“Who could blame them for wanting to plonk down in a spacious seaside suburbia, out of the firing line, and raise kids in a quarter-acre Pavlova paradise?”
BRIDGE TO UTOPIA
Once the bridge was finished in ’59, the new housing subdivisions spread like wildfire, eating up the North Shore farmland. The attraction was a modern suburbia of young people, with a relaxed quarteracre lifestyle close to safe beaches. It was family-friendly utopia achieved.
For a generation who had witnessed their parents struggle through the Depression, and been actively engaged in a world war and the austere aftermath, who could blame them for wanting to plonk down in a spacious seaside suburbia, out of the firing line, and raise kids in a quarter-acre Pavlova paradise?
Not me. They were my parents and we were those kids. Myself and my two siblings all arrived in the ’50s. As the middle child of three boys, I emerged smack-dab in mid-decade ’55. The Shore was a work-in-progress in those days. To put it bluntly, it was a sea of rudimentary roads; baches; no kerbing or channelling; farmland and bush; the infamous oxidation ponds or ‘poo ponds’; and then-new subdivisions, which in Kiwi fashion meant razing everything back to bare clay before building. Infrastructure was pretty light on the ground for years.
“Unlike many young families, we were fortunate, as our parents owned motor vehicles from the get-go”
FRONTING UP IN THE ADOLESCENT JUNGLE
The human spirit will
