Vision: A place for us to care for and protect Whatu ngarongaro he tangata, toitu he whenua Man disappears but the land remains

Transcription

1 Art by: Christina Hardie Vision: A place for us to care for and protect Whatu ngarongaro he tangata, toitu he whenua Man disappears but the land remains September

2 Contents Why do a Community Plan?... 3 How will the plan work?... 3 Who will have access to the plan?... 3 How will progress and success be measured?... 3 How can new ideas be incorporated?... 3 History from Kupe to Cook... 4 Dacre s Grant... 5 A description of our community... 7 Our process so far Key areas of focus Alison Henry Plan details

3 A place for us to care and protect Why do a Community Plan? As a short to medium term initiative for the communities of Cooks Beach, Ferry Landing and Flaxmill Bay, the community vision plan will: Focus community debate and get people involved in making decisions and taking responsibility for our communities Set direction and common goals, promote consensus and avoid division Safeguard the community and the environment from exploitation Capture all good ideas and identify initiatives suitable for external funding Assist Community Board decision-making and allow more effective use of ratepayer funds Ensure the small settlements are able to develop facilities How will the plan work? This Community Plan is a collection of aspirations and priorities for future directions. It is a community-owned document and provides a framework to be used to guide decision making for local planning purposes. For example, individuals and groups who may be wishing to undertake a community project could use the Community Plan to determine priorities for action or to support their requests for external funding. As part of the Council s planning process, the Mercury Bay Community Board will use this Plan to determine local priorities and to recommend future work programmes to council. The Thames Coromandel District Council will take into account the principles and priorities as outlined in the Community Plan when deciding its annual and longer-term work programmes. The Council will use the Community Plan as a basis for developing policies for desired growth within the District. that suit the area Help avoid haphazard development Help influence Thames Coromandel District Council s programme of works during its annual and long-term planning processes Show opportunities for individuals and groups to develop new projects and provide goods and services Reporting on this Plan each year will enable the community to record achievements and to check that the identified priorities are still correct. It will also be a chance to include new information and new ideas. The plan will be used to secure support from within and outside the community for funding for specific projects and will be reported on regularly to the Community Board and the public. Annual reporting will enable success to be measured and information to be checked and updated. There is opportunity for involvement at every stage of the process. The Community Board will take an active role in promoting the Plan to the community and where appropriate, facilitating project development. Others who have an interest in the future of the area will find the Community Plan an essential planning guide. These include: Government Agencies Other Councils Developers/Investors Visitors and Tourists Who will have access to the plan? This Community Plan is available from the local Council Office at 46 Albert Street, Whitianga. How will progress and success be measured? A central record of activity will be kept at the District Council office, 46 Albert Street, Whitianga and through the Mercury Bay Community Board. Progress will be reported to the community annually. Maintaining the integrity of the Plan and monitoring its use is a necessary part of the implementation. A review of the Plan s highest priorities will be carried out by the Community Board at a time to coincide with the preparation of How can new ideas be incorporated? The Community Plan has been arranged like a workbook so that an individual or group may use it to keep a record of their activity and ideas. The central record of activity, maintained by Council, will form the basis of the annual report to the community and the Community Board. All comments on or contributions to this Community Vision 2 Council s annual plan budgeting process. A major review of this Community Plan will be undertaken every three years to coincide with the review of Council s LTCCP process. This will involve public consultation and input. Plan should be made to the Thames Coromandel District Council s Mercury Bay Area Manager, 46 Albert Street, Whitianga.

4 A place for us to care and protect Why do a Community Plan? As a short to medium term initiative for the communities of Cooks Beach, Ferry Landing and Flaxmill Bay, the community vision plan will: Focus community debate and get people involved in making decisions and taking responsibility for our communities Set direction and common goals, promote consensus and avoid division Safeguard the community and the environment from exploitation Capture all good ideas and identify initiatives suitable for external funding Assist Community Board decision-making and allow more effective use of ratepayer funds Ensure the small settlements are able to develop facilities How will the plan work? This Community Plan is a collection of aspirations and priorities for future directions. It is a community-owned document and provides a framework to be used to guide decision making for local planning purposes. For example, individuals and groups who may be wishing to undertake a community project could use the Community Plan to determine priorities for action or to support their requests for external funding. As part of the Council s planning process, the Mercury Bay Community Board will use this Plan to determine local priorities and to recommend future work programmes to council. The Thames Coromandel District Council will take into account the principles and priorities as outlined in the Community Plan when deciding its annual and longer-term work programmes. The Council will use the Community Plan as a basis for developing policies for desired growth within the District. that suit the area Help avoid haphazard development Help influence Thames Coromandel District Council s programme of works during its annual and long-term planning processes Show opportunities for individuals and groups to develop new projects and provide goods and services Reporting on this Plan each year will enable the community to record achievements and to check that the identified priorities are still correct. It will also be a chance to include new information and new ideas. The plan will be used to secure support from within and outside the community for funding for specific projects and will be reported on regularly to the Community Board and the public. Annual reporting will enable success to be measured and information to be checked and updated. There is opportunity for involvement at every stage of the process. The Community Board will take an active role in promoting the Plan to the community and where appropriate, facilitating project development. Others who have an interest in the future of the area will find the Community Plan an essential planning guide. These include: Government Agencies Other Councils Developers/Investors Visitors and Tourists Who will have access to the plan? This Community Plan is available from the local Council Office at 46 Albert Street, Whitianga. How will progress and success be measured? A central record of activity will be kept at the District Council office, 46 Albert Street, Whitianga and through the Mercury Bay Community Board. Progress will be reported to the community annually. Maintaining the integrity of the Plan and monitoring its use is a necessary part of the implementation. A review of the Plan s highest priorities will be carried out by the Community Board at a time to coincide with the preparation of How can new ideas be incorporated? The Community Plan has been arranged like a workbook so that an individual or group may use it to keep a record of their activity and ideas. The central record of activity, maintained by Council, will form the basis of the annual report to the community and the Community Board. All comments on or contributions to this Community Vision 3 Council s annual plan budgeting process. A major review of this Community Plan will be undertaken every three years to coincide with the review of Council s LTCCP process. This will involve public consultation and input. Plan should be made to the Thames Coromandel District Council s Mercury Bay Area Manager, 46 Albert Street, Whitianga.

5 History From Kupe to Cook Drifts of settlement in the Mercury Bay Area Settlements on the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula reach back to the 14th Century when Kupe and his companions made their epic journey to Aotearoa from the legendary Hawaiiki. He named his first landing place in the new land Te Whitianga-A-Kupe where Kupe crossed over. On his return to Hawaiiki Kupe, in the tradition of great Polynesian voyagers, described the cosmological pathway for future fleets of waka to sail to Aotearoa. One such waka to arrive in Whitianga some 400 years after Kupe s visit was Te Arawa, captained by Tama te-kapua with Hei as the tauira (spiritual leader). Hei and his people stayed and settled the area and the descendents of his Ngati Hei tribe remain here today. Numerous pa sites have been excavated in the Whitianga area indicating a large number of Maori lived here over the next two hundred years after Hei s arrival. The Whitianga pa at Whitanga Rock is known as the pa of Hei Turepepa, a grandson of Hei, and is recognized as one of the earliest and longest inhabited pa sites in New Zealand. Prolonged intertribal warfare took toll, and by the time Captain Cook arrived in 1769 the above pa had been recently sacked, and he saw only one well organized pa at Wharetaewa with gardens and many whare housing some 500 people. There was little evidence of occupation outside the pa although at the Purangi estuary people lived in summer camps collecting shellfish and fern root to dry for winter. Cook s ship Endeavour was met by Ngati Hei canoes on arrival in the bay in 1769 and some testy encounters resulted in a Maori warrior being killed in a trading exchange with crew of Endeavour. The name Mahinakino, the area on Captain Cook Drive where the monument to Captain Cook stands today, commemorates that event. Despite this unfortunate incident, a positive and productive relationship between European and Maori ensued. Cook named the area, known to Maori as Whanganui-a-hei, Mercury Bay as it was here where he observed the transit of mercury across the sun adding important certainty to navigational accuracy. Cooks Beach was named at this time and the cliff adjacent to the beach was named Shakespeare Cliff for the resemblance to Shakespeare Cliff at Dover. (This is the most likely story although there are other suggestions as to how the cliff was named.) Below the cliffs beside Cooks Stream estuary is a small cave where, according to historic records and paintings, is probably the place where Ngati Hei first greeted their European visitors. Like Kupe before him, Captain Cook s visit was followed by a wave of settlers, this time from Britain and Europe drawn to the riches of timber, land, mining, and hunting the seas. From the early 1800s European settlement expanded and the places we now know as Ferry Landing, Front Beach, Flaxmill Bay (originally Maramaratotara) and Cooks Beach took shape within the area known as Dacre s Grant a large parcel of land stretching from the Whitianga harbour to the Purangi Estuary. The first timber mill in the area was established at Ferry Landing in 1838 to process the expanding kauri timber industry but was re-sited to Mercury Bay (Whitianga) in A flax mill on the stream below Shakespeare Cliff remained the only industry on this side of the harbour until it closed in 1907 but the name Flaxmill Bay remains. The ferry service which plays an essential role in transport connections with Whitianga today was started in the 1880s to link the growing development on both sides of the harbour. Where the ferry landed was the name given to the settlement and is the one we use today. The front face of this settlement was known as Front Beach and Back Bay was behind and was where a kauri log-boom was constructed with rocks taken from the pa fortifications on Whitianga Rock. Joe Davis Peter Johnston Dal Minogue Kate Piper Alison Henry 4

6 History A short history of Dacre s Grant from the early 1800s to today. Captain Ranulph Dacre arrived in Mercury Bay in 1828 on the ship Lucy Ann looking for spars for the British Admiralty. He had met in Sydney a bankrupt merchant named Gordon Davis Browne with whom Dacre sailed to NZ in the Belina in After a disastrous few years in Mahurangi they moved the operation to Mercury Bay where Dacre instructed Browne to purchase as much land with standing timber as possible as well as non-forested land for a cattle station. At this time Browne built the stone wall, jetty and sawmill at Ferry Landing at a cost to Dacre of 4,000 Pounds. The land he bought for the cattle station was virtually all the land between the Whitianga harbour and the Purangi river and was purchased from Taharakee on 27 October 1837 for 16 pounds cash, 36 Sydney pieces worth 3 pounds each, 24 blankets, 10 tents,10 hats, 20 tomahawks, 20 tinder boxes, 20 boxes of lucifers, 10 pairs of scissors, 10 looking glasses, 3 sixty pound boxes of tobacco, 140 pounds in Spanish dollars and articles of merchandise. This land became known as Browne s Grant. Browne died in 1842 owing Dacre 9,100 pounds, 13 shillings and 10 pence. On 28 th of June 1862 the court awarded Dacre the land and it became Dacre s Grant. During the period from the late 1870s until the construction of roads in the area up to thirty families lived on the eastern bank of the Purangi River, their only access and transport being by water. They farmed, fished, dept bees, sold kauri gum and cultivated orchards and gardens. In 1893 James Maxwell Dacre, Auctioneer of Auckland (presumably Ranulph Dacre s grandson) as Trustee ceded to the Coromandel County Council 28 acres of land now used as a public road between Whitianga harbour and the Purangi river in lieu of rates owing of 32 pounds 2 shillings and 4 pence. (It is not known when or why Shakespeare Cliff was transferred to the Crown but the DPS number suggests that it would have been around 1920 when Bidwell owned it.) The next known owner of Dacre s Grant was Leonard Shelford Bidwell, a Cambridge Graduate in engineering. His forte was apparently motor car designing, and two of his granddaughters who have visited in recent years are perplexed as to why he would want to bring his wife and two children, Tom and Cynthia, to the other side of the world to live in such an isolated spot. Edith Hamilton (nee Lee ) who was born in 1906 and was a similar age to Cynthia visited them occasionally and recalls that they had a nice launch to go round to Whitianga or Mercury Bay as the town was then called. They arrived about 1910 and set about building at Flaxmill Bay the Homestead and a barn which was turned into a motel by Derek and Jo McNeil. The Homestead was built by a man called Dagg who lived in a cottage at about what is now 1100 Purangi Road behind Front beach. In 2003 John and Helen Hunt bought the Homestead for removal and it now sits high on the ridge behind Cooks beach. The Bidwells had three more children, while in Flaxmill Bay (twins Bill and John, then Bob ), and concern for their education led them to build a school down near the beach. A minimum of nine pupils was required to open a school, but they got the numbers comfortably with their own, one son of Arthur Lee, three orphan daughters of Charlie Lee and several from the Waddington family who milked a small dairy herd for the Bidwells on Cooks beach in a shed near the Purangi. A slab 4 of concrete remains to this day. Mention should be made here of Fanny s garden the 50 acres at Purangi owned now by the Harsant family. James Colville tells that it was given to an employee of the Bidwells in lieu of wages. Shortly thereafter Sam Harsant s Grandmother bought it from a Ben Anderson. Mrs Bidwell s Christian names were Fanny Caryl as evidenced by a book of poems she wrote. It is not known exactly when Bidwell sold to the next owners, the Colville family, but it must have been in the early 1920s as minutes of the School of Mines in Thames in 1925 show LS Bidwell as being employed as a temporary electrical instructor. The minutes also mention how lucky they felt to procure his services because of the current polio epidemic. These dates are borne out by a scheme plan for subdivision drawn 4 th of March 1926 by John Dawson, Licensed surveyor, of the whole 3,390 acres of Dacre s Grant into 8 farms and lots of quarter-acre sections all the way from Ferry landing to nearly half a mile up the Purangi. The plan was drawn for George Colville but the Land Sales Court (which dictated the price of land!) and the general economic collapse thereafter scotched any ideas of implementing the scheme. It was to be 20 years later in 1946, after the slump and WWII that the next owners started subdividing. Today the original 3,390 acres is in close to 1,000 separate titles, and no doubt the process will continue. The Colvilles ran sheep at first but wool prices were abysmal so they built a cowshed behind Flaxmill Bay and milked a herd of cows. They collected cream from neighbouring farms up the Purangi, first with horses and wagon then later with a Fargo truck. The cream was delivered to the river and ferried over to the Dairy factory which had been established in This procedure was not without its dramas - there was the time when the Fargo rolled backwards into the tide with their small daughter in the cab! Fortunately she was rescued and later the Lady Jocelyn winched the truck out. In 1946 two young Englishmen, Richard Hardy and Gilbert Reginald Martinez de las Rivas who had been in the merchant navy during the war bought Dacre s Grant from the Colvilles and with the help of solicitor Hawea Rees proceeded to subdivide along the southern side of Purangi Rd from Ferry landing. In 1950 they started on the subdivision at Cooks Beach which has only recently finished. The Land Sales Court was still in place when they commenced and a lot of time was spent in court arguing whether sections behind the road at Front Beach were worth 45 Pounds or 90 Pounds! The small farm between the road and Whakapenui Point had not been part of Dacre s Grant for a long time (if ever?). It was owned by the Hunts in the mid 20s and the McCarthy family owned it from the early 1940s until subdivision. After they had separated off most of the sub-dividable land, Hardy and Rivas sold the balance of the original Grant in 1951 to Chas and Myra Morcom who had been dairy farming in Tokoroa. They, with the help of son Toby and later younger son Keith milked cows in the old shed at Flaxmill until 1956 and proceeded to develop the hinterland. Up to that stage farming had mainly been confined to the small valleys near the coast and any attempt to grow grass in the volcanic ash covering the hills had met with little success, mainly because it was low in phosphate. The Morcoms sold 1,000 acres of the south western part of the block to Derek and Jo McNiel in

7 History A short history of Dacre s Grant from the early 1800s to today. Captain Ranulph Dacre arrived in Mercury Bay in 1828 on the ship Lucy Ann looking for spars for the British Admiralty. He had met in Sydney a bankrupt merchant named Gordon Davis Browne with whom Dacre sailed to NZ in the Belina in After a disastrous few years in Mahurangi they moved the operation to Mercury Bay where Dacre instructed Browne to purchase as much land with standing timber as possible as well as non-forested land for a cattle station. At this time Browne built the stone wall, jetty and sawmill at Ferry Landing at a cost to Dacre of 4,000 Pounds. The land he bought for the cattle station was virtually all the land between the Whitianga harbour and the Purangi river and was purchased from Taharakee on 27 October 1837 for 16 pounds cash, 36 Sydney pieces worth 3 pounds each, 24 blankets, 10 tents,10 hats, 20 tomahawks, 20 tinder boxes, 20 boxes of lucifers, 10 pairs of scissors, 10 looking glasses, 3 sixty pound boxes of tobacco, 140 pounds in Spanish dollars and articles of merchandise. This land became known as Browne s Grant. Browne died in 1842 owing Dacre 9,100 pounds, 13 shillings and 10 pence. On 28 th of June 1862 the court awarded Dacre the land and it became Dacre s Grant. During the period from the late 1870s until the construction of roads in the area up to thirty families lived on the eastern bank of the Purangi River, their only access and transport being by water. They farmed, fished, dept bees, sold kauri gum and cultivated orchards and gardens. In 1893 James Maxwell Dacre, Auctioneer of Auckland (presumably Ranulph Dacre s grandson) as Trustee ceded to the Coromandel County Council 28 acres of land now used as a public road between Whitianga harbour and the Purangi river in lieu of rates owing of 32 pounds 2 shillings and 4 pence. (It is not known when or why Shakespeare Cliff was transferred to the Crown but the DPS number suggests that it would have been around 1920 when Bidwell owned it.) The next known owner of Dacre s Grant was Leonard Shelford Bidwell, a Cambridge Graduate in engineering. His forte was apparently motor car designing, and two of his granddaughters who have visited in recent years are perplexed as to why he would want to bring his wife and two children, Tom and Cynthia, to the other side of the world to live in such an isolated spot. Edith Hamilton (nee Lee ) who was born in 1906 and was a similar age to Cynthia visited them occasionally and recalls that they had a nice launch to go round to Whitianga or Mercury Bay as the town was then called. They arrived about 1910 and set about building at Flaxmill Bay the Homestead and a barn which was turned into a motel by Derek and Jo McNeil. The Homestead was built by a man called Dagg who lived in a cottage at about what is now 1100 Purangi Road behind Front beach. In 2003 John and Helen Hunt bought the Homestead for removal and it now sits high on the ridge behind Cooks beach. The Bidwells had three more children, while in Flaxmill Bay (twins Bill and John, then Bob ), and concern for their education led them to build a school down near the beach. A minimum of nine pupils was required to open a school, but they got the numbers comfortably with their own, one son of Arthur Lee, three orphan daughters of Charlie Lee and several from the Waddington family who milked a small dairy herd for the Bidwells on Cooks beach in a shed near the Purangi. A slab 5 of concrete remains to this day. Mention should be made here of Fanny s garden the 50 acres at Purangi owned now by the Harsant family. James Colville tells that it was given to an employee of the Bidwells in lieu of wages. Shortly thereafter Sam Harsant s Grandmother bought it from a Ben Anderson. Mrs Bidwell s Christian names were Fanny Caryl as evidenced by a book of poems she wrote. It is not known exactly when Bidwell sold to the next owners, the Colville family, but it must have been in the early 1920s as minutes of the School of Mines in Thames in 1925 show LS Bidwell as being employed as a temporary electrical instructor. The minutes also mention how lucky they felt to procure his services because of the current polio epidemic. These dates are borne out by a scheme plan for subdivision drawn 4 th of March 1926 by John Dawson, Licensed surveyor, of the whole 3,390 acres of Dacre s Grant into 8 farms and lots of quarter-acre sections all the way from Ferry landing to nearly half a mile up the Purangi. The plan was drawn for George Colville but the Land Sales Court (which dictated the price of land!) and the general economic collapse thereafter scotched any ideas of implementing the scheme. It was to be 20 years later in 1946, after the slump and WWII that the next owners started subdividing. Today the original 3,390 acres is in close to 1,000 separate titles, and no doubt the process will continue. The Colvilles ran sheep at first but wool prices were abysmal so they built a cowshed behind Flaxmill Bay and milked a herd of cows. They collected cream from neighbouring farms up the Purangi, first with horses and wagon then later with a Fargo truck. The cream was delivered to the river and ferried over to the Dairy factory which had been established in This procedure was not without its dramas - there was the time when the Fargo rolled backwards into the tide with their small daughter in the cab! Fortunately she was rescued and later the Lady Jocelyn winched the truck out. In 1946 two young Englishmen, Richard Hardy and Gilbert Reginald Martinez de las Rivas who had been in the merchant navy during the war bought Dacre s Grant from the Colvilles and with the help of solicitor Hawea Rees proceeded to subdivide along the southern side of Purangi Rd from Ferry landing. In 1950 they started on the subdivision at Cooks Beach which has only recently finished. The Land Sales Court was still in place when they commenced and a lot of time was spent in court arguing whether sections behind the road at Front Beach were worth 45 Pounds or 90 Pounds! The small farm between the road and Whakapenui Point had not been part of Dacre s Grant for a long time (if ever?). It was owned by the Hunts in the mid 20s and the McCarthy family owned it from the early 1940s until subdivision. After they had separated off most of the sub-dividable land, Hardy and Rivas sold the balance of the original Grant in 1951 to Chas and Myra Morcom who had been dairy farming in Tokoroa. They, with the help of son Toby and later younger son Keith milked cows in the old shed at Flaxmill until 1956 and proceeded to develop the hinterland. Up to that stage farming had mainly been confined to the small valleys near the coast and any attempt to grow grass in the volcanic ash covering the hills had met with little success, mainly because it was low in phosphate. The Morcoms sold 1,000 acres of the south western part of the block to Derek and Jo McNiel in

8 History A short history of Dacre s Grant from the early 1800s to today. cont 1953, an English couple who had bought the Homestead from Dick Hardy. The McNiels also acquired from Hardy and Rivas all the land sloping to the Whitianga River between Whitianga Rock and Quarry Point. In 2005 the McNiel family put that land into a QEII covenant so that it could never be built on. In 1959 Toby bought 1100 acres at the Purangi end from his parents and five years later Keith took over the home farm behind Flaxmill Bay. The advent of aerial topdressing had a tremendous impact on the two farms and land that had Captain Cook commenting on its barrenness during his visit of By the 1980s that land was carrying in excess of 3,500 sheep and 500 cattle. Since then nearly all the sheep and a lot of the beef breeding cows have disappeared and been replaced by Freisian bulls, dairy grazers, avocado orchards and vineyards. In 2006 most of the second, third and fourth generations of the Morcom family are still resident on Dacre s Grant. Toby Morcom August The Jelly Bean Ladies Photo: Jack Vickerman 6

9 A description of our community 1. Demographics Population/housing/projections Cooks Beach, Flaxmill Bay and Ferry Landing: what is there at the moment? In the ten years between 1991 and 2001 the number of dwellings in Cooks Beach to Ferry Landing increased from 603 to 741 an additional 111 dwellings or 18% increase. Analysis of the Council s building consent records for new dwellings from March 2001 to December 2005 indicated that total dwelling numbers are continuing to grow at a high rate. Over this time, 469 building consents were issued for the construction of new dwellings, with most activity occurring in Cooks beach in the years 2001 and At the time of writing, Council records indicate that the strong growth in dwelling numbers has seen Cooks Beach to Ferry Landing become the sixth largest settlement in the District. Photograph supplied by Toby Morcom While traditionally separate settlements, Cooks Beach, Flaxmill Bay and Ferry Landing have been addressed together in this study due to the organisation of statistical information. At the time of the 2001 Census, there was a usual resident population of approximately 327 people in the area. This was an increase of 87 or 36% since In the summer of 2003/04, the peak population reached approximately 6,000 people 18 times the usual population. In terms of development trends, Cooks Beach to Ferry Landing consists predominantly of standard residential development in the coastal area. Most subdivision in Cooks Beach has been in the form of staged, greenfield subdivision. In Ferry Landing and Flaxmill Bay, recent subdivision has included one greenfield-type subdivision and limited infill. Some of the rural areas surrounding Cooks beach/ferry Landing have also been subdivided into smaller rural blocks. 6

10 A description of our community 1. Demographics Population/housing/projections Cooks Beach, Flaxmill Bay and Ferry Landing: what is there at the moment? In the ten years between 1991 and 2001 the number of dwellings in Cooks Beach to Ferry Landing increased from 603 to 741 an additional 111 dwellings or 18% increase. Analysis of the Council s building consent records for new dwellings from March 2001 to December 2005 indicated that total dwelling numbers are continuing to grow at a high rate. Over this time, 469 building consents were issued for the construction of new dwellings, with most activity occurring in Cooks beach in the years 2001 and At the time of writing, Council records indicate that the strong growth in dwelling numbers has seen Cooks Beach to Ferry Landing become the sixth largest settlement in the District. Photograph supplied by Toby Morcom While traditionally separate settlements, Cooks Beach, Flaxmill Bay and Ferry Landing have been addressed together in this study due to the organisation of statistical information. At the time of the 2001 Census, there was a usual resident population of approximately 327 people in the area. This was an increase of 87 or 36% since In the summer of 2003/04, the peak population reached approximately 6,000 people 18 times the usual population. In terms of development trends, Cooks Beach to Ferry Landing consists predominantly of standard residential development in the coastal area. Most subdivision in Cooks Beach has been in the form of staged, greenfield subdivision. In Ferry Landing and Flaxmill Bay, recent subdivision has included one greenfield-type subdivision and limited infill. Some of the rural areas surrounding Cooks beach/ferry Landing have also been subdivided into smaller rural blocks. 7