By Roselyn Fauth
Someone mentioned to me that if you look closely at the entrance to Caroline Bay from Virtue Avenue, under the railway bridge, you can still see the hinges that once held anti-tank gates. I went down to have a look and, sure enough, there they were. Iron fittings set in the concrete. Not obvious, and easy to walk past for years without noticing. I stood there longer than I expected to, trying to picture how it would have worked. Gates swinging shut across the road. The Bay no longer open. I could not quite make it line up in my head, but that did not stop the shiver that came with it. The War at one point was very close to home.
This week I was loaned a book produced for the Caroline Bay centennial of the carnivals, A Century of Carnivals. It filled in the gap I had been missing. Reading it, it taught me that there was a period when our Bay was not really about play at all. It was about defence.
After Japan entered the Second World War, Caroline Bay was treated as a potential landing site. Great concrete cylinders were laid on their sides and set into the sand, stretching from the Benvenue cliffs right across the Bay to the port. The sand was no longer just sand. It was something to be blocked, shaped, defended...
A gun was positioned on the Smithfield freezing works headland. An army camp appeared at the Showgrounds. An air raid shelter was dug into the clay bank in Station Street, complete with three entrances. These were not just incase... They were practical responses to a fear that felt very real and likely.
It was interesting to read in the book how the carnivals changed during this time. They continued, but under restrictions. Patriotic Carnivals. No New Year’s Eve bonfires. Lighting limits. Many familiar helpers were missing, serving overseas. Every profit was handed over to the Patriotic Fund. One year raised £1,137. Another still managed £802 after expenses. Even the helpers’ picnic was given up.
The hinges under the bridge. The headland. The clay bank... They are places we move through without thinking about invasion, but which once held real anxiety and real preparation.
I recently wrote about the war memorial wall and sundial at Caroline Bay, and this feels like the next chapter of that story. Memorials tend to look backwards. These traces like the hinges in the viaduct do something different. They remind us of a moment when the war had not yet arrived, but felt close enough that gates were installed, shelters were dug, and the Bay itself was adapted.
Today Caroline Bay has slipped back into its familiar role. A place of play, of memory, of summer rituals. But if you know where to look, the past is there to see, reconnect with, learn from and remember.
Under the bridge... In the sand. Worryingly once, almost at our shore.
Side Quest: When Japan Entered the War, New Zealand Looked to Its Shores
For much of the early Second World War, New Zealand experienced the conflict at a distance. The war was happening elsewhere, carried home through telegrams, newspaper columns, and the growing absence of men who had gone overseas. That sense of separation shifted abruptly in December 1941, when Japan entered the war.
Almost overnight, the Pacific felt uncomfortably close. Japan’s rapid expansion through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific raised real fears about coastal vulnerability. New Zealand, long reliant on Britain for defence, was suddenly forced to confront the possibility that it might have to protect itself. There was no certainty that an invasion would come, but there was enough uncertainty that preparation felt necessary.
Across the country, familiar places were reassessed. Beaches, harbours, and ports were no longer just sites of work or recreation. They became potential points of entry. Defensive measures appeared with quiet urgency. Obstacles were placed on beaches. Guns were installed on headlands. Air raid shelters were dug into hillsides. Civil defence plans were drawn up. Blackouts and lighting restrictions slipped into everyday life.
On the South Island, this took the form of a connected coastal defence system rather than a series of isolated responses. Major ports such as Lyttelton and Dunedin were treated as anchor points, protected by established coastal artillery, observation posts, mine-controlled harbour entrances, and trained gun crews on constant standby. Their role was to deny enemy ships access to deep-water harbours.
Timaru sat within this wider logic, but its vulnerability looked different. Without a sheltered harbour, concern focused on its open roadstead, beaches, and transport links. Defence here was practical and local. Beach obstacles were laid across Caroline Bay. A gun was positioned on the Smithfield freezing works headland. An army camp was established at the Showgrounds. An air raid shelter was dug into the clay bank in Station Street. Together with the larger ports, these measures formed a layered regional defence, preparing for a threat that never arrived but could not be dismissed at the time.
Caroline Bay’s broad sweep of sand and proximity to the port placed it squarely within these concerns. The fortifications that reshaped the Bay were not an overreaction so much as a reflection of how the war felt in that moment.
With hindsight, it is easy to see that a direct attack on New Zealand was unlikely. At the time, that clarity did not exist. Decisions were made in an atmosphere of limited information, mounting losses elsewhere, and a growing understanding that the Pacific war would not be fought at a safe distance.
This side of the war rarely features in memorials. There were no battles on our beaches, no landings marked by dates and names. What remains instead are quieter traces of anticipation. Hinges beneath a bridge. Concrete set into sand.
They tell a different kind of war story. One about waiting, watching, and preparing for something that might come. And about how, for a brief moment, the war felt close enough that New Zealand reshaped its own shoreline in response.
Evidence to find that links us back to that time - WWII Pillbox and Defensive Sites in South Canterbury
The Station Street clay bank still marks the location where an air raid shelter was dug, even though the shelter itself has long since been removed. On the headland near the Smithfield freezing works, the position once used for a gun emplacement can still be identified through its elevated outlook, even if the gun is gone.
What can still be seen near the lower Orari River, close to the river mouth, are concrete wartime defensive structures, generally identified as World War Two pillbox style or observation and defence positions. These were part of New Zealand’s wider home defence and coastal protection measures rather than evidence of any engagement.
In Lyttelton, elements of the wartime defence network remain more visible. Former coastal gun sites, observation posts, and concrete foundations survive on surrounding headlands, often repurposed as walking tracks or viewpoints. These structures reflect the port’s role as a heavily defended harbour rather than a beach-landing site.
Around Dunedin and Otago Harbour, remnants of coastal batteries, concrete platforms, and lookout positions can still be found, particularly at strategic points overlooking harbour approaches. As in Lyttelton, these were never used in combat but were fully operational during the war.
To what I could find, Timaru did not host major ammunition or weapons manufacturing plants.
Those were deliberately kept in larger centres or inland North Island locations for security reasons. What South Canterbury contributed instead was infrastructure, logistics, food production, training, and civil defence, and that is reflected in its historic buildings. althought I will need to do some further digging as I am sure I have heard of buildings more inland that were used for ammunition manufacture and storage, including one very large building that had a epic concrete roof.
Across the town and South Canterbury, existing buildings were repurposed: Drill halls, Training spaces, Storage, and Emergency coordination centres. These uses rarely left obvious physical traces, but they are well documented in local histories and newspapers. The curved roof buiding on Mill Street was a former Drill Hall.