Deep Waters And Broken Horizons

Pristine Coastline: The Government's plans to bring deep-sea oil exploration and exploitation to New Zealand's Exclusive Economic Zone threaten the unspoiled beauty of its coasts, the survival of its flora and fauna and the future of its fishing and tourism industries.

 

THE NORTH OTAGO COUNTRYSIDE descends in a series of broad terraces towards the sea. So, when I was a child, the journey home was all downhill. On the farm where I grew up, those smooth-topped hills came to an abrupt end, dropping suddenly to the flat paddocks and meandering creeks that ran out among the sea grass and sand dunes of Otago’s curving shoreline. 

Behind our homestead, all was high hills and distant mountains, but before it ran the ruled line of the Pacific’s far horizon. Well, it seemed far to me, but, in reality, it was only a few miles away. Even so, the world lay beyond it, infinitely far, and every night I’d fall asleep to the steady rhythm of the breakers whose soft whispers I could never quite decipher.

 

Fifty years later, those breakers' messages are suddenly intelligible: full of warning and fears for the future. Because, if Prime Minister Key and his gung-ho Energy Minister, Simon Bridges, get their way, then the unsullied line of the Pacific will be defiled. 

Rising between the horizon and the shore, gas stacks flaring in the wind like the banners of a feudal host, will be oil platforms. And everything I cherished as a child: the rush-lined creeks; the orange and white pebble beaches; the fishing grounds; the circling gulls; the little estuaries and wide river mouths; will be one accident away from destruction.

 

Of course, Mr Bridges will tell me exactly what he told the 600 oil prospectors and their enablers gathered at the Advantage New Zealand Conference in Auckland on Monday, that: “New Zealand has a world-class regulatory system that ensures the safety of its people and its environment, alongside greater resource development.”

 

I wish that was true. I wish that before any company was permitted to lower their drilling equipment more than a thousand metres to the bottom of the sea they had to have all the necessary salvage equipment ready and waiting, just hours away, in the event of something going wrong.

 

Because things do go wrong with deep sea oil wells. And Robert P. Daniels, Senior Vice President, International and Deepwater Exploration, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, a guest speaker at the Advantage New Zealand Conference, could’ve told Mr Bridges all about them.

 

Because the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation was there when something very serious went wrong on a deep sea oil platform. Anadarko owned 25 percent of the Deepwater Horizon when it exploded, killing eleven men, and unleashing, more than a mile below, the first of the 780,000 cubic metres of crude oil that devastated the unprotected Gulf of Mexico.

 

Disaster On The High Seas: The Deepwater Horizon tragedy took 87 days to contain - and that was in the Gulf of Mexico where salvage equipment was close by. A similar oil spill would take many more months to contain if it happened off the New Zealand coast.

 

It took 87 days to finally cap that oil gusher – and that was when the necessary (and eye-wateringly expensive) equipment required for the job was located only a few days sailing time from the scene of the disaster.

 

If something akin to the Deepwater Horizon disaster happened here in New Zealand, that equipment would take not days, but months, to arrive. While it was being assembled an environmental catastrophe beyond the imagination of most New Zealanders would be destroying our flora and fauna, fouling our coastline, and inflicting damage on our fishing and tourist industries that only decades could repair.

 

None of this information appears in Mr Bridges’ speech to the oil explorers. What he did say, after listing the vast strips of New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone which the National Government has opened for exploration, was this:

 

“Many of you have actively engaged with the Government on the review of the Crown Minerals Act, the introduction of environmental legislation into the Exclusive Economic Zone and on new health and safety regulations for petroleum operations.

 

“I thank you for your tireless efforts to help make our laws and regulations world-class.”

 

In other words, Mr Bridges thanks the oil exploration companies for “actively engaging” in the task of drawing up the legislation intended to regulate the behaviour of … the oil exploration companies.

 

Included among the regulatory provisions of this “world-class” legislation are Mr Bridges’ clauses permitting the armed forces to be used against New Zealand citizens challenging the oil exploration companies. Any repetition of the actions that drove Petrobras out of the Raukumara Basin will see protesters facing massive fines and serious jail time.

 

Our country faces a sudden downhill journey – but we are not going home.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 May 2013.

Grandfather's Beach (A poem from 1980)

Katiki Beach, North Otago.

It’s funny the way random events can shake free old memories and allow them to float up to the surface of one’s conscious mind. A query from a man who knew my grandfather’s brother’s son back in the 1930s wrote to me recently with a genealogical query. He had holidayed with this cousin of mine at Hillgrove in North Otago – just a short bike-ride from Katiki Beach. His questions recalled to my mind the following poem, written by me nearly thirty years ago about the very same spot, and my family’s ties to the surrounding countryside. The "wink-warning light" in the poem’s first stanza is, of course, the Moeraki Point lighthouse, situated on the next headland up. And the reference to "this cannibal coast" is drawn from Trotter family history, which tells of a great cache of human bones (many blackened by fire) uncovered not far from the beach. Interestingly, Michael Trotter, the cousin with whom my correspondent explored the area all those years ago, became a noted New Zealand archaeologist, and served for many years as the Director of Canterbury Museum.

　
Grandfather’s Beach


The headland black
Stretched arms-length seaward.
In the cloud-banked, soft-sighing night
No stars show –
Save the man-made wink-warning light
Fingering a dark sea face.
The ocean, vast,
Turns silently with the world,
Consumed in private longing
For a hidden winsome moon
Big-bellied and cloud-skipping
On the wide sky-sprawling cloak.

Here by night,
Above the saw-toothed zig-zagging reef,
Heavy with the seaweed’s slapping rags,
I stand – Man dwarfed
By the indifferent earth-blind hills.
Transient flesh,
Where sand-strangled rock
And the fish-gulping sea
Laugh, laugh
At a human wisp of time.

My Father’s Father’s
Father’s Father
Claimed this,
This bow-taut beach.
From the silver-singing sea
To sloping gorge-gut hill
He felled the trees,
Left his blubber-boiling, barb-sharp peers
For a deeper dream inland.
Where high-keening gulls
And the Kea’s wicked shriek
Close fast about a groping hand.

Fathering sons
Upon the scarred, unflinching earth
He wrestled wealth
From raped and ravaged land.
Poured forth his blood,
Set his soul free
To pace the frothing margins
Of this, His sullen
Southern strand.

Katiki – the name lingers
Along this cannibal coast.
Bone-bleached and broken skulled,
Spirits of the murdered dead
Whisper in the sand
And bubble blood
In the gurgling, tide-tugging pools.
Obscure ghosts haunt
The bush-buried creeks.
The skylines are empty of sound.

I walk.
I walk with slow strides
At the sea’s side, singing.
A living son
On his dead grandsire’s shore.
Heavy with history
The hills look down.
I step in time.
In time with the surf’s retreat,
With the Heron’s lazy beat upstream.
Where the creek spills over
The birds scatter
Like living wind-blown litter.

Answering the stone wall’s fall
I scrawl my name,
Heart’s graffiti
And a hundred years’ claim.
The sun dark hills
Muster in a line.
Sand-strangled rock
And the fish-gulping sea
Laugh, laugh
At a human wisp of time.

Chris Trotter
27 May 1980