THE LOST LAKE

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 238, 7 October 1932, Page 6

THE LOST LAKE

Lake Waiatarua, to give it. its musical Maori name, Lake St. John, the name upon it at the founding of St. John's College in the district, was until a year or two ago a unique feature in a unique landscape. The only natural sheet of fresh water within many miles of Auckland, it has a history and an aura of tradition, for it is associated with many of the old Maori legends and was the home of a powerful taniwha in bygone days. It is the great natural mother of many subterranean springs in and about the Tamaki district, and many a nameless creek and meandering thread of crystal water wending their way down to the sea had their source in its bosom. It is now no more, banished' by the hand of man, though it fought gallantly for its lifle, returning again and again to its bed, welling up in spreading sheets of water over quaking quagmires of gluey mud, which daunted the engineers as they trenched and dug and drained, and at Inst conquered. It "was never a (beautiful lake in the conventional pictorial style, but it had a melancholy, somewhat sterile ibeauty of its own, the beauty of placid stretches of beryl green or steel grey waters guarded by belts of vividly-green raupo, lance-like reeds and tall velvety-brown bullrush rods. Where it. lay lonely in the lap of the hills—the crater of some extinct volcano —the green shores sloped upward in gentle undulations, clothed in spring time with a glorious blaze of flowering gorse, with here and there a solitary graceful tree upon a ridge, a clump of kowhai or wind-twisted hawthorn in a green hollow. Grey and cold-looking nea.r at hand, from a distance Waiatarua glowed like a sapphire, and at sunset when the wild duck came winding- over in wedge-sihaped formation, black against "the pink and gold of sunset, the lake waters would slowly kindle to a rich wine colour. The wild duck fiound a home and brought up their young among its reeds for countless yeans, and the lordly pheasant and rustling coveys of quail rose unmolested from the coverts about the lake. Weird-looking fish with goggling eyes and catlike whiskers, like creatures bewitched, swam in the water, eete as thick as a man's arm slowly wriggled their sinuous way along the muddy bed, while myriads of frogs raised their hoarse, low chant. Remote, wild, solitary, approached but seldom by man or beast, Lake Waiatarua was for generations of the water folk a little world in itself, a sanctuary. Then, alas! some shrewd civic eye marked it for destruction as a. sacrifice to the great god Sport, for truly the sportsman shall inherit the earth- Now where once the lake flashed back the sunlight and the ripple rose gently in the reeds, fanning out before the noiseless oaring of some water tiling, or the duck skimmed the surface with whirring wings, lies a melancholy stretch of blackened turf intersected by muddy ditches, while night and day little wisps of smoke rise like the smoke of sacrificial fires. But it is not yet too late to call back the vanished lake, if we are earnest, and instant to act, for the lake is still a living thing and united effort can still save it from utter extinction. Down there on ■that dreary flat one can hear the voicc of its imprisoned springs. murmuring and fretting behind their man-made barriers, as if pleading to be allowed to repossess their ancient bed. How long before that voice sinks for ever into silence? —ISABEL M. CLUETT.