The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 11 (February 1, 1937)
The Sand of a Thousand Golden Beaches — Surf And Sunshine, Sparkling Sand And Smiling Seas For Endless Miles
The Sand of a Thousand Golden Beaches
Surf And Sunshine, Sparkling Sand And Smiling Seas For Endless Miles.
New Zealand is unique in the whole wide world in its rich profusion of perfect bathing beaches. The three enemies of the foreshore as a place of enjoyment are shingle, mudflats, and excessive tidal rise and fall. The latter gives rise in the Old Country to scores of music hall jokes about taking the train out to low water mark, and the first two disfigure many famous watering places in the Mediterranean littoral, and elsewhere. The number of our beaches suffering in any of these ways is small, and our hundreds of leagues of coastline contain sealovers' faultless playgrounds every few miles. It would seem that Nature, when New Zealand was planned, having granted such lavish gifts of mild airs and copious sunshine, thought it as well to furnish also the means for their proper use. This article is a brief survey of this particular aspect of our wonderland and its blessings, and a still shorter summary of the extraordinary standard of man-made facilities for this form of human recreation which our fellow-countrymen, with their British love of open air life, have created throughout the length and breadth of New Zealand.
IWas in Timaru early last summer, and I encountered there a New Zealander who holds one of the most important official positions in London. We made a date to go down for a swim at seven in the morning. We sauntered down in Timaru sunshine in our dressing gowns, had a swim in the velvet-seeming waters of Caroline Bay, a shower each, and the use of a comfortable dressing shed. In the hunt for coins in our well-worn garments we eventually mustered a shilling between us and it was ample. Then my friend burst into speech. He indicated with a sweep of his hand the lovely spreading lawns, the groves of noble trees and the hundred and one other amenities of Caroline Bay. “Better than Deauville,” he said, “and by now at that place or any like it in Europe we would have been up for a pound … and yet I heard someone say he was going to retire from Timaru … to Timaru is sense, the other is lunacy.”
He was a soul-mate of mine, inasmuch as he was an addict, not of drugs, but of sun and sea bathing. If I am not approaching a good cream colour in late October, and a medium tan by the end of November, I have a feeling that life has been in vain up to that date. Through the gift of circumstance, I have a nodding acquaintance with a large number of New Zealand beaches. I have a written record of two hundred swims on the same number of different beaches. I was controlling a business once which compelled me to visit every place once every two years that had a picture show. This, as you may know, means every place larger than an incubator or a “K” wagon. I was sea bathing all the year round in Wellington in those days, and when I went on my travels I carried on the practice. I am afraid my itinerary usually provided that I did the Far North in the winter and the South in the summer.
It may be as well to ascertain the reason. The angry Irishman, discovering his idle son trying to do circus tricks on the farm plough horse sáid that “the only show in the ring the ‘omadhaun could put on would be to thravel as the world's smallest giant.” New Zealand is the world's smallest continent, and a continent is described in the dictionary as “a large mass or great division of land.” However, to quote from a scientific work, “It is continental in structure. The rocks are of the same kind as those of which continents are built.” It is surmised, also, that once the continent of New Zealand was of larger area than at present; but the most interesting fact of all is that, geologically speaking, New Zealand is a mixture of youth and hoary antiquity. It is thus the proper environment for its people, who are young in their settlement here as citizens and as old as England herself in heritage, tradition and racial history. In spite of the great age of much of New Zealand's structural elements, the forces which change the earth's shape, mould its contours and grave its features, are still actively at work here. It is this strange combination of physical phenomena that makes our country a pocket world, a miniature universe, a museum of natural wonders, and provides us with a replica of every world sight.
Now our beaches and their sands that range from the shining gold of Cooper's Beach to the glossy dark ironsand of Fitzroy, are all the product of water and rock. These two constituents are here in unique quality, quantity and combination. The elemental contents of the rocks are responsible for the formation of sand, and we have a surpassing percentage of sand-making rock. We have other natural advantages, too, that assist in the creation of such a multitude of choice beaches. New Zealand stretches across the “Roaring Forties” and is washed by great ocean currents. We have therefore a private climate. There is a good deal of wind, there is a varying but ample rainfall, and there is a constant stream of sunshine. Thus, every foot of our four thousand miles of coastline is flooded with the “little fingers of the rain,” with copious sunlight, and refreshed with steady breezes. Auckland is in the corresponding latitude to Algiers, but it is ten degrees cooler and its sunshine is comparable, and its rainfall immeasurably superior. Our three largest capitals have more than 2,000 hours of sunshine each year, and dozens of lesser towns have 500 hours more. A great part of our terrain has been sculptured by glacial action, and we have many glaciers still busily at work. Other great portions of our country are of recent volcanic origin; and we can sum up by saying that by the greatest of good luck our whole physical frame contains the perfect mechanism for the making of delectable sandy beaches.
It is a far cry from the tip of the Coromandel Peninsula to the bold headland of Cape Farewell, standing at the top of the South Island. At the foot of the big bluff is a semicircular beach with the most perfect surf of all the hundreds in New Zealand. But farther south is Porari, close to the Blowhole and the bizarre Pancake Rocks which are heaped up in enormous flat layers, as if some primal gods had been playing a game with titanic counters. I spent eleven hours once at Porari, and it seemed like one dream hour. The heavy green background of bush, the sand that shone like a million jewels, the laughing sea that broke gently into creamy foam, make up a memory that gives the lie to the yarn about the “wet West Coast.” Here I would like to say, too, that New Zealand rejoices in hundreds of beaches which are close to bush trees, in many cases the forest running right down to the border of the beach. This characteristic belongs to New Zealand alone, and should be mentioned in a loud, clear tone whenever beaches are quoted that belong to other lands.
It is a pleasant pastime, too, to run through the names, for they have a habit of being picturesque. I take these at random: Goose Bay, near Kaikoura; Fuller's Ti Beach, Bay of Islands; Oreti, near Invercargill; Anaura Bay, East Coast, past Tologa Bay; Spirits Bay, in the very Far North; Oruaiti, a pohutukawa-lined crescent of creamy sand; Goat Island Beach, on the East Coast of the North Auckland Peninsula near Leigh; Red Beach, in the Kaipara; and Paekakariki. At Tauranga they have been affected by the movies, for there are Honolulu Beach and Sixth Avenue Beach. A quartette from Canterbury are Corsair Bay, a delicious dimple in Lyttelton Harbour, Woodend, Waikuku, and Kairakei, where there “is the splendid combination of the Waimakariri Estuary and the Pacific; then there are the rolling names from North Auckland: Ahipara, Parakerake, Taipa, and Ngungururu, and a hundred more.
Christchurch has the fine surf beach at New Brighton, and the neat little coves of Sumner and Redcliffs. I have swum in the Sumner pool under the electric lights at eleven o'clock in the evening, and the scene had all the glamour of the best Hollywood cinema production. Dunedin, for my taste, has the red-haired girl of them all in the way of a public swimming place in the St. Clair baths hewn out of the shore rocks. Its harbour beaches are counted by the dozen, and everyone has looked out of the mail train and noted the sheer beauty of Waitati, once decorated by the unpoetic name of Blueskin.
Then when it comes to our provincial capitals and large towns, most of them are on or very near the coast. There is not one without a flawless specimen of beach wonder, and most of them have more than two. Where there are river mouths or harbour enclosures as, for instance, Gisborne, one has the choice of surf or inner sea.
Then there is a type of sea beach which is inimitable and almost wholly ours. It exists at Keri Keri, Whangaroa, and the other exquisite deep inlets of the Auckland Peninsula; it is to be found all about the mighty Kaipara Harbour and is seen in its best form possibly in the complex system of fiords known as the Picton Sounds. This is the tiny beach which sleeps in between the curving shores of waterways which are almost enclosed. The shore line of Pelorus Sound is no less than 237 miles, and its beaches are numbered by the round dozen in every arm of its lovely length.
One would say that there is little need for New Zealanders to go far for their summer sea sports. But if an air view could be quickly taken of the greater part of our land on a summer holiday, it would appear to be a mass of swift trains carrying happy crowds to beaches. The comfort-loving New Zealander has seen to it that his beaches are equipped as efficiently and as luxuriously in many cases as the best of the South of France. The universality of the love of the sea makes for love of change, and we have the delightful spectacle for instance of sun-tanned crowds filling a special train to go right across the North Island from the dark sands of New Plymouth to the gleaming white of Mount Maunganui. Into Auckland great trains pour tens of thousands to scatter about the Queen City's garland of creamy sands. As for Timaru, several twenty coach expresses rush up and down there from and to Christchurch, and from Oamaru, while Dunedin and Oamaru exchange sea-loving crowds with steady expedition. Out of Wellington on fine days, thousands pour to the five “P's,” Paremata, Plimmerton, Pukerua, Paekakariki, and Paraparaumu, and a dozen intervening stations that are gateways to sunshine and sea breezes. These trains puff past equally large crowds on their way down from the inland towns of the Manawatu and Rangitikei.
When counting our blessings, we New Zealanders should include in the forefront of the gifts that should make us a fellowship of the happy ones of earth, our priceless, our resplendent boon, of the best sea beaches to be found on the surface of the globe.