A shore thing: The return of Coast New Zealand.

Coast New Zealand presenter Hamish Campbell delves once more into New Zealand’s origins in TVNZ 1’s popular documentary series. Peter Eley reports.

Coast New Zealand presenter Hamish Campbell studies the seismic forces that have shaped New Zealand in his other persona as an academic. He is a geologist and a palaeontologist – a fossil hunter – who has some seismic ideas of his own. For one thing, he is unashamedly pro mining and sees coal as an integral part of civilisation for the foreseeable future. “I hate to say it, but cities are built out of steel and concrete, and both require coal, damn it. “If we want cities, we don’t have much option. I don’t think the public quite appreciate this. If we don’t use concrete and steel, what do we use?” It is a subject that comes up in the second season of Coast New Zealand which films at the West Coast’s Denniston and Stockton coal mines. Dr Campbell will co-present three of the six hour-long episodes. He made the news in seismic fashion in February when Australian media picked up a peer-reviewed paper he had co-written, postulating that New Zealand was once submerged and was, in fact, part of a large, hitherto unknown continent called Zealandia.

“I think it boiled down to a lack of news that week.

“We had just published a paper … and the media in Australia picked it up and it just went nuts. I’ve been told that the audience size (worldwide) was about a billion,” he says.

Although Dr Campbell is primarily an academic who finds being a TV personality “a bit weird”, he says he is enjoying his role as a Coast New

Zealand co-presenter. He has been Te Papa’s official geologist since 1998 and that role thrust him into the public eye, which helped the transition, he says.

The show is licensed from the BBC and the lead presenter for our version is Neil Oliver, who presented Coast Australia and the original Coast, featuring Britain’s shoreline.

But although they appear in the same episodes, Dr Campbell has never met Oliver.

“He talks as though he knows me well ... but that’s just television. It’s all smoke and mirrors. I would love to meet him. I think we’d get on like a house on fire.”

For Dr Campbell, the most interesting segment in series two is a visit to Great Mercury Island where archaeologists are investigating one of the earliest known landfalls by Maori migrants.

“There are gardens there. They were growing kumara there big time and this may well be one of the very first places in New Zealand where kumara was cultivated.”

So how does the New Zealand coastline stack up against that of Britain and Australia?

“I suppose what we have that neither Britain nor Australia have is a very dynamic, tectonic environment. New Zealand isn’t called the Shaky Isles for nothing.

“We’ve got quite perilous stretches of coast, quite frankly, subject to very active natural processes, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, and that’s a subliminal message that comes through, I think.”

That message is brought home in one episode in the new series which looks at the impact of the Christchurch earthquakes.

“There’s an outdoor art installation where the artist has created a chair or seat for every single person who was killed.

“It’s very moving. People will be quite taken by that.”

“New Zealand isn’t called the Shaky Isles for nothing. We’ve got quite perilous stretches of coast.” – Hamish Campbell