Farewell to a resort that saw many birthdays, hot summers and high adrenaline on the hydroslides.
Growing up on the Hibiscus Coast, Waiwera Hot Pools was more than a water park: it was a promise. A promise that we were more than just a fringe cluster of Auckland suburbs – we were a destination, the Gold Coast, Noosa. Come for the beach, stay for the hydroslides; leave only footprints, take only a bottle of Waiwera Infinity Water. In 2002, the construction of the high-rise Nautilus apartments in the centre of Orewa, a few bays over from Waiwera, called out to this aspiration: look at this coastline! Look at its future!
For local kids, Waiwera Hot Pools was a prize. Our schools would award the winning house a free day there at the end of the year, unleashing hundreds of children desperate for poolside ice creams and hydroslide races. Only the bravest among us, however, would yeet ourselves down the pitch-dark Black Hole, smacking our soft heads against the fibreglass on its final hairpin turn and cannoning out into the sunlight like that cop on the Boston slide. No rider could avoid it: it was a universal injury, a great leveller.
Waiwera was a place of hopes and dreams, heartbreaks and discoveries. Rhiana, 26, learnt to swim there. “I always pretended to have cramp so I could go chill in the movie pool instead, and spy on adult couples kissing while pretending I was there to watch the movies,” she says. These adult environs were fascinating: “I was like, ‘wow look at those grown-up couples kissing! How disgusting, but I can’t not look at them!’” Amanda, 34, remembers meeting her first boyfriend at an 11th birthday party at the pools: “We only met once at Waiwera, then spoke on the phone for a week, then it was over.”
Dana, 34, worked as a cafe assistant at the park from 2012 to 2016, serving coffee and pizza to dripping-wet customers. “People didn’t towel off before coming inside,” she says, leading to “many incidents of staff falling over.” She remembers the café fondly, but heard horror stories from lifeguards of “disgusting toilets, couples getting amorous on the slide tower, and customers taking eggs into the opal pools to try cook them while they swam”. She served Stan Walker, Temuera Morrison (and his grandchildren), Sonny Bill Williams. “People valued what we offered and had such happy memories growing up around Waiwera,” she says. “The cafe was the central hub for the staff, so we took care of one another.”
As I grew older, Waiwera Hot Pools began to lose its sheen. At 12, unaware that this was my last time at the park, I remember registering the creep of decay – the pervasive smell of urine, algae in the swimming pools, exposed nails on the rickety slide tower. The slides themselves went from thrill to threat: my cousin Ruby told me that on a school trip from Kerikeri, her classmate emerged from the Black Hole with a concussion and had to miss school to recover. Once-fun whispers of urban legends took on a sinister edge, with rumours of a ghost in the Twister and nits in the spa pools.
Around us, the Hibiscus Coast was transforming from holiday town to satellite city. The Nautilus was leaking, and rumoured to be slowly sinking into the dune system on which Orewa was built. Cloaked in scaffolding, it remained a monolith looming over the town, as developers abandoned their vision of New Zealand’s Noosa and pushed up into the hills, turning the surrounding paddocks into American-style suburbs seemingly overnight. The Johnstones Hill Tunnels opened, diverting State Highway One away from us, while nearby Silverdale’s bright, white and expensive Snowplanet captured the motorway traffic Waiwera once enjoyed.
The Hibiscus Coast is beautiful, but has always been a colonial experiment. A reef at the mouth of Orewa’s estuary was blasted away by the Air Force in the late 1950s to remove dangerous currents that made the beach unsafe for holidaying Aucklanders. Construction on the dune system halted natural sand replenishment, and hundreds of thousands are now spent annually to keep the sea from swallowing beachfront mansions.
Waiwera Hot Pools was part of this project. Glaswegian Robert Graham purchased the land from Ngāti Rongo in 1844 – for £16, clothes, tobacco and weapons – and had a vision of turning the natural hot springs into a health resort for Auckland’s growing Pākehā population. The site had drawn his attention after a friend, who suffered “the most painful and distressing skin disease on his ankle,” deemed incurable, found himself healed “after four weeks’ bathing and drinking the mineral waters at Waiwera”.
Soon, steamboats were bringing Aucklanders to the resort, and in the 20th century, Waiwera Hot Pools began flourishing. But 100 years later, as the Hibiscus Coast continued expanding – a new mall, Bunnings and Pak’nSave all appeared in my last few years of high school – the waterpark was mismanaged into oblivion and sold to a Russian billionaire, who disappeared, then died. The dreams of families bonding and ailments cured soon echoed around a decomposing skeleton, now finally being destroyed.
Growing up on the Hibiscus Coast, I had always wanted more: signs from the universe that life could be more exciting than the suburbs, school, routine. Just 10 minutes from my house, I could find that at Waiwera, the waterpark that put us on the map, where excitement and merriment was permanent, and the hydroslide tower looked like a castle. But as I got bigger, it looked smaller, sadder. I’d emerge from a slide, look up at the looming sandstone cliffs, and see them as walls.
Now, at 27, living in London, I realise with the sharp clarity of adulthood that I was never too big for Waiwera, or the Hibiscus Coast. It was home. Kids from all over Auckland came to Waiwera Hot Pools, but it was first and foremost ours – we knew the fastest way to ride the Speed Slide or how to claim the best seat at the movie pool. The vanishing of the park erases this, but its legacy lives on – in our adult swimming skills, in photos from 10th birthday parties, and in our memories, still foggy years later from one too many rides on the Black Hole.