MACKENZIE COUNTRY

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 10, 22 May 1944, Page 3

MACKENZIE COUNTRY

NEW ZEALAND TO-DAY

A KO RE BO REPORT

The name “ country,” as applied to a district, has in New Zealand come to be associated with the remote, the wild, and the extraordinary. The King-country and the Mackenzie country are, or were until recently, areas set apart, the one by its forest and the other by its mountain barriers. Moreover, each has a history so curious that legend and truth have become inextricably mixed. The King-country is fast losing its wildness. Axe and fire and plough are smoothing its outlines, and in another fifty years it will have few visible associations with its past. But the Mackenzie country will always be extraordinary ; here Nature has worked on so vast a scale that the marks left by a century of human habitation are trivial scratches. Even now, when Mount Cook is a comfortable day’s journey from Timaru, he is an insensitive traveller who, topping Burke’s Pass, does not become conscious of a dramatic transition. Behind lies the genteel, cultivated landscape of the Fairlie Basin; ahead everything is bare and vast and unfriendly.

Nature, earth’s angel, man’s antagonist, The stern antagonist from whom he wrests his bread, Long heretofore with vast magnificence Did carve this scene, prepare the arena, spread Bronze tussocked terraces before precipitous Great purple alps, loose glacier-shed Fierce-laughing streams in circuitous riverbed. Thus a New Zealand poet seeing the Mackenzie country for the first time. From a distance the range beyond Fairlie blocks off the plains with such an air of finality that the squatters who began to arrive in South Canterbury in 1850 assumed that it was part of the main divide and that the passes they could see led through to the West Coast. Not for five years did they discover that beyond the range lay a great basin some 30 miles long by 20 broad where sheep could be pastured. The story of the discovery has become a sort of folk-tale in Canterbury. In 1855 the land in the Opihi Valley from the sea inland to the neighbourhood of what is now Fairlie comprised the great Levels Station, held by the Rhodes brothers. In March of that year J. H. C. Sidebottom, manager of the station, was at the Cave “ paring the sheep’s feet ” when Seventeen, a Maori shepherd, came to tell him that a man named Mackenzie had stolen the greater part of his flock. Taking with him Seventeen and another Maori named Taiko, Sidebottom set off in pursuit and picked up tracks along a branch of the Tengawai River.

The rest of the story is told in a letter to his employers. “ Just before sundown we came to the pass to the West Coast through the Snowy Mountains, and on looking down a very abrupt hill we saw the sheep and one man keeping them together. When I got to the flat below the man was preparing to turn in for the night. I rode up and collared him and tied his hands. Being regularly knocked up, I meant camping for the night, so I laid down and took a feed of his damper, mutton, tea, and sugar. Foolishly, I untied his hands, but took his boots away, thinking three were surely enough for him. After we had stopped about two hours, we heard some suspicious calls, the dogs began growling and the sheep broke camp.” Sidebottom then decided

to travel back by night, but ran into mist almost immediately, and his prisoner escaped. At the foot of the Mackenzie Pass there is now a monument with this inscription in English, Maori, and Gaelic : “On this spot James Mackenzie the Freebooter was captured by John Sidebottom and the Maoris Taiko and Seventeen and escaped the same night, 4th March, 1855.” . At the end of his letter to his employers Sidebottom noted that “ there seemed to be a fine plain just at the back of the Snowy Range and a first-rate pass through the mountains to it.” A month later a Christchurch paper reported the discovery of “ a plain of immense extent capable of depasturing sheep ” beyond the mountains in which Mackenzie had been captured. The first pastoral lease in the

Mackenzie was taken up in the following year ; four years later there was eight runs pasturing 17,500 sheep. Since sheep-stealing was a common enough offence in New Zealand in those days it seems natural to ask why a sheepstealer should have given his name to a region which equals in natural grandeur the alpine scenery of Switzerland and Italy. Moreover, when we sift truth from legend, Mackenzie becomes a shadowy figure. It is not known for certain where he was born, when he came to New Zealand, where or when he died, or where he lived the greater part of his life ; there is even some doubt about his name. He is supposed to have come to Otago in 1847 from Australia ; and for many years it was believed by the settlers of the Mataura district that he had buried the proceeds of his sheep-stealing in Stuart’s Bush, near what is now Edendale. After his escape from Sidebottom he was .recaptured, brought to trial in Lyttelton, and sentenced to five years penal servitude. Even the reports of his trial are conflicting. After he had escaped three times the authorities wearied of him and he was freed on condition that he left the country. There is a story that years later he came back to the Mataura district and dug up his buried fortune. There seem to be two reasons why Mackenzie made a place for himself in history. One is sheer force of personality. Upon everyone who met him, even for a few moments, he seems to have left an indelible impression. He was, we are told, “ of large build, with red hair, high cheek bones, and piercing ferrety eyes ” ; his manner was a blend of insolence and cunning, and a favourite affectation was that he spoke only Gaelic. One story about him is typical, whether or not it is true. Before he came to Australia he was a drover and dealer in stock in Scotland. The City of Aberdeen was giving a banquet in honour of Queen Victoria, and Mackenzie contracted with the banquet committee to deliver bullocks at a cut price. After he had collected his money it was discovered that he had stolen the bullocks from the estate of the committee’s chairman. The other reason why Mackenzie looms so large in the

memory of the district to which he gave his name is that it was settled mainly by men who were, like himself, Highland Scots. As Dr. Johnson and others have noted, the Highland Scots are accomplished legend-builders. It is conjectured by some geologists that the Mackenzie Basin was at one time covered by glacial ice to a thickness of perhaps 5,000 ft. This mass, sometimes called the Great Waitaki Glacier, had its outlets through the Hakataramea, Mackenzie, and Burke’s Passes; its remnants are the glaciers of the Mount Cook region. At some later time the Great Waitaki Glacier probably turned into a vast inland sea which receded leaving behind it Lakes Tekapo, Pukaki, and Ohau. Fed by glacier rivers, and themselves feeding the great Waitaki River, these three lakes assure to the Mackenzie country a permanent importance in the economy of New Zealand. The story of high country pastoralism has over the last half-century been a story of steady decline. Even

in the Mackenzie country, where the decline has been least rapid, pastures no longer have the carry-ing-capacity they had before burning weakened the vegetation. But the hundreds of public-works huts dotted along the hillside at the outlet of Lake Tekapo announce the beginning of the second phase of the Mackenzie country economic development. To-day it

is wool, to-morrow it will be power. Tekapo, Pukaki, and Ohau are reservoirs which could power the factories of a country many times larger than the South Island. In the meantime life in the Mackenzie changes more slowly than it does in most parts of New Zealand. Machine shearing, tractors, motor transport, and wireless have had their effects; but the

economy of the high-country station has not changed in its fundamentals. Seeing the Mackenzie to-day, you see it much as Mackenzie the Freebooter would have seen it. The principal change is in the vegetation. Then the floor of the basin was covered with wild-irishman and bayonet-sharp Spaniard through which horsemen forced their way with difficulty and even at some danger. The smoothlyrolling tussock downs are the product of fire.

Autumn and winter are the times to visit the Mackenzie. In autumn there is a fair chance of brilliant still days, with Tekapo milky blue and fringed with poplars which are more orange than gold. The winter cold is arctic but exhilarating, and every station has a skating-rink of some sort. If you have ever skated by moonlight in the Mackenzie, you will not forget it. If you have ever played ice hockey as they play it in the Mackenzie, you are even less likely to forget it. By comparison,

commando training is safe and restful. Summer and spring are liable to be plagued by the nor’wester, which in these seasons can blow for weeks day and night. The warning signal is purple clouds over towards Mount Cook. In an hour or two the outlines of the main divide are lost, and sky, tussocks, and lake surfaces have turned sullen grey. The wind rattles doors and windows interminably, lifts carpets, forces dust through every crack, and outside roars in the trees with a noise like Niagara. If your temper stays equable after a few days of this you are superhuman. The people of the Mackenzie are very much the product of their ancestry and their environment. As their names show, most of them are descendants of the Highland Scots who pioneered the country. They are imaginative, half believe in ghosts, keep their past with them, and have a passion for memorials. Monuments, cairns, plaques, and liberallyinscribed memorial churches abound in the Mackenzie. There is, for instance, the memorial at the top of Burke’s Pass, which reads thus : — TO PUT ON RECORD THAT MICHAEL JOSEPH BURKE A GRADUATE OF DUBLIN UNIVERSITY AND THE FIRST OCCUPIER OF RAINCLIFF STN

ENTERED THIS PASS, KNOWN TO THE MAORIS AS TE KOPI OPIHI IN 1855. O YE WHO ENTER THE PORTALS OF THE MACKENZIE TO FOUND HOMES, TAKE THE WORD OF A CHILD OF THE MISTY GORGES, AND PLANT FOREST TREES FOR YOUR LIVES : SO SHALL YOUR MOUNTAIN FACINGS AND RIVER FLATS BE PRESERVED TO YOUR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN AND FOR EVERMORE. 1917 THIS PASS IS 2,200 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL. This mixture of the high falutin, the common-sense, and the informative is characteristic. From their environment the people of the Mackenzie get a certain remoteness from the affairs of the world. In all that has to do with sheep they are, of course, severely practical; if you don’t know sheep and sheep country you don’t survive in the Mackenzie. But in matters of politics and economics they think and talk with a simplicity and directness denied to lowlanders. They see things from an elevation, and they do not know what it means to be parochial. When an inhabitant of the Mackenzie goes beyond Burke’s Pass, he talks of going “ down country.” The phrase implies a moral as well as a physical descent.