Gambling on dice to spur river action

SAM BAKER/Manawatu Standard

ROLL THE DICE: This art installation appeared on the Manawatu riverbed under the Ashhurst bridge on Friday. It is intended as a protest against the water quality in the river.

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If you  go down to the Manawatu River today, you'll be in for a big surprise.

Two surprises, actually – in the form of a pair of giant concrete dice, flung on the stones of the riverbed under the Ashhurst bridge.

As the river flowed past sedately yesterday, curious passersby stopped to check out the metre-high structures.

The Manawatu Standard discovered the massive dice are the work of a well-known local sculptor and academic, who did not want his identity revealed. He had made the art installation as a protest against the degradation of the water quality in the Manawatu River, he said.

"It's a roll of the dice – they [Horizons Regional Council and polluters] are just gambling with our environment.

"I used to swim in there when I was younger, about 20 years ago, and it wasn't too bad. Just the degeneration that's happened since then, and nothing has improved and nothing will until they put a bit of money into it."

A recent report named the Manawatu River as one of the most polluted in the Western world, a finding that has since been disputed by Horizons.

It had taken the artist a year to construct the dice out of concrete, and each of them weighed in at one and a half tonnes. They had been winched into place by a crane on the back of a truck.

He hoped to stimulate discussion about the state of the environment.

"The average person will see them and go `dice at the river?' and it will take them a while to click, and maybe they won't. But they will think about it."

He was unsure how Horizons would react. "I'm looking forward to it, to see what happens, they might just leave them there, I don't know. It won't flood again till maybe autumn next year, so if they're still there then I'll be happy."

Horizons Regional Council chief executive Michael McCartney could not be contacted for comment yesterday.

But he said on Thursday that the river had been cleaned up since the 1980s, when outflows from meatworks, untreated sewage and dairy farm effluent emptied straight into the water. River pollution peaked in 2000 and has improved since, he said.

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