In a scrapbook, where I kept clippings on landscape design and planning, I came across press clippings about the widening of Somme Pde from Moutoa Gardens to Plymouth St. The river was eating into the bank and it had reduced Somme Pde to one lane so, starting in the 1970s, the Wanganui "City" Council bought all the houses along that section and demolished or shifted them back to allow for road widening.
Sorting old landscape plans, I came across my landscape proposals for the Castlecliff Domain. While Chas Poynter was mayor, I had been hired to co-ordinate the ideas of the Castlecliff Linking Group and to come up with a redevelopment plan for the domain.
Out of it came the restoration of the Duncan Pavilion, the construction of the skate park in the domain, a weed management programme for the dunes and the construction of Jo Aud's public sculpture "the dune fence".
Because funding was tight I questioned the $25,000 per year the council was paying to clear windblown sand from the Rangiora St lower carpark. Why not allow the fore dunes to form and "design with nature", I suggested.
Enter the new mayor, Michael Laws, who took the populist stance. "We will continue bulldozing sand into the sea and the beach will remain as it was in my childhood," said Michael, playing to the Castlecliff Residents' Committee.
That was the last time I got any landscape design work from the council, and since then the council has bulldozed nearly half a million dollars' worth of sand into the sea, "fighting nature".
Another set of folders contained information that the then Horizons regional councillor Bob Walker had obtained for me about the proposed Balgownie flood protection scheme. There in black and white was a graph by Colin Hovey showing flood levels dropping radically from the Cobham Bridge down but, despite overwhelming submissions against the scheme, Horizons ploughed ahead blowing $2 million "fighting nature" where you didn't even need to fight it.
I was standing in the queue at the supermarket the other day when former Whanganui district councillor Steven Palmer said to me: "You're right, you know ... about the Balgownie stopbanks".
Not only were these stopbanks a waste of money, they actually caused flooding that the council has subsequently had to rectify in Gilberd St and Heads Rd.
Poor Bob Walker has been much maligned for advocating a fall-back solution for the houses subject to flooding in Anzac Pde, but he was right. The solution was quite simple, instead of blowing $2 million in Balgownie, Horizons could have offered to buy -- at Government valuation -- any of the flood-prone houses in Anzac Pde.
For one or two, the only solution would have been demolition, but the sections could have been then sold to developers willing to construct an appropriate structure on what is still a prime site.
For others, simply putting them up on poles and concrete block walls -- as they do in flood-prone areas of Australia -- was the solution. These flood-proofed houses could have been put back on the market, hopefully at a profit, and some more bought until the problem was solved.
�When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller. In his spare time he is co-chairman of the Whanganui Musicians' Club.
