The Spell of the Lakes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 798, 5 November 1954, Page 26

The Spell of the Lakes

INE hundred years ago the chief Rakaihaitu came from Hawaiki and explored the South Island, and while he was there one of his chores, with his miraculous digging-stick and incantations, was to dig out Lake Hawea, It wasn’t the only job of that sort he did, but Hawea has been chosen as the first stopping-place in A. R. Dreaver’s tour of The Southern Lakes, which starts from 4YA on Monday, November 8, at 7.15 p.m. We envy the pakeha explorers of this region, he says, but we admire the men with less altruistic motives who were the infantry to the others’ light cavalry-the men who looked for grasslands for sheep. We can stand in imagination on the top of Grandview’s 5000 feet with John McLean, and while enraptured by views of Clutha, Hawea, Wanaka and the distant pinnacle of Aspiring, consider the 450,000 acres of tussock and rock he marked out for his Morven Hills run, A less grim, more popular prospect than Hawea is Wakatipu — which as "whaka-tipu" was "heaving lake." For, as visitors know, even on a calm day its waters lift and fall several inches every few minutes. The Maoris told each other that these were the heartbeats of Matau, a giant whose body had been burnt up in a tremendous fire. Mr. Dreaver brings some evidence himself in support of this tale-a magnificent aurora he saw there one Easter when a "vibrant ruby curtain quivered and glowed above Cecil and Walter Peaks and the level lake below was a bowl of reflected fire." There was more than one fire in the early history of Wakatipu. The Maori girl who swam across the lake signalled her success with a fire; and the first pakehas to stand at the lakeside had to take refuge neck-deep in the water from the raging fire started by a careless match. Of course, in the old days the real attraction of Wakatipu was gold-gold at the Arrow, gold at Skippers, gold at the Shotover-the fluke that won for two men 25 pounds of the precious

metal, worth about £1200, in one afternoon. Today they mine for scheelite at Glenorchy-it’s heavy stuff and a local joke is to ask a new chum to "throw me that bag" and watch him struggle with it. But nowadays most people go to Wakatipu neither for gold nor for scheelite but to tramp, climb, ski (on snow or on water), or just loaf around yarning and playing bowls and eating locallygrown strawberries and cream. And speaking of strawberries-Mr. Dreaver mentions the small, sweet, wild ones above the jetty at Elfin Bay. Or again-to give you a taste of something quite different-he tells of the extraordinary chorus of bells from the bell birds at Rere Lake. And he visits Diamond Lake, of which Robin Hyde said that Down upon Diamond Lake the trout plopped home such lonely circles, Diamond Lake was O-tura in Maori days -"Turu’s place." And that’s another case where you can pay your money and please yourself, for "turu" meant either "to last a short time" or "to build an eel weir.’