Publications

Heritage New Zealand Magazine Magazine Request Spring 2008 Winter 2008 Autumn 2008 Summer 2007 Spring 2007 Winter 2007 Autumn 2007 Summer 2006 Spring 2006 Winter 2006 Autumn 2006 Summer 2005 Spring 2005 Winter 2005 50th Anniversary commemorative issue Autumn 2005 Summer 2004 Spring 2004 Winter 2004 Autumn 2004 Summer 2003 Spring 2003 Winter 2003 Autumn 2003 Summer 2002 Spring 2002 NZ Historic Places Magazine May 2002 February 2002 November 2001 August 2001 May 2001 February 2001 November 2000 August 2000 May 2000 February 2000

Membership of the Historic Places Trust entitles you to a range of unique benefits including a free subscription to Heritage New Zealand magazine.

From Heritage New Zealand Winter 2006

Cave New World

by David Lomas

An astounding cave discovery is a remarkable addition to one of Auckland's hidden treasures

Geologists examining interior of Lava Caves, Rangitoto Island, Hauraki Gulf. Photo: GNS Science/Lloyd Homer

In the middle of a footpath in the middle of Auckland’s very suburban Mt Albert, speleologist Peter Crossley recently stepped on 45,000-year-old land that no one had ever seen, let alone walked on. The discovery of Kitenui Cave is being dubbed Auckland’s most significant lava cave discovery in a century.

The cave was revealed by accident. Workmen repairing gas pipes watched in astonishment as the hole they had just dug suddenly got deeper and deeper. They did not venture below to see what they had opened up. Instead they pulled a massive metal sheet across the hole and went off to tell their bosses.

Soon Auckland City’s heritage department heard of the find, but regulations prevented entry. “We didn’t know what we had,” says Bryan Bennett, a council architect specialising in heritage issues. “But it seemed likely it was going to be significant.”

In the small world of lava cave enthusiasts word quickly got to Peter Crossley, an Auckland University Geography Department researcher and technician. Crossley has spent the past 40 years exploring and mapping Auckland’s lava underworld, most of which lies just metres below the surface of the city’s big lava fields.

Entrance to Lava Caves, Rangitoto Island, Hauraki Gulf Photo: Photo GNS Science/Lloyd Homer

“You are always hoping that someone will find a big new one and that you will get the opportunity to explore it first,” Crossley says. He last had that chance in the late 1970s, when he and colleagues explored and mapped the last major cave find - the “Cave of One Thousand Press-Ups”, under Campbell Road near One Tree Hill.

Like Kitenui Cave it was discovered by workmen laying pipes. Running just below the busy road, the cave is for the most part between half and a metre high, with much of the volcanic rock having “razor sharp edges”. Crossley says exploring the cave was difficult, necessitating crawling by people “with leather knee caps and cast iron elbows” and the ability to do endless press-ups.

Crossley later wrote that the cave “is one of the best lava caves in Auckland for cleanliness, complexity and size”. But because of its tight confines, the cave has only been seen by dedicated cavers.

“What you hope for is a cave that just opens up and keeps on going,” says Crossley. And that was what he found when he and fellow caver Kevin Jose did what regulations forbade others doing in Kitenui Cave.

“We knew it would take forever to get formal approval so we just did it,” he says. “One day we just quietly went up there and, after struggling to lift the massive sheet of metal covering the cave entrance, went exploring. When you go in to a new cave you don’t know how far it is going to go – and this one just kept going and going.

“We weren’t exactly silent when we were in there – there were a lot of oohs and aahs. There you are, in a place no human has seen or been. It is 45,000 years old and just a metre below the road.

”What Crossley and Jose found was a cave that wandered for about 250 metres, passing not just under the road but also under 11 properties. In parts, the cave was low – not press up low, just hands and knees low. But in other parts it was expansive, a great cavern 20 metres wide.

Back at Auckland City, the news of the cave’s size was greeted with great joy. After generations of neglect and little statutory protection the council has now earmarked significant geological features, including known lava caves, for heritage protection. The Kitenui Cave seems likely to be the council’s jewel.“

For a long time now we have been looking for a cave which we can, with the right precautions, open up for public access,” says Bennett. “Now one has opened up under our feet and it is on public land.”

Bennett says the council has to move cautiously with Kitenui and cannot open it up till “we are sure the proper provisions are in place. The days are gone where the council can let people go where they might find themselves in danger.”

The excitement about Kitenui is because it is a significant cave on which is very accessible. Auckland has other large caves, but the good ones are all on private land, in backyards near Three Kings, Mt Eden and Mt Albert.

Private land owners do allow access but it is goodwill rather than a public right which determines this. “We can protect the caves, make sure nothing happens to them, but we have no rights to let people see them,” says Bennett.

The Kitenui discovery is in contrast to another cave find in 1996. Developers at what is now the Ascot Hospital in Green Lane found a large cave but filled it in before the council heard of it because it would have cost too much to protect it.

“That was a terrible loss,” says Bennett. “Today we would act much more quickly. We have emergency procedures which would allow us to get a protection order in just hours.”

Auckland has more than 50 caves of 20 metres or longer. Both Bennett and Crossley estimate another 50 such caves have been destroyed and perhaps as many as 50 more are yet to be unearthed.

“They are part of our heritage people are just getting to grips with – the whole volcano thing is the same,” Bennett says. “People think the volcanoes are just the cones – but the lava flows and the caves within them make Auckland a unique city.”

He says there is increasing recognition of how remarkable Auckland as a city built around and on 40 major volcanoes.

The Department of Conservation is the other main protector of lava caves in the region. It has small but significant caves on Rangitoto Island. But its most impressive asset is a cave and on a patch of land at Wiri in south Auckland, once used by NZ Railways as a quarry.

The Wiri cave is, according to speleologists, Auckland’s best. “It is the best preserved and the longest,” says Crossley. The cave is 290 metres long and up to six metres high.

“In parts it looks like a bulldozer went down and just smoothed it all out,” says Crossley.

DoC, like Auckland City with its caves, talks of opening up the Wiri cave to the public. “We are in discussions with the local council (Manukau) and weed control will start soon,” says spokesman Phillip McDonald

But McDonald also says there are a number of issues to resolve, including discussions with local iwi Ngati Te Ata, whose mythology is connected with the creation of the volcanoes and the iwi’s own arrival in Aotearoa through the earth.

Iwi spokeswoman Nganeko Minhinnick says the lava fields are important as “our tupuna are there”, but she says the iwi’s story is “not a story we can share with you”.

Ngati Te Ata, she says, are disappointed with the way the land around the cave has been treated, with quarrying having been allowed so close to the cave that “there is a split in the wall of the cave”.

“Quarrying has not been good housekeeping,” says Minhinnick. “It is now hard to see with the roads and the destruction what might have been.”She adds that Ngati Te Ata has not resolved its attitude to public access to the cave. “That is something we need to sit down and discuss with DoC.”

DoC, like Auckland City, is also concerned about public safety, saying there are issues about allowing access to an area which has been extensively quarried. The Wiri cave is currently locked behind a heavy metal grille in the middle of a weed covered waste land.

The modern day interest in the protection of the caves contrasts with years of neglect.

Maori knew of the caves but had little use for them. They were used as impromptu burial grounds; especially for the disposing of bodies after tribal wars.

Little is recorded, but there are tales of many human bones being found in caves which were part of the Mt Wellington lava flow. The location of the bones, like the caves in which they were placed, is not known. Both were victims of development in an era when little heed was paid of history.

Bones were also known to have been placed in caves around Mt Eden. They too are long gone, as are many of the caves hidden under urban sprawl. A report in the New Zealand Observer newspaper in 1936 says the Mt Eden bones were crushed at a local mill for fertiliser during a wheat crop failure in the late 1800s.

Crossley says there is no doubt some caves had skeletons in them … but only at the cave entrance. “Maori certainly used the entrances of caves for burial in other parts of the country – it is inconceivable they did not use some in Auckland. But they never went beyond the darkness.

“I have been in enough to be pretty certain of that … when you explore a cave you know whether anyone else has been there before. There are footprints – and they must have had burning torches – but I have never seen any evidence of it in Auckland and it has never been reported.

“But they were at the cave entrance. Maori never ventured far inside. In all my searches I have never seen any sign of bones, not even fingernails, inside the caves,” he says.

Europeans too had little use for the caves. Farmers in early years used them for dumping rubbish. Later, the bigger caves around Three Kings and Mt Albert were investigated as possible World War II air raid shelters, and some were used for mushroom growing. But as Bennett notes the most common use was for storm water drainage.

“In Auckland we have a history of small territorial authorities who saw the caves as a great place to feed storm water into. You just have to go inside some of them and the evidence is there,” he says

.“There are quite a few which are a bit smelly,” says Crossley. “An awful lot of storm water has gone through them.”

Auckland City and DoC are both now determined to end the days of destruction of caves.

“They are valuable geological features which need to be preserved,” says McDonald.

Bennett sees them as an integral part of the Auckland story – “the story of a great city built on volcanoes.”