THE WAIKATO RIVER

Waikato Times, Volume 105, Issue 17687, 16 April 1929, Page 9

THE WAIKATO RIVER

(By HENRY WILY.)

The Waikato, the greatest and most | important of our New Zealand rivers, I possesses characteristics that make it Jin some respects unique among the rivers of the world; added to that it has a life history more vivid, romantic and exciting than falls to the lot of many rivers. The blind forces of Nature have ever sought to check and thwart and baffle it, and in its old age it has been still more blindly manhandled, till it is little wonder that it carries out its functions slowly, ■ indifferently, and at times it would almost seem malevolently. A dozen years ago it was very much in the limelight on account of the way ignorance and wilfulness attempted, and to a great extent succeeded, to destroy its value for navigation and drainage in the face of the best practical and expert opinion. During the last year or so the injury wrought to it by silt from the Arapuni diversion channel has again brought it into prominence, and to-day the apparent willingness of the Government to at last face the situation and give the river its chance, if chance it has, and the promised inspection of it by the Minister for Public Works, makes it once more a matter of interest to the public. 11 is proposed in this article to give a brief outline of the Waikato’s early history and the disastrous manner in which man has meddled and muddled in its affairs. The theme is a large one and can scarcely be done justice to within the narrow limits of a newspaper’s columns, but at least enougti can be told to give readers some idea of what lias been and is, and probably will be, the river's career.

Early History. It is fairly commonly known that the Waikato has not always flowed in its present bed. In fact it has tried many courses, and has praoticall} boxed the compass in its efforts to And a path to the sea that suited it. Since it first began to carry off the surplus waters of the great central plateau of the North Island it has run in at least five different channels, and, for the main part of its career, in at least four different directions.

Millions of years ago the North Island of New Zealand was by no means the solid stable patch of land we now hope that it is, in spite of occasional tremors that make us wonder what is still going on under our feet. It was, especially the heart of it, a seething mass of convulsive volcanic energy, on a scale compared with which the greatest outbursts of historic times would have seemed harmless squibs. The face of the land was continually changing its form and its elevation. If you look at a rice-pudding when it is taken out of the oven and watch it gradually cool, counting each second as a period of thousands of years, you will observe in miniature what went on here on a gigantic scale. You will see little bubbles rising under its skin, sometimes bursting and emitting a tiny puff of steam—sometimes, subsiding and leaving a hollow. Tiny W'rinkles form on its surface in little insignificant ripples, but larger in proportion to the size of the pudding than the highest chain of mountains to the size of the earth. Gradually, as the internal heat escapes the surface of the pudding becomes more and more quiescent till finally all movement ceases, just as movement ce-ased in this island oi ours. And if you have imagination you can reconstruct for yourself a dim image of w’hat went on for countless ages in the plateau from which the Waikato springs. At some very early time a great river ran from the high country of which Lake Taupo is now the centre, carrying off the torrential rainfalls of tin period, of the intensity of which we moderns can form no conception. Down into Hawke’s Bay it ran, and commenced filling up the great bay of the sea whicli is now the fertile Heretaunga Plains. Its course can still be traced in places where it cut itself a course through the rhyolitic Java.

Its Socond Essay.

Then some great seismic disturbance altered the level of the land and ended the first chapter of the Wai-

SKETCH OF ITS HISTORY. SEVERAL CHANGES IN ITS COURSE. GREAT SEISMIC DISTURBANCES. A Ministerial party will shortly make an Inspection of the Waikato River with the object of ascertaining what can be done to secure greater efficiency from the viewpoints of drainage and navigation. In view of that visit a series of three articles, to appear In these columns dealing with the past, present and future of the river will be of peculiar Interest.

(kato’s history. The river took an entirely new course, running first north and then east and falling into the Bay of Plenty, its occupancy of its new bed was not as lengthy as its tenure of the first one, but was yet of reputable duration, being perhaps much in the same proportion to the duration of the white man’s time in New Zealand as the length of the sheet o! paper I am writing on is to its thickness. But it had not yet settled down. Some other convulsion of Nature turned it in an entirely new direction. Forty miles from Lake Taupo it had taken an abrupt turn to th-e right. Now at this point it turned to the left, flowing for some distance to the nor’-west, then turning north, converting the great central Waikato Plain into a lake, which it in time filled up with pumice sand from the great central volcanoes, and finding its outlet in the wide inlet of the sea now known as the Ilauraki Plains, which also it industriously set to work to fill up. Unfortunately it was interrupted before it had finished its task, hence the drainage troubles of Ilauraki. Some wild convulsions sundered the hills at Taupiri, and through the rift poured the Waikato and on into the Manukau, carrying with it countless millions of cubic yards of spoil into that great harbour. It would have filled it up, as it had filled up on its way the depression which is now the Ake Ake Plains, but it was disturbed again at its task by another rifting of the coast hills which allowed it to go straight out to the sea by its present mouth. Its Troubles Begin.

From now on we need only concern ourselves with the last sixty or l seventy miles of the river’s course, i The upper part is well able to take I care of itself, for it runs between well-defined banks, and has enough i fall in the flattest section to be able to keep itself in respectable condition. When the Waikato broke through Taupiri it found itself in pretty easy conditions. There was an ample fall to the sea, and it began to dig itself out a considerable bed through the drift formation of which the locality is composed, for to a river, as to you and me, a comfortable bed is a most desirable thing, and to attain it it devotes all its talents and energies. In the course of time it gouged out a channel for itself sixty or seventh feet deep, and no doubt began to think it ! was safely settled down for life—but its troubles were not yet over. Slowly and insensibly the North Island began to sink, as it had sunk more than once before and risen again. Gradually it lowered the elevation of the Waikato's bed till the bottom of it was many feel below sea level. No longer could the unfortunate river keep its course clear by sweeping out to sea all of the millions of tons of sand it annually brought down. And in the course of time it became what we found it when we came here, and what the Maoris found it centuries before we saw it, a wide shallow stream, with a bed four times as wide as il ought to be, and thousands of acres of sandbanks. But it had not quite forgotten the ambitions belonging to every self-respecting river, and in the ages which had elapsed since the sinking of the land was arrested, had managed to do the best possible for itself ( under the disabilities which very little ' fall for 'the last thirty miles *of its I I course and not much more for the next thirty laid it under.

; At this point, by way of a digression, ; it may he as well to explain what has puzzled a good many people. Through the swamp lands fringing the river flow sluggish tributaries with firm clay bottoms twenty and even thirty feet below their surfaces, and yet flowing into a river only two or three feet deep. Many have wondered how these beds could have been gouged out deep down below any influence of an effective current. They were of course made when the Waikato was flowing in a deep channel. Running through sandy country the river has filled its bed, but the tributaries carry no sand and, slow as they are, have yet current enough to keep ouL the river-sand. They are, in miniature, what the Wai--1 kato was before its misfortunes overlook it.