The very to of Mt Kau Kau, which, on a good day, will give you a 360 panoramic view of the city. As a young boy I climbed up here, often with friends, to escape the adults, who were trailing far behind after eating too much at the picnics we had on the lower lawns of Khandallah Reserve.
The hill’s original name Tarikākā means ‘where the parrots rested’ and is shared with the nearby settlement in Ngaio at the base of the mountain.
Before the clearing of the native Totara forest on the slopes and general area, the native parrot kaka was common through the city.
Over a hundred years later today, the population of kaka has begun to regenerate thanks mostly to the efforts at Zealandia, and are becoming a more regular sight throughout the city and in the rejuvenating native forest on the slopes of Mount Kau kau.
A taonga to the city and a playground for all. As kids, we would rush to see who could be ‘king of the mountain’.
Through the bush line, across the steep slopes of the farm that covered the top. With its tiny sheep trails zig-zagging across the hills, and always the inevitable ambush of fresh manure and sheep pellets, the journey had plenty of hazards to slow down the less intrepid. Even today, the farm is still in operation.
But once you’ve mounted the last sty and ambled up the final few metres to the look out, its all worth it for the million dollar view.
It stretches up beyond the winding Ara Kairangi, which snakes through the Hutt Valley, to Eastbourne, where Katherine Mansfield once holidayed at the bay, and up through the pinnacles of the Orongorongos, Barrett’s Reef, where the Wāhine once came aground, to the harbour entrance.
If you are lucky, you may see the Picton Ferry slipping in past the sleeping taniwha at the edge of Pencarrow lighthouse.
Look again over to the Wellington Airport at Kilbirnie, where airplanes swoop in and out, brining their cargo of tourists and homebound business warriors. Over the top of Mount Victoria, your eyes brushes past the student flats, the Victorian architecture the defiantly resists the developers wrecking ball. Below the city of business and politics calms the animals of commerce and power. Sleeping lions, ready to pounce. Their briefcases full of ideas bureaucratized until weak as an etherized patient.
Move again across the sweeping Newtown, to Brooklyn’s heights and the windmills, then across to the South Island, the Waka of Maui, emerging through the warm haze of cumulonimbus.
A constantly changing vista. And this is why is is my own, magical place.
freshthinking 