TRAVEL: The river city Wanganui

Grant Smithies finds a bright new outlook in his home town, the river city Wanganui.

Slow, brown, sleepy as a trout, the Whanganui River flows thorough my home town. I fell into it once, fishing for herrings for my cat, and was off school, sick, for two days. My cat wouldn't eat the herring I caught, either. People said the river flowed "upside down", with the muddy river bed on its surface, but as children we all knew the truth: it was chocka with the city's poos.

My favourite place to play as a child was on one of the river's bristly haunches: Kowhai Park. It was a dream made concrete, a huge lawn scattered with ferro-cement manifestations of fairytales and TV shows: Humpty Dumpty perched on his wall; Little Miss Muffet's spider with swings hanging from all eight legs; a pirate ship; a rocket angled toward the stars; a slide running down the back of Fred Flintstone's pet dinosaur. There was even a miniature Mt Taranaki, with tunnels you could crawl through, but dogs peed in there, so we left tunnels to the tourist kids.

Kowhai Park was a wonderland when I was a kid. Still is. I took my daughter there when she was two. Her eyes grew wide as a possum's in the headlights. She could barely put her feelings into words at the time, but she still talks about it now, more than a year later, at bedtime. "When are we going back to that park, Dad? In Wanganui?"

So we packed up and went. The timing was perfect. The Wanganui City Council was importing a planeload of journalists from around the country to write about how the city had changed in recent years. They wanted to dispel the notion that Wanganui was an economically depressed backwater populated with young kids and old people, a place from where everyone with any ambition buggered off for greener pastures when they were 17.

But I knew this was true. I left when I was 17. Couldn't wait to move to Wellington. Depressed by all the "Pensioner Rates Available" signs, I bailed out on my softly snoozing home town, only returning every couple of years to see my mum. But now I was going back for two days, to be wined, dined, greased up, pampered.

After dropping my daughter at my mum's, I would stay in the kind of flash hotel that never existed here when I was a kid. I would eat in restaurants where everything wasn't served with chips. Most importantly, I would bear witness to the influx of young professionals, the stylish new cafes, the new boardwalk along the river, the airport upgrade.

But unlike the other invited writers, I knew that most of these things were mere window dressing. I was born here. I knew this place like a dog's tongue knows its bum. Familiar ghosts haunted every street corner. I had my first kiss here, fell off a motorbike here, did shitty school holiday jobs here, lost my virginity here.

I learned some abiding lessons about cultural respect here, too. Wanganui has a big Maori population, but it has an even bigger population of conservative Pakeha. Like any city or town, the complex race relations issues of the adult world were also reflected in the interactions of kids in the street. When I was growing up here, many young Maori kids walked around looking permanently pissed off. If you were a cheeky Pakeha, you could easily get the bash outside the takeaway bar on a Friday night, so you rapidly learned not to be cheeky.

Like many other of life's lessons, I learned this at Kowhai Park. When I was about nine, I was down there a couple of days before Christmas. A young Maori boy about my age walked past toward the mini-train. "We wish you a Maori Christmas, and A Happy New Year" I sang in his direction. I had dreamed this up earlier in the day. I thought it was hilarious. He walked over and smacked me hard in the face, giving me my first blood nose. My stripey "Hang Ten" T-shirt got soaked with snot, blood and tears, and I almost passed out in a clump of riverside bamboo. Fair enough.

Wanganui still seems like a fairly divided city today. Maori and Pakeha dance politely around one another for the most part, but Maori anger over tribal land issues is readily apparent and it takes only the lubrication of a little alcohol to reveal the casual racist lurking within many a middle-aged Pakeha. But things seem to be changing. Old rednecks are dying off, taking their colonial bitterness to the grave, and a steady trickle of young people are moving here from bigger centres, bringing with them more progressive attitudes.

Wanganui is a city that's slowly edging forward, evolving from the kind of provincial backwater where your nana might live, to the kind of city you might consider living in yourself. The river is still brown, but now it's because of silt, not because everyone's dunnies are discharging directly into it. And those tell-tale "Pensioner Rates Available" signs are in the windows of a lot of new shops now. The place feels brighter, fresher, more energetic.

It's swarming with young kids, too, many of them roaring around without adult supervision like I used to when I was growing up. Walking around Kowhai Park with my daughter, she was amazed to see so many children and so few adults. She said a most extraordinary thing that suggested she thought local children were about to throw off the shackles of adult oppression and take over Wanganui: "One day, Dad, the kids are gonna run it."

Perhaps they will, but one thing is certain: for all the positive changes, the thing I love most about Wanganui has barely changed in 40 years. Kowhai Park: a wonderland of warm concrete and faded paint, site of my childhood fantasies and my first blood nose, on the banks of a river flowing upside down. It's still the best kids' park in the country, and now that she's been back there, my daughter has fallen in love with it all over again. She lies in bed at night and she says to me "When will we go back to that park again, Dad? That park in Wanganui."

FACT FILE

Coffee: In need of a liquid defibrillator? Jolt (19 Victoria Ave) makes the strongest cup of joe in the River City. Honorable mention also goes to the effortlessly bohemian Red Eye Cafe at 96 Guyton St.

Lunch: When I was a nipper, the grand old building at 26 Victoria Ave was a bank. Now it's a lovingly restored restaurant and bar called Element. The beef and red wine pie is worth the drive up from Wellington.

Art: A long-overdue upgrade was quashed by an unsympathetic council, much to the disgust of the local artistic community, but the Sarjeant Art Gallery on Queens Park hill remains the most beautiful art gallery in the country, with the kind of sharp curation normally found in major metropolitan galleries.

Craft: Wanganui has a thriving community of glass artists, painters, sculptors, carvers and more, but if you're pressed for time and have an eye for genuinely world-class objet d'art, go directly to 71 Bedford Ave, the studio of potter Ross Mitchell-Anyon.

Accommodation: The Tamara Backpackers' Lodge at 24 Somme Pde (ph 06 347-6300) offers superior accommodation to travellers on a tight budget and it's so close to the river that owner Rory Smith's two kids treat it as their backyard swimming pool all summer long.

- © Fairfax NZ News