Michael Batson

The South Coast near Wellington on New Zealand’s North Island is an inhospitable stretch of land at the best of times. The winds are sometimes extreme with gales from the north and the south. The only time there’s calm is when the wind is changing direction. However, the barrenness belies a tapestry of life, death and history to beguile the visitor.

Public access exists along the whole stretch of the South Coast. There are a number of roads and tracks which provide opportunities for circular walking and driving routes.

My access was by 4WD. Paul had been coming here for years and knew the area well, it’s attractions and pitfalls. Our route was along the paper road that follows the Karori Stream down to the coast from South Makara Road heading to a collection of baches, Kiwi weekend huts, though some are more like four-bedroom houses.

Karori Stream regularly floods and carries with it all manner of objects. To get to the coast we crossed the stream 31 times, so it pays to avoid periods of heavy weather.

He told me he’d once brought an English mate of his visiting New Zealand here for a day. “He liked it so much he stayed a fortnight. He thought this was the real New Zealand,” said Paul. “He kept saying that you couldn’t do this in England but was it legal? To cap it all off, he won second-division Lotto. He thought New Zealand was great!”

The existing formed road crosses private land and permission from the landowner is required to use it. The coastal track to Red Rocks, or Pariwhero, is just a short drive from the Wellington CBD, and many people drive to the coast and then walk along the foreshore.

“Nutters,” said Carl, who enjoys extended stays at the bach I visited, one of 10 built at the mouth of Karori Stream.  Carl had a pot belly to match the stove, so I gathered he wasn’t much of a rambler. The baches are solid constructs with all amenities, including hot showers, generators for power and solar heating, some have satellite television.

Everyone owns an assortment of vehicles, 4WD, also motocross bikes, boats and quad bikes. There’s a propensity for firearms, largely I assume, for hunting the feral goats and wild pigs to be found in the area. The goats I could hear on the steep, rugged hillsides, but not see. The wild pigs I couldn’t see or hear and judging by their size in some trophy photos, I wouldn’t want to do either.

Carl explained that while he and his mates built and owned their bach over years, the land now belonged to a Jaffa, or “just another fucking Aucklander” and was valued at less than $200k. The said Aucklander is now trying to recoup costs by asking bach-owners to fork out a seven-figure sum.  Not surprisingly, negotiations have stalled.

The South Coast has had a hard time from farming, quarrying, fires, off-road vehicles, and introduced pests and weeds. It’s a testing environment with blasting winds, eroding screes and desiccating summers. Some areas are now so damaged by off-road vehicles and the old quarrying operations that many coastal flora and fauna are now rare. Since the quarry closed in 1999, the city council has set about replanting the habitat but recovery has been slow.

Nearby Terawhiti Station is one of New Zealand’s oldest and largest sheep stations. Over the last 160 years it’s seen a diverse range of land uses. Originally a cattle station, Terawhiti grew into one of New Zealand's largest sheep stations before returning to cattle in 1993.

Gold mining was attempted during the 1800s, however this failed to provide an economic return. Forestry has also been tried but this has also failed due to the slow growth cycle for pine, the trees and soil blasted by sea salt and deprived of nutrients.

Fitting then that wind farming is seen as a new chapter of land-use in the ongoing story of survival in this harsh landscape. Meridian Energy has established over 60 turbines dotted along the ridges, each over 110m tall with blades 40m long and weighing 10 tonnes. The farm nets a hefty annual rental from Meridian for each turbine, money for jam, and more that the land would ever return from farming.

Wind turbines are fairly robust, they’d have to be to survive on such an exposed site as the South Coast. New Zealand is two long thin strips of land contained between two wide bodies of water. Wind has hundreds of miles to build up force before crashing into terra firma. Turbine gearboxes, which dictate directional tilt on the blades, are mainly designed for wind speed, not wind gusts, which are extreme in the area. In violent winds, the turbines need to be entirely shut down for safety reasons, so they aren’t always operational.

Such are the extreme variation of winds found in Wellington, an original turbine on nearby Brooklyn Hill was, and is, regularly shut down, but still needed a complete overhaul after only half the lifespan guaranteed by the Danish manufacturer.

Pubilc access to the station was once fairly open, but is now curtailed on those areas with Meridian turbines. Visitors are now subject to the laws of occupational health and safety, and cannot venture on to the site without the proper authority and documentation.

At the beach near the Karori Stream mouth, the nearby lighthouse looked like the construction crew had carried out the work when drunk, such is the pronounced southerly lean of the concrete tower. Caution is advised if making the short trip to the tower. “It’s further than it looks,” said Carl, who also claimed to have climbed the ladder and stolen the bulb.

There’s a constant flow of beach traffic with recreational fishers and day trippers; and vessels on the approaches to and from Wellington harbour. The ferry services to Picton in the Marlborough Sounds, entrance to the South Island, seem to travel in pairs, as if for safety. Cook Strait is a notoriously rough stretch of water, which makes the lack of size in these vessels all the more surprising.

In 1909, the steamer SS Penguin sank with the loss of over 70 lives, driven on to the rocks near Cape Terawhiti by strong currents and a flood tide, after the ship lost its bearings at night. When it sank the cold water flooded the ship’s boilers causing a massive explosion. Parts of the wreck are still visible to divers and there’s a small plaque mounted on rocks near Cave Bay.  I was told near here a French hermit now long gone once lived for years, a painter and a poet, but that was in the 1940s.

Back towards Wellington along the coast Red Rocks are aptly named, the sharp shore is vivid with oxides. Māori, who visited the headland to fish and gather bull kelp (Rimurapa), told various legends explaining how the red colour. One says the rocks are stained with the blood of Māui (half-man, half-god), which he used to bait his hook to catch Te Ika a Māui – the North Island.Geologists have a different explanation.

The greywackes here began life as sediments on an ancient seafloor. About 200 million years ago, pillow lava flowed from fissures in the seabed, releasing great clouds of superheated steam into the ocean. The minerals that leached out impregnated the rocks you see today, giving them their distinctive palette. The red comes from the fine grains of iron oxide, or haematite. The greens are from chlorite, a clay mineral. The red and white striped rocks are full of silica.

Over the millennia, the rocks were driven to the surface by the tectonic hammering of the Alpine Fault, where the great Australian and Pacific plates collide. It is the longest active fault in New Zealand running for 650 kilometres and makes some of New Zealand’s mountain ranges the fastest-rising in the world. Later upheavals folded them into the waves of rock you can see in the cliffs, and the Cook Strait elements wore them away to expose today’s kaleidoscope.

The sense of living on the edge in and around Cook Strait is sharpened by the frequent earthquakes. Wellington’s suburbs are even divided by the fault lines. Many believe a major earthquake, like the one in 1855 which raised much of the region’s coastline, is overdue, a sobering thought.

Heading in the opposite direction, east away from the harbour between May and August fur seals beach at Rimurapa. They can be noisy but you’ll smell them before you see them. Well camouflaged, seals can be difficult to spot among the rocks. It also pays to be wary if around them so avoid coming between them and the sea.

Besides beached seals, the coastal strip is home to lizards and birdlife.  Aside from the large seagulls, resembling adolescent albatross in size, there are long-billed oystercatchers and reef herons. Blue penguins breed along here too, and inland grey warbler, pipit, fantail, silvereye and kingfishers.

Near Cave Bay, it pays to be cautious driving on the beach. Here the tide comes right in against the cliffs, and the sand is subsequently much softer, and having to ask for a tow can be time-consuming, not to mention, embarrassing. To avoid this it’s best to deflate your tyres slightly.

Few traces of nearly 1000 years of Māori settlement remain. The Ngati Mamoe people came to the Wellington District about the beginning of the fourteenth century. Ngai Tara, the occupants of the region at the time, gave Ngati Mamoe land extending from Rimurapa towards Omere (Cape Terawhiti) and northwards to Karori and Mokara, which Ngati Mamoe occupied for about 150 years, probably leaving around 1460 AD.

Surf-casting and trawling is banned at Cable Bay. Here the main electricity cables come ashore from the South Island, powering much of the rest of the country. Fisheries officers patrol the hillsides with binoculars and helicopters take photos of vessels and fishers doing anything they’re not supposed to. One absent minded trawler once rent untold damage to the cable costing a six-figure sum in order to keep the North Island’s lights on.

Access along the beach road to Cable Bay is now blocked by gates and concrete blocks. Even motorbikes are unable to get through without permission.

The South Coast is rife with paua (abalone) poachers. The daily limit for paua is 10 per diver. The minimum size limit varies by region but here it’s 125mm along the longest part of the shell. Fisheries inspectors patrol the coast and intercept carloads of recreational divers carrying sacks of paua, but the poachers employ increasingly diverse methods to avoid detection.

Some bring their mates along to increase the allowable catch quota, though legally to be eligible to do this, each person requires proof the catch is theirs, so must have their own diving gear. Others come and go several times a day, unobserved by fisheries staff who have much ground to cover. Catching illegal quantities and hoarding them submerged for retrieval later is another method. Others cook and eat the undersized shell fish before leaving with the legal sized paua, the burnt driftwood and detritus of opened shells attesting to the practice.

Illegally caught paua is destined for farmer’s markets providing cash income for poachers, while ignoring the non-sustainability of this ecological pillage.  Fisheries experts say such blatant plunder, sometimes on a massive scale, will have long-reaching effects on local paua stocks.

If convicted, poachers, also referred to as “plunderers” or “fish thieves”, could face penalties of up to a $250,000 fine, forfeiture of gear and vehicles, and – if it can be proved that there was a commercial motive behind the poaching – up to five years in prison. However, many receive community service, which holds less deterrence.

While it’s a pity then that land so battered by nature is then robbed by people, the South Coast has much to offer the visitor. Tours are available from Wellington, or, if you’re like me, you find a local to offer you an insight.