EARTHQUAKE TOWN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 633, 17 August 1951, Page 8

EARTHQUAKE TOWN

by

LAWRENCE

CONSTABLE

URE in the promise of scenic bounty, we must overlook the first stage across Cook Strait. Around midnight, sleep is violated by the advent of. French Pass. While the sound of chains and winches vibrates overhead, passengers stir in their berths and take stock of their discomfort, There is always a chance the tides may prove unkind, in which case Nelson may’ be ‘two hours late in coming. alongside: ‘the shipping company accepts no responsibility in the \All things being equal; however, we may breakfast in Nelson within sight of the city’s truncated cathedral. ‘Trafalgar Street is only just astir, Shutters are being taken down and doors opened. Cyclists’ bells and a passing bus, leisurely provincial sounds that yesterday were submerged in the hum of the capital’s traffic, At nine o’clock we board a southbound bus and the countryside opens before us, a broad expanse of cultivation. Across it, the road cuts a section of field and farm, garden and orchard. But as the hills close in and the long climb begins to the heights of Hope Saddle, the forest reaches over from WesMand. Above the wooded hills of the foreground, range upon range, the high points of three provinces lift into view; then the road falls swiftly to Glenhope in the upper basin of the Buller. The Tailway ends here, twenty miles short of Murchison. But beyond Glenhope a ghost train runs on through cuttings, tunnels, stations, embankments-al] of them empty of rails. Many years have passed since work ceased on the Glen-hope-Inangahua section. The country is formidable, but if we are to believe Nel-

son’s hampered business people, not impossible; and there is still a campaign to "close the gap" between railheads. POLITICALLY you are still in Nelson, but geographically this country is Westland. The bush is heavier, and so is the rainfall. The people are different, too. Their fathers rejected the ways of the city for the rigorous life of the bush, and their character survives in the .children. In the valleys around Murchison a few early settlers still inhabit the decaying places of their prime. Since their day the road to. Reefton has replaced the track to Quartzopolis, and Newman’s runs cars instead of coaches. You will still occasionally find these old chaps in back-country bars, shrunken now like the world about them, yet alive with a deep vitality and vivid memories. Their lives are running out in the country they know, though it’s no longer as they knew it, In a country the size of New Zealand it comes as a surprise to travel two hundred miles and find only a single town. Eighty miles from Nelson on the Lewis Pass route to Christchurch, we come to such a place. A scatter of tidy square houses and farms appears on the Four River Plain, which opens unexpectedly between the hills; and here is the township of Murchison. To New Zealanders, however, Murchison is not so much the name of a town as the name of an earthquake, the great shake of 1929 which made itself felt over the entire country. Hills in this district still carry the scars of 1929, split hilltops and exposed rock-faces where landslips buried the bush. NOT the least remarkable thing about Murchison is its sense of quiet. The ‘stillness that prevails is due not only

to its isolation in the high country of the Nelson province,. but to the unusual absence of wind. During the winter the line of tip-tilted peaks above the settlement is sometimes hidden by fog for weeks at a time; but in summer a breathless heat stifles all activity except on the Matakitaki riverbank. Some would say it was an Ominous quiet. But they are the folk who remember the winter morning 21 years ago when disaster enlarged the name of their town on maps all over the world. °* In the light of later events, there are still people in Murchison who recall the premonitions that came to them in early June of 1929. Some curious

phenomena are on record-most of them connected with the sounds heard in the district for a fortnight before the disaster. These sounds have been likened to explosions; at the time they were, in fact, put down to blasting in the nearby hills. Others recall hearing unaccountable noises in open country-thunder from a clear sky, or the roar of traffic far out in the bush-eerie effects for which there is now a sound geological explanation, but which were then puzzling and not a little unnerving. The earthquake itself started at 10,17 on the morning of June 17, It struck with a violent up-and-down motion of a force that made the hills crackle and set the church-bell clanging in alarm. _A customer escaped from the barber’s chair in double-quick time, leaving the barber hesitating. "For myself, .I. felt there was no need to run. I tried to hold up a mirror which began to wobble. Then all the contents of the shop were about my ears. At last I reached the door, and hung on for a moment, I was fortunate, for my chimney was at that moment hurled out in front of the building. Then with my hands over my head, I struggled on to the road." The force of that first shock wrecked every building in Murchison. Roofs caved in, chimneys toppled, houses swivelled off their piles, and Hodgson’s store heeled over at a@ ridiculous angle. Most people found it impossible to keep their feet, and some were affected by a physical nausea, Fences writhed and fell. Animals fled. In those few moments Murchison’s whole skyline was changed. A shooting party on the hills above Rotoroa later described how the lake rocked from side to side in its bed like water in a basin. UCH was the enormity of the disaster that many predicted Murchison would never recover, that residents would refuse to come back. Yet Murchison is still there, four hundred strong, neater and newer-looking than otherwise it might have been, and certainly better known. It waits, pretending to be (continued on next page)

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larger than it is, coasting along on the name of its earthquake, until it gets its railway. At midday service cars begin to arrive and the town comes to life. The service cars ere the lifeblood of Murchison, pumping passengers through in a steady stream at four shillings per head per lunch. Yet though more than 20 years have passed since the great ‘quake, tourists still descend uneasily from the buses, questioning the wisdom of remaining even an hour in so shaky a locality. All routes converge here: southbound from Nelson and Blenheim, and northbound from Christchurch and the West Coast. The crossroads on which the town stands, is, however, a conceit that will not bear investigation. Two of these roads shrivel to cart-tracks within a hundred yards; both lead only to the riverbank. Thus the town stands not upon a crossroads, but rather at an artful L-bend. Although the Four River Plain is the logical place for a town, Murchison has been a long time growing on it. Rivers were the problem; until bridges were built the road to the goldfields had no means of leaving thé north bank of the Buller. And so the prosperity of the gold years passed Murchison by. Pictures of the town fifty years ago give it a stern

colonial character, with moustachioed heroes looking out from the verandahs of its two parent hotels, a few shops, and bush coming down close to the back doors. Nowadays, of course, the plain is cleared for farms, and even the hills are balding. But the gold towns have perished while Murchison survives, founded on the rock of its situation. [;-ROM Murchison the way runs south across the White Creek Fault, Here the road dips over a low cliff which sets the land at two levels. In the Maruia Valley we have a glimpse of a 22-year-old waterfall. At this point the ‘quake dropped thousands of tons of rock across the bed of the river, changing its course, and plunging it over the fault line. The Shenandoah Road is dusty, narrow and very winding, notched with cranky little bridges whose every plank is a pistol shot. Mostly it tracks through dense bush; but sometimes there are blackened valleys, empty spaces littered with the bones of old forests. For more than a hundred miles now there are few signs of human habitation; only occasional farms peopled by red-faced farmers, and perhaps, if the numbers are sufficient, a storekeeper. The river falls deeply below, shining through the beech forest, and the road climbs over into Canterbury.