All Roads Lead to Ponsonby

When I first lived in Ponsonby (in 1985), the community was just on the point of change. For decades it had been a haven for low-income tenants, students, and Pacific Island immigrants. Because of the availability of cheap accommodation and it's proximity to Carrington Hospital, the village also become a collecting ground for psychiatric patients.

All of these factors helped to form the vibrancy and cosmopolitan nature of Ponsonby. But already something had shifted. The oil shocks had made residential accommodation close to the central city desirable, and house prices began to rise.

There was an incoming tide consisting of trendy and well to do white people. They brought with them their culture and passions. It's not that the area became any less interesting or vibrant, but it became a much more difficult place for poorer people to survive.

The novelist Chaim Potok says that all fiction comes from the clash of cultures. It's that clash which generated the material for The Insatiable Moon as a novel, and also undergirds the film. Ponsonby is a crossrosads, a threshold, a creative cauldron. It is as much a myth as a reality. The setting is one of the lead characters in the film.