Rudman's city: DoC knocked off perch in North Head ruling

For most of us, scoring a famous victory over a leading politician would be enough excitement for one summer.

But not North and South editor Robyn Langwell.

She followed up her success in repulsing David Lange's defamation proceedings against her magazine by taking on the country's biggest landlord.

This week, Justice Judith Potter backed Ms Langwell, ruling that the Department of Conservation is acting unlawfully in running its Auckland operations from the North Head historic reserve, Devonport, and should decamp.

A stunned DoC is now licking its wounds and trawling through its records to see where else in its vast estate it might be similarly breaking the law.

With 1.8 million hectares of forest parks, 1.1 million hectares of marine reserves, 500 actively managed historic reserves and 13 national parks this search could take a while.

Justice Potter's declaratory judgment says that DoC's use of 60-year-old, former Navy administration buildings on North Head to accommodate its Auckland area administrative offices is in breach of the Reserves Act 1977.

She agreed with the complainant that section 58 of the act meant what it said. That is that DoC is limited, in its use of reserve land, to providing residences for reserve workers, and "buildings necessary for the proper and beneficial management, protection and maintenance of the reserve."

The act restricts this further by saying such facilities can occupy reserve land only when they "cannot readily be provided outside and [close] to the reserve ... "

DoC had argued that it was using the buildings not just as its Auckland area administrative base, but for North Head-related activities as well.

Justice Potter argued to the effect that combining unlawful and lawful activities on one site did not give a legitimacy to the unlawful ones.

Ms Langwell, a Devonport resident, and her partner in litigation, neighbour and poet Kevin Ireland, want the mountain stripped of all but a few of its old buildings "and left as open space, a place of peace and tranquillity."

DoC, on the other hand, is keen to preserve the built legacy of North Head as a reminder of its long role as a key part of Auckland's coastal defences. It is also keen to make use of the old buildings for commercial and community activities.

The 8.6ha site was reserved for public defence purposes in 1878 and occupied by defence forces until 1996. In 1972 "reserve purposes" was altered to "recreational purposes" and then in 1980, to "historical purposes."

When the Navy quit in 1996, DoC assumed responsibility.

The buildings were in poor repair, unoccupied and rapidly vandalised.

In 1997, Auckland DoC was split into three administrative areas - Warkworth, Great Barrier Island and Auckland. It was decided to put the Auckland office headquarters in the vacant buildings on North Head. This occurred in February 1999.

Ms Langwell was initially delighted that DoC had removed the 5m-high security fence circling the top third of the site.

"There was hope that the rag-tag bunch of ugly and dilapidated barracks buildings would be removed or destroyed as the public had always been promised."

She and her disparate group of early morning, dog-walking, friends of the mountain, were very put out one day to discover the reverse - that DoC was out tarting up the old buildings - two dating from 1885, one from 1911 and three from 1940.

How long DoC remains in its spartan 1940s barracks depends on whether Crown Law decides the judgment is appealable. Or whether the people of Devonport rise up in support of Ms Langwell.

"If the community doesn't want us there," Warwick Murray, DoC's Auckland community relations manager, tells me, "we'll go. We don't need a High Court judgment to tell us that."

All of which leaves the quandary, if DoC goes, what will happen to the old buildings?

At least at present a couple are earning their keep. Ms Langwell is praying for the bulldozers.

Another option - given the magic views towards Auckland - would be a swish restaurant. Whether the Reserves Act, to say nothing of the neighbours, would permit that is something for another day.