Choked waterway cleared up as flood fix plans pending

Culvert and drain clean-up work to clear flood debris has identified a series of bridges on Sunnynook properties apparently built in contravention of council rules.

Before-and-after shots (right) show one such structure, with at least half a dozen now identified as compliance issues behind homes on Sunnynook Rd and a slip lane leading off it.

Devonport-Takapuna Local Board member Mel Powell, a Sunnynook resident, said she had been on a mission to have stormwater drains in the suburb cleared to hinder future flooding.

A “slammed” Watercare had put workers on the job in recent weeks, clearing rubbish and plant matter from waterways, she said. But they also found rubbish caught up on structures residents had installed at the rear of their properties, bridging open culverts. Among larger items cleared away were plastic rubbish bins.

Powell said in some cases residents owned the land on either side of the culvert.

Some house occupants had bridged the divide to access gardens or play areas. The crossings ranged from planks to actual bridges. Her understanding from Watercare was this was not permitted and that compliance officers were investigating.

A shipping container required removal by a crane from where it was left lodged

Before and after... Debris and weeds have been cleared from drains after being washed on 27 January from a property bordering the waterway under the south-eastern overbridge to the Sunnynook bus station. The slip road here flooded again last month, causing damage to cars parked by commuters.

Responsibility for waterways care became a point of contention when Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown said residents should do more to clear out drains bordering their properties. This caused a backlash, with residents noting it was physically impossible for some to clamber into deeper culverts or remove large items washed downstream.

Streets not being swept more regularly of leaves from trees on public land also remains an issue.

Local board chair Toni van Tonder told the Observer that Auckland Council had undertaken to increase street sweeping and that street drain sumps were now to be cleared twice rather than once a year, with problem areas examined three times.

Work was ongoing on bigger infrastructure solutions, but “our area is not being forgotten”, she said.

Managing stormwater through Sunnynook, which includes water channelled from Totaravale on the western side of the motorway, is a key issue for authorities.

The Milford Residents Association recently added its voice for more to be done to ensure flow onward through the Wairau Valley to Milford. It wants a large pond in Link Rd, below the Danske Mobler showroom, dredged more often.

Some officials front up, but questions linger on AEM plans

Our area has finally had the public meeting it deserved months ago, providing straight answers from emergency-response groups about their handling of recent events, rather than another derisory exercise in deflection.

But many questions remain about preparedness for future floods or natural disasters.

The takeaway message from the session in Takapuna two weeks ago was again that communities should plan their own response in case of major emergencies, but this came with a better underpinning of why this is the case. What ongoing support will be provided for this, especially from Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) is still not clear.

Senior leaders from police and fire, along with radio-communications and local groups, spoke about how the 27 January floods and Cyclone Gabrielle in February had played out and what had been learned. Around 35 people attended the session convened by the Auckland North Community and Development group (Ancad), with Auckland Council specialist adviser Michael Alofa chairing proceedings.

They came away with a clearer picture than from a farcical earlier session, at which a representative from council department AEM invited people to participate in a whiteboard planning exercise. Several of those who turned out in March, expecting some explanations, walked out; others stayed on bemused and irritated or trying to understand how organised civil defence had devolved to self-help.

The latest meeting fostered better awareness of the issues, even if the what to do next is clearly still a work in progress. Key services said communication channels and plans had already improved, including with AEM, though that organisation did not itself attend the meeting.

Revelations about the response included:

• Police had just three incident cars with two staff in each, along with a couple of desk sergeants on duty on the North Shore, when the 27 January floods struck. They rallied to deal with two deaths and hundreds of priority-one calls.

• Fire and Emergency New Zealand dealt with 400 calls in the Waitemata area, while its own Takapuna station in Wairau Rd was flooded, along with the homes of a number of staff and volunteers. It has only recently moved back into the station’s ground floor.

• Auckland Radio Emergency Communications (AREC), which is based in Sunnynook, helped with search and rescue in South Auckland during the floods, but was left unsure why AEM did not make contact, as it did for the later cyclone. AREC found AEM reliant on business systems not emergency systems, and said it had to come up with a plan for when Auckland power might fail and cellphone coverage lost.

AEM’s handling of the floods was faulted in an Auckland Council-commissioned report by former police commissioner Mike Bush. Alofa told the meeting changes were coming to how the organisation functioned, based on the report, and these would be fed back through local boards.

Concerns about what leadership AEM is offering remain, particularly from residents involved in groups drawing up suburb response plans, which Ancad has been helping deliver in the Devonport-Takapuna Local Board area. Board chair Toni van Tonder said it was pushing to get council funds.

Neighbourhood Support told the meeting it had only just employed a North Shore co-ordinator when the floods struck. Its data base needed building back up, but existing members had helped on their streets.

North Harbour Community Patrol, a volunteer group which works with police, activated a 25-member quick response team, helping move cars in the flood and liaising with police over looting in Wairau Valley. A frustration for the volunteers was council’s unwillingness, on privacy grounds, to provide the addresses of red and yellow-stickered properties, so patrols could keep an eye on vacant sites.

The meeting ended with talk about building personal resilience, but also calls for a greater duty of care for the vulnerable.

Neglected ‘major’ North Shore artist wins overdue

North Shore artist Pauline Thompson is the subject of two retrospective exhibitions, one in Takapuna, showcasing a vision it is surely time to celebrate.

Although her paintings gained respect in the art world before her death, aged 69, in 2012, including a place in the Auckland Art Gallery collection, their themes from her days at Elam arts school onwards were outside prevailing modernist norms, says curator Peter Shaw.

Thompson was a descendant of the Bounty mutineers, and Fletcher Christian’s Tahitian wife Mauatua. This Pasifika background, along with cosmic and spiritual themes, informed her work.

Portraits in domestic settings and Tāmaki Makaurau land and skyscapes – including the Matariki constellation, which was important to her – feature strongly.

Shaw and his wife own two of her paintings, including a local orchard scene which is on show at Takapuna Library’s Angela Morton room, along with miniatures made as gifts for friends and family, notebooks and studio artefacts. Across town at the Pah gallery, her larger paintings feature across its entire ground floor.

Shaw began research pre-Covid, keen to pull together an exhibition to help rectify what he describes as the “terrible neglect of a major artist”. He later learned that the Arts House Trust based at the Pah Homestead in Hillsborough was also interested in Thomp- son, leading to him helming the exhibitions that opened last week.

When her daughters, who live in Birkdale, were contacted, they said: “We’ve been waiting.”

The family willingly provided material which Shaw combined with works held in other private and public collections to make up the two shows.

There is a simple and pretty quality to the paintings, making it easy to see why Thompson was a misfit at art school, where the bold strokes and masculine views of Colin McCahon benchmarked New Zealand art.

“She was apart from the primarily modernist teaching that prevailed at the time,” says Shaw. After 18 discouraging months, she quit her studies, going on to marry and have three children. But she always kept painting and drawing, reading and thinking.

Nowadays, her exploration of the indigenous and women’s experience has gained ground in art discourse. It couples with a style Shaw calls “challenging, alluring and mysterious”.

Shaw met Thompson in the 1980s, when her work was shown by prestigious dealer Denis Cohn and other galleries, but this is the first time it has been exhibited since her death.

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“Pauline was a woman of conviction and determination, she continued to forge her own way,” he says.

“She had one of those minds that wanted to find linkages between the here and now events@thevic.co.nz

Close to home... An orchard view by Pauline

(right) has an air of mystery and the everyday and the cosmic.”

Better understanding her Tahitian and English background led her to visits to Norfolk Island, where Bounty descendants are numerous. She also delighted in depicting her home town, from night views of Rangitoto to city-centre scenes.

Both exhibitions will be open for three months, with the Takapuna show best seen as an insightful adjunct, in keeping with the educational purpose of its venue.

Shaw says the Angela Morton Room is a “godsend” for Auckland, with its collection of books on art. The noted art writer and curator even travels from his home in Pirongia in the Waikato to use it.

“It is absolutely invaluable because it has everything you’d want in one place to research.”

• Pauline Thompson: at Takapuna Library’s Angela Morton Room until 27 August.

Wayfinder... Themes of mythology and cosmology imbue the artist’s work, along with her deep knowledge of Polynesian history and a conviction the spiritual pervades nature and humanity. This painting, part of a retrospective at two venues, is on display at Pah Homestead