Rolling Thunder, The Spirit of Karekare

Forest and Bird, Issue 303, 1 February 2002, Page 44

Rolling Thunder, The Spirit of Karekare

by Bob Harvey, 240pp, limpbound, Exisle Publishing, Auckland 2001, RRP $39.95. There can’t be many little beaches in the world to be celebrated on such as scale as Bob Harvey has Karekare. The veteran surfer, and Mayor of Waitakere City, has gone out to the wild west coast of the Auckland isthmus to record his love for one of the black-sand beaches where he has been in the surf club for 45 seasons. That is not to diminish his

relationship with the place, just to explain how he comes to love it like a local. The Rolling Thunder of the surf, echoing off the valley walls, is just one of the affecting sounds and sights which help to define ‘the Spirit of Karekare’ so gloriously delineated in this book. Imagine please, 240 A4 pages of full colour about your own favourite place enriched by the poems, memories, photographs, prints and paintings of some of New Zealand’s leading artists over more than a century. Here is an unusually rich cultural heritage for any New Zealand place, shared internationally in recent years through such movies as The Piano. Not that this book broods in wilderness. The pages are packed with graphic marginalia, of people and the artefacts of everyday life — a richly peopled landscape from Maori times to the present. This is local history, and sense of place, evoked on a

visual scale to the level where it encompasses more universal themes of pioneering and love for our land. Quite coincidentally, it stands with Bob Harvey’s other recent book Untamed Coast, the Waitakere Ranges and West Coast Beaches as a persuasive argument for the better preservation of this comparatively little-known corner of wild New Zealand (see our feature from page 12 of this issue).