The Sun FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 1928. DESPOILING HOBSON BAY

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 441, 24 August 1928, Page 8

The Sun FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 1928. DESPOILING HOBSON BAY

THERE ar f e vandals of progress as well as vandals in destruction. The new and worst kind of vandalism just now. in Auckland is represented by a department of State, which threatens to defile the beauty of the waterfront at Orakei and on the stately slopes of Reinuera and the harbour side of Parnell. And this heinous project has been formulated and pushed forward in the name of that efficient railway development which is to make the New Zealand railway service the enviable wonder of the world.

A special committee of Eemuera and Panic 11 residents whose homes and gardens are within the wide circle of a grimy, noisy menace, in the form of shunting yards and possibly hideous factories and soap and sulphur works, discussed the sooty scheme last evening with vigour, yet with restraint. They deplored the murky prospect. All that needed to be said logically against the ugly disfigurement of Auckland’s front gate was said admirably by Mr. L. P. Leary, who kept his temper on leash, though occasionally it strained for a biting freedom. One of Mr. Leary’s phrases completed the unwholesome picture of the eastern waterfront in the visible future. This was his reference to the despoiled area as a “plague-spot.” Such a description may seem a term of exaggeration, but what else could a clear-seeing observer call it, if he noted the noisome features both in the foreground and in the background: a sewer across the bay with septic conditions on strips of beach and typhoidal shellfish lurking in the tidal mud; pillars of smoke by day and running columns of fire by night; and through and over all the din of asthmatic locomotives and groaning' wagons fussing and bumping about between twilight and the dawn? It is not surprising that lovers of Auckland’s natural beauty should resent this latest scheme of vandalism. The surprise is in the fact that the public and practised commentators, with more than lialf-a-eentury’s opportunity and cause to protect the city from widespread spoliation of volcanic cones, harbour charm and other places of beauty, should have been so apathetic and supine. Now, they are beginning to realise, almost too late, that the vandals of progress laugh at town-planning organisations and scenery-conservation societies, and push on the work of disfigurement, their sole joy being the contemplation of the scars of profitable enterprise and those twin symbols of Dominion progress—smoke and scoria.

Not content with the possession of sixty acres or so of the reclamation in Mechanics’ Bay, and a huge slice of Campbell Point, the Railway Departnxent, it has been repoi'ted, has taken an area of 25 acres, “constituting an island at the point where the waterfront road and the new railway line across Ilobson Bay part,” and intends to use it for the purpose of train assembling yards. If the project be achieved, the results will involve a dirty disfigurement of Hobson Bay where it sweeps close in to the new, model, garden suburb of Orakei, where purchasers of the choicest sections on 500 acres of Government land, in the first rush for possession, paid for residential holdings at paradisal values. And now, another department of State will thi-ust clouds of smoke and showers of soot upon a place that was intended to be glorious. Elsewhere about the area of the new railway, a tidal basin will be reclaimed some day for industrial purposes. All the dreams of the most beautiful railway approach to any city in the Southern Hemisphere have been rudely shattered And the Auckland politicians have been as dumb as gargoyles on the intolerable vandalism. It is time they ceased from sleeping too often in, the comfortable Parliamentary benches, and tackled the Government with vim and awakening effect.