Brian Rudman: Ever-shrinking Domain needs boundary riders

Twenty-odd years ago, the Parnell Community Board went on the warpath against locals who had slyly absorbed slices of neighbouring parkland into their own backyards. Fences were ordered back to their correct places and incorrectly aligned hedgerows, sneakily planted to enlarge private gardens, were ripped out.

In more recent times the Parnell activists have turned their attention to the worst case of all, the incredibly shrinking Auckland Domain. By their estimation the city's oldest park has, in the past 145 years, shed at least 4.3ha.

Some land, to be sure, seems to have gone legitimately: a corner, for example, handed over early on for hospital use, followed by the seizure of land in the 1870s for the new railway. Later, slices became the homes of rugby league and tennis. But just how much is missing and in what circumstances is unclear.

Yesterday, after much foot-dragging, the Auckland City Council decided to spend about $10,000 researching the 150 years of alienation.

A plan is to be prepared showing the boundaries of the Auckland Domain as defined in the Auckland Domain Vesting Act 1893, superimposed over the present domain "so Auckland City is in a better position to make any claims or statements in respect of former domain land should it require to do so".

What a shame the council didn't do this 10 years ago when New Zealand Rail offered it first refusal on a slice of one-time Domain land alongside the Waipapa Stream, adjacent to Birdwood Crescent, Parnell.

Community committee chairman Roger Cole-Baker said the asking price was $300,000. The council said no and then approved plans for 13 terraced houses from the eventual purchaser.

Unfortunately, if council officials had done their homework at the time, they would have discovered that the railways was trying to sell them land Auckland City either already owned, or had first claim to, as statutory guardian of the Auckland Domain.

First-term councillor and one-time Birdwood Crescent resident Richard Simpson has been battling for years for clarification of Domain boundaries. He put up a long fight against the townhouse proposal but failed to move either bureaucrats or politicians, despite a pretty convincing case.

Put at its simplest, in July 1840, one of Governor William Hobson's first moves was to proclaim a public domain bounded on the Parnell side by the Waipapa Stream and on the other by Waiparuru Stream which ran down Grafton Gully. The boundaries were defined in the Public Domains Act 1860 and the land declared Crown land. In 1893 the Domain was vested in Auckland City.

During the 1860s the railway came to town, and as a report from the Daily Southern Cross, April 24, 1865, records, "the Auckland and Drury railway passes through the Domain". To ease construction of the railway, the stream was put in a culvert and moved farther west towards the Domain.

It was the surplus land to the east of the culvert which was put up for sale in 1995. Mr Simpson argues that the Domain boundary is not the culvert but the original stream bed, and if the land was surplus to rail requirements, it should have been returned to whence it came - to the Domain.

But the land at the bottom of what was once Mr Simpson's garden is not the only land in question. Over the years there has been nibbling from all directions. How, for example, did Carlaw Park become freehold land?

Apparently, in the 1920s what was then a market garden was leased from either the city council, or the hospital board, depending on who is telling the story, as a home for rugby league. Subsequently it was freeholded and is now about to be turned into a commercial property development cash-cow for league.

While it seems too late to turn the clock back as far as these cases are concerned, clarifying the boundaries and status of Domain land could prevent future shrinkage - if, for example, occupants of the tennis stadium and bowling greens, both within the original Domain boundaries, decide to move on. More basically, it seems long past time that the boundaries of Auckland's oldest park were accurately defined.