About Mahurangi Action Incorporated

Locker’s Lifetime’s Pleasure: Friend of the Mahurangi Ronald Locker wrote his tribute to the ‘river’ as payback for the lifetime’s pleasure it gave him. The book’s cover features Henry Winkelmann’s photograph of the 1901 Mahurangi Regatta. publisher Mahurangi Action

In 2009, after years of failing to attract a willing treasurer, the group lost its status as an incorporated society. To address this deficiency, Mahurangi Action was incorporated on 7 December 2011, with Michael Gordon as the inaugural treasurer.

Styled ‘Mahurangi Action, established 1974 as Friends of the Mahurangi’ to signal the imperative for action, the new name is also aimed to both be more inclusive and to be better aligned with the Mahurangi Action Plan. The issue providing urgency to form Friends of the Mahurangi in 1974 was the plans by the then Warkworth Town Council for a wastewater treatment plant. Like the severely overloaded septic tank it was to replace, the system would discharge into the Mahurangi River, just below the town.

Many, and particularly founding member Wilfred AllanWilfred ‘Wilf’ John Davy Allan, considered the council’s plans inadequate to restore the water quality at Warkworth and protect, long-term, the oyster farms downstream. Meanwhile, founding chairman John Male had been discussing formation of a ‘watch dog group’ to protect harbour’s landscape and to back a moratorium on further marine farms, which he had sought while serving as a Rodney County councillor. Not wishing to be seen as just another protest group, Friends of the Mahurangi revived the Mahurangi Regatta, in 1977—it had lapsed during World War Two.

Today the organisation works closely with the harbour’s marine farmers to help resolve the issue of derelict oyster leases and towards improving the harbour’s water quality.

In 2001, Mahurangi Action published Jade River : A History of the Mahurangi, which was written by member Ronald Locker as “a kind of payback for all the pleasure the river has given me.”

The organisation is energetically involved in the Auckland Regional Council-initiated Mahurangi Action Plan, the principal aim of which is to address the harbour’s elevated sediment accumulation rate.