Karekare Beach, West Coast, Auckland
This post has been prompted by a video I watched this morning from Kim Grant about how things change in the landscape.
I have quite a few photos taken over the years that show changes in places but a few that I felt showed some dramatic changes are of Karekare Beach at Auckland’s west coast.
When I visited in June 1960 the local surf club had their building made from stone sitting on top of a rock outcrop down on the beach, and it was surrounded by water at high tide. Not anymore. A visit again in 2008 found it almost swallowed by sand dunes.
The surf photo was taken from a ridge splitting the beach in two and I had to be careful balancing on the rocks to take that photo, but in 2008 the water was nowhere near the rocks. Instead, the sand had built up and the shoreline was well out to the west.
Visible beyond the club rooms in the first photo is the rusting remains of a bush railway engine. This was used on a railway running down the coast to remove logs from the bush. In the second photo, all you see is sand dunes. The engine is buried somewhere under metres of sand.
