The Bottle That Speaks Of The Past

This article by ecological engineer Stu Farrant first appeared in the November/December 2023 edition of Water

Sometime in the 1880’s a ginger beer bottle was flippantly discarded in the headwaters of Papawai Stream in Mt Cook, Wellington. We don’t know who threw away the bottle after savouring the sweet liquid at a time when potable drinking water was increasingly unattainable in the fledgeling capital city. It could have been a road builder working on the precipitous hills of Brooklyn above, it could have been a builder crafting heartwood native timber into another distinction villa, or it could have been a council employee checking on the rudimentary brick dams used to capture and divert fresh water to homes in the growing suburb of Te Aro below. It may even have been cast aside by a curious recent immigrant exploring the headwaters of the Papawai marvelling at the bizarre and bejewelled indigenous fish that were so alien to the species of the Europe they had left behind. We will obviously never know.

At the time the bottle was discarded, Wellington was still intersected by a lattice of open streams which flowed from the recently deforested hills to the tidal estuaries that flanked the shimmering Te Whanganui a Tara…the Great Harbour of Tara. Reclamation had already shunted the western coastline from Lambton to Jervois Quays but to the south the tidal flats recently raised by the 1855 earthquake extended unmodified to Te Aro Pa, where the park of the same name now sits. As the town of Wellington grew, a sense of change was in the air. The culturally significant Kumutoto Stream had been piped around 20 years previously and plans to create an expansive shipping channel and turning basin had been abandoned following the seismic uplift of 1855. Wellingtonians were already becoming aware of the perils of life alongside the open waterways and ‘drainage’ was a core focus for the early council as they tried to ‘tame’ the landscape.

Alongside stormwater, drinking water was also increasingly tenuous. In 1871 James Hector reported to the Wellington Water Supply Committee that “no water collected from within the crowded part of the city, from either wells or house taps is safe or proper for human consumption”. When John Lewin (J. L.) Bacon arrived in the booming capital in 1874 the construction of the Karori water supply reservoir was still 4 years away and he saw an opportunity. Safe and reliable drinking water was needed, and the source lay deep below the suburb of Te Aro. For millennia, pure rainwater had soaked through the podocarp cloaked hills feeding abundant streams like Papawai and slowly recharging the extensive aquifer that lay deep in the fractured greywacke beneath the wetlands at the lower end of Waitangi Stream. Bacon seized the moment, supplying aerated water, ginger beer and cordial from his bore and factory on lower Tory Street. Immediately behind the bustling factory, the increasingly putrid waters of the Moturoa Stream provided a convenient ‘drain’ for Bacon but doubled as an open sewer for large parts of Te Aro.

It was now that someone bought themselves a refreshing bottle of J. L. Bacon’s finest and mindlessly cast it aside in the hills above Wellington. But the water story was not all fizz and fun for Mr Bacon. As typhoid ravaged Te Aro, Bacon fell victim to the merciless illness in 1891. A victim of a mindset where our streams had become conduits for raw sewage discharging into the inner harbour on the doorstep of Te Aro Pa. Just as city leaders like Mayor Samuel Brown were waking up to the devastating consequences of using our once abundant freshwater streams as open sewers, the typhoid outbreak of 1890-92 demanded change. A Foxton flax farmer, coal merchant and central figure in the roll out of Wellingtons first stream powered trams, Mayor Brown had vision. Brown oversaw the delivery of the then globally innovative domestic refuse powered ‘waste to energy’ plant affectionately named ‘The Destructor’ on the site of the current Waitangi Park which generated steam to powered pumps taking untreated wastewater to the Moa Point outfall on the south coast. The reticulated sewer pipes and tunnels which connected the city to the coast are the same troublesome pipes that continue to cause headaches for us today.

A pioneer in the earliest days of urban Wellington, John Lewin Bacon recognised the need for safe drinking water, saw the rampant desecration of our precious freshwater streams and paid the ultimate price for poorly managed wastewater system. Its hard not to reflect on the criticality of decisions made at this time when we could have shaped a radically different city to what we grapple with today.

Fast forward 140 years and I find myself early on a Saturday morning clambering up the incised and sodden headwaters of Papawai Stream to document the ongoing adverse impacts of our continued mismanagement of urban stormwater (see story on page 56 of Water). The headwaters of Papawai are one of the few remaining reaches of the once extensive network of streams but are now subjected to persistent scour and erosion from unmitigated stormwater. On this same Saturday morning, as I rounded a bend, the 140-year-old clay J.L. Bacon ginger beer bottled was itself dislodged from the bank for me to pick up before it was shattered by the pounding flows. Call it coincidence, serendipity or a Tohu, this beautiful clay bottle which had hidden for 140 years revealed itself at a time when we are still grappling with how to better manage our stormwater, drinking water, wastewater and of course the freshwater on which we all rely. The bottle has also revealed a connection to a time when we had a chance to truly respect Te Mana o Te Wai and highlights for me the importance of understanding the legacy of decisions we make today on the world we create for future generations to inherit.

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How will the decisions we make now be regarded in another 140 years?

- Stu Farrant | Ecological Engineer | Morphum Environmental

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