Te Puna 1954
When David and Shirley Sparks came to start farming in Te Puna the year after this 1954 photograph [1] was taken, the Quarry that lay on the hill to the south-east of their farm was a merely noticeable, rather than a noteworthy, feature. The metalled road that snaked up to it was little different in surface quality to any of the roads in the vicinity – their pale dustiness stands out in this image. Te Puna Road runs up the middle, Borell Road is off at centre right, even a pale streak of Te Puna Station Road is discernible at upper left. The rhyolite used to make and maintain them came from the Tauranga County’s quarry, at that time run by the Smythe quarrying company. The Quarry, in this picture just a background smudge on the dark Minden ridge at top right, had by that stage been a source of roading stone since 1911.
And that, it seemed, was all it would ever be. Rhyolite is not commended by most roading engineers – it is highly crystalline and degrades quickly in comparison to andesite, often called ‘blue chip’ and familiar to all of us who drive on tar-sealed roads. It is what Brian Robbins, who took over the Quarry from the Smythes in the mid-fifties, described as a “woolly” rock [2], good for the first course at the base of a roadway, and for creating a quick slurry in preparation for a firmer, harder-wearing surface, and not much else. But it was handy, and it was cheap.
By 1975, however, this local source of rock had become a landmark that could be used as a navigational aid from well out to sea around Tauranga Moana. Here’s a closer shot [3], taken from the (now sealed) intersection of Quarry Road and State Highway 2.
Te Puna 1975
While some of the pastoral landscape typical of early twentieth-century Te Puna remains upland, and new kiwifruit and citrus orchards are coming to occupy the flats, the Quarry itself now looms as an industrial behemoth over this benign countryside. What were the reasons for this extraordinary expansion of rock mining activity on the Minden?
The answer has to do with both navigation and Depression-era forestry. As economies recovered from World War II, new stirrings of ambition for the development of shipping, and the export of logs from mature radiata forests in and out of the Pilot Bay wharves at Mount Maunganui came to the fore [4]. (It seems odd, now, to see that the immediately alternative contender for a major port in the Bay of Plenty was Whakatane [5]. This is not the place to discuss the debate that ensued.) Outcomes, however, were to be seen in a range of 1960s reclamation projects that extended all around the Tauranga Harbour edge and, eventually, out into its depths [6] - and (as a sidenote) even contemplated eliminating the Waikareao estuary entirely [7].
Waikareao Estuary
reclamation proposal
The image is of a print block, showing (in reverse) a map of the planned project, which did not proceed beyond the proposal stage. It illustrates, however, the scale of thinking that exponentially increased demand for exactly the sort of rock that came from the Te Puna Quarry.
Here’s where some of it went [8].
Strand
reclamation
Anyone familiar with the present Quarry Park will recognise the useful lumpiness of rocks that settle and lean into each other, creating an inelegant but useful mass that could cope with the sea swirling through below and the pressure of cars parking above. The Strand reclamation was finished in time for two royal visits over 1962 and 1963 [9], glamorous occasions for a workaday material.
Most of the Quarry rock went into the water. Huge quantities were required for port development. Trucks rolled out for twenty years, making a new shoreline beyond the Mission House. This 1969 image [10] shows the start of the Sulphur Point causeway, not for a harbour bridge but another purpose entrely.
Sulphur Point
causeway
The causeway was part of the maritime enterprise that became the Port of Tauranga.
Training wall
heading north
The astonishing “training wall” [11] in the middle of the water was designed by hydrological engineers in London, working with a tank that modelled Tauranga Moana’s tidal flows. It was the flows that were being “trained”. The line of rhyolite boulders intercepted the moving sand and built it up in sufficient quantities to enable, eventually, the advent of container cranes and a new wall of stacked containers.
This phase of port work was completed by 1976 and the Quarry operations ceased. Here’s what it, and Te Puna, looked like in 1982[12]:
Te Puna 1982
My mother
Shirley’s caption to this photograph reads:
“The Te Puna Quarry showing signs of weed re-growth during … years of closure. Land development for subdivision of the
Sparks farm in the foreground.” In
truth, the actual foreground is occupied by clumps of Quarry rocks, features
for a new garden my mother was making, in existence still.
In 1997 Shirley created, from Council records, a hand-drawn map (she chose to orient it to the south) of the effects of other subdivisions. Forty years after she came to live underneath the Minden, and twenty years after Don Thwaites’ 1975 photograph, the area shows a close-packed jigsaw of lifestyle blocks.
Shirley’s map 1997
From the hills to the sea. Quarry rhyolite underlies an emphatic story of rapid infrastructural growth and development in Tauranga Moana. The one constant is the Quarry reserve’s shape and extent [13], which has remained unchanged ever since it was gazetted in 1912. The same cannot be said of the landscape around it.
section of SO 13702
[2] Conversation with the author, December 2017
[3] Image courtesy of Don Thwaites, by permission
[4] Bay of Plenty Times, 23 January 1950, p.2
[5] Bay of Plenty Times, 24 January 1950, p.3
[6] A relative term. Local wisdom described the average depth of Tauranga Harbour as “eighteen inches”. Dredging and the hydrology of the training wall exploited harbour channels to the full.
[9] Visiting monarchs were King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit of Thailand and Queen Elizabeth II
[11] Image courtesy of Brian Robbins. The explanation is also his – from a conversation with the author, December 2017
[12] Image courtesy of Shirley Sparks
[13] Section of SO 13702 TePuna Eastern Grazing Run 1906 SAK33VIII, cadastral map courtesy of LINZ
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