Mahurangi magazine
Dedicated to climate-action mobilisation, curiosity, democracy, and the Mahurangi
stv bicentennial extraordinary town-hall talk
Ideally, the bicentennial of stv should be held where the Birmingham Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement held the world’s first election with it. But even if that ultimate location was the epicentre of a global celebration, two other, antipodean, countries…
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Crude reminder of royally half-cocked commission
First-past-the-post, 200 years after the first single transferable vote election, deserves to be a very distant memory. But, thanks to the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance stvsingle-transferable-vote-ignoramuses, the region is about to elect its fourth mayor with the…
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Bay where no ships has been 60 years with no name
It was almost certainly a good thing, that 60 years ago the name of the Auckland region’s first European settlement slid unnoticed into the next bay north. Had the bay been known by a descriptive name, such as Spar Station Cove, or by any name…
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hmss Buffalo arrives at Mr Browne’s establishment
His putative youngest brother was Charles Dickens’ friend and illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne, aka Phiz. Putative, because Hablot was in fact the nephew of the founder of the Auckland region’s first European settlement, Gordon Davis Browne…
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Fourth Thursdays 3rd time lucky after 20 June
The clash wasn’t discovered until after 20 June was locked in for the Mahurangi Coastal Trail Taking Shapely town-hall talk. Having cheerfully ceded their second-Wednesdays slot to bpw Warkworth, the town-hall talks have found…
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Mahurangi Coastal Trail taking shapely
Most of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail is already in use, and has been for decades. This, thanks to the entire coastline from Waiwera to the Mahurangi Harbour becoming regional park between 1965 and 1973. Within that time, built by park staff…
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ipcc-understates-threat understatement
Bulletins proclaiming that the ipcc 1.5° report understates climate threat are literally understatements of epochal proportions. Self-reinforcing climate feedbacks already irreversibly underway signal civilization’s ever-growing greenhouse gas…
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On the unspeakable ephemerality of beaches
Relying on economics to salvage a survivable climate is the 21st century equivalent of a standing down an army and leaving defence of the realm to wizardry. With the United States Senate summarily scuttling the Green New Deal, it might seem…
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Ceding second-Wednesdays for fourth-Thursdays
As of midnight last Monday, dredging the town basin and river downstream became the most urgent Mahurangi project. Up until that deadline, feedback on the structure plan that will shape development of Mahurangi’s tidehead town for…
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Strikingly unfit for fossil-fuel-free future
Anthropogenic climate disruption is not just another issue. It is the issue that will bedevil generation after generation for at least hundreds of years. Just how hard and how fast global warming will impact cannot be accurately quantified, given that…
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Seriously steeling the green network backbone
Whether the green network proposed in the Draft Warkworth Structure Plan is fit-for-purpose for this week’s climate-striking school students, for their next 30 years, must be the question. And given that streets, once surveyed, tend to endure, the…
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Seriously serial structure plan submission
There is much to applaud and support in Warkworth’s draft structure plan. Submissions are invited, as is statutorily required, prior to the final stages, labelled “Changes to Structure Plan and Adoption” or, as the text explains, “Following consultation…
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Warkworth watermills millraces and weirs
A more apposite topic for the next town-hall talk could scarcely be conceived. The fact that such a topic has already been conceived, is another story, hopefully for the following Warkworth Town Hall Talk. On Wednesday 13 March, the historian…
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Mahurangi Regatta 2019 gallery
Just the beginnings of another mostly Bergquist beauteous gallery of Mahurangi Regatta images. Principal regatta photographer since 2006, Lyn Bergquist’s art positively pervades the Mahurangi Cruising Club Yearbook, looking at 20…
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Valiant and virtuous volunteer regatta crew
Virtually ahead of every regatta, the need for volunteers is ventilated. But to avoid repeating this year’s last-minute scrabble to make up an apparent shortfall, several measures are being planned. The first is to augment the ‘This Saturday’s Mahurangi Regatta needs volunteers…
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Mahurangi Regatta 2019 results
Results are ordered alphabetically by division, then by handicap place within each division. However, for those desiring an overall picture of the day’s racing, a combined-fleet list ordered by elapsed time is appended below the division placings…
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Mahurangi Regatta 2019 lost and found
Given that more than a thousand people attended the prize giving and dance, that almost all the evenings detritus found its way into the dozen wheelie bins provided by Mahurangi Regatta principal sponsor Teak Construction is testament…
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Livestreaming the prize giving and dance
For many, the Mahurangi Regatta beats Christmas. But not all of those devotees can attend every regatta prize giving and dance. Until tonight. Thanks to the wonderful people who did the Warkworth Town Hall proud doing Mahurangi Action the…
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A little light for Saturday in the park
Light breezes are again the prospect for the Mahurangi Regatta. Nice for the picnickers, and dancers in the evening, but not what most of the sailors crave. Unfortunately, what is also a little light, so far, is the response of Mahurangi West…
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Super Masonic solution to blank riverbank wall
Mahurangi Magazine has stuck its neck out by soliciting support for its suggested solution to the ugly butt of the Old Masonic Hall. The timing was poor. Six days before Christmas meant that most folk missed the email and, as of this morning, only…
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2020 Mahurangi Regatta programme
Programme for the 2019 Mahurangi Regatta was unique in that it included the first Up the Mahu! parade to Warkworth. Tides prevented a repeat in 2020, and indeed will only really favourable twice between now and the end of the decade…
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‘Up the Mahu!’ day-after-the-regatta flotilla
There could only be one flagship for the ‘Up the Mahu!’ day-after-the-regatta demonstration. The Jane Gifford scow, aside from being the face of the Mahurangi Regatta since 2010, following her heroic restoration, epitomises the necessity of…
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Time for town hall to take it to city hall
Warkworth Town Hall, inescapably, is where the community should assemble to make decisions for itself. Not the Auckland Town Hall, with its region-wide responsibilities for a city of 1.7 million. In a slightly less imperfect world, Mahurangi…
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Drop-in drops solution to Old Masonic derriere dilemma
Its arse-end is one of Warkworth’s worst features, despite robust heritage architecture being about striving to keep public buildings relevant to their communities. Nothing about the blank back wall of the Old Masonic Hall commends it to be considered…
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Whitebait deserve layer too Pūhoi – Te Arai
When a Warkworth Town Hall Talk catalysed the Mahurangi-based green-lipped mussel reef restoration research project, it triggered a veritable chain reaction. The immediate impact was to shock the community into taking…
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Millrace to the rescue of whitebait and weir
Millennia before human habitation, the natural sandstone weir at the Mahurangi River tidehead would have formed a formidable barrier to īnanga in their imperative to migrate from the sea to freshwater reaches. Then, over about the last 6000 years, towards…
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Arising from ashes of the Phoenix
Better connecting its tidehead town to its river has been a Mahurangi Action goal, since the organisation was formed 44 years and a fortnight ago. Understandably, for a forward-looking town, Warkworth was built with its back to the river that represented…
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Phase 3 of action plan to connect the dots
Billed as a district and regional council initiative—in reality, all the running had been made by the Auckland Regional Council—the goal of Mahurangi Action Plan, launched in 2004, was to kickstart the fencing and planting of riparian margins, and…
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Warkworth Town Hall Talks are all action
Wednesday night’s wonderful, wonderfully well-attended town-hall talk wasn’t supposed to happen and wouldn’t have, had Auckland Council not hired Adrian and Alex Hayward to promote the use of the Warkworth Town Hall. The same day Adrian…
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Near-certainty of 66-metre sea-level rise
Permanent ice sheets are a misnomer. Ages involving alternating glacial and interglacial periods are ephemeral, occupying only a small percentage of geological time. Humankind’s greatest—although certainly not in any laudatory…
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Mahurangi mussels in to save the planet
Green-lipped-mussel-reef establishment might seem an unlikely choice for a climate-change tour-de-force by the organisation that revived the Mahurangi Regatta 42 years ago this summer. But Mahurangi Action believes that the beauty of the…
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Support Mahurangi mussel action
These six quick check-the-box questions will help Mahurangi Action plan the five-year green-lipped mussel reef restoration research project. With your even modest support, by greatly leveraging other funding sources this Mahurangi-based…
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Mahurangi Action 44th annual report
Global Warming of 1.5°C will forever define 2018, the year that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally published a report that refrained from kicking the climate-action can ever-further down the road. Since that report, as is the…
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