Clyde Quay Wharf, Wellington.

Progress, Volume V, Issue 12, 1 October 1910, Page 16

Clyde Quay Wharf, Wellington.

It is not the most wonderful of all quays ever built, but it is the last built in the harbour of "Wellington, giving finish for the moment to the harbour improvements. Hard by is the dock, which at present need not trouble any one with its affairs, for they are not of the happiest. Hard by, also, is the Destructor and the Municipal industrial quarters, if they may be so nominated, where the Council keeps its carts, horses, tools, and so forth. A wall connects these by sea with the baths of Te Aro, and then comes the untouched sweep of Oriental Bay. On the other side of the Clyde Quay is the railway station of Te Aro, and thence a sea wall, broken by the Taranaki Street wharf and the boat sheds of the various clubs, takes the line of works on to Jervois Quay.

Standing on the Clyde Quay wharf, one sees this connection and one follows it all along to the Queen's Wharf, and one marks the various shipping, big liners, mosquito boats, sailing craft, pleasure craft, coal hulking craft. The eye, getting past these, stops on the Railway Wharf and the breastworks, marking more ships and more pleasure craft, notably the steamers of the harbour ferry service. Subsequently it falls on the Glasgow Wharf and the King's Wharf, vast structures unsurpassed in Australasia. They, too, have liners alongside, and they speak plainly of the comforts of the latest styles in handling cargo and stowing warehouses. The railway lines come down to these wharves, and this enables you to gauge what sort of a future there is before the port of Wellington. Beyond the last of these big structures is the reclamation, where one can at any time see the big dredges at work, making land through its gigantic pipes and driving the ocean back into deep water at a pace which a few years ago would have seemed necromantic. To-day the children lounge about the dripping scene, watch the gulls fighting for a meal as the dredge discharges its spoil of the sea bottom, and wander on when they have had enough to the esplanade, to watch the fast completing Hutt railway duplication crossing the fag end of the bay. All this you see comfortably from the Clyde Quay Wharf, and the sight is exhilarating for the Wellingtonian, and informative for the tourist, who thereby is taught much about the advancing prosperity of the capital of Maoriland. The wharf is between five and six hundred feet long, and protected by fenders of strong posts, carrying a breastwork which protects the sides -of ships from the concrete of the construction. The thing chiefly remarkable about the wharf is the gantry way that carries the cranes for use on either side. Bach crane has a long leg and a short leg, the former on the deck of the wharf, the other on the gantry way, and in this way are they enabled to travel back and forth about their work without obstructing the traffic of the wharf. A big boat can lie alongside on each side. From the level of the water this is the

best place from which to see a view of the harbour, with all the wharves and shipping, and the scene presented by the shore curving .away to the Hutt Valley and carrying on the tradition of beauty to the summits of the Rimutaka beyond. Our illustration is characteristic of the work.