On the Edge
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’
The south coast of Wellington is rugged and rambling, and has many faces. They include sunny, though chilly Riviera, picture-book pebbly seaside strand, and, on occasion, churning, storm-stirred cauldron that refuses to acknowledge the boundary between land and sea. As with many of our coastal regions, such masks hide a sicklier complexion, as when the heavens cry, the waters become unfit to swim, marred by life-threatening urban run-off.
Such ‘civilising’ is at least blunted to a degree by the protections afforded by the Taputeranga Marine Reserve, which bars wanton pillaging of resources within a rectangle bounded to the north by the ‘median high water mark’.
As a hard-to-define and ever-transitional zone between states of matter, coastal boundaries are of incalculable importance to life of all dimensions and complexities, and, with enormous emotional charge, to both locals and visitors. For some they are a backdrop to everyday life, important visually, and perhaps symbolically, though seldom deeply engaged
