Built to Sway

21 February 2009 – “Wellington, full of steep and newly formed hills held together by grass, gorse bushes and stunted ngaio trees … shares with its better-known counterpart San Francisco an engaging characteristic: it’s a wooden city,” writes The Sydney Morning Herald’s Hamish McDonald, who revisits his adolescence. “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.” To see the wooden foundations of New Zealand society, McDonald takes a short walk around Thorndon, visiting the all-timber 1876 government office building, “disguised cunningly in faux stone” and Old St Paul’s Anglican Church, “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.”