SAILING OVER DRY LAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 196, 19 August 1936, Page 6

SAILING OVER DRY LAND.

PROBLEM OF KAIPARA HEADS. (By M.H.) A problem of national importance which lias its real source in the depletion of the watershed areas through deforestation is the problem of the silting up of river mouths and the mouths of areas of tidal water which is augmented by fresli-water rivers. Only last week the Wanganui Harbour Board was put to very considerable expense and anxiety when heavy seas met flood waters at the mouth of the Wanganui River, threatening a change of course of the river and the breaking through of a new outlet to the sea. Sandbags were used by the hundred to control the flow of water. A similar crisis occurred in 1922, it will be remembered, after which groynes were erected, which quickly became covered with sand. Latterly, however, these have become exposed again.

Nearer Auckland a problem involving unceasing vigilance from shipping is found at the mouth of the Kaipara Harbour, which is the largest tidal area in the Dominion, and where twice daily a tremendous volume of outgoing water often charged with silt meets the full force of the Tasman rollers and the west coast sand drift. So great is the drift at this point of the coast that the Kaipara bar extends as far as seven miles out to sea from the heads, and the ever-changing banks and channels are a constant menace to navigation.

If ships negotiating the Kaipara entrance followed the.old Admiralty chart made from the survey of the s.s. Pandora in 1852 they would have to sail over the sand dunes, for tlieee occupy to-day the site which apparently once was deep water. The navigable channel now used by boats, the North Channel, is three-quarters of a mile from the old Pandora line. This fact has been established by the recent visit to the Kaipara of the Marine Department's vessel, s.s. Matai, which has just completed an overhaul of the buoys and marks of the locality. Vessels to-day must use the Marine Department marks instead of the Admiralty charts.

That there is well-authenticated Maori historical record of the changing Kaipara entrance is perhaps not widely known. One of the feats of the giant Kawharu, ancestor of the Paora Kawliaru family, leading family of the Ngati-Whatua tribe, whose lands extended from beyond Helensville to the Tamaki River, was that he waded across the Kaipara entrance at low tide. Kawliaru was indisputably a giant, for his bones were seen by John Slieeliari, the Rev. W. Gittos and other pioneers of the Kaipara before their final secret interment, and were estimated to be those of a man about nine feet in height. Yet as the Kaipara channels are now, he could not perform the feat were he alive to-day, for the Matai found that the shallowest water was 27 feet at low water, spring tides. The Maori history of the heads discloses that once, centuries ago, a vast fertile area of land lay insid£ the present North Head. This land was named Te Taporapora-o-Toko-o-Te-Rangi, which means "The Outspread Mat of Toko-o-Te-Rangi." Toko was a son of Kauea, the grandson of Toi-kai-Rakau, who led the migration which arrived about 1150 A.D. The fertile "mat" lay approximately opposite the mouth of the Oruawharo River, and is now only sand flats, having been overwhelmed by the sea. The method of its engulfment is poetically accounted for in folk lore by the magical powers of the guardian ocean Taniwlia,. of the descendants of Rongomai, whose canoe, the Maahuhu, it had safely escorted to Aotearoa. This Taniwha, named Kaivvliare, when invoked to avenge an insult to the Rongomai tribes from the people who lived on the "mat" of Toko-o-Te-Rangi, is said to have raised a terrible tempest which shook the whole coast, sweeping away the "mat" and its Maori inhabitants, and thus very considerably altering the Kaipara channels and mouth. Whether caused by Kaiwhare or by ordinary meteorological phenomena, there was certainly in more recent times a devastating storm which swept away every vestige of drv land under the North Head.

* May not the dire and costly effects to-day of erosion resulting from widespread deforesting of river banks and sources quite reasonably be attributed to the wrath of Tane, god of the forests, whose children have been so drastically slaughtered by axe and fire during a century of European occupancy ?