Van Dammes Lagoon - Te Waipuna a Rangiatea

Van Damme’s Lagoon - Te Waipuna a Rangiatea
by Celia Walker
Van Damme’s Lagoon - Te Waipuna a Rangiatea seems an unlikely find, a tranquil lagoon, stream, and tree-filled basin squeezed in amongst a vexatious tangle of multi-lane roads in deepest Panmure. This lagoon has seen many lives, and been subject to many uses, not all of them good.

A dirty history of industrial use and abuse of this natural spring began with its use as a water source for the Ireland Brothers Tannery from the 1870s until 1923. This was not the worst of its suffering, though there was a happy interlude when Theodore Van Damme purchased the land in 1930 and put some effort into turning it into a park. After Van Damme’s death its fortunes plummeted, and it became essentially just one big oozing rubbish tip of industrial waste and pollution. Auckland Council purchased the land in 1975 in order to clean it up, but it once again languished and declined into a muddy wasteland with a bad reputation.

Although the most recent upgrade was the side product of a road bypass, which is not a terribly environmentally beneficial thing in itself, it has come with huge investment in the site: a big clean-up, extensive tracks, planting, and some signage that helps to once again foreground its ancient Maori past.

Traces still remain of a whole network of agricultural lands worked by Maori in this area, including large stone-filled hangi pits, small kumara pits and middens dating back to the 1600s, uncovered here when the bypass was pushed through. However, decades of semi-industrial and residential developments that followed on from European agriculture have severed any obvious connection and context between this little pocket of land and Maungarei - Mt Wellington or nearby Panmure Basin.

Some of the biggest treats are exotic species: the mass of water lilies that fill the lagoon, along with mallard ducks, and an enormous walnut tree in the centre of the reserve area. Even the constructed stream bed running under the overpass has some charm – with so many urban waterways buried in a network of hidden pipes or channelled into open concrete culverts, the city as a whole is a bit bereft of semi-natural watercourses. The large, graffiti scrawled exposed pipe that runs through one part of the lagoon retains some sense of industrial grit, but there is enough of the natural to make it an attractive retreat.

In many ways these overlays of regenerating bush, exotic trees and introduced birds, industrial remnants and ancient traces of Maori occupation conflate the many histories of this area into one tiny site.

Image credits: Celia Walker