Campaign finance reform
Without which bought-and-paid-for government swamps democracy
Climate inaction and gratuitous risk-taking adventure tourism
From Mount Erebus to Carterton, Aotearoa has accumulated an appalling air-crash record. While pilot error was found to be the cause of the latter disaster, the country’s risk-taking tourism culture is endemic and stretches a long way back. In the era before the main...
Ecomodernism in action in Aotearoa: agricultural greenhouse gas slashed up to 90%
Since Copenhagen, Aotearoa has had one, solitary, meaningful climate action policy. Amid the recriminations that followed the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, scant attention, much less credit, was given to the New Zealand delegates’ coup....
PM’s science advisor on need for Aotearoa to both delay and adapt to a warming world
Professor Sir Peter Gluckman opening the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Conference Palmerston North 28 April 2015 While many would prefer not to have to address the challenge of climate change, we do not have that luxury. The scientific consensus...
How trail can help save a habitable planet
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Guardian is throwing everything at it. Well, nearly everything. While its ‘Keep it in the ground’ campaign is all over its environment section, there is no trace, on the newspaper’s main online masthead, of the millennial moral…
3 separate vs one magnificent Mahurangi Regional Park
Waitākere Ranges Regional Park is more than 19 times the combined size of the three Mahurangi regional parks. Waitākere Ranges dwarfs the combined 900 hectares of the largely contiguous regional parks of Mahurangi, Te Muri and Wenderholm, including the…
Roll on the regional parks rolling 50th celebrations
Auckland Council is planning to push the regional parks 50th boat out. But rather than one grand event, or weekend, the celebrations will likely take the form of a season of events, rather like the way Warkworth’s 150th anniversary was celebrated. For…
Wenderholm celebratory sunrise breakfast
There were very good reasons for celebrating in 2016. Thirty-first of March is the 50th anniversary of the purchase of Wenderholm Regional Park, meaning that the main celebratory event could justifiably been held on Tuesday. But while…
Trail trustees sign on and board votes to support
This week sees concrete step number three, with step four imminent. Concrete step one towards the Mahurangi Coastal Trail was last November, when Christine Fletcher’s parks, recreation and sport committee voted for work to proceed on the…
Second concrete step as coastal trail wins Friends
Friends of Regional Parks is strictly a high-level, umbrella group. It was formed to ensure that the Auckland Regional Parks network survived and flourished under the new unified governance arrangements for the region. So for Friends of Regional Parks to make a local…
Next step on coastal trail is trust and working group
Trust is the essential element in any successful collaboration. And it is never more so when that collaboration involves various community groups, elected council representatives, and council staff. Trust was clearly a key factor in Mahurangi Coastal Trail…
Mainstream ignores novel climate-action mobilisation
Story-telling goes back at least as far as the 200 000-year-old species itself. Yet humanity’s biggest story ever, how Homo sapiens sapiens learned how to exploit fossil fuels, and thus placed itself on the one guaranteed path to extinction, is neither a major…
2016 regatta will be well worth extra week’s wait
It will be well worth the extra week’s wait. Well, only six days, actually, as Auckland Anniversary Day is celebrated on the last Monday in January, even if that falls on 1 February—the logic of this rule for setting the date of an upcoming Mahurangi Regatta, possibly...
Mahurangi Regatta 2015 results
Results of the 2015 Mahurangi Regatta, to hand: A-Class Trophy Line honours Prize 1st Prize 2nd Rainbow 3rd Tawera 4th Waitangi 5th Iorangi 6th Frances 7th Thelma 8th Achernar Frostbites 1st Kiteroa 2nd Green hull 3rd Rapscalion 4th Tawhiri 5th Amber 6th Incognito 7th...
Introduction to Mahurangi surveys and settlement
Rejected as the site for the capital, Mahurangi was seen as desirable for rural settlement. All the coast from Te Ārai to the Waitematā was purchased in 1841. After concessions to the local tribes, the surveys went ahead, and Mahurangi Harbour land sales began in…
Introduction to how Aotearoa formed and Mahurangi named
Like Aphrodite, our islands arose from the sea, but not as she, fair and fully formed. The shaping of our land continues, and in the process it has emerged and submerged repeatedly. It is a mere by-product of the coastal rubble of its two older continental neighbours…
Introduction to a maritime community
Mahurangi was one of the more fortunate of the Auckland settlements. Fewer than thirty nautical miles from the capital, it was able to develop, in spite of the absence of roads. The traffic in the tideway was the lifeline of the settlers, from the earliest cutters to…
Zero-carbon energy ultimate nuclear waste solution
In the last 6 years and 8 weeks of published measurements, global sea level has risen a whisker more than an inch. At least that is the raw, seasonally adjusted data from the incredible, and credible, Jason 2 satellite, however, the El Niño…
2015 Mahurangi Regatta programme
Helping push Auckland’s 175th anniversary boat out Regatta Day Saturday 24 January 2015 Friday Night-Race to Mahurangi 3 pm Classic A and Modern Classics 3.05 pm Classic B Sailing Instructions Mahurangi Regatta Generally held at Sullivans Bay* *In the event of...
Nation with least need for nuclear has most to gain
Even the pro-nuclear-power Dr James Hansen doubts Aotearoa needs it: “You happen to be very fortunate and be very wealthy in terms of renewable energy.” But New Zealanders’ future prospects now directly depend upon an unprecedented international…
Laying the foundations of a harbour
The rocks exposed in the cliffs of the Mahurangi Harbour, in the highest road cuttings on Schedewys Hill, and even on the summit of Mount Tamahunga at 438 metres, are the familiar Waitematā sandstones. Clearly they are extensive and thick, but they are not old…
How the Mahurangi Harbour got its name
Mahurangi, the name, belonged to the sea-stack between the mouths of the Waiwera and the Pūhoi, and to the pā which once crowned its summit. Percy Smith, who chronicled the history of Māori occupation, said Mahurangi applied to the small island off Waiwera, but…
Jade River – Ronald Locker ode to the Mahurangi
A sea of jade, unruffled
reflects each sunlit headland
On this still morning
the boat glides smoothly
at gentlest dip of oars
through leaves and sea scum
drifting on the tide…
Best understood by least represented
Cohort that best understands the enormity of anthropogenic global warming is that which is least represented in Parliament. It is also the age-group that is least enrolled, and votes least. But given the great gulf between the awful reality of global warming…
Preface to payback for all the pleasure
Since this is not the first history of the Mahurangi, some excuse for its writing seems called for. Tribute is also due to those who have gone before. The first history of the district was the work of the late Terence Otway, son of a former postmaster of Warkworth…
Acknowledging friends of the Mahurangi and author
In preparing my husband’s manuscript for publication, the skills and commitment of many people have been called on and generously given. In particular I should like to record my thanks to Friends of the Mahurangi for undertaking the publication of Jade…
About its singular meat-scientist author
Ronald Harry Locker’s links with the Mahurangi go back to his Jamieson great-grandparents, early European settlers in the district. Derived from the association was a lifelong and passionate interest in how both natural and human forces have shaped the region. He…
Global climate action party brainstorming breakfast
Counting its Values Party roots, after 42 years it has only a few thousand members. If the Green Party’s membership, and its 10.7% electoral support, were an indication of how seriously New Zealanders view anthropogenic global warming…
Short open letter to environmentalists
As conservation scientists concerned with global depletion of biodiversity and the degradation of the human life-support system this entails, we, the co-signed, support the broad conclusions drawn in the article Key Role for Nuclear Energy in Global Biodiversity…
Work on Warkworth pilot to reduce sediment generation
Omelettes can’t be made without cracking eggs, nor roads and houses built without moving a certain amount of earth. On the big jobs, such as residential subdivisions, the resource consents required ensure that robust controls are put in place, which…
Breakfast brainstorming on the next bit
What John Clarke said of the neoliberal de-democratisation of Aotearoa, in the New Zealand Listener, could equally be said of fossil-fuel use: “Complaining about what’s wrong but not taking action, has the same effect as not noticing what’s wrong…”
Surveyor-general consulted character of the land
Ronald Locker’s dismissive description of Felton Mathew’s plan for “The Town of Auckland”, as “grandiose and impractical”, adds to the unfortunate injustice referred to by editor of the surveyor-general’s journals, Professor James Rutherford: “Since it has become…
Never-to-be-made-official surveyor-general calls
Scribblings in the diaries of missionary visitors have been presented here in full, because although brief, they are valuable records. These transients were too busy to explore or to eulogise during their brief rests at Mahurangi Harbour, in the course of long and arduous…
Introduction
The colony spawned a host of would-be entrepreneurs. Perhaps it is not surprising that among those adventurous enough to leave home and loved ones for a raw colony on the other side of the world, there should have been so many willing to try their hand at anything. There were…
Regatta rush to help push the boat out for 175th anniversary of Makaurau
It might have been better had Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson named the entire country Auckland; and Tāmaki Makaurau, Bourke. That way, Aucklanders might have long-since rejected their town’s colonially imposed name in favour of reverting to the indigenous title of...
Mahurangi Regatta 1865 comparable with Cowes
Dr Ronald H Locker writes in Jade River : A History of the Mahurangi, the first Mahurangi Regatta is not remembered, but Joseph Gard noted in his diary that he saw the event in progress on New Year’s Day, 1858, while passing up-river on his…
Irish–Māori
The scattered tangata whenua who filtered back to their old lands around the Mahurangi after the Treaty of Waitangi managed, after struggle, to reclaim some of their lands, but failed to hold them. Doomed as communities by the trends of colonial history, they…
John Sullivan
John Sullivan was the son of Daniel and Sarah (Hands). He was born in London about 1810, but an early photo shows features as Irish as his name. He went to sea, making his first New Zealand landfall in 1832. When he made his second in 1834, after…
Mountain chief of Kennedys Hill
There is a bold hill by the McElroy boundary, to which hangs another interesting Irish biography: Kennedys Hill. Terence Kennedy was born of a poor family in County Clare in west Ireland. He was snatched early from the grave when a winter storm in 1824…
Rex Fairburn and his Mahurangi friends
Realising that winning recognition as a poet and writer was no easier in England than in New Zealand, A R D (Rex) Fairburn sailed for home in 1932, with his wife Jocelyn and child. On the ship he met Terry Bond, a New Zealander who had been successful…
Coastal path and the ferrymen
Reports of Rodney County Council meetings often mention ferries. (e.g. Weekly News, 8 December 1877; 2 March 1878). With the setting up of highways boards in the 1860s, there emerged a chain of ferries over the estuaries that obstructed coastal journeys…
Introduction
Page 189
Choosing whose story to tell from the rich array offering, is both necessary and difficult. The descendants of those who do not appear should not be offended. Some of those chosen led interesting lives in the earliest days of the colony, some gave special service…
Regional parks 50th perspective unapologetically regatta-centric
Submission to Auckland Council Appropriately, Friends of Regional Parks’ submission has a largely regional-parks-centric viewpoint. But when putting its oar in, Mahurangi Action’s view is unabashedly regatta-centric. It is hoped, however, that Auckland Council will...
Auckland’s 175th and regional parks’ 50th as a major event
Decision as to which year to celebrate is slightly easier for the 50th anniversary. Auckland’s 175th anniversary is to be celebrated on Auckland Anniversary weekend 2015, eight months ahead of the day Captain William Hobson planted the Union Jack at…
Methods of building membership in the digital age
It took the stuffing of thousands of envelops, and the licking of a like number of stamps. That, and the not inconsiderable matter of the publishing and launching of Jade River : A History of the Mahurangi, and the membership of Mahurangi…
Riverview Café supper revives brainstorming breakfast
Sometimes the bulk of the brainstorming had already occurred. On such occasions, the conversation would be more about canvassing support for the new initiative, although it was rare for further brainstorming not to be a feature of the…
2014–2015 committee Mahurangi Action
On 2 November 2014, the following were elected as the committee of Mahurangi Action Incorporated for 2014–2015: Tessa Berger (as vice-president) entrepreneur
nominated by Cimino Cole seconded by Hugh Gladwell…
True test for Mahurangi Action is its plan for the next 40 years
In 1974, the town was planning to replace its appallingly inadequate riverside municipal septic tank. Warkworth’s council was finally facing up to the need to treat its wastewater, after decades of wilful neglect of the issue, which, after heavy rainfall, routinely...
40 Years for Mahurangi Action’s shortest annual report
This year’s annual general meeting needs to be the society’s shortest in its 40-year history. Time and tide dictate that Mahurangi Action members expedite their formalities during the afternoon tea stop at Scott Homestead, before those celebrating the organisation’s...
Celebrations and subscriptions as Mahurangi Action looks at 40
There is surely no better way the milestone could be marked. On Sunday fortnight, Mahurangi Action will be celebrating its 40th anniversary, alongside the Auckland Council and community celebration of the 10th year of the Mahurangi Action Plan. Mahurangi Action was...
Coastal path gains first concrete step
No better proof could possibly be had. Sat in the top-floor council chamber in the Auckland Town Hall, nine supporters of a $0.9 million coastal trail could have been excused for feeling unsure as to whether Auckland Council’s busy parks, recreation…
Hard lessons loom as history repeats
Like Dirty Politics, Watergate was revealed ahead of an election that saw the perpetrating political party rewarded, by being returned to power with an increased majority. Five months after five burglars were caught in Democratic Party offices…
Mainstream media too slow in waking to the proof
It’s all the proof that was needed. That, as urged by Kim Dotcom, the mainstream media needs to ‘wake up’ and do its job. By the morning after the packed-to-overflowing ‘Moment of Truth’ meeting in Auckland Town Hall on Monday night, the mainstream media should have...
mmp permits youth to be given lifetime licence to vote
Before 1996, it mattered—in order to participate in an election, a person needed to be registered in an electorate. This requirement reflected the Westminster system whereby the extent of a voter’s democratic entitlement was, at best, to help…
After a little shadow voting elect the prime minister
It must be exercising the mind of ‘Mattiavelli’ McCarten. Simply give the job of prime minister, post the election, to ‘Wily’ Winston. After all, it is entirely up to the winning bloc as to who the prime minister should be. Across all voters, Winston…
It might be politicians maintaining the miracle
It has happened only once. That the people, rather than the politicians, of an established democracy have led the change to a more proportional system. In fact, Aotearoa in 1993 elected to change from a sometimes inversely proportional system—the patently undemocratic...
Mile-long Mahurangi Farm-Forestry Trail milestone
With the help of 80 school and college pupils, the Mahurangi Farm-Forestry Trail has reached a milestone. Conceived just two years ago, the mile-long trail is the very happy marriage, and intertwining, of multiple complimentary threads…
Voilà! Lance, Laila and Lucy can vanquish neoliberalism
Undemocratic, unnecessary and now, in Germany, unconstitutional. In last month’s European Parliamentary elections, most member countries, and for the first time that included Germany, faced no explicit electoral threshold. In February, Germany’s…
Climate action on the farm-forestry trail
Such have been the negative political consequences of doing so. It wasn’t until in his final four-year term that President Barack Obama felt he could talk openly about addressing anthropogenic global warming. Similarly, it wasn’t until safely at…
Carbon tax and election could be left to the Left of Rodney
Corrected 22 June 2014 Aotearoa’s Green Party is in exceptionally good company. With its proposed carbon tax and ‘climate tax cut’, the party is finally in sync with the carbon ‘fee and dividend’ that Dr James Hansen has relentlessly promoted, at least since 2008. Dr...
After 26 years of climate inaction pull plug on IPCC
It is unstoppable, and it has possibly doubled. And while that is only the disintegration of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, the same is probably true for global warming generally. Three years of the most detailed satellite measurements yet, to the end…
Only honourable option to oppose in full
The best strategy might have been to support the proposal in full. That way, the Pūhoi–Warkworth motorway board of inquiry might have been more receptive to the opportunity for a large-scale trial of open-ground indigenous plants. Realistically…
Only with nuclear is there time to feed the world
Forty years ago this year, Band Aid released a single that in its first week became the fastest selling track in all time in the United Kingdom. Co-written by Bob Geldof, Do They Know it’s Christmas went on to sell more than three million copies, and led to…
Mahurangi Action motorway condition 36c viii
It’s not, in fact, the harbour’s biggest threat since deforestation. The proposed Pūhoi–Warkworth motorway is only the biggest proximate threat. The biggest threat of course—the existential threat—is rampant global warming. The entire litany of…
Submission on the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan
Formed in 1974 as Friends of the Mahurangi, Mahurangi Action Incorporated is a community interest group that, from its inception, has been primarily concerned with protection, enhancement and enjoyment of the outstanding…
Mahurangi River Town Basins, Landings and Navigation Plan
The Mahurangi River Town Basins, Landings and Navigation Plan broadly involves: 1.) Dredging within the Warkworth town basin to restore the ability of visiting boats to remain afloat throughout the tidal cycle; 2.) Dredging parts of the channel of the…
Wrong for Mahurangi but right for Aotea – Great Barrier
Ron was wrong about two important Mahurangi issues. At the time he wrote Jade River : A History of the Mahurangi, Dr Ronald Locker dismissed sedimentation as a serious threat to the health of the harbour, despite Dr Thomas Frank Wyndham Harris having published…
Mahurangi Coastal Trail high-tide Seaweek walk
Last year’s was a low-tide walk, and wade, with the odd wallow. Partly to demonstrate that the Pūhoi River can be readily be crossed at low tide, and partly to avoid the need to arrange for craft to ferry folk across, the Mahurangi Coastal Trail was…
Renewable energy, nuclear power and Galileo
Climate scientists have long warned of potential catastrophic effects of unchecked fossil fuel use. Public awareness of the climate threat has increased. Yet growth of carbon dioxide in the air, the main driver of climate change, has accelerated…
Mahurangi Regatta 2014 results
Updated 30 January 2014 Results of the 2014 Mahurangi Regatta, to hand: A-Class Trophy Line honours Ranger 1st W Leslie Trophy Rainbow 2nd Thelma 3rd Frances 4th Waitangi 5th Ranger 6th Iorangi 7th Tawera 8th Fidelis 9th Achernar 10th Moana 11th Rawene 12th Northerner...
2014 Mahurangi Regatta programme
Event date Saturday 25 January 2014 High tide 02:13 (0.87 m above mean level of sea) Low tide 08:18 (-0.84 m) High tide 14:29 (0.96 m) Low tide 20:50 (-1.01 m) Mahurangi Regatta Generally held at Sullivans Bay* *In the event of strong easterly wind, sailing entries...
Mahurangi headwaters estimated not measured
In a straight line, the stream would run from Mahurangi to Palmerston North. That is, if all the streams in the Mahurangi catchment were laid end-to-end, and assuming, of course, that there was sufficient head to cause this hypothetical stream to run. Then…
Calling all commodores to close the regatta gap
Probably more than a dozen clubs attend. The exact number of yacht and boating clubs attending is not known by the host Mahurangi Cruising Club, but 39 of the 120 affiliated to Yachting New Zealand are listed in the Makaurau region. With Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse...
Mahurangi Harbour urgently needs to sign her friends
Paid-up ‘friends’ of the Mahurangi once numbered 300—on the back of the launch of Jade River: A History of the Mahurangi. The society titled Friends of the Mahurangi, now Mahurangi Action Incorporated, published Ronald Harry Locker’s masterly 416-page work in…
Intricacies of the Gregorian calendar and fixing regatta
It’s a reminder of the utility of weeks. When Christmas along with New Year’s Day, fall in the middle of the week, it is all too easy to be set adrift from the structure provided by the seven-day week. But the one-day advance of the immutable seven-day week, and two-day advance on…
Mahurangi Regatta 2014 to be graced by deputy mayor
It is Mahurangi Harbour’s only annual gathering, but it is sublime. Fittingly, the Mahurangi Regatta is a celebration both for Aucklanders privileged to call the harbour home, full- or part- time, and of those who reside in less utterly idyllic parts of the region but...
Conservation volunteers could realise action plan
Forty farm plans completed and 120 kilometres of riparian margin protected. From those figures, it would be easy to imagine that Mahurangi catchment’s elevated sediment accumulation rate was well on its way to being comprehensively…
Motorway harbour’s biggest threat since deforestation
Clearly, something has to be done. State Highway 1 between Pūhoi and Wellsford is lethal, and at times congested. In 2010, the Campaign for Better Transport in its Operation Lifesaver document came up with two options, either of which, by now…
Resolving outstanding practical problem
It’s nine years six weeks since it was signed. So there is every likelihood that, by the tenth anniversary of the signing of heads of agreement, what Justice Rhys Harrison described in his declaratory judgement as the outstanding practical problems…
2013–2014 committee Mahurangi Action
On 3 November 2013, the following were elected as the committee of Mahurangi Action Incorporated for 2013–2014: Cimino Cole (as secretary) editor incumbent Jim Dollimore biologist incumbent Hugh Gladwell lawyer incumbent Michael Gordon (as treasurer)...
Concurrent elections closest to voter-turnout silver bullet
Another local body election, and another uninformed swipe at STV. While it is probable that the at-large, single-transferable-vote, district health board elections are the single biggest reason only a third of Aucklanders returned their ballots…
Humbled by 2010–2013 Rodney Local Board
Before the meeting began, one of the local board members offered up a prayer: that the meeting might close by 5 pm. Service as a local body representative is famously thankless work. The work has been doubly thankless for the inaugural…
Coast clear for Labour as the climate action party
Aotearoa’s major political parties share a broadly similar stance on anthropogenic global warming. In contrast, climate action in Australia and the United States is a deeply partisan business. The ‘invisible substance’ reference of Liberal Party leader and prime...
Fossil fuel fuse and the mother of all unintended consequences
It happened somewhere between the mastery of fire a million and a half years ago, and today’s rampant exploitation of fossil fuel reserves. Practiced judiciously, and to jumpstart sustainable energy technologies, and by a sustainable population, the burning of a...
Not just century, warming moral issue of millennium
More mud, fewer oysters, and galloping foreshore erosion. This is the forlorn future faced by the Mahurangi Harbour. Just how muddy, how few oysters or fish, and how quickly higher and higher tides carve into soft unprotected shorelines depends…
Can’t afford to solve one problem at a time
When the Alpine Fault goes, it will probably take Wellington with it. Wellington, now Aotearoa’s second largest city, is staring down the barrel of the Alpine Fault, which is primed and due to jump eight metres horizontally and four vertically. In both 1220 and 1450…
4 or 40 years late climate thrust to front page
George Monbiot declared 28 August 2012 as the day world went mad. Writing on the following day, the Guardian’s respected environmental journalist asked readers to remember that date. It was the day that scientists announced the record Arctic ice melt, unnoticed…
‘Essentially a technical problem’ – City ’s technocrats rejected rail
Since 1999, New Zealand’s tourism board has marketed the country as ‘100% Pure New Zealand’. The campaign draws on the country’s scenic beauty, displayed to the world in the Lord of the Rings movies, and a reputation for environmental activism dating back to 1970s campaigns…
Draft unitary plan draws focussed feedback
September’s scheduled notification of the Auckland Unitary Plan is now in doubt. Despite that, it is possible that any further informal discussion of the draft plan will only be between Auckland Council and selected groups, and Mahurangi Action is not in that...
50 reasons to celebrate anniversary weekend 2016
First reason: It will be the 50th summer of Auckland’s coastal regional parks. The coastal parks commenced with the purchase of Wenderholm Regional Park on 31 March 1965, and its opening the following December. It was an immediate…
New unitary authority not going to plan
Len’s in danger of loosing it. As was all too apparent halfway through the term of Aotearoa’s first mayoral office to enjoy significant executive powers, Mayor Brown has bet the farm on a project for which he has little to show, come local body election year. Had...
Looking back over 50 years of regional park history
In the early 1960s, Mr F W O Jones, Auckland’s regional planning officer, was concerned at the rapid growth of urban development along Auckland’s coastline, which was preventing all but a favoured few from having access to good beaches. He recommended that large...
World’s worst-polluting pair of superpowers work on climate
Amidst a rash of high-profile setbacks, he’s just played a blinder. What little remained of President Barack Obama’s gun control legislation has been unceremoniously buried by the gun manufacturers, in cold-blooded disregard for the funerals for…
Sole shot at salvation calls for youth to withhold labour
The Green Party doesn’t understand anthropogenic global warming: “…we can expect droughts to be more extreme and strike more often if we don’t take global action.” Never mind if—droughts will be more extreme and will strike more often, they…
Clean green dirty secrets of a future environmentalist
Ozzie Zehner’s magnum opus is mostly other than about the dirtiness of clean energy. Green Illusions: The dirty secrets of clean energy and future of environmentalism is more about the last few words of its subtitle—what the author terms: Future environmentalism....
Low-tide walk to sample low-hanging fruit
Mahurangi can best ease the region’s growing pains by not housing its share of Aucklanders. According to the introductory video on the new unitary plan website, Aucklanders want a high quality, more compact city, in the face of the expected 30-year growth rate…
Mahurangi Action draft minutes
Meeting Mahurangi Action Incorporated Committee Resolutions Resolutions unanimous unless otherwise noted Date Tuesday 26 February 2013 Time 5.30 pm Start Meeting opened at 5.37 pm Attending Cimino Cole, Michael Gordon, Mike Hanne and Burnette O’Connor...
Mahurangi Regatta 2013 results
Results of the 2013 Mahurangi Regatta, to hand: A Class Trophy Line honoursRanger 1stW Leslie Trophy Thelma 2ndRawene 3rdRanger 4thAchernar 5thPrize 6thMoana 7thIorangi 8thWaitangi 9thFrances 10thTawera Frostbites Times not recorded. Due to confusion emanating from...
One trail to demonstrate them all
It may be because the landscape resembles a South Seas Lake District. Or it may simply be a universal urge, but locals have long dreamed and talked of creating a network of trails in the harbourscape of outstanding natural beauty that is the…
Best band line-up and end to playing on the grass
The big band was back with sweet vengeance. Following a two-year hiatus initiated by an ex-tropical cyclone and prolonged, in 2012, by mediocre weather combined with a lack of funding, the Prohibition Big Band line-up on Saturday night was strongest, tightest and most...
Unprecedented struggle yet story with no name
For two decades it was the Great War. Then, with the outbreak of World War II, it became the First World War. As a descriptive title, First World War says a great deal more than Great War. It would be even more descriptive, but less eloquent, as the First...