I HAD A PLAYGROUND you could not imagine. Thousands of people drive over it every day, and they can’t imagine it either. There was water. There were fish. Drive softly, for breakfast swam here.

There were seashells, sandstone and a dash of sandy beach. There was a pretty wooden footbridge. The naval training shed, HMNZS Ngapona, now landlocked and jutting into the motorway, stood on legs above the waves. There were skids and boatsheds along a rocky shore.

Looking north-east you saw old ships—scows, coasters, barges. There was the slog of the maul, the tok-tok of the caulking mallet and the distant racket of steel riveting. There were slips and greasy ways down which craft slid freshly repaired or wood-shaving new. There was Casey’s sawmill, with rafts of logs corralled and ready for hauling up a ramp into the screaming ripsaw. There was the chuff-chuff of steam power; the shriek of the knock-off whistle; the smell of wet sawdust.

Watermen went hazing along in grey punts, sculling one-handed with long sweeps of the oar over the stern. There were rickety jetties. Sturdy tugs with rope-scarred bollards and car tyres for body armour butted about; great coir hawsers rose dripping and twanging from the sea. Ocean-going ships went up the 600-tonne harbour board slipway, to be released later with a mighty rumble of iron wheels and a whoosh as they hit the water.

We saw it all some 70 years ago from the sun porch of our little cliff-top house at the city end of Auckland’s St Marys Bay. But no more. What we see now—for we’re still there—is an eight-lane motorway carrying more than 170,000 cars a day and an immaculate array of 1500 pleasure craft in New Zealand’s largest marina—Westhaven—with a matching display of superyachts at Orams, on the eastern shore, where the mills and shipyards were.

Away to the north-west is the spider-work of the harbour bridge. By night the car lights encircle the harbour like an army—the poet’s Assyrian cohorts with “the sheen of their spears . . . like stars on the sea.” A mightier host in the marina has its moment of brilliance at sunset each day, when the dying light tingles on the aluminium mast-tips like a stroke on a celeste. And over on the North Shore, for just a few minutes, glass-fronted tower blocks become gorged with reflected flame, gradually quenched from the ground up as the sun goes down.

The price for this modern spectacle was St Marys Bay itself, once known as the Ponsonby waterfront. Its entire southern shore—beaches, walls, steps, coves and crannies—was filled in to provide access to the harbour bridge. The thriving maritime village of boat-builders and yachting and rowing clubs at the foot of St Marys Road was wiped out. So were the Shelly Beach baths at Point Erin. Now all that remains of the bay is its name, applied to the nouveau-chic suburb above the cliffs.

Looking back on the changes, I am amazed to realise that the former scene of nautical clutter and raw industry was not much older than the motorway which displaced it is today. The main harbour reclamation from Victoria Park outwards was in place by 1914, giving St Marys Bay an eastern wall. The harbour board slipway dates from 1915, and adjacent industries must have appeared around the same time. The main breakwater was finished in 1928, and the Westhaven extension got its name only in 1941.