Brian Rudman: Auckland's natural history could end museum malarkey

Illustration / Peter Bromhead

For five long years, Auckland Council politicians have been dithering over how to spend $3 million they don't have on a World War I centennial memorial. That's a year longer than the war itself, which toppled empires and left 41 million dead or injured.

Now, with time fast running out to get something in place before the anniversary ends, Mayor Phil Goff has donned his Field Marshal cap and assumed control.

At tomorrow's council meeting he wants councillors to relieve the Domain Committee of command of the exercise, and "to revoke any and all previous decisions" the committee had made. He wants the bureaucrats to take over and the Wellington designers, Wraight Athfield, who stormed off in a huff after a row with the Domain Committee, to be brought back to do the job.

In early 2016, the governing body selected the Wraight Athfield design, Te Takuahi - The Hearth, and delegated final design approval to first the World War I Centenary Memorial Working Party and subsequently, to the Domain Committee.

Since then there's been an impasse over the route of the access path between the new memorial on the slopes below the museum and the cenotaph. In April this year, the committee had had enough and voted to seek a new simplified - and cheaper - design. At which time the designers tossed their drawing boards into the air and decamped.

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Four months on, and the centennial deadline fast approaching, the mayor is now trying to kick start the project back into life.

Which is a shame. As I've said in the past, the grieving, post-war generation of Aucklanders built a magnificent war memorial museum that already says it all. On a more practical note, the mayor doesn't have the $3m, to say nothing of the inevitable cost over-runs that Te Takuahi is budgeted to cost.

The only money committed is $1m from ratepayers, and an NZ Lotteries grant pledge of $655,000. From this we can deduct $242,000 to cover the initial design contest, plus $70,000 for design fees and other sundries.

There's also the neglected issue of the 1915 Act of Parliament, passed a century ago to stop further despoliation of Auckland's landmark volcanic cones.

Perhaps the Wellingtonian designers can be forgiven their ignorance, but not the mayor. Goff was the MP for Mt Roskill and a minister in the Clark government which tried to bulldoze a motorway through the side of his local maunga.

To his government's embarrassment, The Volcanic Cones Society unearthed the long-forgotten act in 2003, forcing the motorway builders to go around Puketapapa - Mt Roskill, not through it.

In backing the act in 1915, Prime Minister William Massey said: "The volcanic hills in and around the city of Auckland are being destroyed ... and the legislation has been framed with a view to preventing their destruction."

Only four paragraphs long, the key passage is "it shall be unlawful for any person, unless expressly authorised by the Governor in Council ... to make any excavation, quarry, terrace or cutting of any kind ... on the side or slope of any of the volcanic cones or hills in the Auckland provincial district" in a public domain or reserve, without leaving a slope from top to bottom of 40 degrees or more.

Te Takuahi surely breaks that law. It proposes to cut a vertically backed basin into the side of the Pukekawa volcano over which Auckland Domain sprawls.

Describing the planned excavation, Wraight Athfield's design competition entry admits, "the edges carved into the slope of the hill provide sheltered ledges to move along or sit. These 'cut' edges are faced with stone incorporating interpretations of the strata of geological and cultural memories layered under the surface."

It further refers to "the raised crescent [which] rises out of the volcanic tuff ring, offering new views out to the harbour" and highlights the new structure "as a new geometric form in the land".

The 1915 act is clear. It wants the volcanoes left as they are. Not excavated for road metal in 1915, nor remodelled into so-called new geometric forms 100 years later.

It seems obvious that the 1915 act is the centennial councillors should be remembering, and acting on, not the over-memorialised World War I.