Home to strange and wondrous amphibians and fish who had no concerns about pollution or wholesale driftnet fishing ... all they had to worry about were the whereabouts of the marauding prehistoric sharks and rays.
Until they were severed by sharp teeth they would have enjoyed sparkling, pristine waters.
Today it's not a ray you're likely to get a nip from whilst wading ... more likely be a rusting can.
The thing is, we make a lot of waste, human and domestic and industrial, and we've got to put it somewhere.
So, it's either in the ground or in the sea.
We haven't yet worked out how to hurl the millions of tonnes of junk produced globally every week into space yet ... but we're probably looking at it.
The universe, apparently, is infinite.
The perfect dumping ground and it won't attract the scavengers or seagulls.
And you never have to see it or smell it.
It is unlikely to happen, of course, as Nasa is struggling to get anything up into the great dark void these days, although in March 2009 they managed to send up a large space telescope dubbed the Kepler (named after a 17th-century German astronomer).
It's a four-year mission - to search for other solar systems and new stars and planets.
Which it has been doing successfully, by all accounts.
The latest discovery was but a week or so ago, although unlike the scientific fraternity I was slightly unsettled to hear it had discovered a piece of universal real estate called Kepler 22b.
The signs and signals it has received point to a planet twice the size of ours, but with potentially similar conditions.
I don't understand how they reach such a conclusion, but the indications are it has a temperature around the 22C mark, and may have soil and water.
Sounds like the recipe for life, not to mention a recipe for somewhere to go when this house called Earth is totally trashed as a result of this out-of-control party we appear to be hosting.
I reckon we're in the kitchen of that house ... we're keeping things pretty tidy, but the living room is occupied by the usual environmental gatecrashing suspects, China, Russia and the US.
So maybe that's why the Kepler probe was sent aloft ... to find another venue.
And one appears to have been found, although anyone living on that distant and clement world need not fear invasion ... for it is 600 light years away.
Also, it is a lonely planet and appears to be the only one orbiting a sun like ours. And there is no indication it has any moons, so staring up at the night sky would be a tad dull.
But the search for Earth-like planets will continue, and with all the money being injected into the task you can't help wondering why.
They're all too far to reach, and after making it to the Moon 42 years ago we haven't proved we can go any further and our space-propulsion technology is still crazy old rockets.
But of course as the house gets messier so too does the determination to find a quick way out of it.
Meanwhile, the search for a new venue appears to be on, and behind the sealed and secured doors of great camouflaged hangars in Utah experiments on warp drive engines and developing worm drive access to distant worlds in mere minutes is continuing.
And meanwhile again, over there on Kepler 22b a conversation is taking place.
"We've been spotted," a high ranking official with Kepler 22b's waste disposal division gravely announces.
A colleague, with a look of concern, responds with a speculative question.
"Do you think they've come across one of our sewage containers?"
"That's more than possible ... we've been blasting 130 of them out into the void every day for the past 12 years ... someone's bound to come across one sooner or later."
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.
