Yesterday I visited a beach just south of the Hokitika River mouth on the West Coast of the South Island. It was raining and cold, a south-west wind blowing in over the sea. This is a beach where the sea is advancing, where the land is being eaten away when the tides are high and the weather stormy. Access is by a road that heads towards the local golf course – a vehicle-track then turns off just past the bridge over the Mahinapua Creek. The track ends abruptly at the coast – the stretch that runs parallel to the sea is being washed away.
I walked along the beach, finding plenty of stones scattered across the sand, amongst the driftwood and remnants of flax roots. There are places where drifts of stones stretch down into the surf. The owner of the Annabelle Motel, where I was staying in Hokitika, told me this is one of the beaches where the people who make stone mats collect their raw materials.
The outstanding stone on this beach is white quartz. This type of stone is common in many places in the South Island and I found many varieties of it here. Some seem banded, some have inclusions of colour, some are pure white.
