As news spread on Wellington’s leafy Miramar peninsula that the film-maker Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh had halted a controversial NZ$500m housing development by buying the land it was to be built on, residents of the seaside suburb were joyous.
“It’s fantastic,” says Miramar local Dan Stickley, as he leaves the supermarket. It matters that it was Jackson – whose sprawling moviemaking enclave powers the otherwise sleepy suburb – who bought the land, he adds.
