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Once a month we send out an e-newsletter, giving behind the scenes insight into the production of the magazine, sneak previews of upcoming issues as well as interactive features.The new pioneers
A debt-free lifestyle on a beautiful patch of land by the sea sounds like heaven. Work-from-home technology combined with low property prices has made it a real possibility around the shores of the remote Hokianga harbour. Words: Pam Neville; Photos: David Whorwood
THE SOUTHERN HOKIANGA is littered with graphic evidence that the boom in coastal property is over. Sections, some still with their $500,000 for-sale signs, sprout only weeds. Giant hilltop subdivisions – once touted as sites for million-dollar holiday homes – are literally on the move, victims of slash-and-bulldoze development that sends the already unstable Hokianga soil slipping in rivers of mud to the harbour. Economic recession has spelled the end of the property heyday when a coastal holiday home was considered an essential. Property sales in the Hokianga have pretty much collapsed.
But there’s a silver lining here. While the recession is bad news for the big-city land developers who during the property boom bought pine forests with magical views and cattle farms with harbour frontages, local environmentalists see it as breathing space. The economic downturn provides a chance for the mistakes of boom times to be recognized and prevented in future. “As soon as you move trees and bush up here you get slips and weed growth. This is a creeping landscape; it’s on the move, so small problems quickly become large ones when you disturb it,” says ecologist Terry Kennedy. “If you bulldoze trees and scrub from hillsides and burn them or try to bury them in gullies, the repercussions are awful.”
He points to a coastal strip that was once a sandy beach with one of the last habitats of native rock oysters in the harbour. Topsoil and leachates washed from a failed property development on the hills above now cover the sand with mud; Pacific oysters colonize the mud and both beach and rock oysters are dead and buried.
The Hokianga harbour could lose its brownish hue and the muddy edges could once again become sandy beaches if historical cattle farming practices (where fertilizer run-off causes destructive algal blooms in the harbour) and recent land-development techniques ceased, Terry believes.
