STAR OF GLORY – SHE’LL BE RIGHT

Haruhiko Sameshima

Wayne Wilson’s Three Kings invites the viewer to a nocturnal stroll, a dream-like journey home through the suburb after a long night of excess.  The familiar Auckland streets take on a theatrical luminosity setting the scene for an unveiling drama. 
Wilson is no stranger to the insomniac’s meander – his last major project was on Auckland’s burgeoning dance culture in which the focus of his camera was the carnality of claustrophobic physical presence in city nightclubs.*
Three Kings, on first viewing, seems to sit at the opposite end of the spectrum. The only presence of people here is an implied one in the empty night scenes of human habitat.  The jazzy colours of the dance floor lighting accentuated by filters on hand-held flash – which he so aptly employed for the dance culture images – were here replaced with digital pixels.  Their improved reciprocity characteristics ­– an ability to render all light, however dim, in correct proportions – capture every bit of available light in the camera’s optical path. Moon light, sodium vapour streetlights and household tungsten/fluorescent all come into play, creating a mise-en-scene akin to a movie set accentuated with lighting that is laden with coloured filters.  

It seems a meditation on suburbia; an after-hours visit to the familiar rendered iconic in the best tradition of exploratory street photography, exemplified in this country by Robin Morrison and visually quoted here by Wilson. The cultural artefact and constructed environment act as the visual signifier of civilization: the post-box, the architectural styles, the washing lines, the fence, the garden sculptures.   So, what kind of place has Wilson found here, in his nightly stroll? 

A quick trip to the friendly and popular Mt Roskill library, situated next to the Three Kings quarry, revealed some fascinating bits of local history. The region was covered with a complex series of volcanic cones created in an eruption about 20,000 years ago. It must have been a spectacular volcanic landscape.  Geologist Ernest Searle described the geological formation of the place­­ in his book City of Volcanoes,  “It seems almost as if this volcano was determined to build up within its small compass a complete collection of various volcanic structures with everything scaled down to miniature proportions. Scoria cones, tuff cones and craters; explosion pits, horse shoe rings and breached craters; dykes and flows, tuff, scoria and lapilli beds – all are represented in this fascinating cluster.”**
There was a succession of occupying Maori tribes who applied various names to the locale. The extensive earthworks and kumara pits attest to the large population the area sustained.  In the18th Century, Te Tatua a Riukiuta- the girdle or belt of Riukiuta, named probably for the tuff belt that encircled the complex, was inhabited by Ngai Riukiuta under Chief Wharoa and his three sons who each had a paa in one of the cones. The sites were vacated about 1790, when the three brothers were killed fighting Ngati-Whatua at Titirangi.***  The European name, Three Kings, has its origin in 1841 when the surveyor Felton Mathew first came across the area. He was so impressed by the beauty of the site that he recorded his wonder by naming the cones after a representation of homage – The Kings, an image that echoes repetitively through Renaissance art in the form of the Adoration of the Magi.****

The centuries of effort to transform the terrain to accommodate human habitation was followed by a century of industrialised change under the spell of modernity. Hunger for raw materials for roading and transport stripped all but one of the scoria cones, thus radically transforming the landscape. The only reminders of the former volcanic splendour are in the remaining cone Big King – with its ironic ‘crown’, the water reservoir on its summit – and the adjoining negative space of the man-made quarry.  Three Kings and adjacent Sandringham and Mt Roskill are part of the belt of housing that encircles central Auckland.  Here, in the golden age of the welfare state and the houses for all policies of Labour governments, were built clusters of state houses on full 1/4acre sections bordered with wide footpaths and generous street dimensions. Real-estate agents today will tell you these are the next gold mines of up and coming desirable suburbs only ten minutes from the centre of the city and that they are fast becoming out of reach for many first homebuyers.  There are pockets of high-density development already seeping through, and planned for, these tranquil suburbs.

Wilson’s vision however, carefully sidesteps these intrusions and seeks out the vernacular. Here there is little sense of the weariness that can be felt in much recent New Zealand art on suburbia – the behind the state house wall violence in Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, Peter Black’s witty yet brooding photographic depictions of suburban vernacular or Ava Seymour’s tortured cut out characters that inhabit the state houses – are nowhere to be seen.   As Wilson says in his accompanying statement, “The suburb of Three Kings, which I knew very little about, began to quietly work its magic on me. It depicts a quieter Auckland where tall fences don’t exist, great grassy lawns reign, bach-like architecture is prolific and an older sense of place is tucked away.”  When the whole city seems to be obsessed with time and movement rather than place and permanence, it is reassuring to find such vernacular intact. But unlike the funereal rites that characterise another spectrum of photographic practice that presupposes the imminent extinction of the subjects - some works of Les Cleveland and Laurence Aberhart or the Upper Cuba Street project in Wellington by Hugh Best come to mind - Wilson is optimistic. His suburb thrives with living traces of generations of dwellers, where new families are being raised, kids will jump over those fences to play with the neighbours in the morning and Mum can still walk to the local dairy – except that it is now a supermarket.  The Kiwi dream of growing up in egalitarian arcadia, which previous generations came to expect, is fondly reminisced. The Big King stands in as the backdrop, embodying its namesake under the spectacular moonlight and crisp stars.

Wilson goes on, “Three Kings is a contemporary expression of New Zealand’s on going interest in the peculiarities of its own burgeoning landscape, exemplified by the gentle but penetrating vision of Robin Morrison.”    Wilson’s version of Three Kings echoes the naming of the place by that European surveyor 160 odd years ago – who expressed his delight at encountering the site by honouring it with images from art history, by quoting one of the most celebrated photographers whose images firmly established the look of the vernacular of settler culture.  But here the surveyor’s reverence for the religious connotation of the Three Kings is perhaps closer to the dialect of Fred Dagg’s popularised song: 

Wilson’s new “older sense of place” eloquently captures the contemporary sentiment that yearns for our peculiarities, and which is exasperated by the shifting political beliefs and economic realities that continue to radically transform our surroundings.