1962: Memorial Park Fountain
December 15, 2024
By AHNZ
Today in New Zealand history, December 15, 1962, Memorial Park Fountain in Tauranga was unveiled.
“12 jet formations and 8 different light changes,” and “volunteers gave up 5000 hours of their time over 27 weekends to build it.” – Tauranga Historical Society
That’s proper New Zealand High Kiwis doing things for themselves rather than letting their government over-tax them, over-spend, and then have a bad result to complain about. This was standard practice, unlike today where we expect Council or government to provide. The world now means getting things like this done turns the public into a victim/complainant as a means of ‘achievement’ rather than a participant.
ReWoking The Memorial Fountain
In mid-2024 $106,000 was spent converting the fountain after an accidental child drowning in 2023. This on top of “a $15,000 upgrade” just 5 years before. Ref. RNZ (2023)
Six different generations enjoyed and survived the fountain as it was but modern parents and children can’t cope. Or, at least a very small minority among the hundreds of families and thousands of children could not. So, the 60yo fountain had to bend. The locus of safety was, at great cost, invested in the object rather than in the people who would otherwise have to respect it.
“We stayed at the park in Jan 2019 in one of the freedom camping spot. its a Awesome spot for kids and families with the big water fountain for the young kids to have a splash in and not so small kids eg my wife LOL.” – Marielee29, Tripadvisor (2019)
” Lee, 3, was one of the youngsters enjoying the Memorial Park water fountain,” and “Lee said they chose to go to Memorial Park over the beach because it’s safer for the kids.” – NZH (2019)
A child has drowned at Tauranga’s Memorial Park this morning.
“In a statement, police said they responded after a 9.50am report was received of a “drowning incident”…According to Water Safety NZ, drowning is the leading cause of death in children under the age of 5.” – Bay of Plenty Times (2023)
“…woman’s child was pulled from the same fountain. The woman had been cooking on the barbecue…The three-year-old had been with her grandma and wanted to swim along with the 20 or 30 other children already in the fountain…The woman said she was upset, and wanted to report it to the council — but talked herself out of it. They were newcomers to the area, anda family that were generally quite clumsy. She thought maybe grandma wasn’t paying enough attention, and it was an isolated incident. That was until she heard of the drowning at Memorial Park on sunday.” – Waikato Times (23 May, 2023)
“There is a fountain in my home town. Easy for a child to access but not one ever got into the fountain….. why? Because we all knew it was not allowed.” – Christine Diane to AHNZ (2023)
“Anarkiwi and when these kids become adults that can’t assess risk…. Then we are in big trouble.” – Andrew Cowsill, ibid
One of the annoying things about our time in our history which I will not miss when it is gone is the self-imposed ignorance.
New Zealanders are not allowed to know the names, the circumstances, the context, the facts of everyday happenings. Tens of millions of dollars are spent, heritage removed or stripped away, industries wiped out, lives lost, justice processed, decisions made; All without the public being allowed to know why. Name-suppression is rife. The Official Information Act (1982) was supposed to encourage a more transparent bureaucracy but instead it killed any organic transparency and replaced it with pretense. If you really want to know you have to OIA some flunky and wait.
Thus, for “privacy” we are not permitted to know about the chain of events that lead up to disasters. In a more enlightened age, before Woke, we even had Darwin Awards for people who demonstrated an example how not to stay alive. People were not hurt and did not die for nothing because their bad example spread through the culture as a warning meme. Now any such lesson will be buried in some coroner’s report you’ll never get to see.
How do we know the fountain is to blame and needed to be expensively stripped of some of its historic function? How do we know if it should even be for swimming in? The closest thing to information our news media offer is a similar incident from another family and their young child. A picture of a woman who might be Indian was in the Waikato Times report to go with the earlier incident. But the woman said they were a quite clumsy family, new to the area, and the child’s safety was in the hands of a grandmother probably not paying enough attention.
Many public toilets in New Zealand have instruction signs as a concession that foreigners try to mount them. If visitors here don’t know how to use a toilet then why suppose they would know how to encounter a far more exotic and custom object like a fountain? For all we know the fountain has been visited by people from sub-Saharan Africa, India’s interior, remote Pacific Islands, or some other place to which they returned. Is it really fair for Tauranga to have to redact parts of its heritage because a clumsy day tourist, long since exited the country, doesn’t watch their children the way New Zealanders are supposed to? For all we know that’s what happened here, is my point.
Perhaps if citizens, Anarkiwis, ran their lives rather than The State we wouldn’t buckle so easily. But somewhere a contractor with a political patron’s story about “safety” to back him up has a large percentage of $100,000 in his pocket now. If politicians, contractors, media, and bureaucrats can’t say “no” then who will?
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Image ref. Lee, 3, was one of the youngsters enjoying the Memorial Park water fountain. George Novak, NZH (2019)
Image ref. Photograph by Allan Scott, Postcard published by Dow Productions, Collection of Justine Neal, Tauranga Historical Society
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