ABSTRACT
It only took me minutes to fly from Auckland over the Coromandel Range to Mercury Bay in my World War II fighter plane. I flew the Corsair low along Cooks Beach, flashed past Purangi River, pulled hard on the control column and soared to two thousand feet in a climbing turn to make a second pass at my childhood paradise. The area on the east bank of the creek, where my father had pitched his tents 20 years before, seemed to have shrunk with time. There was no little boy sliding on the mud-slimed, volcanic slabs at the edge of the stream, no tents under the spreading trees and very little native bush. Everything had been scaled down. I turned back towards the Coromandel Range and Auckland, saddened at realizing that my romantic playground had vanished. Perhaps it was just in my imagination. . .
