue of academic excellence and high-spirited student antics.
But it sometimes seems as if the naysayers and doom merchants have got this city by the throat and are determined to choke the life out of it. Or at least get it to admit, under duress, that the glass is half empty rather than half full; or to convince its citizenry and their elected representatives that the only valid business of public office is the business of human waste disposal.
Where is the vision? The sense of community? Whose names will grace the public buildings of the future (if and when the city decides it can afford to build some)? What does it say about Dunedin's future that arts and culture get barely a mention in its draft visitor strategy? How can the city revitalise its proud sporting culture if there is no modern facility in which to set it?
What do we surmise about the pursuit of academic excellence from the observation that increasing numbers of students appear to live in slums and spend many of their degree days in a semi-alcoholic haze?
If the answer to these issues, and the public discussion surrounding them, is always it is too expensive or too hard or too controversial or too unpopular - if the expansive far-sighted attitudes upon which this place was built are to be finally snuffed out by the vociferous cheerleading of the disaffected, the inward-looking, the bitter and the self-absorbed, then we may as well take the spirit of a proud, forward-thinking city and bury it once and for all in the southern cemetery.
There, at least, it will be in good company.
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
