In his novel, You Can't Go Home Again, writer Thomas Wolfe captured something the endless stream of samey stories about the rise and fall (and re-rise, and inevitable decline) of towns like Wellington have all failed to articulate (including my own).
Wolfe's tale is one of a resentful hometown and a protagonist grappling with the reality that places and people who helped mould you in childhood won't feel the same after the passing of time and your own personal growth.
Its title, and the response protagonist George Webber finds when he returns home after writing a somewhat damning appraisal of his hometown, perfectly sums up the realism that must follow any nostalgia for an era of a place - Your version of that era and place will not be everyone else's.
Places evolve, and sometimes they die a slow agonising death, as many former freezing works towns - your Patea's - are testament to.
Sometimes they thrive, but in a way that feels alien and hostile to locals, as Greytown shows in its pretentious, gentrified, Thorndon-lite current state.
In slightly bigger towns this can feel more meaningful, but it's not.
If you've left, your memory will be clouded by what was.
If you haven't, your memory will be poisoned by what was meant to be and what it isn't.
Nothing remains untouched by the passing of time, even clear green fields.
In this way, and while acknowledging that it is an inevitable feeling, nostalgia is a curse.
My Wellington is one very OF the 1990's: public sector resentment towards a National government, a growing but still relevant to locals film scene, bars and restaurants filled with people who both feared the future and felt it would break their way anyway.
Only one of these things remains unchanged since, and even that is largely down to nostalgia for a reality that never really was. We are all imperfect vessels of dodgy history.
You can see this version of Vivian and Cuba Streets in the video for Head Like a Hole's cover of ‘I'm on Fire’.
It was grubby, noticeably less high-end, but also open to possibilities. Like 1977 New York, only without the crime, or vice, or diversity, or character.
You can see how this town, a shabby but creatively rich one, could influence and house Peter Jackson, Taika Waititi, Jane Campion, Brett Mckenzie, and Jermaine Clement all at the same time.
The films, songs, and other art works of this time and place are all that remains of this Wellington.
That town will never be again, and our desperate attempts to recapture it have only made the likes of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh too rich. I'm not one to look in others' pockets, but it is clear that entitlement can rob one of creativity.
‘Wellywood' has transferred money out of the pockets of hospital, schools, and local artists.
Wellington is no longer in the business of telling Wellington stories - that golden era will not be replicated, largely because that era pulled the ladder up with them.
The only golden era filmmaker who stayed is a NIMBY determined to turn it into a museum dedicated to himself.
That's my histrionic take, but there's another one that reflects a more dispassionate reality like the one Wolfe showed towards his hometown.
Wellington was never special, just lucky.
The cold reality of Wellington is that it's a one industry town whose most talented and creative people, regardless of industry, will always either abandon it or get dragged down by it.
Towns like these get their homegrown talent until their early twenties (at the latest).
Then they are free agents, open for more prestigious or lucrative deals elsewhere.
That golden era of Wellington influenced filmmakers was a fluke.
In reality their success had nothing to do with the town itself, or the nation more widely, they are due to easier access to a variety of art forms and works.
They could be from anywhere, in their hearts they probably are from elsewhere.
Our memories of times and places may have soundtracks and landscapes, but it is the people (as they were then) which make somewhere matter.
Wellington - like Auckland, or Greytown, or Patea - will only ever be as magical as the people in it.
They will always evolve because the people will either grow or leave. Often both.
People seeking the Wellington of artists and opportunity will be disappointed in the same way people seeking the San Francisco of the Summer Of Love will be.
The passage of time is undefeated, to lament this, or to argue against it, is pissing in the wind.
None of us can ever go home again, but once we get over that dogged commitment to nostalgia we can find what George Webber found - An appreciation for what is, not what was or should have been.
My Wellington is dead. And my Wellingtonians (as well as the passing of time) have killed it. Yet its shadow still looms in bland commentary.
Every time I go back to central Wellington I'm struck by how few people I recognise, only now I see that as a good thing.
It's time for someone else's Wellington - a lot of the townies who left, myself included, were miserable pricks anyway.
“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to family who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” - Thomas Wolfe