Dialogue: How the good old days made way for the good new days

Twenty-five years have wrought huge changes in Auckland. And for all the downside, it now has the qualities of a real city, writes DAVID HILL.

It's our anniversary this summer - it's 25 years since we left Auckland. Why did we leave? Because we liked part of it too much.

It was the start of the 1970s when Beth and I came to the North Shore, over a bridge that had half as many lanes as now - and about one-tenth as much traffic.

We had a rusty second-hand VW. We had a 10-month-old son whom we knew was the most beautiful human being on the planet. We had $1400, so we bought a section in the East Coast Bays.

You could buy a Bays section for $1400 in those days - if it was on a one-in-three slope choked with blackberry like ours. Mind you, even flat sections without the blackberry option didn't cost much more.

We took out two mortgages, had a three-bedroom group house built, and moved in during a winter so wet that the boards laid across the mud to the front gate kept sliding down on to our porch each night.

After years in flats, we suddenly had our own place and our own neighbours. Real neighbours: on one side was a white timber house which housed a radiographer and a bank clerk; on the other was a grey fibrolite bach which was home to sheet-metal worker and a laundry helper.

Almost anyone could afford the East Coast Bays then.

Behind us, paddocks and stands of bush sloped down to a glittering stream. Horses gazed benignly over our back fence. Once, they walked through the fence and ate my vegetable garden.

Our son loved the place. He loved the bush; the dusty track winding down beside the road towards Browns Bay where footpaths began; the beach where closure by pollution would have been too ludicrous to contemplate.

The North Shore still had an egalitarian feel at the start of the 1970s. The clifftops were home to baches or ordinary family homes.

There were big houses around Lake Pupuke and Thorne Bay, and one rich guy had built a glass-and-metal mansion up against the beach at Milford, but it functioned mainly as something that people could wander along the sand to giggle at on weekends.

In 1974 we rented out our house and set off for our OE. With our son (and after a while, our daughter), we travelled and worked across Europe for two years.

Then we headed back towards New Zealand. Auckland, and the East Coast Bays. We couldn't wait to get there. And within six months of returning, we couldn't wait to get away again.

The North Shore was not egalitarian any more. Vast, vulgar villas were beginning to crowd the clifftops and beachfronts.

On dank, southerly facing hillsides, subdivisions of cheap housing were being crammed in. Roads, schools, stormwater and sewage were all under strain.

A gap between haves and have-littles was starting to yawn. The grey fibrolite bach beside us had gone. Three concrete-and-aluminium units filled the section. Carports and drives combined with units to glare in the sun on hot days, and send runoff pouring down the hillside on wet days.

The paddocks and horses behind had gone, too. So had the bush stands. The valley was scraped - clay dotted with smouldering piles of stumps.

The stream had become a drain in a concrete bed strewn with plastic and cardboard. Signs rose above the treeless ground proclaiming Sherwood Estate.

So we moved 350km away, cleared our mortgages and became provincials.

We couldn't live in Auckland again. We are small-town people now, with different rhythms and different expectations.

When we venture north of the Bombay Hills these days, we come home with wide-eyed tales of motorway driving, buildings more than six storeys high, ethnic ghettoes and incredibly tiny servings of coffee.

Each time we visit, we drive past that part of the Bays where we used to live.

The scraped clay and stump piles are rows of homes now. Fast-growing trees soften the houses and hillside. The stream is weedy but pretty clear in its concrete channel, with pathways and footbridges accompanying it.

There is still no school, hall, shops or community centre for an area that must hold 5000 people, but the people living there are evidently making the best of it. Aucklanders are good at that.

And each time we drive there, or through different parts of the North Shore and the city, we notice other things.

We notice brashness, aggression, impatience, conspicuous consumption.

And we also notice energy, expansiveness, excitement, a willingness to plan big, act big and risk big - the qualities of a real city. Aucklanders are good at those things, too.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.