About this address

This page explains who used this web address before us, because some old links still point here. River Notes Aotearoa is a new, independent site. It is not a continuation of any of the earlier sites, and it does not speak for anyone who ran them.

In 2008 this address hosted a volunteer campaign for New Zealand’s wild rivers, and later other unrelated sites. This site is independent: it is not any of those groups, does not campaign, and does not speak for them.

2008: a river campaign

The first site here belonged to the Wild Rivers Action Project, a volunteer group of trampers and river users. It opposed a proposed hydro-electric dam on the Mōkihinui River, north of Westport on the West Coast, and argued more widely against damming New Zealand’s remaining wild rivers. Its site carried news, background papers and campaign material.

That campaign is long finished. Meridian Energy dropped its Mōkihinui dam plan in May 2012, and in March 2019 the government added about 64,000 hectares of the Mōkihinui catchment to Kahurangi National Park. How that kind of protection works is the subject of our note on how New Zealand protects a river.

The 2010s: unrelated sites

A few years later the address was used by Women’s Rights and Advocacy in the Pacific, an Auckland-based coalition working on gender equity in the Pacific region. It had no connection with the river campaign. Later still, after the name lapsed again, the address carried an unrelated fitness blog.

Now

River Notes Aotearoa picked up the address in 2026 and writes about the subject the first site’s readers cared about: rivers, the outdoors and freshwater life. We have not copied any old text, files, photos or names, and we have no link with any of the earlier groups or the people involved in them. Old links are sent to the closest page we have; documents from the earlier sites are not kept here.