This week Christchurch Dilemmas asks how is our prized waterway really doing?

For the Maori settlers of central Otautahi, living by the Avon River would have been like “living next door to Pak ‘n Save,” according to Joseph Hullen.

The river and surrounding wetlands, mahinga kai to the Maori, offered up many delicacies, including eel, flounder, whitebait in season, and herring or mullet.

But Hullen says he wouldn’t eat from the river now and believes it has, over time, “been turned into what I consider an iconic but uniform width and depth drain.”