What follows are fragments of a curious history. From scraps of information scattered on the internet and throughout many libraries, together with explorations of the neighbourhood, I have constructed a detailed portrait of my backyard in Auckland's Waitakere City, that stretches backwards through European settlement, pre-European Maori history, to ancient times before human colonisation, and ultimately to the land's origins on the coast of Gondwanaland 250 million years ago.
This project started life as an essay written for the J. T. Diamond Essay competition, which it won 2nd prize in 2005. To date the essay has been published in the West Auckland Historical Society newsletter (June 2006) and then serialised in The Titirangi Tatler (April - June 2007). This site is a greatly expanded multimedia version of the original essay download PDF.
You can download the latest text of this web site here.
I would like to continue to develop this project as new information becomes available.
Please email me anything of interest...
I would like to thank Auckland City Libraries, the Alexander Turnbull Library, and Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd. for their kind permission to reproduce the historic maps and images.
This site is dedicated to the memory of my father who helped introduce me to the vast richness of the Waitakere Ranges and Manukau coast.
© nigel brookes | chimaera 2010 | rights reserved