(First published in The Dominion Post, November 17.)
I’ve been copping a bit of
stick lately. Not because of anything I’ve said or done, or even how I look,
but because of where I live.
Last month’s announcement
that Masterton had been declared New Zealand’s Most Beautiful City was the cue
for much chortling and guffawing at my expense.
I’ve lived contentedly in
Masterton for nearly 15 years, but I concede it’s not a town that immediately
springs to mind when you start thinking about beautiful places.
I received an email about the
award from a friend in Nelson, a city so lovely that its residents can’t help
but feel smug. In the subject line he simply wrote “Oh, please!”. There was a
world of incredulity and ridicule in those two words.
Even locally, the decision
was regarded with surprise and scepticism. “You have to be bloody joking,” one
heretical Masterton resident wrote on the Wairarapa
News website. Another wondered whether all the other cities in New Zealand
had been blown up - proving at least that Masterton people have a self-deprecating sense of humour, along with their many other virtues.
In the same awards, Greytown,
just down the road, was declared New Zealand’s most beautiful small town. Now
there was an award that people understood and agreed with.
Greytown is pretty and charming.
It has become Wellington’s favourite weekend bolt-hole. If you’re from Kelburn or
Wadestown, you’re just as likely to see your next-door neighbour in Greytown’s
Main Street on a Saturday as you are at your corner dairy. Locals grizzle that
they can’t find a car park because of all the out-of-town Porsches and Range-Rovers
clogging the street.
But to me (and I hope I don’t
offend my Greytown friends by saying this), Greytown is a bit Midsomer, if you
get my drift. I don’t mean they keep killing each other there by gruesomely
inventive means, as in the TV series, but it’s all rather fashionably homogeneous.
Masterton, on the other hand,
is a Decile 1-10 town. Every socio-economic stratum is represented here, from
wealthy old Wairarapa farming dynasties to multi-generational welfare-dependent families
living in P houses with dead Ford Falcons on the front lawn.
It remains a no-nonsense
provincial farming town. Drive in from the south and you run a gauntlet of
agricultural equipment dealers, which clearly signals what drives the local
economy. On weekends the sound of chainsaws can be deafening.
People think there’s a lot of
crime here, but that’s largely a residual reputation from a past era. In any
case, I no longer cringe when I see a headline about a drive-by shooting or a
senseless act of vandalism in M-town.
In fact I now take a kind of
perverse pride in such incidents, celebrating them as evidence of a community
that represents humanity in all its rich and wondrous diversity. There’s more
to life in Masterton than being able to find the perfect soy latte.
But back to that award. Part
of the reason it occasioned such disbelief was that the phrase “Most Beautiful
City” is a misnomer. For a start, Masterton’s technically not a city. You need
50,000 people for that, and we’re barely halfway there.
More to the point, the
organisers weren’t using that word “beautiful” in the conventional sense. No
one could claim that Masterton is richly endowed with scenic wonders, although
it certainly makes the most of the assets it has. Even my Nelson friend admits
to a fondness for Queen Elizabeth Park, where you can imagine the thwack of
leather on willow even when there’s not a cricketer in sight.
This is the sort of thing the
judges were getting at. They praised the town for its environmental and
heritage conservation efforts, and for the strength of its “community
engagement”.
I know what they mean, even
if the sneerers don’t. It’s a place where people pitch in when there’s
something that needs doing.
Trouble is, word seems to be
getting out. Last year, Masterton’s population grew faster than any other place
in the Greater Wellington region, other than the capital itself.
It’s certainly not one of those
provincial zombie towns that you read about. Visitor numbers keep increasing, new housing consents are double
what they were in 2016 and local builders are going gangbusters.
Most of the new arrivals are
from Wellington and Auckland. Whatever Masterton’s got, they seem to like
it.
But the town is changing to
meet their requirements. There are now bars where you don’t have to drink Tui and we're about to get a classy boutique
cinema. Traffic keeps building up and next thing you know, people will be
demanding traffic lights.
1 comment:
Drive into Christchurch all you see is cars. cars, cars,
In the 1950's half the population rode bicycles and we had but half the population of today.
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