History
Portage Road is the location of one of the overland routes between the two harbours (and thus the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea), where the Maori would beach their waka (canoes) and drag them overland to the other coast, thus avoiding having to paddle around Cape Reinga. This made the area of immense strategic importance in both pre-European times and during the early years of European occupation.
In the 1850s, after settlement by Europeans, the areas around the inlet had become the agricultural centre of Auckland. Later industrial expansion westwards from the new railway line at Westfield led to increasing discharges of contaminants into the inlet.
Read more about this topic: Mangere Inlet
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)