Westland As It Was

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 135, 23 January 1942, Page 7

Westland As It Was

have made the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand easily accessible to tourist and business man, but something of the Coast’s tradition of isolation still remains from the roaring, busy days of gold-seeking, when small cities sprang up and disappeared in the course of a few years, when money was easy come, easy go, and a man was judged by what he was and not by what he claimed he was. Am. rail travel and the service car The Coast never was and never will be like any other part of New Zealand, and something of the secret of this distinction is revealed-in a series of six talks on early Westland, the first of which will be heard from 3YA on Monday, February 2, given by A. P. Harper, the veteran New Zealand explorer and mountaineer. Mr. Harper knows the Coast, as it is to-day and as it was 50 years ago, as few other New Zealanders do. His father was Leonard Harper, who made the first crossing of the Southern Alps in 1857 and with James Mackay was responsible for the earliest exploration of South Westland; he is a nephew of Archdeacon Harper, one of the most celebrated figures in the early history of the coast; and he himself has explored the wildest and most distant corners of Westland and has met and talked with some of the many picturesque figures on the old diggings. Up to the beginning of this century the Coast had produced 300 tons weight

gf gold, and even with gold at its former value of just under four pounds an ouncé, that represents a consider. able reward. In his talks Mr. Harper discusses the value of some of the finds, and after discounting the digger’s inevitable tendency to exaggerate his success, comes to the conclusion that the richest patch of fine sea gold was at the Okarito, Five Mile Beach. The best pocket on the beach was said to have yielded one man £1,600 for two months’ work: Another rich claim was at Ross, not far south of Hokitika, and a legend has sprung up around the name of Cassius, a digger who is reputed to have won 20,000 ounces of gold in two years, Many stories of fantastic successes, however. must be treated with more than.a little caution, says Mr. Harper. An old West Coast friend of his once warned him that if a digger had worked ground worth, say, £2 a day, the £2 would in the course of time grow into two ounces, or about three times the actual value. Of Archdeacon Harper, Mr. Harper has many revealing stories to tell. With the Coasters the man came first and the clergyman second. Inquiring once from some diggers as to the secret of the Archdeacon’s popularity, Mr. Harper received the reply, "Well, you see, he could box better than any of us, he could ride any horse, and if a flooded river had to be crossed, he pulled as good an oar as any of us,"