If you’ve travelled through the Moa Point tunnel, you’ve passed some scattered structures by the side of the road.
Maybe you’ve walked among them.
From ground-level you’re looking at shapes and shadows.
Climb on top of these structures and a pattern emerges like a staggered Stonehenge.
Pilots landing at Wellington Airport see something that you don’t.
The next time you’re flying in or out of Wellington over the Cook Strait, look down towards the Moa Point side of the runway. Don’t blink or you’ll miss the shape of a giant concrete koru.
What are these structures? How did they get there? What does it all mean? What’s the significance?
Well- nothing, according to the guys who did it.
I did some sleuthing and tracked down Vaughan Clark, General Manager of Titan Cranes.
Titan Cranes have helped maintain the southern seawall at Wellington International Airport for over 30 years.
The huge concrete blocks that make up the koru are called akmons. Akmons protect land from the sea where water breaks hard, like at the southern end of the Wellington Airport runway.
Spare akmons are stored nearby for when they’re needed. The Wellington Airport akmons used to be stored where Spruce Goose Cafe is now. Things got creative when Titan Cranes moved the akmons to their current site.
“From what we collectively remember around here, we moved the akmons around 2005 after the Moa Point Tunnel was completed”, Vaughan told me.
“Not sure who came up with the idea, but since then we have just carried on with it.”
The koru arrangement of the akmons seems very accurate and neat. Vaughan says it is done by eye. No fancy GPS.
The fist visual record of the koru appears in Google satellite imagery in 2009. It has changed shapes and configurations ever since.
Apart from walking through the koru formation, the southern end of the airport is a cool place for taking photos and watching the planes come in.
Do you know any other Wellington mysteries which need solving? Let me know in the comments below.