Feature
Paradise in peril
by Philip Matthews
The property boom and population pressures threaten the unique nature of some of New Zealand’s coastal communities. What are we losing and what can we do about it?
In Hollywood, “development hell” is the name given to the limbo status of a film project that never goes into production. But the residents of Piha, on the wild coast west of Auckland, might have another meaning for the phrase. Certainly, they did in the mid-90s when Piha was threatened by the spectre of an exclusive resort, proposed by the Amanresorts chain. The brainchild of Indonesian entrepreneur Adrian Zecha, Amanresorts specialises in the luxurious minimalism beloved of celebrities and the super-rich. Are the resorts unobtrusive and environmentally conscious? Sure. Expensive as hell and rigorously exclusive? You bet.
The resort was going to be at “the gap”, at the south end of Piha’s famous beach. Apart from the helicopters carrying wealthy visitors in and out, locals may not have even noticed. Certainly, you weren’t going to see Tom Cruise or Bill Gates down at the local RSA. But exclusivity? “They wanted exclusive use of the beach and they would restrict people’s access to the gap,” says John Edgar, president of the Waitakere Ranges Protection Society (WRPS).
Auckland Regional Councillor Sandra Coney remembers being at a public meeting at which an Amanresorts representative was asked whether Piha locals might be able to use the resort’s gym or the beachfront bar? Well, there wouldn’t be any right, she was told, but perhaps if they asked the security guards nicely … Not really the Piha way.
The Amanresorts publicity literature has always made a big play of the importance of local flora and fauna to the business plan – it’s all part of the experience, they say – but the company seemed, according to early proposals that Edgar saw, to find Piha worryingly scruffy. “I thought, uh-oh, they’re going to gentrify the place. But I think people love that scruffiness, that roughness. We associate it with the beaches, the baches, the way it used to be. I don’t think anybody wants to see Piha tarted up.” In the end, Amanresorts was driven out by the collapse in the late 90s of the east Asian economies. More recently, Piha activists have also seen off another proposed development. But isn’t this notion of “the way it used to be” ammunition to those who think that groups such as WRPS are nostalgic daydreamers? “Everybody who has been to Piha for the last 50 years, as I have, knows it’s changed,” Edgar says. “It’s completely different from when I used to go there as a kid. It’s not as if we’re trying to freeze it. We all acknowledge that it will change. It’s just how it changes and whether it’s rampant or controlled.”
For Coney, the place is more thickly wrapped in nostalgia. As the conscience of Piha, she collects photos of old baches and has compiled a book of historic pictures – including, as if its personal importance was not clear enough, a photo of herself as a baby enjoying the sun on the beach. “I’ve spent most weekends and every school holiday there since I was born,” she says.
But this issue is bigger than her personal experience. The bach, the beach holiday, she believes, is a Kiwi birthright. “I suppose that I had such a fantastic childhood that I want children now and in the future to have those experiences. We’re losing something unique about the New Zealand way of life if we become like Surfer’s Paradise, with built-up beach environments.”
Is that the danger? Potentially. If you haven’t been to Piha in a while, you might be surprised. Along the north end of the beach, the property boom has produced large, flashy, prominent houses in an environment that always seemed better suited for smaller, more discreet places that blended into the bush. These are big-noting urban houses, out of place in a damp, wild landscape where human habitation has always looked transient at best. On Marine Parade North, at a spot adjacent to the beach, a big, new place is going up just in front of the forest of pohutukawa that spreads over this part of Piha like a thick blanket. It’s virtually on the road, in everyone’s face. Locals are furious and mutter darkly about these and other “monstrosities” that dominate the view from the beach back up to the hill. “It’s about wealth and a style of display,” Coney says.
The “Jenny Gibbs house” is also notorious. Built atop a ridge with great views, Gibbs’s place featured in a Telecom ad about working remotely: a man painted his wife’s toenails as she video-conferenced. “It’s an urban style of house. It looks like a glass box,” Coney says, adding that no thought appears to have been given to how it would look to everyone else. Like Piha’s version of the Sky Tower, it appears in nearly everyone’s views. Also, Coney says, it was one of the first places in Piha to include a drive and a locked gate – symbols of creeping urbanisation or exclusivity. Coney lives in Auckland during the week and her Piha bach is ancient by comparison: the gravel drive, the toilet under the house. “You go out there and nothing’s changed, apart from that the fridge has stopped going.”
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