PLACE NAMES

Southland Times, Issue 21097, 31 May 1930, Page 13

PLACE NAMES

ALONG THE RIVER

(By

Rambler.)

Names have a beginning and they usually have an ending. They are conferred upon a place and that is the end of them unless someone rises up and wants to try something new, in the hopes that a new name will make new conditions. I have written about a number of place names with a purely local application, and every one of those names was conferred on the place many years ago. That is why I write names have an ending, meaning that the time conies when no more names are conferred. The names to which I have referred and to which I intend to refer are all “old timers” and their origin has been lost to many people. As I previously stated, Try-pot Bay is near the mouth of the Waikawa River but it is by no means the only name on the river. If anyone interested likes to take a trip up the river he will have numerous places pointed out to him as Wallace Rock, Jack’s Bay, Strawberry Island, etc., etc. Before leaving the mouth of the river there is one place of interest beyond the mouth. This is Dagmar Cove, an inlet on the North Head. One of the old coastal vessels was the Dagmar and on one occasion she ran into the cove in question and went aground. How she came to go in there I do not know but go in she did, with the result that the place is still known as Dagmar Cove. When we went to the mouth of the river to fish we were always careful to time our visit to sail down the river on the outgoing tide and return on the flood. The tide flows very rapidly there and we were accordingly saved a great deal of exertion. As we sailed up the river we passed Currie’s wharf on the right and then Gillie’s wharf on the left, monuments to two of the sawmillers of the district, though not very permanent ones. The latter wharf has now almost entirely disappeared and the few stumps of piles left are far from secure in the sand. Not so very long ago a trawler, the Ruru, sailed into the Waikawa River and her crew’ tied their mooring cable to one of the piles. During the night the pile pulled out, the Ruru swung round on to the steep bank of the river, the tide rushed out to sea, and the Ruru rolled down the bank into the river. The effect of the manoeuvre on the sleeping crew can better be imagined than described; they came out at the hatchway as the water rushed in and stood on the bank while their vessel settled beneath the tide.

Having passed Gilles’s wharf we come to a rock in the middle of the channel, Wallace Rock. Another sailing vessel of the early days, the Wallace, ran aground on that rock, hence the name. The only road to the Waikawa Beach passes Wallace Rock and curiously enough the name locally is generally taken to mean the place where the road passes around the point of land opposite the rock. At one time, when a number of ships used to enter the Waikawa Harbour to load timber, a b’eacon was kept on the rock and was frequently washed off by the rush of the outgoing tide. Someone suggested that the rock should be blown out of the river but those who should have known objected because they considered such a course would release the tidal waters too quickly, with the result that they would wash away the sandhill, which guards the mouth of the river from the southerly busters. Since then the sandhill has shifted in the wind and has practically walked into the river to form a sand-bar, which effectively blocks the harbour to anything larger than a trawler. Captain Marks entered the river on one occasion with the Kotare and passed up beyond Wallace Rock to Moffat’s wharf, on the left hand side above the rock. He said that the sand-bar was a myth and loaded his vessel with timber and started to go out again, but the sandbar was too much for him and he had to stay there until a spring tide carried him over. His position was not a very enviable one because he ran out of stores and had to send his steward around the farmers in the vicinity to buy meat and bred. The sand-bar was only in its infancy then. The drifting sand formed another danger when it fell into the river. I jumped out of a boat on to what I took to be solid sand on one occasion, and sank to my middle. I would have gone out of sight only I threw myself forward, face down on the quick-sand and. offered enough resistance to keep me on top until I was pulled out. Continuing up the river beyond Moffatt's wharf, we come to the Government wharf and Joe Clark’s hut. The Government wharf is within a few chains of Waikawa and Joe Clark’s hut is right beside it. The visitor need not waste any time looking for a hut because it has passed away these many years. A hut was there at one time and an old sailor, who was a beachcomber on the Waikawa Beach and then a boatman on the Waikawa River, lived there, but he departed to the Old Man’s Home and thence out of our ken about thirty years ago. Another old gentleman—a writer for several magazines, by the way—lived in the hut over twenty years ago, but I forget his name. He did not live in the hut for long but moved to the cottage occupied by the late Mr W. O. Brown, the shoe-maker, because he became convinced that someone might murder him if he lived alone. He did not remain with Brown for long because they could not agree. While I cannot remember the writer’s name I can remember what Brown used to call him but, while the name was not obscene, it was decidedly vulgar and is better not mentioned here. The name, Joe Clark’s but more often just Joe Clark's still survives in the district and a boat-owner will reply when asked regarding the location of his boat: “It’s down by Joe Clark’s.”

If we land at the Government wharf and walk into Waikawa someone in the township may see us when we are about halfway along the causeway and say to a friend: “There’s someone down by the baths.” If the friend is a stranger to Waikawa he will probably wonder where the baths are. The baths, or their location can still be seen ringed round by posts, like a small field on the mud flat. They were just a section of posts when I first saw them about 30 years ago and I asked my mother what they were. I was told that they were the baths and was satisfied with the answer, but later I asked for further information and was told that the late Mr A. Currie had built baths there but they were not a success. My informant’s actual comment on their non-success was: “Only one man ever used them and he came out dirtier than he went in.”