1945: Punakaiki Home Guard

May 12, 2021

By AHNZ

I managed a visit to Punakaiki on the West Coast and tried to match this iconic photo from 1945. Standing sentry on the Tasman Sea would have been a fairly futile and inhospitable job for this Home Guard soldier even on a fine day.

Despite all the handy rock features it was very hard to find the exact spot the man once stood. I think this area, once frequently visited and photographed, as other archived pictures show, is now off limits. To get the right angle would involve going beyond the fenced off area of today.

I doubt that the local Home Guard really had much of a practical role to play here but the picture does look impressive. These Pancake Rocks have been a special tourist destination for about 100 years. Central Government appears to have taken the site over in the late 1920s which probably indicates that a private owner was deprived of what they had developed. Back in the day, tourists were apparently as impressed by the nikau palms along the walkway to the rocks.

Pancake Rocks were also used to great affect in the pterosaur scene of Walking With Dinosaurs (1999.)

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Image ref. John Pascoe (1945); Museum of New Zealand
Image ref. AHNZ Archive (2020)

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