A cold, rainy day on Waiheke might not sound like a good day for an island tour. In fact, it was perfect.
We were heading out on the loop road around the eastern end, in pursuit of a little-known testament to Waiheke fortitude. I have passed it many times without noticing it, but a post from Greg Hartley’s Waiheke Vintage and Historic Photo page made me want to see it for myself.
It was a Sunday and the road was empty except for squadrons of pūkeko and crowds of weka, two pheasants and a peacock who treated the smooth, wet road like a catwalk.
We were looking for the site of a historic battleground. No lives were lost here, but it was a battle all right — one which lasted 20 years, and cost Waiheke ratepayers many millions of dollars.
The memorial to all that money is an unmarked grassy knoll on the side of the road, with a tuft of weeds on its head.
I didn’t live here then, but partner Greg can remember that bank of dirt when it was big enough to block the road, and consequently access to the island’s eastern end, the historic Stony Batter gun emplacements, and its best beach, Cactus Bay. The earthworks were one man’s anger made manifest. The man was John Spencer, who bought the land in 1980.
The public road to Man O’ War Bay had been in use since the Road Board opened it in 1972. Problem was, the title seems to have been based on a verbal agreement with the previous landowner, Arthur Hooks.
And Hooks was a man of few words.
‘Spencer’s mound’ was an impressive fortification at five metres high and 15 metres long. Another mound blocked the road just after Man O’ War Bay. You could walk over it, but John Spencer wasn’t having cars on ‘his’ road.
A poignant photograph in 1992 showing people with spades trying to move the dirt is a testament to the community’s frustration. The Waiheke County Council, and later the Auckland City Council spent years in court trying to reopen the road, fighting Spencer all the way to the Privy Court in London. They had the island behind them – an informal poll in 1994 showed 6008 in support of legal action against Spencer, with only 669 opposed.
Although the road opened to the public in 2001, it took until 2004 for Spencer’s legal road to run out. The remains of his mound is still there – a monument to people power.
Spencer’s dispute wasn’t the first time a landowner blocked access to the ‘Bottom End’ with earthworks.
Until 1953, cars and trucks got to the eastern end of the island via ‘Carey’s Track’, an old sheep trail. When the land was sold, the new owner, Mate Druzianic, decided he didn’t like having a public road through his farm. So, he put a padlock on the gate and pushed a pile of cut mānuka over the road.
He was within his rights, although his abrupt closure of the road made life difficult for his neighbours. School children used the track to get home, and other farmers needed it to move stock.
So Mate’s neighbours snipped the padlock and cleared the mānuka. When Mate pushed the pile back over the road, they pushed the pile back and set it on fire. So Mate bulldozed a two-metre trench across the road.
As local lad Malcolm Philcox wrote with magnificent understatement years later, “there was considerable animosity as a result of this action”.
Residents long resisted local government at this end of Waiheke, and especially the rates which went with it.
But the days of the ‘wild west’ were over for Waiheke. The eastern end of the island accepted the need for a roads board, the beginning of formal local government. The Crown stepped in, requisitioned land and built a road skirting Mate’s farm – the one we use today.
In the end, these tussles made a larger point. Democratic entities serve the many, not the few.
There will always be vested interests who hate the word ‘public’. Who put profit over community.
If the government’s Environment Select Committee gets its way, these interests will be turbocharged. The committee is seeking draconian changes to the Natural Environment Bill and Planning Bill, making it ruinously expensive for a council to curb a landowner’s excesses.
The recommendations are “shocking in the extreme” for anyone who cares about our natural heritage, says Dr Greg Severinsen, a senior policy adviser at the Environmental Defence Society. The committee, mostly comprising MPs from National and Act, have taken bills that favoured economic development and “doubled down on that ideology”, he says.
Three things stand out to Severinsen. “First, regulatory relief will require councils to either pay for public interest environmental protections or do away with them. Second, the legislation’s environmental limits framework has been gutted. And third, a breathtaking amount of power has been vested in the minister.”
Act, says environmentalist Dr Peter Carey, wants to disenfranchise Māori rights under the Treaty of Waitangi because as kaitiaki they are seen as an impediment to those who put profit first.
If these proposed rules had been around forty years ago, the battle to “liberate the Batter” may have had a very different ending.
• Jenny Nicholls
