cambria

Mt Cambria
(Published in JAAM 1996)

Devonport peninsula. Mt Victoria is on the left, North Head on the right. Cambria, from this angle, was just to the rear of Victoria. Behind the peninsula is Rangitoto Island.

Curled about the harbour, just across from Auckland's Central Business District, Devonport Peninsula juts out from the North Shore. There, the houses are still decorated in the colonial trellising and the nights are punctuated by the deep groans of ocean liners and cargo hulls that navigate about the peninsula and the volcano to approach the deep-water dock. Life on the peninsula seems particularly isolated, despite its proximity to the central city, due to the fact that there is only one road linking the township to the shore, Lake Rd, which sets the drive to the city at around twenty minutes. A regular ferry service provides a more direct route.
Behind Devonport rests Rangitoto (which is Maori for 'sky blood'), the youngest and largest of Auckland's many volcanoes. Legend has it that the Maori were witness to its eruption, and it is said that footprints may be discerned in the solidified ash on neighbouring islands.
Devonport itself has undergone a tremendous reshaping in the last century as a consequence of the native Maori population and the colonial European settlers. It was originally a tidal island, as at high tide the waters would meet at the neck, thus cutting Devonport off from the mainland suburb of Takapuna. To facilitate the construction of Lake Rd and the urban settlements, early landscapers built up the interior of the peninsular shores.
The tip of the peninsula has also been altered. There were originally three volcanic cones at the extremes of the land mass, called Mt Victoria, Mt Cambria, and North Head, respectively. Cambria herself was levelled early in colonial history for its rich scoria deposits, scoria being ruddy lava rock, riddled with old bubble holes from its molten history, sharp and brittle.
North Head, noted for its strategic position at the lip of the central Auckland harbour, was developed with military facilities during the World Wars. The tip of North Head has been closed off to the general public until quite recently, although the old gunner's tunnels have been open for a good many years and have been the source of many urban legends and myths. Fears of an invasion were fortunately proved precautionary. The guns, rusting in their fixtures, were never fired at men.

As if I had been in a fever. I am walking on Narrowneck Beach. The saline air is moist and thin, and the sea bubbles and foams like rock. Across on the volcano, pohutukawa trees clutch at the igneous rocks.

Once a tidal island, now a peninsula. They wrapped rock about the narrow neck, slicing the sea. The grieved tides advance and no longer meet.

A bloodless calm. An extinct chill. I carve sleep in the sand. I dream:

From this promontory
At the salt-thick sea
We crawl on the sea-cold stones.

The city is venous. In each pulse, a hot fluid of people. Each tower breathes in.

On a side street, a church inhales its congregation. The stones are basalt blocks quarried from Rangitoto. I step inside. There is no view of the ocean.

We crawled on the black, sharp stones
Not understanding, not seeing
The colour of the city’s blood.

The candles are lava-hot. The red wine is crimson scoria.

The city is vulcanous. Beneath each squat grassy mount lies thick black coagulate rock.

The throat-cut harbour. There, at the tip of the peninsula, Cambria once bled her unwholesome salty air in malarial fever.

The pahoehoe lava curdled with the sea and clotted fast to thicken a thin-necked peninsula. Cambria, drawn off, fell into an extinct chill.

Sharp stone shock and sea
Cut crust; ooze
Of magma cooled to sharp.

I’m tired and watch the sea from the window of the bus. The sanguine sun on the plasma yellow sea.

A bloodless muttering old woman sits next to me. Her salty blooded breath.

The bus turns and passes Narrowneck Beach. Children crawl on stones. She remembers unexpectedly:

Crawling on those rocks when small
Not understanding, not seeing
The vastness of this ocean.

I step off the bus and walk across the Neck. Beneath me, thick black coagulate rock.

As if in a fever they placed guns about the head of the peninsula, in fear, in expectation of an invasion which would never come. To protect the city.

A uniformed old man still guarded the harbour from his vantage point on Rangitoto, years after the war. In 1950 he was finally convinced by the navy that there was no risk of attack.

The guns stayed their sanguinary urge to burst men. They rust extinct now on North Head.

The volcano is blood-thick. Its crust is a rubble of black basalt blocks, bubble-hot sharp. Pohutukawa trees bloom scoria-red. They breathe in saline air.

The island is sacred. Walking on a black-ash beach, I watched the volcano bleed into the sky.

The red wine rain. Rangitoto. And black sharp rock. The venous sea.

On Motutapu he
Ash paced
Crawled across the scar.

Cambria’s gone, quarried away for scoria. Her sisters remain, cool and grass-covered. A soft crust of moist soil combed over the lava.

A bloodless old couple wander about grassy Mt Cambria reserve. Far beneath them, cautery and scoria.

Myself a wan figure at the end of the peninsula. In the sea, a sick sickle-celled anaemic moon. I dream of the old woman:

I lay pale with blood-blacked back
On the sharp basalt rocks. She
Clutched my Neck, lifting,
Placed me on the cold, grassy mount, and said sleep.

Michael Arnold