Watch and sea

WORDS: MATT PHILP

As thousands of us flock to the beaches over summer, surf lifesaving clubs up and down the country will be on patrol, helping to keep beachgoers safe as they have for more than a century

Sir Bob Harvey’s lifelong romances with Karekare beach and surf lifesaving began on a day in 1956 when he and a schoolmate cycled out from Auckland city because “we wanted to see surf”. It was an epic ride over the Waitākere Ranges on single-geared Raleighs, and when they arrived, they found the Karekare Surf Life Saving Club celebrating its 21st birthday.

“There were lots of drunken guys sitting under the trees with beautiful girlfriends and I thought, ‘God, I want to be like these guys’. Someone came over and said, ‘Hello boys, did you bike out from town? We’re looking for guys like you to join the club. Can you swim?’”

He could, he joined, and this summer the former mayor of Waitakere City, aged 82 and probably New Zealand’s longest-serving lifeguard, will patrol the black sands of Karekare for the 66th consecutive season – his last, he thinks.

Sir Bob will bow out at a milestone moment for the club, which in September officially opened its new home, a $3.3 million architecturally designed clubhouse beside Karekare Stream. The old headquarters was rotting, rusting, and unfit for purpose, and while there’s some nostalgia – “That club has been my second home most of my life,” he says – its passing is not mourned.

Which is not to say that Karekare doesn’t treasure its heritage. The new bunkrooms are named for illustrious former members – Colin Callan, for instance, an eight-time New Zealand swimming champion, and Ray Bailey, who, aged 17, was awakened in the clubhouse by someone yelling, ‘There are people drowning!’, leaped into the surf and saved two lives, a feat later honoured with a Rescue of the Year award.

The club has preserved the original rescue reel and cork belt, and there’s a four-metre-long wall covered in photographs dating back to the club’s founding. “We greatly honour the history of the club,” says Sir Bob.

In that sense, Karekare is typical of New Zealand’s 74 surf lifesaving clubs, the oldest of which began official patrolling in 1911. None of the early clubhouses were built for longevity.

As Surf Life Saving New Zealand CEO Paul Dalton says, “They were built by their members using donated materials”, and their beachside settings accelerated their decline.

“A lot of the clubhouses are like Granddad’s axe – they’ve had six new handles, six new heads, but they’re still the same axe.” (The country’s oldest surviving surf clubhouse, Maranui’s iconic 1930s rectilinear building on Lyall Parade, was extended twice, then rebuilt after a fire gutted it in 2009. Club members and the Maranui community fought for the rebuild after the building’s owner, Wellington City Council, decided initially to demolish it. Sadly, the fire consumed records and photos dating back to 1911, as well as a beautiful carved wooden honours board.)

The Covid-19 pandemic has hastened the replacement of many clubhouses, with the Government funding more than a dozen rebuilds and upgrades as ‘shovel-ready’ projects.

In the past few years, clubhouses have been rebuilt in Christchurch, Bay of Plenty, Wellington, ManawatūWhanganui, Coromandel, Auckland and elsewhere, although not all necessarily with pandemic-related funding.

1 Sir Bob Harvey began patrolling the black sands of Karekare 66 years ago.

2 Sir Bob outside the new home of Karekare Surf Life

Saving Club, which officially opened in September.

IMAGERY:

BRENDON O’HAGAN

1 The $3.3 million architecturally designed clubhouse beside Karekare

Stream.

2 A four-metre-long wall in the new

Karekare clubhouse is covered in photographs dating back to the club’s founding.

IMAGERY:

BRENDON O’HAGAN

3 Lyall Bay Surf Life

Saving Club was the first in New Zealand to actively conduct patrols.

IMAGE:

MIKE HEYDON

4 Sir Bob inside the new Karekare clubhouse.

IMAGE:

BRENDON O’HAGAN

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So the rich history of surf lifesaving in New Zealand isn’t to be found in built heritage. Instead, it’s in the clubs’ traditions and their collections, in the black-and-white photographs of lifeguards dressed in ‘neck-to-knees’, and the vintage rescue craft that adorn the clubhouses.

Carol Quirk’s much loved Lyall Bay Surf Life Saving Club, the first in New Zealand to actively conduct patrols, replaced its 1950s clubhouse in 2021. But the club’s 112-year history is celebrated inside.

“We’ve got a roll of honour for all the members who fought in World War I and World War II, a pair of togs from the 1920s, and an old reel and a surfboard from the 1960s on display – a lot of wonderful memorabilia,” says Carol, who joined Lyall Bay in 1976 after it amalgamated with the women-only Wellington Ladies Surf Life Saving Club. She later became New Zealand’s first female club captain and National President of Surf Life Saving New Zealand (of which she was made a life member in 2010).

“While a lot of the original built heritage has gone, clubs try to look after their other heritage. For example, Lyall Bay did oral histories of several of our older members well before our 100th, and we have records

such as a scrapbook that includes records from the first swimming meet held by the Wellington Amateur Swimming Club, which later morphed into the Lyall Bay surf club, and photo albums from the 1920s.”

A number have been entrusted to the Alexander Turnbull Library, adds Carol, who was a New Zealand Historic Places Trust deputy director from 1984 to 1995.

“Keeping them in a surf club is not a wise conservation move!”

Carol’s surf lifesaving story stretches back beyond Lyall Bay to 1968, when she volunteered for the club at Paekākāriki. Fifty-odd years later, it remains a voluntary movement, but “it’s so much more professional”, she observes.

“When I started patrolling, we had a reel and patrol flags, and you sat on the beach in your bikini and your beanie and that was it. Now we have all these power craft, and the people are really qualified – first aid, advanced lifeguarding, you name it.”

Growing professionalism means the service offered is also becoming increasingly consistent between clubs. Paul Dalton talks about the drive to ensure that “what you see between the red and yellow flags in Dunedin is the same as in the Coromandel”.

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See more of Sir Bob at Karakare: youtube.com/ HeritageNewZealand PouhereTaonga

“A lot of the clubhouses are like Granddad’s axe – they’ve had six new handles, six new heads, but they’re still the same axe”

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1 The country’s oldest surviving surf clubhouse is home to Maranui Surf Life

Saving Club.

2 3 Maranui Surf Life

Saving Club.

IMAGERY: MIKE HEYDON

3 2

That said, our surf clubs have always had unique identities, formed from the stuff of their founders and their setting – a pounding West Coast surf beach, say, or a benign urban strand – and embedded in club traditions and lore.

There are the ‘breakaway’ clubs, historically in rivalry with their parent club along the beach (Maranui and Lyall Bay, for instance) and the hardcore clubs, the ones that patrol the wildest beaches and tend to attract people keen on a challenge (Piha and its neighbours).

Origin stories are a celebrated element of these club identities. Karekare, for example, was formed as a result of a near-drowning, when a young woman, Hazel Bentham, drifted beyond the reach of the reel at Piha. A Fairey seaplane dispatched from Hobsonville reached her in the nick of time as she “floated, waiting for death”, the whole saga witnessed from the beach by members of the Manukau Cycling Club.

“Those guys were in awe,” says Sir Bob. “They later had a meeting at the YMCA and said, ‘Let’s start a surf club!’”

Piha, the first club to patrol the West Coast, had a less dramatic genesis: players from the Waitematā Rugby Club formed it in 1934 around a dining table, with a keg of beer and a bowl of sausages. But Piha was – and still is – the epitome of the hard-edged surf lifesaving club. Its founders were elite athletes – boxers, cyclists, rugby and league players.

“They were people who wanted to test themselves, and there isn’t anywhere you can test yourself more than at Piha,” says author and local-body politician Sandra Coney, who wrote a history of the first 75 years of the club called Piha: Guardians of the Iron Sands.

Sandra’s father, Tom Pearce, a representative rugby player and All Blacks reserve, was Piha’s first boat captain and a champion competitor (there are trophies at the family’s Piha bach still).

“Once, he took the surf boat out in really big surf and they got completely smashed. When they staggered onto the shore, heads bleeding, Dad said, ‘Check for broken oars!’ That slightly sums up the ethos of the club.”

Piha was innovative, its members always keen to push the envelope. The club bought a surfboat from Sydney in its second year and promoted the competitive side of the sport to other clubs; the following year it took possession of two surf skis, and in the 1950s Piha led the way in adopting Malibu boards, a pair of which have been restored and are displayed in the clubrooms. There’s also an old surf boat hanging from the clubroom ceiling, and three enormous Whites Aviation photographs of Piha scenes.

The club is also at the heart of the resurrection of a thrilling surf lifesaving tradition with the Big Wave Classic (Day of the Giants), held every February at Piha. In an essay based on her book, Sandra describes it as the “brainchild of ex-Kiwi [rugby league team] Mark ‘Horse’ Bourneville who, inspired by the historic images of early Piha boaties on the clubhouse walls, started the contests in 2005, helping the revival of the heroic and entertaining sport of surf boat racing”.

So much for history; what about the future? Surf lifesaving in this country has arguably never been stronger. The movement is on a more secure financial footing, with the Government allocating $9.4 million per year in perpetuity in the May 2020 budget.

“It’s the first time we’ve had any government support in 100-plus years,” says Paul. “It’s taken a lot of pressure off the clubs.”

Meanwhile, membership continues to grow – at last count, it was around 19,000 (including more than 4500 patrolling lifeguards), with the popular junior ‘Nippers’ programme providing a pipeline of volunteers.

Sir Bob says these contemporary rookies are a different breed – fitter, more athletic, leading healthier lifestyles.

“The raging parties, the keg on the back of the truck, that doesn’t exist anymore,” he says.

But the movement’s essence hasn’t changed.

“It’s part of the spirit of this country: a volunteer movement doing something extraordinary – and which can often be dangerous – for the community.”