Projects

What did you do in the weekend? Tidy up the house? Mowed the lawn maybe. Dusted your collectables and rearranged the kitchen cupboards.

But if you wanted a break from domesticity, from chores, from the four walls of your life, maybe you went to the beach.

Bad luck if you live on the south coast.

Because someone has been there before you, rearranging the driftwood, piling up stones, arranging washed-up logs into patterns. Who IS this guy? You’re bound to have seen his efforts if you live in Wellington. Bad enough that we have rubbish bins, and parking spaces, and PEOPLE everywhere at the coast.

At Red Rocks (obvs).

Still, tune them out and you have the majesty of the ocean, the primal rocks that once formed the edge of Gondwana, the empty sky, and the faint distance of the Kaikouras, shimmering at the edge of the horizon, ghostly blue and capped with early snow.

You could be in the middle of nowhere, in an ancient time. Your modern stressed-out soul soothed by the timelessness of the waves; yesterday, today and tomorrow. The patterns of wind and wave on the shore, shells, driftwood, and dried out kelp where sea and the southerly have strewn them. Random, shifting, real.

But, SURPRISE! There is a man with a mission, twiddling with our landscape. Who does he think he is? Frankly, I find him very rude. It’s one thing to graffiti in the built environment. Some of it’s ugly, some of it’s art, all of it’s like a dog pissing on a

Must you?

lamppost. But at least it’s all on the same level – someone has built something, or painted something, installed something – and someone else has decorated it, to make a point. Fair enough.

But when you graffiti the beach, well, that’s another matter. You reduce the natural environment – a precious reminder of who we really are – to a piece of stuff. An adjustable backdrop. Furniture.

I know, it’s only human, arranging, filing, tidying, making your mark. But can’t this guy just stick to imposing his ego on his own turf? Trim your hedges, Stacking Man, by all means. Straighten up your picture frames, alphabeticise your spice rack, and rake parallel lines in your zen garden. At your house. But the beach belongs to all of us  – and none of us. So leave the beach alone.