CENTRAL OTAGO

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 5, 9 April 1945, Page 3

CENTRAL OTAGO

A-KOBE RO REPORT?

Cold morning dew, which had settled in beads on the man’s whiskers as

he waited on the deserted platform, glistened in the yellow flickering of the guard’s hurricane lamp; an Australian rum-bottle (empty) was in his hand, another (still sealed) craned from his hip pocket, but his face was pale and pinched with the cold. Without speaking, without, it seemed, even looking, he slouched awkwardly into the light, startling us with the unexpectedness and the quietness of his arrival and, too, by his dishevelled appearance : his clothes were crumpled and loosely hanging, the leather laces of his boots trailed untied, his sleeve was torn, and into the brim of the hat low over his eyes were jammed all thingsthree two-section trip tram tickets (they were unclipped, and, in the middle of Otago Central, likely to remain so). We were running an hour late : he must have had a long wait on that platform, unlighted, deserted, and forlorn of shelter except for the break to the chill wind made by comfortless cream-cans and heaped sacks of potatoes.

Good-day, he said, although it was half-way through the night, and he said it cheerfully, although he looked any-

thing but that. For three days, the stranger continued (although no explanation was needed : it was obvious enough) he had been on the spree ; his shearing finished, he had taken the chance to leave his 1,000-acre sheep-run at the back of Drybread for a trip to Ranfurly. His visit, unfortunately (and this with a grin), had extended from one to two, to three days ; now his return was urgent —he had to untie his dogs. Waiting for the usual passenger transport meant more wasted time : would there be any objection to his sitting in a spare corner of the van of this night goods as far as Omakau ? There wouldn’t, said the guard. Our stranger slumped down, he took a swig ; soon he was asleep.

We, too, not wanting to wait for the passenger train (which runs three times a week only), had travelled on the night goods, not realizing before we were aboard that the 155 miles from Dunedin to Cromwell, the terminus, took eleven hours, to which must be added, usually, at least another hour for time lost on the way. We steamed from Dunedin Station at 9 p.m., we chugged into Cromwell at 9.30 the next morning ; we had stopped, it seemed, at every tenth fence-post (and

often that was all apparently there). The temperature through the night would have made a frog shiver ; the floor of the van where we lay with a mail-bag for a pillow was as hard as boards. That night, as we travelled, the South Island seemed to stretch its width until it was as broad as it was long.

A hard floor and cold night air were no more comfortable to the stranger than they were to us. He began to talk and we to listen. His stories were of the sixty years he had lived in Otago Central as a rabbit-trapper, blacksmith, farmer, and soldier (for two weeks he’d been a soldier. Then they found he had a bad leg. He couldn’t do the quick marcji, they said. Back to Otago Central he was sent to trap rabbits. It was something he had been sorry about ever since). For grazing, in some parts for cropping too, Otago Central country, with enough rain, was as good as any in New Zealand ; usually, however, with the rainfall averaging about 15 in. a year only (and in some parts less) it was too dry. The result was a “ country made for rabbits.” Daylight was to show us the truth of what he said ; our travels in the next week were to prove it beyond doubt. Otago Central is the rabbits’ own country ; in some back country blocks they share it with nothing, not a person, a sheep, or, it seems, a blade of grass.

This farmer, an old man now with a face like a contour map, who after three days was returning to his run to untie his dogs, was like many other of the “ old identities ” we were to meet all through Otago Central. They are in every township, not now as active as in their younger days, but more talkative ; often they are older than the houses in which they live ; sometimes they have been in the district longer than the township ; one had planted the tree under which he was sitting, and its shade covered the street. In the van of the train that raw morning the old man told us of madly excited mining days, when gold was often in greater supply than flour, of coaches and bushrangers and sweeping floods, of cooking on a sheep-station when the menu was solely and uninterruptedly mutton, tea (without milk), and sour bread—twenty-one times a week, not

counting morning tea, afternoon tea, and supper, which was tea (without milk) and bread sometimes for a treat cooked, still sour, with currants.

But his concern was not only with the past. If we were thinking of taking up farming in Centra] his advice was, “ Clear out the rabbits and get a good wife. Both were essential. It’s no good else— I know, because I did neither. But it’s grand country, and Bob Semple has a great head on him for irrigation ; that’s the thing.” He left us in the early morning light to saddle his horse for the journey to his run behind Drybread. “ I hate the snow,” he said, " and winter’s coming on. I’d like to move into a pub for winter quarters ; I could take the dogs, a neighbour would have the horses, but what about the sheep ? ” He growled off.

Morning slammed the sun over the top of high hills. All through a night as black as a musterer’s billy we had seen nothing but, occasionally, the black form of black hills, the suggestion of height, the line of flatter country ; we had heard the rush of rivers and pounded over bridges. Miles had passed without a. light. Between stations, at times, the distance had seemed never-ending. Without seeing, we had groped through the districts of which Middlemarch, Hyde, Ranfurly, Wedderburn, and Ida Valley are the main centres.

With daylight came transformation. We were in a new world. In no other part of New Zealand is there anything similar ; and what we saw was typical of Otago Central except in and round the towns and where irrigation, bringing the softer colour of live trees and green growth, had relieved this unrelenting ferocity of Nature.

On all sides huge ugly blocks of hills and mountains jagged into a sky that seemed to have drawn back fearfully Giant crocodiles or prehistoric monsters with armour-plated backs, they lay not stirring, waiting, it seemed, for their victims ; the smashed gulches and tornout valleys were the eyes, the high-flung razor ridges the teeth. None of the majesty of New Zealand mountain scenery was to be seen that morning, but the effects were certainly no less striking ;

there was no smooth roundness, these ranges pierced upwards and outwards with huge bites and unsymmetrical leaps of rock. Between the peaks and stretching from the foot of one range to the foot of another lay flat dry plains.

• The strength and power of the scene brings you to a stop. Looking from even a short distance away there is no sign of vegetation, no tussock or grass, not even gorse or blackberry, nothing more than a solitary stunted treeit stems to be petrified and lifeless. Through fire-bars of early morning clouds the sun strikes down into a clear hard atmosphere on to rock which is bleached, flayed raw and bare with the heat. In the sunshine this expanse has a blinding brilliance in which there is no leavening of colour, no reds, yellows, or blues : the only relief is from the deep splashes of black shadow where the sun has not yet risen high enough to reach. As far as we can see, for miles,

there is no relenting in the scene., no change or difference : there are no houses or buildings nor sign of human life, and the steel railway track with its bridges and cuttings and embankments, with this heavily puffing engine and long line of trucks and vans, has no significance in this country. It’s a land for giants and dragons, not toy clockwork trains. But close at hand there is life to be seen, especially near the thinly flowing deep-cut rivers and creeks. We were riding in the engine now, and after twisting sharply through steep turns we would run into a straight to find the gullies of the hillsides on either side of us moving and shimmering like the leaves of a tree in a slight breeze. Sloping banks seemed to slide as the rumbling engine came abreast. But the movement was neither wind nor leaves ; it was the scampering of rabbits. At times a whole hillside would slither upwards and over its own crown. Even

in a small area they were beyond counting ; if you were not accustomed to Otago Central, they were beyond believing. They were there thicker almost than rice in a pudding, thicker than stars in the sky ; beyond counting, but there could be no doubt of their millions ; whole hillsides of rabbits. Cheekily, knowing no fear, they sat on their tails and flicked their ears as we rattled past. Once when the driver, amused at our wonder, pulled on the whistle violently as we turned a bend, the hillside flashed ; a second later it looked like a table from which a coloured rug had been quickly jerked. “ They’re so cheeky ; that’s what gets me,” said the fireman, and he threw a lump of coal at two large eyes between two large ears ; the buck hardly shifted position.

But it’s not possible ; what do they eat ? Each other ? How do they live ? we asked. A few miles on we stopped at a siding for a faster fruit train from Alexandra to pass ; we climbed over the fence and up the side of a hill to find it not as completely bare as it looked. It wasn’t grass, but it wasn’t exactly not grass ; it was like a thin, shabby, loose hair, a bit here, a bit there. The hills there support about one timorous sheep and one million fearless rabbits to each 10 acres. This is a strange part of New Zealand, we thought, feeling the way of Robinson Crusoe after he had seen a footprint on the beach one Friday morning. * Early colonization of New Zealand was first to the North Island in spite of fewer Maoris in the South and treeless country already clear for ploughing : it was not until after the trouble caused by Busby’s lack of power, the confusion rising from the arrival of Wakefield’s first settlers in Wellington and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the Wairau massacre, the weak governorship of Fitzroy, and the First Maori War that the South was thought of seriously. Colonists landed at Port Chalmers in 1848, at Lyttelton a year later. However, several years passed before exploration was carried far inland from the coast ; until 1856 when a survey party journeyed fifty miles from the edge of the then-settled 'country nothing was

known of the interior except from stories by Maoris of wide stretches of open country and lakes at the head of the Molyneux River. Settlement began soon after the information gained was made known, and after regulations, legalized at that time, allowed land outside the original Otago Block to be bought for grazing-runs at a low cost. (Runholders were allowed 80 acres for the homestead block with 10 acres for each out-station.) Pasture (before the introduction of rabbitsthey were first liberated to provide sport and distraction from hard work) was good ; by 1861 the greater part of Otago Central had been sliced into huge blocks for sheep-runs. Slowly pastoral runs improved ; the building of homesteads increased. For a time runholders enjoyed prosperity.

After 1856 efforts to attract colonists to Otago were made ; and to encourage emigrants to the south of the “ Middle Island ” rather than to the north or the North Island pamphlets were printed and made available throughout the British Isles. With some of them the information was obscure and the wording quaint. How much was known of the interior of the province where settlers were asked to voyage across the sea to make their homes is obvious. “ Lakes (one of the pamphlets says)—there are three lakes in the interior, but their existence, and position on the map, rest solely on Native testimony. . Indeed, there is but one Native who has actually seen them . • . . (their) proportions and the surrounding country, are at present shrouded in mystery.” “ About the

atmosphere,” the pamphlet continues, “ there is a purity and lightness of which persons newly landed are quite sensible, producing a buoyancy and elevation of spirits which they never before experienced. All children landed or born here

convey to the mind of the physiologist the most satisfactory evidence of the salubrity of the climate. The child of the poor man never knows what it is to want wholesome food.” Many of the scenes are so striking or magnificent that they “ may indeed be looked upon, but cannot be described.” Under the heading of Natives (not once is the word Maori used) the pamphlet says the country had but recently been adapted to people of agricultural and pastoral pursuits— “ Of this there are many evidences, the most wonderful of which is the sudden decrease of the aborigines during tlje last half-century.” The aborigines (or aboriginals, as later they are called) are reported to profess Christianity, “ many of them understanding its leading truths, and all of them manifesting the greatest veneration for the Sabbath . . . The settler of the Middle Island has nothing to fear from man, beast, or reptile.” The picture painted by the pamphlet must have been particularly attractive to women. “ And ladies,” it says, “ who are willing to fill the place for which Nature originally intended them, will find unfailing sources of amusement in the dairy, the kitchen, the fruit and flower garden, or, if this fail, in watching tenderly over the young olive plants of a well-filled nursery ; for while children are a source of wealth and happiness in Otago, they are not infrequently one of anxiety and fear in Britain.” Advice is given to the male emigrant that he “ should provide himself with a really useful woman for his wife . . .” And, “ But ladies are very scarce, and those who are now shooting up to womanhood can always select a good husband out of four or five applicants ; for the Statistics of 1856 show that there is a discrepancy in the sexes of five hundred, and the only way of remedying this unfortunate defect is for the parents to give us of their daughters, as the Israelites once did to the tribe of Benjamin . . .”, and so on.

A contract organized by the local Government and a firm in the colony enabled emigrants to be landed on the jetty at Dunedin with a cost for the voyage of only £l6 for adults and £8 for children. “ The Scale of Dietary ” (framed on the most liberal principles), as the allowance of rations was called, with its salt beef and pork, biscuit, preserved potatoes and carrots, lime-juice, and a restricted quantity of water, in these days of luxury liners, modern refrigeration, and six-course meals, is interesting rather than attractive. After the discovery between 1858 and 1861 of small quantities of gold, miners and prospectors began to drift into Otago Central. Gabriel Read’s discovery in 1861, and the rich find of Hartley and Reilly the next year swept the drift into a flood that covered the country with men, and some women ; a few were practical miners with experience of the Australian and Californian fields, the many had never -before seen even the colour of natural gold, but all were eager and determined to make an easy fortune. Inexperience, shortage of food, unaccustomed severity of climate, and tough almost trackless country caused, at first, all but unendurable hardship, widespread suffering, and many deaths. Many returned in despair. But their places were quickly taken ; more valuable fields were found ; gold poured in. Gold worth more than £7,000,000 was packed from the district in the four years after 1861. The greatest number of miners on the fields, in 1864, has been estimated at more than fifteen thousand

(and the population of Dunedin was about six thousand). As the pamphlet would have stated, “ ladies were even more scarce, and those who are now shooting up to womanhood can always select a good husband out of four or five hundred applicants.” Of the huge population, less than two hundred, at one time, were women. By 1865 the days of the rushes were over. Several thousand diggers left for other fields. Those remaining built themselves homes, settling to a more comfortable if less exciting way of living ; often they divided their time and labour between sluicing and farming the land they had bought ; some returned to the trades they had forsaken for the early rushes. Gold, however, continued to pour into the banks. An era of dredging, which started in the “ seventies ” and reached full force about 1900 and which has still not ended, replaced sluicing. From 1857 to 1927 gold valued at nearly £31,000,000 was exported from Otago fields. * Venison and wild pork were on the menu for dinner at the pub at which we stayed in Cromwell. In the bar were a refrigerator and a fuel stove from which pipes had been led round the wall for steam heating. They were an indication of the extremes of summer'heat and winter cold, of the variation in temperature of from more than ioo°F. down, at times, to nearly zero.. On the walls were the Lawson Woods cartoon of a group of policemen ; a picture of a rooster and two fowls with the caption “ Ginger Breasted Old English Reds,” a modernistic study, done with an

airbrush, of a gazelle ; and several stockfirm advertisements. Beer —and the practice in the district seemed to be general —was sold in medium-sized glasses for 6d.; there were no handles. Upstairs in the lounge was a case of strangely assorted books, including Isadora Duncan’s autobiography (in the back of which was the annual report and balance-sheet for 1935 of the New Zealand Croquet Association), “ How to Win at Cards,” the second volume of Tolstoy’s “ War and Peace,” James M. Kain’s “ The Postman Always Rings Twice ” (without a cover), and three copies of “ Love in Chains.” Cromwell, pleasantly situated at the conflux of the Molyneux and Kawarau Rivers, is rather like that collection of books. In the districts round the township are heaps of tailings which have laid waste to the land, deserted mining shafts, orchards with the latest available in frostfighting equipment, lignite-coal mines, a gold-dredge which is described as the largest in the Southern Hemisphere and which uses one-third of the entire output of a power-station, a cemetery close to the town in which the old-timers were buried and in which the average age of death for both men and women is probably under thirty years, a swimming-bath, and a war memorial. There is the old and the new, the usual and the unusual. Surrounding it all is that countryside with its appearance of fierce heat and the gullies towards the hill tops even in the middle of summer packed tight with snow. “ Boy, it’s just like home,” a soldier on leave said one morning, and he stood looking. He was a United States Marine, and he came from Colorado.