New lives for OLD BALLS
Great Barrier Island – we can assert with confidence – certainly has the biggest balls in the country.
This has nothing to do with any localised testosterone explosion – the drinking water is quite safe. Instead, the story starts with an invasion threat from Emperor Hirohito’s submarine fleet during WW2.
At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbour, the Imperial Japanese Navy had 60 submarines, including the mighty I-class subs which displaced 2,000 tonnes and carried mini-subs and a seaplane. In May 1942, submarine I-21 had hove to in the Hauraki Gulf and launched its seaplane for a leisurely dawn reconnaissance flight over Auckland city and the Hauraki Gulf.
Mines laid by the German raider Orion had already claimed RMS Niagara off the Hen and Chickens in 1940.
Prompted by the US Navy Command, the War Cabinet approved funding in 1941 for a submarine defence net, or boom, across the main approaches to the port to prevent attack by mini-subs which had proved to be so devastating at Pearl Harbour. Part of the project would be 12 Fairmile HDML (harbour defence motor launches) to deploy ASDIC (an early type of sonar ) transponders and police the gulf.
The US government, which had already installed nets on its own west coast ports, agreed to provide the boom hardware on a lend/lease basis and, at an estimated cost of £30,000, work began in July 1942. The US Navy net tender, USN Ebony, laid the wire rope mesh south from North Head using pilings spaced 1.5m apart with a 640m-wide gate to allow ingress for shipping.
A gate vessel, one of the Fairmiles, was to be stationed in the channel to open access for shipping.
The big steel floats for the gate arrived from the US in a cargo ship in four parts. They were assembled and welded to make the spheres at a base established at Islington Bay on Rangitoto Island.
The assembled orbs were 1.4m in diameter, made of either 5mm or 3mm thick steel and tipped the scales at about 272kg. “They displaced about a ton (1016kg),” says Great Barrier boatbuilder, Tony Litherland. “They were great pieces of work – they’d cost thousands of dollars to make these days.”
Most of the documentation for the boom and materials was lost when the ship carrying it was sunk on passage to the USA, so little is known about the net itself.
By September 1942 the net was up and guarding Auckland City and other booms were planned for Fitzroy Harbour on Great Barrier Island and the Whangaparaoa Channel.
But by 1944 the threat of attack had diminished and the big net was dismantled, much of it going into storage at Islington Bay. The steel spheres ended up supporting one of the early mussel farms in the Coromandel.
The big buoys turned out to be too buoyant for mussel work however – in a choppy
sea their sharp motion dislodged the growing mussels. So the balls went into storage in Mt Wellington, and when they’d outlived their time there, were snapped up by Great Barrier engineer, Graeme Sharp.
“About 150 came to the Barrier in the barge Tasman,” says Tony. “She dropped her bow ramp and we rolled them off onto the old whaling station at Whangaparapara by hand.”
The balls were a boon for the resourceful folk of the island and the he first ones had axles welded to them to make fuel tankers. “They held about 1,360 litres and were really handy,” he adds.
Others were cut in half, filled with scrap iron and cement and employed as boat moorings. “Their insides were covered in a sort of chalk emulsion and the people who assembled them had scribbled war graffiti or their signatures – it felt like carving up a piece of history.”
A floating net structure – with ballasted balls on the bottom and floating ones at the top – was built for a local live-fish export business. Local longline fishing boats could tie alongside and discharge their catch straight into the net. Tony built a ‘roller barge’ using four steel spheres which he used to carry steel plate across Whangaparapara harbour to his boatbuilding business.
“It was perfect for that purpose,” he recalls. It was later sold on and the new owners used it to transport a rebuilt Farmall tractor to nearby
“Each weighed 272kg but displaced about a tonne.”
Mangati Bay. The tractor was carefully inched aboard the barge at Whangaparapara wharf and lashed down but, when the dock lines were let go, the whole operation rolled upside down at the wharf, floating buoys upmost with the tractor dangling below them.
Some of the balls made it south to buoy the Taharoa ironsands pipeline, near Kawhia, during construction of the offshore shipping terminal there. But more were reconfigured as barbecues or garden ornaments on Great Barrier.
The balls also became a boon to Great Barrier crafts folk and artists. At Tryphena a gap-toothed public barbecue in natty top hat beams a rusty smile, courtesy of the war effort. Various other steel ball structures abound round the island and many Great Barrier children grew up clambering up their rusty flanks and sliding back down to the ground. A whale with a moving tail was made from the spheres, and numerous other sculptures made from the curved steel plate garnish island properties.
So the balls that protected war time Auckland from submarine attack now lead new lives as ornaments in the outer Hauraki Gulf. B