spinofflive
A speaker that may or may not be emitting a piercing frequency only audible to younger ears (Image: Tina Tiller)
A speaker that may or may not be emitting a piercing frequency only audible to younger ears (Image: Tina Tiller)

SocietyApril 26, 2023

Is Auckland Council really operating a youth-repelling noise weapon?

A speaker that may or may not be emitting a piercing frequency only audible to younger ears (Image: Tina Tiller)
A speaker that may or may not be emitting a piercing frequency only audible to younger ears (Image: Tina Tiller)

The evidence is compelling. It’s also completely anecdotal.

Scott Caldwell remembers the first time he heard the sound. It was a sickening, shrill whine, piercing through the background burble in the plaza by the Auckland Council building entrance on Federal St. He was suffering a migraine within seconds, and had to evacuate down an escalator into the council’s lobby. The only relief came as he rode past thick concrete pillars.

Oscar Sims was with Caldwell at the time. He remembers the sound as an “ear-splitting screech”. It rang out at a “highly punishing” pitch near the edge of his hearing, and quickly became intolerable for him as well. Both he and Caldwell struggled to determine which direction the noise was coming from. “The sound is simply all-encompassing,” says Caldwell.

Both Sims and Caldwell are members of the Coalition For More Homes, and they were at council to talk housing with newly elected Whau councillor Kerrin Leoni. Auckland Council has a long history of antagonism toward anyone wanting homes to be built, particularly in the central suburbs where construction would make the most sense. It’s conceivable it would install a noise weapon to shoo away anyone who wants apartments in Grey Lynn. But in this case, Sims and Caldwell believe a different group is being targeted. Both are 25 years old. They’re convinced the council is operating an ultrasonic device aimed at repelling young people from its premises.

There’s precedent for the use of noise weapons in New Zealand. In 2016, the Papanui library in Christchurch was heavily criticised for installing “Mosquito” speakers, which emit a pulsing sound at a frequency only audible to people whose hearing hasn’t been dulled by the ravages of age.

Circumstantial evidence points to Auckland Council employing a similar strategy. While Sims and Caldwell were quickly incapacitated by the noise at its Federal St entrance, Stuff reporter Todd Niall, a regular council visitor who identifies as getting older, has never heard the sound.

I’m 37 years old. When I went to visit the Federal St plaza on a clear day in late-March, the sound was audible, though more a mildly nauseating irritation than an overwhelming screech. Just like Caldwell, I found it hard to figure out where it was coming from. It swam in and out of earshot as I walked. But a potential culprit was visible: some large dome-shaped speakers scattered around the plaza. The speakers appear to be emblazoned with the brand name “Toa”, which matches the name of an electronics company. Its website advertises a range of speakers, including several ceiling-mounted models with a “wide frequency range” – presumably perfect for broadcasting ear-splitting shrieks at groups of loitering teens and otherwise grotty youths.

Is a speaker similar to this one being used to deter council-curious youths? (Image: Screenshot)


Auckland Council denies it’s purposely driving youth to madness and despair with an audio assault device. Its statement to The Spinoff says it investigated the noise several years ago after concerns were raised. That effort pointed to a different source for the sound than the speakers. “In 2019, we worked with our Noise and Air Quality team who brought a special noise frequency analyser to site, and via process of elimination we identified a high frequency noise coming from the escalator when it was in operation,” it says. “The source of the noise was a component that was slightly out of alignment in one of the escalators on the Albert Street side and we assessed that metal components rubbing caused the high frequency sound. We believe this may be the case now, and will investigate to see what we can do to remedy the situation.”

Richard Hills, a North Shore councillor who’s young in local government terms, says he doesn’t believe his own organisation. “Corporate property keeps telling me the speakers aren’t working and haven’t been in use since before we owned the building,” he says. “BUT I CAN HEAR IT.”

If Hills sounds upset, it’s because the sound has been a source of long-term torment. He’s adamant the sound isn’t coming from the escalator, and says he’s 98% sure he’s heard it at night when the escalator is turned off. Other youth-adjacent council workers have made the same allegation. “I’ve told them before the sound still happens when the escalators are off. It’s been a three year journey for me at least,” Hills says. The issue is a source of such distress for Hills that he wants to take matters into his own hands. “Do you want to get a ladder and smash them down for me?” he asks me, several times. He’s made the same request to council staff.

The case for the council purposely repelling the youth may be compelling, but it’s anecdotal. In an effort to settle the dispute, I enlisted a thirty-something council worker, who asked to remain anonymous, but affirms he has been tortured by the sound for some time. He packed some high quality sound equipment of his own and went to the plaza to take measurements in his break.

The worker wanted to check the noise’s waveforms. Sound from a speaker would create a consistent and predictable reading, while an escalator fault would be intermittent and variable. His results were concerning. The sound’s waveform is extremely regular. Furthermore, it appears to be broadcasting at exactly 14khz. Is it possible for an escalator to produce such a frequency at such an amplitude? “I think it’s extremely unlikely,” he says. “The regularity, and the fact that it’s an exact frequency…”

The sine wave as recorded (Image: Supplied)

Unlikely, maybe. But not impossible. In an effort to settle this once and for all, I asked Sims to return to the Federal St plaza after 9pm, when the council escalators are turned off, and see if he can hear the sound. He went one Thursday night, and came to a surprise conclusion: he, Caldwell, Hills, unnamed council workers, and the sine wave are wrong. The plaza was silent apart from sounds from restaurant patrons and casino-goers. In the dark of night, Sims stood at the southern end of Federal St and felt peace for the first time. It appears the escalator is the culprit after all.


It’s shocking to find Auckland Council isn’t actively anti-youth in this one respect. The reason the noise theory seems so convincing is because it aligns with our available data on the council. Young people are absent from many of its processes, right down to the most fundamental functions of local democracy. In 2016, only 20% of
eligible Aucklanders in the 26-30 age bracket voted in the local election, while 61% of people aged 76-80 cast a ballot. More recently, Pākehā aged 40 and above were overrepresented in feedback on mayor Wayne Brown’s cost-cutting budget, while Māori, Pasifika, Asian, poorer and younger people didn’t have as much of a say.

‘Become a member and help us keep local, independent journalism thriving.’
Alice Neville
— Deputy editor

Those figures are the product of deliberate decisions. The council’s consultations are inaccessible and its meetings are in the middle of the day. Postal voting favours homeowners, who are more likely to stay in one place long-term, as does the ratepayers roll, which allows people with investment properties to vote in multiple elections. Both Sims and Caldwell feel assailing young people with a painful noise weapon jibes with existing council policy. “This is not an institution that highly values what young people think and feel,” Sims says.

But perversely, those settings may be why the council doesn’t feel the need to broadcast high-pitched shrieking in its entranceways. When it comes to repulsing teens, an ultrasonic noise weapon has nothing on a speech from Wayne Walker. Most young people would rather insert a Mosquito device directly into their right eardrum than fill out a 14-page consultation document on a minor roundabout upgrade in Blockhouse Bay. Auckland’s mayor is 76. He’s younger than most of the people who turn up to town hall meetings. Why would the council bother installing a noise weapon? It’s doing a great job of repelling young people without one.

Keep going!
The fight at Rangiaowhia. (Image: Alexander Turnbull Library / Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0475)
The fight at Rangiaowhia. (Image: Alexander Turnbull Library / Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0475)

SocietyApril 25, 2023

The first, forgotten Anzacs, more than 50 years before Gallipoli

The fight at Rangiaowhia. (Image: Alexander Turnbull Library / Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0475)
The fight at Rangiaowhia. (Image: Alexander Turnbull Library / Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0475)

Australian and New Zealand volunteers fought together in the Waikato War, yet still its place in the Anzac tradition is unacknowledged by our defence forces or Returned Services Association.

First published in 2018.

When I was a boy cub I attended Anzac Day services in the South Auckland suburb of Drury. A crowd would gather around a cenotaph that rose between the Great South Road, the main trunk line, and our local rugby club’s changing sheds.

I would stand with my fellow cubs, behind a thin tweedy line of RSA members. A bugle would blow, the sun and the national flag would rise, and medals would flash from the blazers of the veterans, as they stood to attention in front of the cenotaph. I would puff out my bronchial chest, which was covered in badges my mother had sown onto my cub jersey, and pretend I was wearing a row of Victoria Crosses.

A local minister – some years he was Anglican, others he was Presbyterian – would speak about the sacred Anzac tradition, which had begun on the beaches of Gallipoli in 1915, when New Zealand and Australia troops had fought side by side. When the sermon was over, the veterans would march off slowly towards the Jolly Farmer, our local pub, with tears in their eyes.

A grenade’s throw away from our cenotaph, on the other side of the Great South Road, stood St John’s, one of the network of fort-like Selwyn churches that Anglican settlers of South Auckland had raised in the 1850s and 60s. I never thought of visiting the neglected graveyard of St John’s, but if I had pushed my way through its hawthorn hedge and long grass I would have found a white obelisk, about eight feet tall, on which the names of eight men were inscribed. I wouldn’t have known it, and the other Kiwis who gathered across the road every Anzac Day wouldn’t have known it, but the men commemorated by that monument were the first Anzacs to die in battle. They didn’t die on a Turkish beach in 1915; they were slain by Māori muskets and tomahawks in a battle at Tītī Hill, a few kilometres south of Drury, in the cold spring of 1863.

Almost 52 years before Gallipoli, Australian and New Zealand volunteers fought together in the Waikato War. In the swamps and forests of Te Ika a Māui, they struggled with the army of King Tāwhiao, ruler of the Waikato. Scores of them died; the survivors received, as compensation for their troubles, plots of confiscated Māori land.

The Waikato War was fought because Auckland, the capital city of the colony of New Zealand, had filled with frustrated immigrants from other parts of the British Empire. These men and women had been promised their pick of the most fertile land in Aotearoa.

But Tāwhiao had persuaded Māori to stop selling their land to settlers, and to instead use new-fangled technologies – the flour mill, the iron plough – to produce food for the hungry city of Auckland. Instead of colonising the Waikato, thousands of immigrants found themselves stuck in the capital, eating bread and fruit and fish exported north by Tāwhiao’s kingdom.

A clique of colonial politicians, many of whom would soon begin careers as property speculators, persuaded Governor George Grey that the Waikato must be conquered and colonised. Grey did not need much persuading: ever since he’d led violent “expeditions” into Aboriginal Australia in the 1830s, he had been fond of gunplay.

Grey knew that he would need a huge army to defeat Tāwhiao. He was able to haggle 5,000 soldiers from Britain, and his allies in the settler government conscripted 5,000 local whites.

But Grey needed more troops, so he sent recruiting agents across the Tasman. The nation-state of Australia did not exist until 1901, when six colonies agreed to unite and create a federal government. But the concept of Australia existed throughout the 19th century, and by the 1860s a sense of Australian identity was spreading through the continent. This new identity did not necessarily conflict with old loyalties: advocates of an Australian nation-state often argued that it was the only way to ensure Britain’s continued dominance of the South Pacific. A strong Australia could counter the threats that other European empires and Chinese immigrants posed to the “British race”.

Grey’s recruiters tried to appeal to both the imperial and national pride of Australians. In the halls and meeting rooms of Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and Tasmania, his emissaries explained the threat that Kingite Māori posed to British civilisation. Tāwhiao, they complained, had isolated Auckland from other settler towns, frustrated immigrants who needed land and a living, and denied both the authority of Queen Victoria and the sanctity of the Anglican church. Australians who joined the fight across the Tasman would win the respect of their fellow members of the British empire. They could also expect to receive parcels of confiscated land, after the enemy was routed.

According to Jeff Hopkins-Weise, who wrote a Masters thesis and a book on the subject, more than 3,000 Australians volunteered for the Waikato War. Australians made up a significant minority of each of the four Waikato Regiments that the settler government was able to form in 1863 and 64. The regiments’ soldiers wore dark blue serge jackets and trousers, and dark blue pork pie hats. They had much less training than the professional soldiers of the British army, and were regarded as less reliable by Grey and his generals.

On the 10th and 11th of July 1863, Grey’s men emptied six Māori villages on the edge of Auckland, sending their inhabitants fleeing down the Great South Road on bullock carts and horses. On the 12th of July, British troops crossed the Mangatāwhiri Creek, the tributary of the Waikato that Tāwhiao had decreed to be the northern border of his kingdom, in whaleboats they had dragged over the Bombay Hills. The invasion had begun.

After Grey sent his troops across the Mangatāwhiri, the Kingite forces began a campaign of guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Bands of fighters would emerge from South Auckland’s puriri forests to ambush troop convoys on the Great South Road and loot and fire settlers’ cottages. The First Waikato Regiment was initially kept north of the Mangatāwhiri, and deployed against the guerrillas.

On the 23rd of October, 1863, a couple of hundred insurgents paddled across the Waikato River and began to shoot at cattle on the slopes of Tītī, a low hill halfway between Pukekohe and Waiuku. Ignoring orders, a column of men from the first Waikato Regiment hurried from Drury towards the gunshots. The 50 or so soldiers were commanded by Lieutenant John Perceval, who had been recruited two months earlier in Bendigo, a gold-mining town in northern Victoria. Perceval’s men were advancing into a few acres of recently felled forest when the Kingites, who had hidden behind logs and branches, opened fire. The colonists fell to the ground and began to return fire, rolling behind logs whenever they needed to reload.

Onehunga Camp, New Zealand, the quarters of the wives and families of the Victorian volunteers. Illustration by Samuel Calvert, Melbourne Post, 1864

Soon Perceval rose and charged alone towards the enemy. His men shouted at him to stop, but he kept going, scrambling over logs, into a volley of musketballs. After Perceval fell dead, his force began a semi-organised retreat into the comparative safety of the uncut bush around the clearing. Unwilling to let the Pākehā go, the Kingites dropped their rifles and rushed forward, wielding long-handled tomahawks. The colonials fired as they retreated; a few Māori dropped dead, but the others kept coming. One Anzac knelt, at the edge of the bush, and began to reload his rifle with trembling hands. A tomahawk split his bowed head in half.

By the time they reached the fortified Selwyn church at Mauku, about halfway back along the road to Drury, the Anzacs had lost nine men. Eight of them, including four Australians – John Perceval, Michael Power, William Beswick, William Williamson – were buried in a single grave in the churchyard at St John’s.

The Waikato War was lost by early 1864, when Tāwhiao and thousands of his subjects retreated across the Pūniu River, into the region of mountains and forests that soon became known as the King Country, leaving Pākehā armies in possession of his best lands.

More than a million acres of the Waikato and adjacent regions were confiscated, and thousands of them were gifted to Australian soldier-settlers. But the new farmlets were far from good roads and from markets, and many of the Australians soon sold their land, for a pittance, to the Auckland politicians who had plotted the war.

The fighting in the Waikato was barely over when John Gorst, a former aide to Governor Grey who had helped recruit Australian volunteers, published The Maori King, a book that exposed the greed and bloodthirstiness of Auckland’s settler government, and provided eyewitness accounts of the suffering of the refugees that Grey sent down the Great South Road. James Cowan’s two-volume The New Zealand Wars, which was published in 1922 and has long been considered a classic, celebrated the bravery with which Waikato fought to defend their rohe from an unprovoked invasion. In 1957 Keith Sinclair’s The Origins of the Maori Wars provided more details of the conspiracy between the settler government and Grey.

In 1995 Queen Elizabeth II apologised to Tainui iwi and to the King movement for Grey’s invasion, which she called a devastating injustice. The monarch was only acknowledging what had always been obvious to scholars.

Australians do not seem to have difficulty acknowledging their role in the Waikato War. Last January two representatives of the Australian Defence Forces visited old Waikato War battlesites, holding ceremonies of remembrance with local hapū and collecting soil from the sites to include in war memorial being built in Sydney. Many branches of the Returned and Services League have taken an interest in the Waikato conflict. The website of the huge New South Wales branch of the RSL, for example, has a page devoted to the subject.

In New Zealand, though, the origins of the Anzac tradition in the Waikato War are almost never acknowledged by either our defence forces or our Returned Services Association. This reticence is part of a larger silence, amongst our Pākehā majority, about the wars of the 19th century.

At the end of 2015 I joined the photographers Paul Janman and Ian Powell on a walk along the 200km length of the Great South Road. At old battlesites and in pubs and on the rubbish-strewn berm of the road, we talked with hundreds of locals about the past.

We noticed a huge gap between Māori and Pākehā knowledge of the war. Most Māori knew at least the outlines of the conflict, and many could give detailed accounts of battles, and produce artefacts – old cannon shells, photographs of warriors – that were held as taonga by their whānau.

A few Pākehā, especially older people, knew about the Waikato War, but the big majority had an encylopaedic ignorance of the conflict. Some of them said that the war was fought in the 15th or 16th century; some insisted that it was a fight between rival Māori iwi, and had nothing to do with Pākehā; others claimed that the war occurred in the years before 1840, and was brought to a close by the Treaty of Waitangi.

The ignorance of Pākehā about a foundational event in their country’s history is not healthy, especially when it is set beside the vivid and bitter memories of Waikato Māori.

This Anzac Day I’ll go back to Drury, but I won’t join the crowd around the suburb’s cenotaph. Instead, I’ll visit that little churchyard on the other side of the Great South Road. I’ll kneel by that lonely monument to the first Anzac dead, and leave a wreath to the innocent victims of the Waikato War.

Scott Hamilton, Paul Janman, and Ian Powell’s book Ghost South Road is published by Atuanui Press.

But wait there's more!