Campaign finance reform
Without which bought-and-paid-for government swamps democracy
Casey’s empire
After these three abortive starts, the honour of establishing the first lasting steam service to the Mahurangi fell to the paddle steamer Lady Bowen. Her owner was the Irish entrepreneur, Jeremiah Casey, born in Cork in 1820, son of a farmer. Around 1845 he married…
Steam comes to the Mahurangi
Henry Pulham in 1889 recalled the beginnings of steamboat service to the Mahurangi. He said the cutter Francis was the only means of getting to town, although for some weeks in 1855 the steamer Wonga Wonga ran here. Some settlers were persuaded…
Steam comes to the Waitematā
In the wider world, the great age of steam was well under way, a product of the inventive spirit of British engineering. As railways crisscrossed Britain in the 1830s, the first steamships were being built, and were destined to have a profound impact on global navigation. The first…
About-face for future Warkworth
Old Warkworth turned its back on the Mahurangi River. Although an egregious act of disrespect, Warkworth settlers were forward-looking Victorians, wedded to smart coaches and fast trains. The river had utility, but steamboats were a yesterday’s…
Te Muri officially splendidly private-light-vehicle-free forever
If they understood the momentousness of their decision, there was no outward indication. On Tuesday morning, Auckland Council, without discussion, voted to adopt the recommendations of the independent commissioners on Te Muri. Given that between its purchase…
Mahurangi Regatta 2017 results
Friday Night-Race to Mahurangi A Division Line honours Thelma 1st Katrina II 2nd Prize 3rd Thelma 4th Jenanne B Division Line honours Aramoana 1st Aramoana 2nd Jonquil 3rd Corona 4th Frances 5th Kotuku 6th Tango 7th Tucana A Modern Line honours Psyche 1st Psyche 2nd Marionette 3rd Pavo…
Mahurangi Regatta 2017 gallery
Mahurangi Regatta supportersAuckland Council Browns Bay Boating Club Bucklands Beach Yacht Club Citywide Electrical Classic Yacht Association Devonport Yacht Club Friends of Regional Parks Gulf Harbour Yacht Club ICIB Insurance Brokers Mahurangi Cruising Club—host...
Mahurangi Regatta 2016 gallery
Mahurangi Regatta supportersAuckland Council Browns Bay Boating Club Bucklands Beach Yacht Club Citywide Electrical Classic Yacht Association Devonport Yacht Club Friends of Regional Parks Gulf Harbour Yacht Club ICIB Insurance Brokers Mahurangi Cruising Club—host...
Small buoys create Sullivans Bay fairway
It may take a year or two to take. The aim is to provide a fairway to allow craft to race or parade past the beach, so as to provide shoreside spectators with a—spectacle. At this year’s Mahurangi Regatta, as well as the four-decade-long practice of buoying…
Regatta revival looks at forty
This month’s Mahurangi Regatta marks the 40th anniversary of the venerable event’s revival. Founded as Friends of the Mahurangi three years earlier, Mahurangi Action revived the regatta in 1977—the event had lapsed during World War II. Planned as a one-off, the...
Sixth of the best to keep them honest
The sixth point of the Chartist’s six-point plan is sublimely simple. To counter parliamentary corruption and bought elections, simply hold far more frequent elections, so that, with the many times more voters called for in the first point: ‘…no purse could…
Four-year term terminal for turnout long-term
The need for Aotearoa to have a codified constitution is self-evident. Despite that, the initiative of constitutional lawyer Dr Andrew Butler and former prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, launched in August, has failed to fire up a nation-wide discussion in the mainstream…
Loyal opposition reaches oblivious conclusion
It was a stroke of unintended brilliance, which has blighted democracy ever since. When John Cam Hobhouse coined the term loyal opposition, in jest, he could’ve had no inkling he would help dignify 190 years of two-party parliaments, where…
Riverpath puts Warkworth in league of its own
If measured in leagues, it’d be fewer than 1.3 of them. While it can take an eternity by road, particularly in holiday traffic, the six-kilometre path between Warkworth and Snells Beach, following the Mahurangi River, takes cyclists an average of about 25 minutes. Many…
If it’s democracy that’s broke, fix it
From Day One he’s wanted a better slogan than ‘the World’s most liveable city.’ For his trouble, and even before hearing what that slogan might be, Mayor Phil Goff is being rubbished and ridiculed for wanting to replace the city’s tragically generic branding, with…
Make Aotearoa egalitarian and great again
His timing is impeccable, and his mission merciful. Immediately mocked by the mainstream media, Gareth Morgan’s launch of a party dedicated to eliminating poverty and closing the inequality gap is a cause worthy of wholehearted support, even by…
Mahurangi Action 2015–2016 annual report
Since it was formed 42 years ago, Mahurangi Action has had some big wins. But not only has the 2015–2016 term of office seen the greatest number of wins in a single year, one of those wins was 42 years in the making: The decision by Watercare Services to cease the...
Scott Homestead annual general afternoon tea Saturday
Last year’s was the culmination of a Te Muri walk and a cross-harbour ferry ride. This year’s annual general meeting will be somewhat more perfunctory, on account of it coinciding with the Mahurangi West Hall working bee and Pūhoi Fire Station Givealittle-athon....
Remember, remember Pūhoi Fire Station 5 November
Anyone planning to, should do it Guy Fawkes weekend. And not just because investing this year’s fireworks budget in Pūhoi’s new fire station is the sane thing to do. The Pūhoi Fire Station Givealittle campaign, technically, is an ‘open cause’ that runs until 31 May...
Criteria for non-footbridge crossing
There were good and obvious reasons for considering a footbridge. But there were also a good many reasons why a footbridge across the Pūhoi Estuary, as part of the long-proposed Mahurangi Coastal Trail, was a less-than-optimal solution. Firstly it would have had…
Kids Voting curtain-raiser could electrify elections
Voting in schools works, or would, if more students were involved. With participation rates so low, the only intervention proven to address the worldwide decline in voter turnout is being relegated to little more than tokenism. Of the nearly 500…
Fire station Givealittle-athon dry run for coastal trail
Mahurangi West has much to thank Pūhoi for. Historically, it was one of two watering holes achievable. Locals, on reaching the Notice Tree, would know whether to head to Pūhoi, or to Waiwera, to find the evening’s frivolities. This year, support from…
Hear no evidence see no evidence speak no…
It is difficult to say which is more egregious. The three mayors yearning for the good old days of single-day polling. Or the mainstream media for being equally ill-informed and not pillorying them for their collective abject lack of evidence-based policy…
Heart-shaped ballot boxes and Kombi combo fails to fire
Tessa Berger is quoted, but not by name. In his New Zealand Herald column Political Roundup, Dr Bryce Edwards names neither Tessa, nor the national Kids Voting programme she champions. Dr Edwards suggests local government is headed towards an…
Mahurangi Action committee nominations open
It’s is a committee for people who detest them. In contrast to most incorporated societies, which typically meet monthly, Mahurangi Action meets continually, via the Mahurangi Magazine and email. Although committees are an integral part of representative…
Mahurangi-initiated 50-year plan hit by mainstream media
Dr Ronald Locker had suggested it as a national park. It was 1973, when he had suggested creation of a national park to protect his beloved Mahurangi Harbour, in Seacoast in the Seventies, which he co-authored with Professor John Morton and David Thom cbe…
Health boards and the triennial panning of STV
Every local-body election since its introduction, sees the same disinformation. The rock-solid single-transferable-vote system, first computerised in Aotearoa and used by her for 12 years, is set to endure its triennial onslaught of…
Only council candidate to score straight-a pluses
Warkworth from 4000 to 20 000 by 2040. That would be a five-fold increase in less than half the 50 years it took the region to treble to today’s population, of about 1.5 million. With this planned growth-rate of more than three times the regional average…
Penny Webster is good – reports the War for Auckland
Penny Webster is good. She’s been a keen advocate for old people who don’t like apartments leaving the centre of Auckland, which is one of the key values of our War effort. Besides that, she’s handled a key finance role for the last three years [and the…
Berger tops list thanks to National ideology
Tessa Berger’s bonanza of national media coverage began locally. It began with the Rodney Times sending out its excellent reporter Jay Boreham to interview Tessa in respect to her eye-catching billboards, one of which by then had been removed…
Polling patch-up for flawed first-past-the-post
Polling gets blamed for a lot of things. For starters, for influencing folk into voting for the winning side. Or, conversely, for influencing folk into voting for the underdog. Whereas, in an ideal world, voters would express their honestly held preference…
Bugger evidence-based policymaking – buy a Kombi
After three decades of Kids Voting, there is ample evidence to back it up. And for half that time, after it was imported from the United States by the then Auckland City Council, kids in Aotearoa have been at it. This year, a record 11 730 students in the…
First-past-the-post dictates one tick
Voters, reasonably, seek to get their money’s worth. But thanks to obdurate royal commissioners, Auckland Council remains stuck in the bad old days of first-past-the-post, and voters are about to be short-changed. This is manifestly evident in the crowded, 18-strong…
Car-free Te Muri with coastal trail no mirage
The indications were entirely auspicious, even before the wrap-up. Then the commissioners, who had just finished hearing submissions on the future development of Te Muri, outlined the points they expected Auckland Council’s planning officers…
Tessa Berger’s snazzy billboards
Although sick was more likely word for a millennial to use, snazzy was the immediate reaction of one of Tessa Berger’s strongest local supporters, and, no doubt, that the majority of the Mahurangi Magazine’s demographic. “You will certainly add a…
Magazine receives boost from Berger board bid
Mahurangi ‘bulletins’ had been getting progressively more ambitious, climaxing, in January 2007, with the first, glossy magazine format, Mahurangi Magazine. The proximate spur was the need to fill the void left when the Mahurangi Cruising…
Exactly two weeks to enrol those elusive 18–29-year-olds
In 2013, Len Brown was elected by a mere 16.5% of Aucklanders registered to vote. This was the result of an abysmal 35% turnout, and marginal popularity combined with the inevitable consequences of first-past-the-post. Dazed and disillusioned…
Convince the commissioners and Te Muri car-free forever
Auckland Council and the community are now in accord. Scheduled to be published today, are the council’s recommendations to the commissioners who will effectively determine the future of Te Muri. When the draft management plan was published in November 2015, most…
Promise of better regional planning fulfilled in the Mahurangi
Sometimes the wait for a win can be a long one. But the issue that precipitated the formation of Mahurangi Action 42 years ago has finally been put to bed. In 1974, the then Warkworth Town Council was belatedly beginning to address its discharge of its septic sewage,...
Unformed-legal-road stopping stopped in its tracks
Forty-four-plus objections in four days, and it was all over. That is, all over for the Pakiri Hill paper-road stopping for the present, as the property holder may yet choose to go another round and slug it out in the Environment Court, but more about that possibility...
Stop road-stopping 1st order of business for new high-level trails trust
The first meeting was two parts fiesta and one part fiasco. Trails and trails-interested organisations from Pakiri to Pūhoi had gathered to collaborate on creating a rich network of trails, or greenways, to use a term in increasing use in the Auckland region. The...
Pro forma objection to stop road-stopping proposal
An eagle-eyed local and supporter of the plans by the Big Omaha Trail Trust for a Pakiri to Big Omaha Valley trail, spotted, on the Pakiri Hill, an Auckland Transport notice advising that an unformed paper road was to be stopped and sold, and amalgamated with the...
Mahurangi Action application for a Tamahunga Local Board
Mahurangi Action Incorporated hereby applies to the Local Government Commission for the single local board within the Rodney Ward of Auckland Council to be replaced by two local boards: a northern local board that conforms with the present…
Mahurangi Action states its support for dredging
Mahurangi Action Incorporated is strongly in support of the application for resource consent by the Mahurangi River Restoration Trust to undertake capital and maintenance dredging of the Mahurangi River and to deposit dredging material at 121 Hepburn…
Mahurangi Action to submit to building a better region
The royal commissioners had recommended list members. List councillors, really; ten of Auckland’s 23 councillors, the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance proposed, were to be elected to supposedly represent the whole region, rather than…
Garnering major help to connect this coast
You read it there first, in a full-page spread in Junction Magazine, profiling ‘uber-human’ Tessa Berger, the 21-year-old chair of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail Trust. Anyone reading the glossy Matakana-based magazine’s description of Tessa’s achievements…
Future is increasingly self-funding regional parks
Operational budget $14.5 million, acquisitions budget $0.0 million, result misery. With a new one, on average, added every other year, regional parks had been the most popular purpose Aucklanders’ rates were put to over the last 50 years. But since 2010…
Daniel Sullivan and family
Pages 266–267
John Sullivan had a brother Daniel, ten years his junior. Daniel married Bridget Barry in Kent in 1842. Their family of four were all born in England: John 1842, Emma 1844, Daniel 1852, and Mary 1854. In 1857 they emigrated to New Zealand, and followed the…
Contents of Jade River: A History of the Mahurangi
About the Author
Foreword to the Online Edition
Preface
Acknowledgements
Link with the Mahurangi
Part 1 Beginnings
Introduction
Jade River…
Submission on Te Muri draft management plan variation
The following is Mahurangi Action Incorporated’s submission, as lodged in PDF format on 18 March, but without the executive summary provided here. In the pursuit of transparency, this submission was published in instalments as a work in progress as each section was…
Mahurangi Action on draft variation in respect to Te Muri
The submission needs to begin by putting the planning process in context. The timing of the Auckland Regional Parks management plan variation in respect to Te Muri, coinciding as it does with the regional parks 50th anniversary, presents…
Cool brainstorming-breakfast interconnectedness
February’s was a fizzer; literally a non-event. The first Thursday of the month after the Mahurangi Regatta is generally too soon for anyone involved to have had time to come up for air, and thus February’s should be permanently scotched. But…
forParks Te Muri walk-in open day single-issue issue
Because of the urgency and importance of the upcoming Te Muri open day, we are breaking with our usual practice and making this a one-issue issue. There is, however, much going on in the regional parks, particularly during Seaweek Saturday 27 February to…
Share Te Muri with walking Aucklanders or their cars
It’s been timed for low tide that day, at 12.22 pm. Because, despite the Auckland Regional Authority’s citizens advisory group 29 years ago embracing the concept of developing Te Muri for walking access only, there is still no all-tide access across the access across the estuary from…
Wednesday before and after the regatta
Speaks volumes about the new principal Mahurangi Regatta sponsor. Before the organisers and volunteers had had time to officially thank Teak Construction for the massive shot-in-the-arm, the company’s managing director had invited all the…
Mahurangi Regatta 2016 results
Results of the 2016 Mahurangi Regatta, to hand: A-Class Trophy Line honours Rawhiti 1st Prize 2nd Rawhiti 3rd Frances 4th Waitangi 5th Iorangi 6th Thelma Achernar John Cole Trophy For aesthetic contribution to the...
Shot in the arm rewarded by best Mahurangi Regatta yet
Criticism of Mahurangi Regatta involvement has finally fully been answered. Ever since it revived the event, in 1977, the question of what a Mahurangi environmental organisation was doing running a regatta had periodically been…
2016 Mahurangi Regatta programme
Helping push the Auckland Regional Parks 50th anniversary boat out Regatta Day Saturday 30 January 2016 This is a good old-fashioned leave-your-wallet-at-home picnic regatta—no food or drink is on sale. Regatta-goers are invited to keep an eye out for folk who may...
Support for sublime vision of regatta and trail entwined
While one B-class might not a regatta make, the vision of a gaff-rigged ‘keeler’ sweeping majestically into the Mahurangi yesterday evening seemed to signal the beginning of the harbour’s annual transformation into New Zealand’s greatest gathering…
2018 Mahurangi Regatta programme
Long-term changes to this year’s Mahurangi Regatta include the addition of a Reactor division, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the design, and one for the H28s. Short-term changes are holding shoreside events requiring a good width…
Long-form formal submission supporting coastal trail
Auckland Council has provided an online form that short-changes the Mahurangi Coastal Trail. While it allows submitters to respond to the primary actions and developments contemplated in the draft variation to the Auckland Regional Park, the Mahurangi Coastal Trail is not…
Reasons to believe footbridge will receive fair shake
Prospects for the Mahurangi Coastal Trail aren’t as dismal as they appear. Or at least as they fail to appear, in the ‘primary actions and developments contemplated,’ in the draft variation to Auckland Regional Parks management plan published yesterday. While…
2017 Mahurangi Regatta programme
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the regatta revival by Mahurangi Action Regatta Day Saturday 28 January 2017 Friday Night-Race to Mahurangi 3 pm Classic A and Modern Classics 3.05 pm Classic B and Woollacott Series 3.10 pm B Division – Hyslop Cup 6 pm A...
Post-Paris apocalypse ou la climate quantitative easing
Post Paris, the obligatory image accompanying stories heralding the historic 195-country agreement is of banks of photovoltaic panels. If that does prove to be the immediate future, along with massive wind farms and millions of electric cars, global…
Forty-one years on and Mahurangi wastewater options revisited
It was the reason, in 1974, that Mahurangi Action was formed. The Warkworth Town Council was forging ahead with long overdue long-term plans for its wastewater treatment, without a skerrick of consultation with the community, much less the Mahurangi oyster farmers...
Parks czar provides perfect Te Muri Christmas present
On 18 December 1965, Aucklanders awoke to a Christmas present for posterity. Nine months earlier the region had learned that, thanks to the establishment of an authority that was able to act in the combined interests of 32 separately constituted cities, towns…
Post-Paris regional parks 50th anniversary rethink
With the 50th anniversary of the opening of Wenderholm to be marked this Friday, supporters are calling for a bold new community–council plan for the regional parks network’s next 50 years. The original visionaries, the region’s first planner, Frederick…
Disdaining community input council plans new group
Simultaneously, it’s one of the best and the most preposterous proposals of the draft plan: Establish a friends group for the park and wider network of Mahurangi regional parks. Preposterous because, having relegated the concept most widely supported by community…
Until March to counter plan to relegate coastal trail
Anybody who’d read the summary of phase-1 submissions would be utterly flummoxed. Of the 140 who made submissions to the Auckland Regional Parks management plan, 101 explicitly supported the concept for a Mahurangi Coastal Trail as the…
21-year-old president rocks coastal trail dream
Her Facebook lit up. It is clear from the rapturous response to the New Zealand Herald article featuring newly elected Mahurangi Action president Tessa Berger, that Facebook is an essential tool in spreading the Mahurangi Coastal Trail message. To land a glowing…
2015–2016 committee Mahurangi Action
On 2 November 2015, the following were elected as the committee of Mahurangi Action Incorporated for 2015–2016: Tessa Berger (as vice-president) entrepreneur, nominated by Cimino Cole, seconded by Hugh Gladwell; Cimino Cole (as…
Minutes of 2015 Mahurangi Action annual general meeting
Scott Homestead Scotts Landing 7 November 2015 Meeting opened 3.22 pm 7 November 2015 Attending Tessa Berger, Jefferson Chapple, Cimino Cole, Margaret Faed, Hugh Gladwell, Joan Gordon, Michael Gordon and Sarah Ransom. Apologies Jim Dollimore, Mike Hanne, Cluny...
Taking Te Araroa and the coastal trail cross-harbour ferry to AGM
Mahurangi Action’s inaugural meeting was held on 17 December 1974 for good reason. Things had come to a head regarding Warkworth’s flawed—many people believed—decision to build a sewage treatment plant that had little capacity to cope with the precipitous flows that...
Re-imagining the Mahurangi Regatta beyond coastal trail
That the Mahurangi Regatta is a regional event is beyond dispute. The venerable event’s region-wide appeal is now backed up by data, collected at this year’s regatta by Auckland Council following its decision to grant $4000 towards the costs of hosting the 2015 prize-giving…
Recurring regional parks rear-guard action or 50-year-plan
By now it should be abundantly clear to all friends of regional parks. The Auckland Regional Parks network, about to begin celebrating its 50th anniversary, is seen by senior council management, and many elected representatives, as overly costly and in imminent need of…
50th celebrations avert requiem for regional parks
It’s 35 years since Yes Minister first ran, yet public servants still shamelessly subvert the democratic process as effortlessly as breathing. In a particularly preposterous case of usurping the authority of elected representatives, Auckland Council senior management had decided…
Book now for the 10th anniversary screening of Anchor Me!
Some of the best, ironic lines came from the cast. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given that the original concept was for the children to write the entire play. That that notion was unrealistic became clear at the first workshop, held in the yet-to-be...
Portals could power town-basin transformation
Warkworth doesn’t boast of much of a town basin. Topographically, the tidal Mahurangi River terminates in a bit of a tight squeeze, compared with, for example, Whangārei. But what Warkworth lacks by way of a commodious tidal headwater…
Celebrity fundraiser rescheduled then reimagined
This proposed event was rescheduled, then reimagined following the spectacularly successful ‘Buy this beach’ campaign that has seen Te Awaroa Beach become part of Abel Tasman Nation Park. Long story short, the timing of the event will be determined only…
Feedback supports coastal-trail primary Te Muri access
Notification of public consultation on the intention to undertake a variation to the Auckland Regional Parks Management Plan to include Te Muri was undertaken in mid-July 2015. Information about the consultation went live on the Shape Auckland website on…
Time for councils to capitalise on open-ground trials
The Mahurangi trials, the Silverdale trials, and then those at Taupō, all said the same thing. Open-ground-raised indigenous plants, in all those trials, have been found to establish every bit as well as the same species—including mānuka—produced at many times…
Mahurangi Action phase-1 Te Muri submission
Mahurangi Action Incorporated is well known to be the initiator of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail concept. This unapologetic focus on the proposed coastal trail and Judge Arnold Turner Footbridge across the Pūhoi River, however, is symptomatic of the society’s comprehensive…
Celebrate whitebait season at the Mahurangi River native fish discovery night
Whitebait Connection Event date 29 August 2015 Whitebait season is upon us, running, in most places, from 15 August to 30 November. For most New Zealanders, whitebait season is closely associated with the word fritter. Love ’em or hate ’em, the little white fish...
Views sought on long-term future of Te Muri
It is only the first phase, but it might also prove to be the most important. When, in its dying days in 2010, the Auckland Regional Council purchased the $15 million, 383-hectare Schischka farm, a large part of the motivation was to take pressure off…
Te Whau Coastal Esplanade walkway close to fruition
A cloudless winter’s day in mid-July helped 20 Mahurangi locals get 750 plants in the ground on Te Whau Coastal Esplanade. The planting is the latest in a series of restoration activities achieved by volunteers in the six years since a strategic 2.7-hectare council...
Once veritable Rodmersham art gallery
Had the settlement of Nelson been sited at Mahurangi as Hobson had urged, the class structure of England would have been transplanted to the Mahurangi. But the New Zealand Company would have none of it. Instead, Mahurangi became an egalitarian…
Invitation to join the Mahurangi Coastal Trail 100
There will only ever be one, Mahurangi Coastal Trail one hundred. In one hundred years’ time, the 100 visionaries who, on 1 November 2015, pledged to support the bid to make the Mahurangi Coastal Trail the Auckland Regional Parks 50th anniversary, legacy project, will…
Need for coastal trail celebrity fundraiser 1-pager
There will only ever be one, Mahurangi Coastal Trail one hundred. One hundred years from now, the 100 visionaries recorded as having made the Mahurangi Coastal Trail the Auckland Regional Parks 50th anniversary legacy project will be the same 100 who attend on…
Mahurangi Coastal Trail celebrity fundraiser
The Auckland Regional Parks 50th anniversary, legacy project. That is what the Mahurangi Coastal Trail must become, if Aucklanders are to mark the first fifty years of their incomparable network of regional parks in a manner befitting its scale and vision…
How Savage would have salvaged a survivable climate
There is an alternative to you-first-no-you-first. Aotearoa, like pretty much every other country, is fearful of getting too far ahead of the pack in respect to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Much of the fear, paranoia even, is of becoming…
Dogma dictates it’s okay for corporations, but not for governments to plan
Despite predictably shirking population, the pope’s heroic climate encyclical will surely ratchet up resolve for meaningful global action. Crucially, Pope Francis calls out cap and trade, which, until recently, few dared question, it being the crux of the sacrosanct,...
Supporter opportunity to spark VP’s potential
Twenty-year-old Tessa Berger is Mahurangi Action’s best hope for the future. And that is good news for the Mahurangi, if the society’s achievements to date can be considered ‘good for the Mahurangi’. Major achievements include: causing Mahurangi Peninsula wastewater...
William Jackson and family
Pages 270–272
William Jackson was born in Dublin. Nothing more survives in the family recollection of his origins or early years in Aotearoa. He may have been the flax-trader, probably from Sydney, who traded out of Onehunga to Kāwhia. Two land claims appear in the New Zealand…
Beautiful bequeathing friends of the Mahurangi
Possibly the only thing they shared was their love for the Mahurangi. One was a British-born immigrant and bomber navigator. The other, a 34th, or thereabouts, generation New Zealander, and Pukapuka postmistress. Wilfred ‘Wilf’…
William Sullivan and family
Pages 267–270
John Sullivan’s only son, William, was educated in Auckland. He then became a hand on the cutter Mahurangi. The family story is that John took William from this apprenticeship in sail to put him in command of his brand new schooner Rosella. It was an…
Foreword to online edition of history of the Mahurangi
That he wrote, and beautifully wrote, the foreword for his own book, was utterly typical of Dr Ronald H Locker. After all, he wrote his own funeral service, complete with eulogy. But rather than egocentricity, it reflected the exceptional self-reliance that was the hallmark…
Web Magna Carta and better democracy for half the price
It is possible to put a price on better democracy. At least to the extent that combining local and general elections would nearly halve the cost of holding them, and massively improve local-body turnout to boot. Extensive experience elsewhere suggests that…
Loose affiliation of billionaires and moratorium babies
Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a lot of unwelcome attention. They are bearing the brunt of the Guardian’s otherwise well-meaning fossil-fuels divestment campaign. To paint Bill and Melinda Gates the face of divestment reluctance is a bit rich. For starters…
Undemocratic democracies and days of living dangerously or excitingly
With just 37% of the votes, the Conservatives have grabbed 100% of the power. If New Zealanders needed a reminder of just how unfair the first-past-the-post system they dumped at the 1993 referendum is, then the United Kingdom’s general election result has just...
Embolden parks chief by bussing in bridge supporters
The Mahurangi Coastal Trail has been paid a considerable compliment. Friends of Regional Parks, in addition to making the coastal trail its flagship project, is making the concept the subject of its annual general meeting, on 29 June. Amongst the speakers will be civil…