I was privileged to be invited to the recent re-dedication of the Kumutoto Stream soundscape installation, as it officially transitioned from a temporary exhibit to a permanent art installation for Wellington. The artist behind this unique-to-the-city work, Kedron Parker, graciously extended that invitation as way of acknowledging the alignment between her desire to uncover linkages to the city’s historic geography and my interest in place.
The event was well and enthusiastically attended with a noteworthy mix of participants from Māori mana whenua, city officials, artists and journalists and I’m sure 
a contingent of lunchtime passers-by, curious no doubt about this impromptu gathering at the top of Woodward Street.
All were supportive of the idea of this new style of public art for the city, a departure from the standard sculpture or mounted plaque, and the significance of Kedron’s contribution as a harbinger of things to come was duly noted. A key topic of discussion concerned proposed work to follow on from the original tunnel enhancements, which 
would extend to broader and increasingly relevant considerations of the local water cycle.
Since my last visit to this location, a waterscape feature (titled The Wet Index) has been installed behind glass in one of the historic buildings bordering Woodward Street, fueled by water collected from the Kumutoto headwaters. It provides the public a chance to see Kumutoto stream water in movement as they listen to its sounds emanating from the nearby pedestrian tunnel.
Representing one of the talks from members of the various groups in attendance, a representative from the Port Nicholson Block Settlement Trust spoke passionately about the significance of local streams like the Kumutoto to local iwi. She bemoaned what she described as the loss of this and other local waterways classified by the city as drainages, rather than streams, within the urban context.
Relegated to pipes beneath the pavement and buildings of the city, and serving purely utilitarian roles as conduits within an infrastructure stormwater system, they had suffered no less than a death in her estimation. For their invisibility within the built environment meant too a loss of direct engagement with their natural movement, the source of their lifeforce.
Listening to her speak on this topic put me in mind of similar ideas expressed by native peoples in North America. In the American desert southwest where I lived for a time, indigenous tribes also recognise the significance of natural movement, expressed most often within that arid environment in terms of wind. Moving wind as a source of life is acknowledged not only in terms of that which flows across the natural landscape but in all of its manifestations, including the breath of words and song.
It also highlighted for me the importance of this idea of movement amongst physicists, a group to which I previously belonged and representing surely one of the most adamantly indoctrinated to the principles of western/pākehā scientific thought. Classified as kinetic energy in this context, the power of movement is accorded a significant role within the precepts of fundamental physics.
In this light, Kedron’s work is more than just another piece of public art. It is in fact an important attempt to reconnect the Wellington public with this particular lifeforce, expressed through temporally distant but familiar sounds associated with the movement of Kumutoto Stream in its natural state. In doing so it is gifting to all who experience it the possibility at least of benefitting from it, as those who resided in or visited this area prior to the development of the Port Nicholson settlement once had.
This particular form of artistic expression, a soundscape, offering as it does a connection to a long absent lifeforce, provides as well yet another avenue to a meaningful sense of place. The rush of water and ancillary sounds of a riparian zone projected through the installation’s speakers effectively captures the place of Kumutoto Stream at this location. Standing within the confines of the pedestrian tunnel, putting aside any visual inputs for a moment, it is that auditory experience that generates meaning. And it is more than anything an emotional reaction.
In my discussions of place I’ve focused primarily on visual inputs, including in particular photography as a trigger for sense of place removed. But perhaps I’ve done so at the expense of those inputs from other senses. I have generally associated sensory triggers like sound and smell and touch with in situ place, as it is in these immediate contexts that they are most prevalent and potent. But the experience of this soundscape has opened up new possibilities for me in this regard. And more than that it has seemingly presented a powerful and highly accessible way to emotionally connect with place.
When I was an undergraduate student at university some twenty years ago, I enrolled in a basic music class as a way to satisfy required non-major elective credits for my degree. The word on the street was that the class was a particularly easy option with a good grade all but assured. The professor teaching that particular class was of an age and an inclination to have been actively involved in the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and was still considered something of an ex-hippy.
But he most definitely knew his subject and his relaxed teaching style resulted in an unexpected level of learning for all of us who had enrolled in that class. It was not uncommon for the lecture to veer off on tangents, once we learned he was easily distracted and prone to tell stories from his past. On one such occasion, we wound up talking about the idea of choosing what sense we would give up if required to do so. After a time it settled into a discussion of sight versus hearing. As expected almost all of those in the class were emphatic that they would never want to do without sight, so could sacrifice their hearing.
The professor was just as passionate in his opposing response – he would sacrifice sight over hearing without hesitation if required. Sight he argued provided plenty of information, it was true, and we had evolved to become very dependent upon it. But sound, he explained, gave life its emotion, its nuanced meaning. Without it life could be empty, a series of flat images, and that he couldn’t bear.
As I suspect was the case with most in the class, I wasn’t fully swayed at the time. But my experience in the intervening twenty-odd years has helped convince me otherwise. I more fully appreciate now the wisdom in that professor’s words.
At the re-dedication ceremony I was struck again by that truth. For it is the auditory experience, the sound of rushing water and birdsong that best captures and meaningfully re-presents a buried lifeforce of movement, of place as it once was here. And it has managed to do this for me, and for others, though we might have no direct personal connection with this particular location.
All of this serves to raise in my mind again this idea of in situ sense of place versus that associated with unknown or otherwise removed locations. For despite a natural and logical partiality towards the superiority of in situ place experience, those biases have again been effectively challenged.
It is hard afterall to deny that in the presence of those gentle sounds emanating from within the Kumutoto pedestrian tunnel, the stream that once ran here in a meaningful way is raised up and out of its buried pipes and into our direct consciousness of place.
place 