Grafton Bridge

BY SALLY CONOR

Bridges are kind of like airplanes. We all use them with impunity and with as little thought possible about the delicate physics that keep them from dropping us out of the sky. We trust bridges to get us from one place to the next over impassable distances. And only the tiniest niggle at the back of our thoughts alerts us to the fact that we are REALLY HIGH UP.

Perched as we are on our craggy little isthmus, in Auckland we rely on bridges daily to carry us over waters or gullies or over ridiculously complex bits of motorway. Our largest bridge is possibly the most instantly recognisable symbol of our city, and its efficiency at squeezing ever-growing numbers of us backwards and forwards over its narrow back is a matter of constant hair-rending. Was any bridge ever so loved and loathed as the Auckland Harbour Bridge? I feel a bit sorry for it really. It has done so much for us and yet we dub it ‘the coathanger’ and berate it for not being bigger or more beautiful or for not being a tunnel.

Anyway, I am inclined to think of Auckland as the ‘city of bridges’. I bet a lot more of us use bridges than sailing boats, and I’ve always thought ‘the city of sails’ was a hopelessly elitist and misleading nickname. We aren’t a city of wankers in dinghys, we are a city of people in the shadow of a bridge. We are troll people.
I’m kidding. But there really are some very nice bridges in Auckland – I always get a lot of pleasure out of crossing the Hopetoun Bridge… it swoops so beautifully out from under Ponsonby and drops you down so gently in the central city. And those railings along the side mean you can see everything over the edge in a faintly flickering way like a reel of film.

The bridge I use the most by far is Grafton Bridge. I’m constantly traipsing across it between home and the city – it’s kind of like the passage between my public and private life. My state of mind always alters slightly as I cross it, between interior thoughts of food and laundry and sleeping, and more outward-looking ideas about food and work and where my next drink is coming from.
I’m kidding again. But it’s true – Grafton Bridge marks where I am, both geographically and psychologically. By the time it deposits me at Grafton shops, I feel like I am home. But when I step off it onto Symonds St I realise I am running ten minutes late for work or to meet someone. It snaps me out of myself and reminds me that I live in Auckland City and had better Buck Up My Ideas.

As a piece of architecture I find it rather lovely – a bit chunky yes, but the Perspex sidings lend it a certain shining, blade-like quality, as well as making it feel a bit like Kelly Tarlton’s, especially when it’s raining. A big freckly stingray could float past and I think most people would barely blink. These curved windows also have the effect of containing the bridge, of folding it over into an almost tunnel, so that you feel you are enveloped by it, and in turn, brought a little bit closer to the other people who happen to be traversing it at the same time. I almost feel part of a community when I cross Grafton Bridge. We’re all on it together, going about our business, for a few minutes all carefully NOT thinking about the equations that prevent us from plummeting to our deaths, all reading the traffic for a good time to cross, and all observing the complex footpath etiquette that allows fast walkers to pass and med students to be held up for as long as possible.

Occasionally, the bridge serves as a message board: once someone plastered slightly scary love notes on the pillars down one side. ‘Karin I Love You’… ‘I Want to Have Your Babies’… ‘I’ll Love You Forever’… etc. I always wondered how the recipient received this incredibly public declaration, because the next day, someone had tried to rip several of the notes down. Was it Karin? Or just some bitter old Scrooge who hates love? To whomever posted those notes: thanks for letting us bridge-dwellers into your private life for one brief day, it was very romantic of you, but in the future, maybe you should stick to text messages like the rest of us.

Probably the best thing about Grafton Bridge is the view out over the gully and the glittering ports, across the harbour to Devonport and into the Gulf. That most Auckland of views is always so comforting as we each trudge along our own little predestined threads of pavement to work or home or school. And it is these threads and passageways that form the pattern of our lives. Clip clop, clip clop. If we are the billy-goats, who is the troll under Grafton Bridge?

Probably John Banks. Or maybe Mark Ellis.



***