Dialogue: City's sorry sewage saga breaks a southern heart

DAVID HILL*, a provincial who usually discovers plenty to snigger about on visits to Auckland, finds only sorrow in the state of once-golden beaches.

Ah, Auckland's North Shore beaches. Gently shelving sand, pohutukawas and Norfolk pines, a sea like hammered copper stretching to a horizon where Rangitoto, Motutapu and the others lie.

I'm talking North Shore beaches in winter, of course.

In summer, Auckland beaches from Torpedo Bay to Long Bay support Sartre's dictum that hell is other people. That's largely because many of those other people are teenagers.

I have nothing against teenagers - but I'm certainly not letting my grandson grow up to be one.

In winter, however, the teenagers are off skateboarding in shopping malls. North Shore beaches are left mainly to the over-50s and the under-5s, both of which groups are good advertisements for the human species.

Winter at Takapuna or Milford or Torbay beaches means fine days when a bright brittle sun crawls low across the sky, or unfine days when the surf growls before you and commuter roads growl behind you.

People make eye contact on North Shore beaches in winter. The only other time such eye contact happens to a visiting provincial like me is when I change lanes suddenly on the motorway.

Winter beaches bring other bonuses: the light is broader and more diffuse; storms leave mini-Sahara sand-dunes across parking lots, and toss up seams of tiny, perfect shells.

You get clear views of everything: the doggy-doo dumpsters which archaeologists of 4000AD are going to see as evidence of a cult who left organic offerings inside their god's totem; the gloriously vulgar cliff-top mansions which bring a smirk to non-Aucklanders who see the rear retaining wall starting to follow the latest slip right on down.

Yes, those little beaches like golden eyelashes along the length of the North Shore are among Auckland's greatest assets.

Which is where this article switches from lyric to lamentation. Because many of them aren't golden any more.

It was like a jolt in the stomach. Someone has put a Grecian 2000 rinse through the sand of Mairangi Bay, St Leonards Bay and others.

The golden grains are now murky, oily, grubby. I wouldn't want my grandson running his fingers through them. I wouldn't want him to pick up any of those little shells, unless there was soap and water nearby.

The reason for the new colour scheme is distressingly easy to find.

Even down on the farm, we've heard of the notices appearing on North Shore beaches: Swimming Is Dangerous ... Keep Away From Stormwater Outlets. We've read about the sewage-loving slugs found at Long Bay.

I also drove down Oteha Valley Rd from Northcross towards the Northern Motorway and saw another link in the over-pulled chain.

I've no idea why a local body allowed developers to cram in whole hillsides of units until you have a valley looking like a huge container storage basin. I've no idea why adjacent local bodies allowed so many blocks of flats on sections where once a single house with a single loo stood.

But I can't go anywhere on the North Shore without picturing its overloaded sewer and stormwater systems straining beneath my feet, exceeding their capacity so often that Auckland from Devonport to Albany is literally and littorally fringed with its own filth.

We non-Aucklanders tend to snigger when the City of Sails (Sales?) finds itself in the metaphorical poo. We love it when the Ranfurly Shield goes south, or when the rain goes north and submerges garagefuls of BMWs.

But nobody down here is gloating at the thought of parts of our country's coastline being fouled; at New Zealand children threatened with septicaemia and dysentery because an adequate North Shore sewage system is still only in the ... well, in the pipeline.

As someone who laughs at Auckland while I'm living in New Zealand, and boasts about it when I'm out of the country, I hope fervently that North Shore local bodies and developers, and anyone else involved in this sorry sewage saga, get things sorted fast.

It would be brilliant to walk on gold beaches again - even in summer with teenagers there.

* David Hill is a New Plymouth writer and former Aucklander.