Te Wharawera Goff and Grace Bennett at Kokohuia Wetland. PHOTO/ STUART MUNRO
Te Wharawera Goff and Grace Bennett at Kokohuia Wetland. PHOTO/ STUART MUNRO
It's got a school, the green mound of a closed landfill, a rusty metallic fringe of industry and some state houses - and it's got a remnant wetland with raupo, cabbage trees, flax and a few eels.
The place is the Whanganui suburb sometimes called Kokohuia.
To Whanganui District Council senior stormwater engineer Kritzo Venter it's "Whanganui's hugest diamond in the rough".
Tanea Tangaroa went to live there three years ago. She sees herself as a kaitiaki (caretaker) for the taiao (environment). She found it unhealthy.
"I felt sick within myself. The more I came here, the more I felt it," she said.
"Our families are surrounded with poisons. It's affecting our bodies, physically, and our psyche. We've all got to live in an area like this."
Kritzo and Tanea want better things for the area that once held Balgownie Tip. They come at it from different perspectives, but both want to restore what was once a large and healthy wetland.
This is toetoe, Tanea tells the children. PHOTO/ STUART MUNRO
Tanea calls it her ripo, and has involved children from nearby Te Kura o Kokohuia.
Kritzo has a vision for healthy city waterways. He'd like to enlarge the wetland, connect it back to the Whanganui River and use it to store stormwater and prevent flooding in Heads Rd.
In pre-European times, when Maori people spent summers near the Whanganui River mouth so they could fish there, the swamp was a playground for their children. Laraine Sole's history of Castlecliff relates how the children would run through the swamp.
They competed to see who could get most covered in orange pollen from the flowering harakeke (flax), which was stuck to their skins by nectar from the flowers.
Maori also harvested food there. Raupo pollen was baked into cakes, and eels were caught.
In that former wetland streams drained into a low area, a 100ha mixture of wetland and dunes that flooded when the river was high. The vegetation was raupo, harakeke, sedges, toetoe and larger plants like manuka.
Europeans came and state housing was built in the area in the 1940s. In the 1950s people began using the low point as a rubbish tip.
Modern landfills are lined. In this one the rubbish was simply dumped into a hollow and compacted.
Right from the start there were people scavenging useful things at the dump. Laraine Sole records that Bill Watson kept himself in beer money by reclaiming items he could sell.
Whanganui residents will vividly remember the piles of refuse, the bulldozer compacting it, the noise, the smell, the flies and the gulls screeching overhead.
By the 1990s the dump was getting full. Part of it was closed and capped. In 2000 the council got resource consent and closed the rest - after that Whanganui refuse was trucked to a new landfill at Bonny Glen, near Marton.
The huge pile of rubbish at Kokohuia was capped with clay from Hylton Pit. The clay was covered with 100mm of topsoil and sown with grass.
Under the mound run two high pressure gas pipelines, 4m apart, connecting Taranaki's Kapuni gas field with users all the way to Wellington. Gas for Whanganui comes off in three pipelines at a compound in riverside Karoro Rd.
One of those pipes is too high and in the way of the wetland's outlet to the river. Kritzo wants to bury it but Tanea is sure it leaks and doesn't want it buried. Nothing has been done about it so far and Kritzo would like to take it further.
Some of the waste in the landfill is toxic, and some is asbestos. Kritzo says all the toxic material is safely under the cap, but Tanea suspects there are nasties outside of it.
The compacted rubbish under the mound oozes a leachate liquid that drains to the edge of the capped area and is piped to the council's wastewater treatment plant. Warning signs have been put up where the public have access to this water - because Tanea asked for them.
A warning sign where leachate and stormwater flow under Heads Rd. PHOTO/ STUART MUNRO
"Tanea pointed out that people don't know which water is which," Kritzo said.
"We don't know or care, because it goes into the wastewater and not into the river. The resource consent doesn't ask for testing," he said.
In heavy rain a small amount of the leachate can get into the river, but it is very diluted.
The other issue with buried rubbish is the gas it gives off - about 64 per cent methane in the case of Balgownie. There is not enough to be tapped and used commercially.
The gas is monitored at several points on the capped landfill. Each of them is surrounded by trees, and fenced.
Gas is monitored at several places on the capped landfill. PHOTO/ STUART MUNRO
There used to be cattle grazing on the rounded grassy hill, but Tanea believes it's too toxic to be healthy, and the grazing has stopped.
When the landfill was completely closed council started thinking about what else could be done with the land there. There was a tiny remanant of wetland left, and a consultant assessed the possibilities.
Water in that remnant wetland, on the west side of the landfill, has been repeatedly tested. The results raised no concerns, so testing has stopped.
Tanea has been working away on that western side, aided by Te Kura o Kokohuia pupils, plants from the Nga Rauru Kiitahi nursery and help from Sustainable Whanganui.
There's water in a stream and lush vegetation, and she feels the mauri (life force) has been somewhat restored. She'd like to do more, and wants no more encroachment.
"It's the kidneys and the lungs. It's the last of the wetlands in Whanganui. This little bit of taiao here is crucial to our whole ecosystem," she said.
Te Kura o Kokohuia teacher Katrina Taura-Hiri's class of seven to 11-year-olds are on board for physical work, while Kokohuia senior boys are to carve seven pou (poles) to put in the wetland as kaitiaki (guardians). The task is for the pupils, because they live in the area, Tanea said.
"This is what they have to take care of before they can go out and take care of anything else."
To her the Matipo Development Trust gardens to the north are awesome, and part of the bigger picture for the area.
Kritzo says the council has been "chipping away" at wetland restoration. The eastern side along Prince Street has been planted, and water there is diverted away from the rubbish mound.
There could be big new developments. Kritzo would like to enlarge both the Kokohuia and Titoki St wetlands by four or five times, connect them, and put in a fish passage to allow eels to go back and forth from the river more freely.
The Westbourne Industrial Estate drains to the wetlands and the proposal he's working on will be part of an upgrade for the estate. If it gets resource consent, and funding through the council's long term plan, the enlarged wetland would act as water storage to prevent floodingin industrial Heads Rd.
It could connect with a completed Rogers St and extended Fitzherbert Ave and have cycle and walking tracks, and perhaps eventually a wetland education centre.
A bigger wetland would have room for more native plants, birds, insects and animals. It would be one of a few in an urban area, and Ministry for the Environment funding could be available for it.
Kritzo wants to continue working with Tanea on the wetland project.
"She's got her heart in the right place," he said.
Tanea can see the value in that.
"There are things that we know and do that are just natural that we could help Kritzo and them with, and they could be teaching us the technical side, because after all it's all for our taiao."
