More History
History
of Stedfast Park
The cultural heritage is particularly important as Stedfast Park is the
historic site of the Piha Saw Mill
from which the famed Piha tramway began its route to Anawhata in the north
and Whatipu in the south, heroically traversing rugged hills, shifting
sands, and wave smashed cliffs. Remnants of the line can be seen all along
the coast from Karekare, including Tunnel Point with its abandoned boiler.
A number of the benched tracks at Piha and Karekare, such as the Marawhara
Walk at North Piha, are the base of the old tramway line. The ARC provides
interpretation of the Maori and milling history on the Kitekite Track,
which is entered past a huge hollow kauri stump brought in from the Kaihu
area.
History of the Piha Valley
When the West Coast was purchased from the Maori in 1854 as part of the
Te Pae o Te Rangi block, Piha was kept as a Maori Reserve of 968 acres.
The arrangement did not last.
In 1876 Dr William Stockwell, an ex-Crimean surgeon who emigrated to Auckland
in 1867, leased the block from local Maori, along with the timber cutting
rights, and then in 1886 purchased it outright. He already owned 1500
acres above the Kitekite Falls, an area which he named Glen Esk after
his Scottish homeland. On what was called a farm, Stockwell settled the
Ness family who had come with him from Scotland as well as his two step-sons
Peter Keith and Charles Cowan.
Dr Stockwell’s plans to make a fortune out of Piha kauri were defeated
by its geography. A plan to float rafts of logs out of the bay was abandoned
when the steamer could not get insurance cover for moving so close to
the shore, risking capsize in the surf. The Cowans left Piha, although
they returned to play their part in Piha’s history in the next century.
For twenty years Piha was a quiet backwater where, for some of the time
the legendary ‘Pa’ Bethell ran cattle before he moved permanently
to Te Henga.
The Rayners enter the scene
In 1910, Piha’s peace was shattered. An entrepreneurial Canadian
dentist and caberet owner, Dr Frederick Rayner, and his meat heiress wife
Ethel, had jointly bought eight thousand acres of the West Coast including
Piha. The Rayners invested in a financially troubled timbermill at Karekare.
Next, an experienced timberman, Chris Ingram, was brought in by the Rayners’
bank to advise on how to turn the enterprise to profit. It was Ingram
who engineered the precipitous tramway to access the great stands of kauri
in the Kitekite catchment. The mill was shifted to Piha, located on the
Stedfast Park flats, which were soon the vast stacking yards of the operation.
Also built on the Stedfast Park land was the blacksmith’s smithy,
and the office, important when the cutting rights were sold to New Zealand
Railways who paid the Rayners large sums in annual royalties for timber.
By this time most of the easy-to-reach timber had been felled and Railways
struggled to make the operation pay, plagued by floods and the maintenance
costs of the tramway which was regularly damaged by the surf and covered
with sand.
Logs were brought to the mill by a series of driving dams on the Glen
Esk and Piha Streams, and a network of log shutes and log slides in the
bush to get logs into the stream beds. A boom across Glen Esk Stream held
the logs before they were hauled up into the mill.
Charles Cowan, whose family had failed in its plans for the Piha bush
in the nineteenth century, ran the steam hauler which moved loads of timber
from the mill up the 900 feet hill separating Piha from Karekare. Helped
by his sons, he also ran the engine from Karekare to Whatipu for a time.
The Cowan name is commemorated in Cowan Stream, Cowan Bay and Cowan Track.
A village with store, school, cookhouse and cottages grew up on the southern
side of the Piha Stream, although the bushmen often slept in whare and
bunkhouses in the bush. The beautiful Home Track which drops from high
in the hills to the end of Glen Esk Road gets its name from the route
hungry bushmen took at the end of the day. Remnants of the Black Rock
and Glen Esk dams can also be visited from the end of Glen Esk Road. The
Mill closed in 1921, Railways having sustained huge losses.
Plans to flood Piha valley
Even while Railways was running its operation Dr Rayner was looking to
the future. In 1915 he hosted the mayor and councillors of the Auckland
City Council on a tour of the property with the hope they would buy it
as a scenic park and water catchment. The Glen Esk dam was tripped for
their entertainment and dinner served in the cookhouse.
At this time the city was obsessed with running out of water and the plan
was to build a huge dam between the high rock buttresses in Glen Esk Road
and flood the valley to a depth of 125 feet, a plan which would have drowned
Stedfast Park.
Fortunately, the cost of pumping the water to 900 feet at the high point
of the Ranges made the project prohibitive and the city did not proceed
although it was later to buy much of the bush-clad areas for inclusion
in the Auckland Centennial Memorial Park.
After Dr Rayner’s death in 1931, the trustees of his estate subdivided
Piha, and while most of his forest holdings went into the public domain,
the land on the flat was sold for holiday homes for Aucklanders, including
the land in Glen Esk Road.
Very little has changed in the intervening years. In 1915, the New Zealand
Herald thought it was too late to save the West Coast forests. In an editorial
it wrote that: ‘The terrible change produced in the once beautiful
Piha Valley by felling the kauris shows that, if the bush is left to itself
once the ax has done its job, Nature has little desire or opportunity
to repair the ravages of man.’
In fact, nature has proved more resilient than this pessimistic prediction,
and the bush-clad slopes of Stedfast Park and the adjoining parkland are
luxuriant and healthy. Kauri rickers are abundant in the bush and regular
pest control has allowed the kereru, tui and fantail to multiple. With
Stedfast Park added to the parkland, the future of this historic and beautiful
area is guaranteed for the public for all time.
Looking eastwards up Glen Esk Valley with Kitenui Knob on the left and
a
rocky bluff on the right, proposed as buttresses for the great Piha dam.
As you wander up
Glen Esk Rd and admire the regenerating kauri in the regional parkland,
you could have been confronted with an immense concrete dam face had a
proposal to the Auckland City Council gone ahead.
The year was 1915, and Dr Frederick Rayner, owner of thousands of hectares
in the Piha and West Coast area, was looking to realize his asset. The
kauri that had kept his mill sending timber down the coast was nearly
exhausted. He approached the City Council with the idea that they could
purchase his land at Piha as a scenic park and to add to the water supply
lands they already owned around Nihotupu.
The city was at the time obsessed with the fear that water might run out
for the growing city during the summer and a number of schemes were being
considered. At the time the Council was looking at Piha, hosing restrictions
had been imposed in the city.
The newspapers of the day debated the scenic potential of the land and
whether it could ever recover from the clear-fell techniques of Dr Rayner’s
milling operation.
According to the New Zealand Herald:
“The terrible change produced in the once beautiful Piha Valley
by felling the kauris shows that, if the bush is left to itself once the
axe has done its work, Nature has little desire or opportunity to repair
the ravages of man. As far as the most characteristic and beautiful of
the West Coast forests is concerned, it is too late to hope that they
may still be saved.”
To assess the situation for themselves, Dr Rayner took the Mayor, Mr Parr,
and a party of Auckland city councillors by motorcar to Piha. Dr Rayner
liked the best of cars, and was president of the AA, so the councillors,
including the one lady councillor, Ellen Melville, were assured the most
comfortable ride that was possible on the rugged Piha Road. It took two
hours to journey from the Town Hall to the top of Piha Hill, and from
there the councillors descended on foot down the steep tramway line to
the mill site. Several of the more portly councillors were by then perspiring
heavily, according to the newspaper.
For their entertainment Dr Rayner had arranged a tripping of a dam, which
they witnessed before lunch in the mill cookhouse.
The council party was particularly impressed with the prospect of public
ownership of “a three-mile frontage to the magnificent West Coast
and Piha Beach – peerless among all beaches within reasonable access
of Auckland….it is quite within the bounds of possibility that before
another two decades are spent the delights of Piha may become as familiar
to holiday picnickers as those of Cheltenham and Takapuna are today.”
Of course, that prospect has come to pass, but we can be thankful that
the other part of the project was abandoned. The proposed block of land
was 5000 acres and most could be used for water catchment. It was estimated
that 4416 million gallons could be collected off the Piha block. This
would be captured in a huge dam that could be built in Piha Valley between
the high rock buttresses on either side of today’s Glen Esk Road.
The dam would be 150 acres in extent and would be 125 feet in depth, flooding
the entire lower part of the Kitekite Stream and Piha Stream catchment
and encasing the valley in concrete.
The great fly in the ointment with this grand engineering scheme was how
to get the water back to Auckland. It would either have to be pumped 900
feet to get it over the top of the Ranges or lifted 600 feet to reach
sufficient altitude to gravity feed it to Nihotupu dam. Either course
would involve an enormous amount of costly tunnelling through the intervening
ridges.
The cost was estimated to be half to three-quarters of a million pounds,
against one million estimated for pumping water out of the Waikato.
We can be thankful that the council did not proceed with the purchase
at that time, so the valley was spared from drowning. In due course, the
Council developed the Huia dams to serve Auckland’s water needs.
The hill country at Piha was eventually purchased and became part of the
Auckland Centennial Memorial Park. The beachfront was subdivided by Dr
Rayner’s estate in the 1930s. Had the Council taken up Dr Rayner’s
original offer, there would of course have been no coastal subdivision
and no houses at Piha, just a great wilderness of dunes and coastal pohutukawa.
Sandra Coney
The Pakiti swimming pool – an idea whose time never came
Pakiti Rock at the
south end of Piha, proposed location of a tidal swimming pool.
Imagine a swimming pool on Pakiti Rock, filled by the ocean waves, a place
for children to frolic and adults to bask.
Fabulous? Or hideous?
Back in the late 1940s, the good folk of Piha seriously pursued this dream
over a period of years. Word of it has been passed down, as a kind of
coastal myth, but at the time it was a dead serious and well-developed
concept that was taken to the highest levels of government.
Presumably some Piha surf club members had seen, or at least heard about,
the splash pools at some surf beaches in Australia. The concept was that
the pool filled by waves breaking over it at high tide, leaving a salt
water swimming pool as the tide went out.
The Piha Ratepayers’ Association first began working on the project
is 1947. A fund was established to collect the projected 400 pounds. The
association sought the support of the Waitemata County Council, which
drew up plans, preparatory to taking these to the Minister of Marine,
Mr Hackett, for approval. The intended bath, excavated into Pakiti Rock,
was to be 60 feet long by 30 feet wide, to a depth of 3 foot 6 inches.
Before this could occur, Alister Bevin, who had commercial interests at
the Lion Rock end of the beach, consisting of a drinks and ice cream kiosk
and changing sheds, made a pre-emptory strike. He wrote to Mr Hackett
raising fears that concussion caused by blasting at Pakiti Rock would
destabilise the cliffs and cause rocks to fall. ‘Two years ago,’
wrote Mr Bevin, ’my wife narrowly escaped at least serious injury
from a rock which fell very close to her as she was walking along under
the cliff’.
Mr Lamont, secretary of the Piha Ratepayers, made the official application
the following month, saying the association had the support of the surf
club, the local Domain Board and the County Council. The plan was for
the pool to be vested in the Ratepayers with the surf club supervising.
It was seen as ideal for small children, providing a safe place for them
to swim.
The association was annoyed to discover that Mr Bevin had been lobbying
against the proposal. There was bad feeling between the association and
Mr Bevin over various matters at the lagoon. The association wrote to
Mr Bevin asking him to ‘desist immediately from using his loudspeaker
and amplifier, which is considered by the 74 ratepayers at this meeting
to create a nuisance.’
Unbeknown to the association, the Public Works Department inspected the
site, and interviewed Mr Bevin. While Mr Bevin’s fears about a rock
fall were dismissed, the engineer thought that the excavation would weaken
the rock shelf and change the natural shape of the beach, leading to erosion.
Furthermore, at high tide the pool was deemed to be dangerous. The department
claimed there was a perfectly adequate place for children to learn to
swim in the lagoon. The request was declined.
This provoked a strongly worded letter from ratepayers’ secretary,
Tom Pearce, who had been put in charge of the project. His association,
he said, was ‘very incensed’ that a government engineer had
inspected the site without knowledge of the ratepayers. He dismissed all
the concerns as displaying ‘a complete lack of knowledge of the
district’ and said the association would not give up. ‘On
the contrary,’ he wrote, ‘we are quite determined to proceed.’
As to children swimming in the lagoon – ‘All the drainage
from houses and the Boarding House, including the cow shed and the boarding
house septic tank, flow into this creek and conditions during the height
of summer are nauseating in the extreme.’
By the time Mr Pearce met with engineers from the Ministry of Works and
the County Council on site, the argument had been raging for a whole year.
On inspecting the proposed site, the Ministry engineers said they did
not favour work on the rocky shelf, and reported that the ratepayers were
now looking at siting the baths further landward, thus requiring less
excavation.
The association at this stage appeared to lose heart. The matter of the
swimming pool vanished from the ratepayers’ agenda. Would today’s
beachgoers have loved or loathed it? I suspect the former.
Sandra Coney