A late night at Auckland’s Sky City
2nd October 2010

A small boy sits on the floor in the foyer of Auckland’s Sky City hotel. He wears a green back pack and carefully eats a banana. He is oblivious to both the tide of humanity flowing around him and to the leaping architecture that dwarfs his small frame.

Sky City is not just a hotel; it is shops, restaurants, a casino, convention centre, theatre and, of course, the iconic Sky Tower.

It is not so much a building as an enormous creature sprawled across downtown Auckland. Watching the small boy I see that he and I and all the many people flowing through this place are like hapless victims of a sci-fi experiment where we have been shrunk to microbes and released into the body of a large beast.

The vastness of the organism is beyond our comprehension so we experience it as a series of disconnected but intense episodes filled with light, colour and sound. We flow through its veins and tubes, swept along on a tide of conversation, laughter, food, drink and money.

Money is, above all else, the life force of this huge creature. It gushes from ranks of ATM machines and attaches momentarily to our wallets and hip pockets like oxygen molecules to red blood cells before vanishing into cash registers, bar tabs and room service. Most of the money ends up in the casino, an enormous heart that endlessly pumps huge volumes of cash through its many intricate transactions.

I leave the boy with his banana and drift towards the casino. As I near the entrance a beautiful young woman approaches me, wearing a dress with a short silver skirt and bodice so tight it could be sprayed on. “Will you be here at 7?” she asks. I could as easily turn back the tide as say no to this woman. I nod and she attaches a small yellow band to my wrist with the tenderness of a mother bandaging a child’s grazed knee. The wristband informs me that I could win $50,000.

The casino gaming floor is a circus of flashing lights, sudden bursts of music and a deep sense of urgency like a muscle cramp. It is a largely male environment and is overwhelmingly Asian. Croupiers stand at their gaming tables like priests, intoning their various litanies. There is roulette, black jack, baccarat and games that I can make no sense of, with oriental names like wai tai and sow mai.

I watch a solitary Chinese man playing roulette. The croupier, a young Asian woman, deftly stacks up piles of grey chips and slides them over to the man. He spreads them across the numbers embossed in the felt playing surface, half a dozen on this number, ten on another. The young woman flicks a white marble into the running track over the spinning roulette wheel as the man continues to place his chips.

As the marble slows she makes a spreading motion with both hands, a silent benediction that closes the bets. The marble drops, she places a small glass talisman on the winning number and sweeps the unlucky gambler’s chips into a round hole where they vanish with the smallest clatter. The Chinese man shows no reaction. She produces several more stacks of chips and slides them across the table to him.

All around the room, at every table and slot machine, I see the same curt efficiency and lack of emotion. This looks more like work than entertainment. Nobody laughs or even speaks much. Nobody appears to notice when a troupe of stunningly beautiful women parades through the room wearing feathered head pieces and not much else.

I lose myself in a maze of poker machines and emerge later onto a balcony overlooking the gaming floor. Above me the room vanishes towards a distant ceiling lit like a constellation. I recall Coleridge’s poem about Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. From where I stand Sky City is a pleasure dome and these are indeed caverns measureless to man.

Far below me the Chinese gambler sits at the roulette wheel, his grey chips flowing into the hole in the table. Does he know how that poem ends? In this great pleasure dome does he “suck the milk of paradise?”