SEA AND SAND DUNES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2858, 23 December 1908, Page 14

SEA AND SAND DUNES.

THE DOMAIN BOARD'S INSPECTION. The Ocean Beach is a scene of incessant warfare between land and water, and an I annual inspection of the frontier of silver I sand shows to what extent one or the other ■ has prevailed. The Ocean Beach possesses 1 remarkable characteristics, one of which is the undertow that makes it euoh a dangerous place to bathe from, and incidentally shifts so many tons of sand. For this the tremendous inrush of billows to ! the Brighton Bight is mainly responsible. I The heaped-up waters find an easy egress 1 by the narrow channel between White ! Island and Forbury Head, through which { they pass at the rate of three miles an I hour, thus causing a scour, which, though felt most severely at St. Clair, affects the whole foreshore right down to Lawyer's Head. In these struggles between Ocean and Mother Earth, man, being mainly a land I animal, takes the part of the latter, and I were it not for the Ocean Beach Domain j Board a high spring tide, accompanied by .' a heavy gale from southerly, might result in a flooded St. Kilda. In emergencies like these, man always seeks a buffer, and this has been found in the sand, buffeted to and fro by the sea and blown about in clouds by every wind. Not a very stable material for a, rampart against the ocean, but with a little ingenuity and a 1 great deal of perseverance the Domain j Board has succeeded beyond expectations 1 and has practically got that most shifty of earthly elements in chains. Scrub fences were erected to act as revetments, j and the sand drifted and covered them, 1 precisely as it blotted out the cities of i the Pharaohs. More fences were mad© 1 and in turn covered, and the coarse, hardy ; sand grass, spreading and growing I steadily, served further, as it were, to , bind tho compact. ! The public strolling by the waves on j Sundays are not likely to be dazzled by 1 what the Domain Board has accomplished. I (t is not showy work, and it is almost monotonously gradual. They may notice the top of a fence just appearing above the sand, or the absence of a lagoon here and there, but they do not associate these ', phenomena with human effort. People have a way of putting all this sort of thing 1 down to magic; whereas the worthy memJ bers of the Ocean Beach Domain Board are j not exactly magicians, • though they may have prevented the waves from levenging , themselves on the homes in adjacent suburbs. One of the annual inspections referred to above was made on the 9th instant bjr ! Messrs J. H. Hancock (chairman), 0. ! Aorkle, W. Burnett. Isaac Green, F. Anderson, and G. Hodges. The inspection commenced at St. Clair, and was in every ! respect most thorough. The wind, which ! blew with \iolence, held possession of the ' beach, and seemed to take a frenzied deI light in catching up clouds of sand and 1 hurling it in stinging defiance in the faces , of the party, who had a breezy morning ' of it, but who stuck to their guns and emerged sand-covered but triumphant. The chairman of the board expiessed himself thorougldy satisfied with the progress made «inoe tho last annual inspection, and ! pointed out how tho one w-oak spot (the 1 gully running 111 behind the band rotunda) was being rendered impregnable. Mr Hancock has the name of being an enthu- : "siast. which, when one consider* the shocking examples of certain English villages and steeples fathoms under the North Sea. is hardly surprising. In addition to the scrub fences running transx ci s-eh , another, just outside these, has been constructed longitudinally, and this, it is hoped, will do away with tho two lagoons which, I after a spring tide, have long formed features on either side of the St. Kilda approach. This approach has be«n considerably extended, and a raised road now reaches within reasonable distance of high water mark. Part of this ha 6 already ' been covered with clay, and in time the public will "be able to walk to the sea- ' shore on solid ground, instead of struggling ' thereto ankle-deep in sand. ' The policy of the Domain Board for the ' coming year is the came a« usual —the for- ; mation of sandhills and the gradual beautifying of a strip of wilderness. The future holds for *»nthu«ia«ts a vision of a 1 green and stately a\enu«. borriftred by ' trees and shrub*, extend ina from Lawyers Head to St. Clair. over what «ere once 1 merely sand duno«. I A SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. • WELLINGTON. December 9. Dr Cockayne has been instructed by the Government to make a com pre hens ive re- ' rjort on the beet way of dealing with drift-

' ing sand, -which in some places is threatening to become a serious danger, especially , on the coast between Patea, and Paekaka- ■ riki, just north of Wellington. It is esti- ' mated that over 90,000 acres in Welling- : ton alone are threatened with destruction. j Something has been, done with marram j grass, lupins, and ice plant, but it is not J comprehensive enough. The planting of I pines, especially Jack pines, has been i found effective in America. Dr Cockayne I is at work near Bulls, and after completj ing investigations in the Manawatu district will go further north. It is stated that 313,000 acres are either barren already or threatened by sand-drift. The appointment of Dr Cockayne was one of Mr M'Nab'e last official acts. He will direct special attention to finding out and investigating the conditions for plant life on the various classes of dunes at present existing on Crown lands, noting the extent of existing sand-drifts on Crown lands, and suggesting methods by which the drifting sand and dunes may be made commercially profitable by afforestation or covering the sands with pasture, and furnishing a genera] report dealing primarily with the dunes on Crown, land, but with special bearing on the improvement of the dunes in general, so as to be a guide for such persons a& desire to reclaim sand dunes on their own land.