TAONGA: The unique remnants of the Waioeka River braids.

JUST a little upstream of Ōpōtiki town, there is a unique remnant of the braided Waioeka river. Walking distance from the bridge. If there was a pathway. Which there isn’t.

Citizens of Woodlands are essentially “prohibited” from accessing a beautiful living river, flowing less than 500 metres distant from their homes.

Put simply, this is remarkable. And untenable.

It could be described as a liminal zone, or an edge land. There is ongoing industrial activity; power pylons compete with Lombardy poplars for the skyline; river shingle is “sustainably” harvested; non-ecologically diverse cow, kiwi and maize lands produce food, and much needed local and national income. And wildlife. Rock pigeons gather there in weaving crowds, especially in winter.

They enjoy the vista from the high tension lines, or rest on the warm shingle.

But also finding sustenance amidst the shallows and mists are shags (kawau), plover, egret and heron, pukeko, pheasant, weka, dotterel, common gulls and ducks, pied stilts, kotare, kahu and karearea (falcon and hawk), sometimes a balletic black swan. Welcome swallows by the dozen.

One morning in 2022, we stumbled upon a lone kotuku (white heron) feeding. I filmed and photographed it for a few minutes before it lazily flew off. Perhaps homeward bound to Ōkārito? Lucky.

Ever since human beings landed upon the shore of these remote southern islands this landscape has been undergoing non-constant change. Even the name of the joint has varied.

In no particular order: Niu Tireni,  New Zealand, Nova Zeelandia, “the land of the long white cloud”, Nieuw Zeeland, and much more recently, Aoteraoa. Humans change stuff. Not always in terrible ways of course.

Place names, well they depend solely upon which recent dot on the ancient geological timeline you are focusing on. And current politics.

Because every people group in history has preferred to shelter in dwellings and have surplus food stores to get through cold or lean periods, well, simple fact is – they exploit natural resources.

Trees are felled; vegetation is burned; soils are cultivated in some way (cue soil dispersal and silt run off); wild animals and fish are hunted; plant species are harvested for herbs, fruit, nuts and so on. Stuff is moved around. Rats, weasels and gorse for example.

Humans are peak predators, in varying degrees of competition for resources with wildlife. And also of course in competition with other groups of humans.

There have been no utopian societies, or at least none that anthropology has so far unearthed. Quite the opposite – the archaeological record is one of rise and fall. Conqueror or conquered. History is not pretty.

Humans and nature in varying degrees of exploitation and dependence. Of course also some complementary or mutually beneficial relationships.

Case in point, the dog. Once were wolves. Your pet. You feed it, and it takes you for walks. Pet, by the by, is a Scottish Gaelic word. Anyone else remember the fantastic 1980s TV series Auf Weidersehen, Pet.

All traditional societies knew to some extent that they needed to steward and conserve resources.

This could be as simple as seasonal migration, or as complex as imposed prohibitions (such as rāhui) on hunting or harvesting.

Intense observation and deep understanding of celestial and other cyclical patterns gave all of our ancestors a survival edge.

Nowadays, indigenous knowledge is belatedly but increasingly valued and drawn upon.

Mātauranga Māori is informing efforts to tackle invasive species at Ōhiwa; Koori ways of knowing are informing bushfire mitigation strategies in New South Wales and Victoria, to give two off top-of-the-head examples.

Scotland’s Gaelic language and heritage is now being mined to find insights for “ecosystem services”.

Just to note, the tongue of my paternal ancestors was banned and suppressed from the 1600s, and only supported by various governments relatively recently. Previously it was seen as “primitive”.

Until the early 1970s bagpipe music was not even recognised in Scotland’s official music curriculum. It evoked “lower culture” prejudice. Highlanders and Islanders were brutes.

2010 was the year, it is claimed, that over half the world’s population lived urban.

At that point in anthropological time less than half of the human family lived in rural areas.

But that milestone had been passed first and earliest by Great Britain, in 1850.

A writer named Richard Jefferies observed of sprawling London in the 19th century that the metropolis (known to the Romans as Londinium – hence the place name we use today) had not so much suppressed nature as much as it had “provoked it to odd improvisations”.

It is not unusual to see a fox in London. Estimates put their number at 10,000.

Travelling by overground train takes you through patchy wild-lands bordering the tracks. Buddleia, ash, good old ragwort, brambles (what we would call blackberry) and giant hogweed (is that a Harry Potter-type thing?) thrive.

Your canny Basil Brush can easily commute between Wiltshire and Woking just by discretely following these tracks, and also hopping between the many parklands.

Island hopping from green space to green space. Nature adapts, or it vanishes.

My son and his family recently built a home on the edge lands of Melbourne, Berwick, productive pasturelands since colonial times. Bunurong/Boonwurrung country, and the Kangaroo they hunted are evidently reluctant to be pushed away by rural sprawl.

Any walker in rural England will have come across smaller species deer – Roe, Muntjac, Fallow, Sika.

Being awakened in your tent at one-ish, deep in the dark woods, by a barking deer, you thought was a prowling, rabid dog.

Nup. Ōpōtiki should definitely send our guns to the Cotswolds’ “Big Three” competitions.

What has all this got to do with Ōpōtiki you may well ask?

Once upon a time the Waioeka was a fast-running braided river, tumbling greywacke rocks down from the area where the Huirau meets the Raukumara ranges.

Bearing logs and debris from the densely covered inland rainforests. It was free of constraints – like stop-banks. It was free of engineering – like gabion stone baskets and culverts.

A friend who grew up in Ōpōtiki but moved north decades ago, name of Tony Becx, was reminiscing recently about the swimming holes the Waiotahi Draglines created for us kids adjacent the bridge.

The river was shallower, more meandering, much more shingly then.

Nobody jumped off the bridge, that would have been mental. Since then, a straighter flowing channel has been created.

As columnist Mike Fletcher pointed out some time ago, the stop bank engineering has created a more direct (forceful?) hydrology in order to protect the township from flooding.

Excellent and neccessary.

Certainly with a loss of visual amenity values. And almost certainly at the cost of spawning sites for native fish species, like eel and whitebait.

Aesthetically, the engineered river looks pretty darn average it has to be said.

Meanwhile, as reported in Ōpōtiki News recently, great work being one by those studying and implementing solutions for fish migration and spawning needs around Ōhiwa.

Could we also, together, somehow give limited access to and protect this last bit of in our town, somewhat wild Waioweka River flow and habitat?

Maybe even improve it. Collectively we have forever “de-natured” (or un-wilded?) the Waioeka River bar.

What mitigation does that call for? How about a walking and cycling path from the western end of the bridge, along the stop bank, to this braid in the river.

And yes, there may be times when it needs to be “closed” for operational reasons, but a low cost two kilometre loop would be amazing for families as well as solo walkers.

With robust dirt bike barrier bars either end. Of course. This is Ōpōtiki.

The catalyst to submitting this 2022 Derelict Ōpōtiki blog post was the publication of an exciting, slightly dated Hukutaia Draft Structure Plan (the shared walking/cycling pathway and crossing aspects) in a recent Ōpōtiki News.

• Sources: NatureScot Research Report No. 1230 Ecosystem Services and Gaelic: a Scoping Exercise (2021), Ruairidh MacIlleathain; Landmarks (2015) Robert Macfarlane; Bateman Field Guide to Wild New Zealand (2010), Julian Fitter.

• John Dickson is interested in most things old, blogs at derelictopotiki.blogspot.com, and can be contacted at [email protected]