A lake once covered the Ruataniwha Plains, and its name remembers the two, human-eating, taniwha who lived there. One day they fought over a boy who had fallen into the lake, and so fierce was their battle, their writhing tails slashed the land; the...Read more
The Regional Council proposes a half-billion dollar dam project. Tom Belford asks, who pays, who owns, and is it worth it? All public hedging about feasibility studies aside, the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council wants to build a dam on the Makaroro...Read more
The Tukituki River is regarded as a taonga (treasured possession) by the hapu of Tamatea and Heretaunga (CHB and Hastings Districts). It will always be a taonga, and our fervent wish is that other river users will start treating it as such. To...Read more
From mountains to sea, the Tukituki presents economic opportunity, but only if it can be harnessed in an environmentally sound way, as Jess Soutar Barron reports. For Kiwis, rivers are life-blood. Mauri. They feed our spirit, energise us. They are a...Read more
Simmering just below the surface in Hawke’s Bay is a debate about how effectively we are governed by our local bodies. In a day-to-day sense, to the degree there’s discontent, it tends to focus on quite immediate issues … we don’t like...Read more
“A swampy jungle of interlaced flax and cutting grass, taller than a mounted horseman, and so dense it is more practical to go by river than attempt to force a path through it.” Missionary William Colenso describes the Heretaunga Plains in...Read more
Keith Newman asks how many big ticket items we can afford as Hawke’s Bay councils budget for the next decade without a master plan. Inter-city rivalry hangs in the air, like the smell from the Clive sewage plant before it was capped, as the big...Read more
