The long road from Wellington to Taupo, on the north island of New Zealand, passes through a succession of fantastic landscapes: the wild coast from Porirua to Paekakariki, the eerie Rangipo Desert north of Waiouru, the sharp peaks of Tongariro National Park. The day my mother and I set out on this drive from Wellington begins sunny and warm, but so windy that in the small, seemingly empty town of Foxton—the last stop before State Highway 1 leaves the coast and curves inland—we have to abandon our attempt to eat lunch outside and retreat to the safety of the car. By the time we climb out to stretch our legs, somewhere between Mangaweka and Turangi, large black storm clouds have gathered, though directly above us the sun is still out. This is what gives the light in this photograph its peculiar quality.
In many ways, New Zealand occupies that territory which exists between reality and fiction—a territory where what is seen and what is imagined can so often change places—and the images that enter and exit the frame of the car window do not disappoint in their scale, their colour or their strangeness. But besides the stunning scenery, there are the usual fixtures of the road—any road, anywhere—service stations, general stores, hotels. The Oasis Motel, as many of these fixtures do, floats on the border of the road—the mirage of some outpost of civilisation. Its brightly painted façade, with its bold LA sensibility, its palms and promise of greenness, is entirely incongruous with the actual setting: a series of monotonously low brick buildings, fronting onto a drab, grey parking lot. The only sound or movement within or without comes from the monstrous trucks flying up and down the highway nearby, always on their way from somewhere else to somewhere else.
Like many chance encounters on the road, this is the impression of a moment—in a few minutes we are back inside the car, map on dashboard, travelling north. In a few weeks I am back in Australia, looking through pictures from the fourteen rolls of film I’d shot while away; experiencing that strange sense of dislocation you feel after you have left an unfamiliar place that has become familiar, and returned to one that is now strange in its familiarity. It has been almost a year since this trip, and a Google search for ‘Oasis Motel, North Island, New Zealand’ only throws up results that don’t accord with how I remember the day, or the route I think we’d taken. Somehow this seems fitting: the Oasis Motel of this photograph, in all its irreducible incongruity, occupies less a real location than the territory between reality and fiction, on the borders of a road that passes, imperfectly, through memory—and in doing so escapes both word and image.
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