Quote:But aren’t ambiguous feelings the reality of maturity? I hope this chapter has explained the complexity of feelings I hold for a place I simultaneously hate and love. The curve of the pohutukawa as they defy gravity and lean down the cliff, the marvellously ornate veins clinging to the clay banks, the faint track through the fallen pohutukawa leaves of the old paths around the cliff edges, the somnolence of a drip falling inside the changing rooms, the raw squeak of the swings as the wind moves them about in autumn or winter, the prairie plain of Point Chevalier Road by night, when everyone is asleep and I’m still driving around the suburb looking for something lost or mislaid — all of these are veins of my personality that still pump, resoundingly, blood.
But of course there are problems trying to speak out in your own home town. My mother still lives in Auckland, though she resolutely changed her suburb when she was at long last able. (But even for her the Point remains a central reference: where we lived our family life perhaps. Our history lies there: the body of it, the pulverised bones.)
Trying to talk about your own family and personal history in this narrow context is difficult, even at times impossible. What can I say? The murmuring voices of the past say: be silent, let the pain be absolved in the great balm that is time. But time is also pressing. Although we lived ‘down the road’ from the biggest mental asylum in the country, we never for one moment considered that we had anything to do with insanity. We were sane: anyone who crossed that boundary and went in through the gates was insane. It was that stark and simple.
At times I feel like the Ancient Mariner who ‘yet must tell his tale’. Increasingly, I guess, gay men and women wish to distance themselves from the past and project an adamantine surface of sexiness and success. In this world, to look back is to risk turning, not to stone, but to the uncertain being we all once were — the unformed being, the person without the smart comeback, the one without an answer. But this is where we all started from. Most people do.
In the end, though, I think that while my story is individual, as anyone’s is, each moment of decision is a juncture in a route to an adult identity. My story is also part of a time, a place, a period. It is, in some senses, personal history, but the emphasis has to be on the second part of the equation: history.
 
As I said at the beginning, you tend to have two different viewpoints of where you grow up. My childhood view was so adhesively close to the Point and its many moods that I unthinkingly loved it. Maybe I had no choice — certainly I didn’t have much of a sense of comparison. Perhaps it’s a symptom of my advancing age that I more and more lull and return to that first view I had of the place: the Point. Is it an irony that the place I came from, the place I started out from, the place that defined me and formed me perhaps more than any other, was actually called the Point? This is what we true locals all called it anyway. Maybe in the end then this is what I learnt, what I got: I came to understand the Point.