 |
| Matua sub-series stratigraphy, Te Mete Road, south side SH2 |
The vigorous geology of our country makes its presence felt in all sorts of places, especially in the well-populated western Bay of Plenty. Present and increasing settlement pressures are frequently the reason for analysis and archaeology that reveals the pre-history of the landscape surrounding us [1].
Recent excavation for the Takitimu North Link (TNL) highway in Te Puna, at Te Mete Road, has revealed the alluvial soils of the Matua subgroup (and some recently-piled topsoil to the right). The stratigraphy showing up most clearly in this image, above the bright green strip of grass, and below the newly-built fence, evokes the handsome markings of the copper skink, Oligosoma aeneum.
 |
| Copper skinks (Auckland) [2] Photo by Nick Harker |
Skink and gecko populations were spread all over New Zealand Aotearoa when humans arrived, and skinks had been here for about 20 million years [3] (geckos have a different and more complex story). The lizards of this whenua are deeply endemic - each has its own family - but within each their species proliferate in tiny ways. Not only does this keep herpetologists happily contending [4]; it also means their small populations are highly vulnerable [5]. But also adaptable, it seems. It is possible that skinks were in place here before the Matua subgroup soils were laid down in the early to Mid-Pleistocene. [6][7]
Their vulnerability in the Anthropocene explains why care was taken, on the TNL site, to capture and re-release these elusive creatures. Some went to Mauao [8]. Others, with less publicity, were taken to the Te Puna Quarry Park. And now, even if (like most of us) you never catch a glimpse of a live one, a new sculpture by Mike McCarty, made from leftover steel from the TNL project and named “Marama [9]”, confirms the Quarry Park as an enduring place for mokomoko.
Mokomoko, Te Puna Quarry Park
It was not always so. Were County Engineer Captain A.C. Turner, or his overseer for the Te Puna Riding, George Davoren, asked, in 1911 or so, to consider the effects of quarrying operations on the wild creatures that lived within the rectangle on the northern face of the Minden rhyolite dome gazetted for the purpose, I imagine their faces would have gone blank. This is an a-historical statement. I have no evidence for it whatsoever.
And I may be wrong. Evidence shows that attitudes to the natural environment was a focus of lively and pertinent discussion in Tauranga’s settler society. Only two months before the temporary Quarry reserve had been gazetted [10] on 6 October 1910, a Mr W.R. Turner, (no relation, as far as I can tell, to the Captain) ventured to read a paper on “The Natural History of the Bay of Plenty” to members of the Tauranga Literary and Debating Society assembled at the Good Templars’ Hall on Wednesday 27 July [11]. Mr Turner was a newcomer to Tauranga, recently settled in in a gracious house built to his own design in Selwyn Street [12].
“Turner” is too usual a name for simple internet searches to deliver reliable information as to personality, but we can work out that W.R. Turner was well-off, confident, vigorous, and had a lively mind. He not only built three houses for himself in Tauranga; he was apparently the architect of its first Baptist church [13]. He bought a farm on the Kaimai Road [14], joined the Chamber of Commerce, and was hon. secretary of the Tree Planting and Beautifying Society [15] in which capacity he led the charge for plantings on the Monmouth Redoubt “of a protective and ornamental character”. In the small society of Tauranga [16] , he was ready to express his opinions and he did. The Literary and Debating Society, initiated as a “Mutual Improvement Society” seems to have been his idea [17].
Crusher bin and bird sculpture, Te Puna Quarry Park
His paper on the natural history of his newly-adopted landscape is a fascinating example of the state of general knowledge and thought at the turn of the twentieth century. After Darwin, but before plate tectonics, this member of the Baptist church thought the science was in on matters geological: “It had been pretty conclusively proved that New Zealand was no child in the arms of nature … we were not living upon a thin crust of the earth’s surface.” He grasped the scale of time involved and the “tremendous power of seismic, glacial, climatic and tidal forces in altering the physical features of the land.” He was matter-of-fact about fossils and the spread of species “by means of ice and drifting wood from one land to another”. (Read Gibbs on Gondwana to find out what particularly intrepid island-hoppers New Zealand skinks seem to have been. [18])
“The lecturer thought,” reports the Bay of Plenty Times, “that with regard to the appearance of flora and fauna upon new countries the founder of the scheme of life had never ceased to create, and that under certain conditions the earth produces species which are changed by environment in varieties.”
Turner was pretty good on the matter of the Matua sub-group soils as well A “great formation of igneous matter consisted of lava, thrachyte [sic] and tuffs [sic], which had been cooled beneath the ocean… we were now living under the line of that formation… the destruction of this system found a great bay extending from the Mount towards the ranges; that after the denudation [sic, he possibly meant inundation] of the material there was an upheaval of land from the bed of the ocean, and that during a long period of volcanic rest a surface was formed, partly through sedimentary formations, and partly through the dust storms of the desert land. Evidence of this surface can now be seen in any of our cuttings and cliffs, which show an excellent soil full of organic matter which once produced a luxuriant vegetation.”
Cog wheel on rhyolite boulder, entrance, Te Puna Quarry Park
That luxuriant vegetation was well gone by the time Europeans arrived in the Bay. There was no timber nearer than the current bush lines along the Kaimai and inland hills [19]. Even today the unbenched parts of the Te Puna Quarry reserve lack aged forest giants. Slash-and-burn cultivation had rendered the lowlands as, in the words of one surveyor, “very poor and broken fern country” [20]. Appreciative though I am of W.R.’s efforts, I doubt that the County Engineer, desperate as he was for a supply of roading stone, gave much thought to the wildlife that made a living there.
Machinery among rhyolite boulders, Te Puna Quarry Park
The Quarry Park is full of reminders of its industrial past. Their decayed mechanics among the rhyolite offer a nostalgic and softened gaze on what was once a brutally desolate, dangerous and noisy place. Put sentiment aside. We need to be reminded where these relics come from and why they were used. (Point of fact: there never was a waterwheel in the industrial Quarry. That feature is a later, post-2000, addition.)
The scholarly field of environmental history has much to teach us. If nothing else, it prompts us to realise that memory shapes attitudes, and that ecologies, especially in complex geologies, are local. The two Turner’s attitudes to their immediate landscapes looked forward as well as back. Today, it is clear we do the same. We routinely “price in” the impact of industrial development on the places we once knew. Invariably the price is paid in small, local ways. To take just one example: by the copper skink. A previously abundant, now ‘at risk – declining’ [21] inhabitant of the surviving bush areas of the Western Bay.
Note to the reader: This essay does not deal with the second half of W.R. Turner’s lecture, a brave traverse of the anthropology of the day. I recommend reading it in the original.
All photographs except that of the copper skinks are by the author.
[2] Photo: Nick Harker, https://www.reptiles.org.nz/herpetofauna/native/oligosoma-aeneum
[3] Gibbs, G., Ghosts of Gondwana, fully
revised edition, Potton and Burton, 2016
[4] Published species were noted as numbering 72 in Gibbs, 2016 and 110 in NZ Geographic, 2020
[5] Hansford, Dave, New Zealand Geographic, “Lizards anonymous”, March/April 2020, pp. 90-105
[6] https://www.tauranga.govt.nz/Portals/0/data/living/natural_hazards/files/maungatapu-landslide-advice.pdf , p.5. But see also:
[8] Bay of Plenty Times, “Native lizards on Takitimu North Link roading project rehomed on the Mount”, August 12 2022 https://www.nzherald.co.nz/bay-of-plenty-times/news/native-lizards-on-takitimu-north-link-roading-project-rehomed-on-the-mount/OHFTHLMZDSFM3YQ5XEIP7K6OVY/
[9] Name bestowed by the pupils of Te Puna School, 4 July 2024
[10] https://library.victoria.ac.nz/databases/nzgazettearchive/pubs/gazettes/1911/1911%20ISSUE%20001.pdf
[16] My estimate: about 1,000 people in 1910. See E. Stokes, Changing patterns of settlement in Tauranga County: a study in historical geography, https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/57096
[18] Gibbs, op.cit, p. 273
[19] Conversation with John Coster, date unknown. See too E. Stokes, op cit, who recounts that timber for the military settlement had to come to Tauranga by boat from the Coromandel.
[20] Cadastral map 1370, Tauranga Survey District
