ARROW

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 7, 7 May 1945, Page 3

ARROW

Arto the casual visitor, at any rate, To casual visitor, at pleasant Arrowtown is a more pleasant township than most of the other once-flourishing gold-mining settlements of Otago. The others have about them a touch of decay ; their best days are behind them. But Arrowtown is like a beginning ; true, a beginning which has come to little beyond the grassy streets lined with small houses—houses which are all of wood and local stone and of one story, except for the higher-pitched roofs of three churches and the pink-washed front of the Bank of New Zealand.

Once there was a way of building in that district that would turn our architects’ eyes homeward from American colonial and Spanish mission if they knew it was there. Stables, shepherds’ huts, farm houses, accommodation houses fit their purposes and the landscape perfectly. The thick walls are built-with slabs of stone bound with a cement of clay and lime. The panes of the sash-windows are delicately divided by thin moulded wood. The joiners took time to consider the proportions and placing of doors atid windows and the grouping of farmhouse, stable and barn. This lends to

the scattered homesteads and most of the houses in the township an unselfconscious charm that can be found elsewhere only in early water colours and prints of New Zealand settlements. Along the main street, Buckingham Street, are the shops (many of them empty) : the bootmaker’s shop, the general store which is so well stocked that there is no need to go to Cromwell or Queenstown for anything at all, the barber’s shop, the builder’s shop, the Royal Oak Hotel, the post-office ; on the river-side stand the Central Hotel, the Athenaeum hall, the garage, a house or two, Tom Johnson’s confectionery shop, Mr. Roman’s butcher’s shop, and the Bank of New Zealand, open for business once a week. The bank and the post-office stand on opposite corners. Then, through an avenue of elms that meets to shut out the sky and branches over the small houses, Buckingham Street continues its magnificent way to Cromwell and the Crown Range. Only the footpath separates the houses from the tree-trunks so that their roots, finding a way up the inner walls, emerge through the guttering, leafing the edge of the roofs in pale green like a second spring.

From the main street, away from the Arrow River, the land rises in gentle terraces to a small plateau, from which you can see a civilized landscape divided by hawthorne hedges, already in February heavy with red berries. Rows of straight poplars that have once been fencingposts, silver poplars, walnuts, elms protecting the stone farmhouses, the surprising greenness of the downlands, the white roads, are like that slightly misconceived idea of English countryside

which you see on American films. For encircling this tender scene rise the rocky spines. and ribs of high arid brown hills and pointed blue

mountains.

From here, too, you can see. half-hidden in a clump of trees and blackberry, the disused gaol, which is approached

from the avenue through a gap in the trees. The whitewashed front with its high barred windows and padlocked door does not look particularly forbidding in the scorching Otago sun. But the walls are 2 ft. thick. So

that inside even on the hottest day the chill air of the cooler is calculated to strike the correct emotion from the guilty heart.

Inside the door to the left is the office and in the office is. the early history of Arrowtown. This is written in flowing Victorian handwriting on the folio pages of eight leather-bound books that lie on an iron bedstead below a pair of ankle shackles— Occurrence books which show a daily record from August 8, 1863, the Warden’s letter books, the Goldreceipt books. But the books take up the story after the rush had begun. The beginning of the story is hectic and exciting and all that even the most romantic could wish it to be.

The township of Arrow huddles haphazardly up to the mouth of the Arrow Gorge. The river and the gorge are hidden from the scrutinizing .eye by the folds of the hills and the terrace on which the town now stands. Into the gorge some tv-three years ago came a half-caste Maori bov. He did not know gold when he saw it, but something he said later put Low and MacGregor, two squatters looking-for pasture land, on the track of the hidden valley. There they found “ gold in the hills, gold in the rocks, gold in the gravel, gold as yellow as Chinamen in the bottom of the shovel.”

' It was not long before they were followed by two other parties —Fox’s and West’s. Fox took charge, and the men

agreed to keep the find a dead secret. A fourth partv arrived, and they, too, were forced to join the , agreement. Everything went happily for the thirty men for four and a half weeks when they ran out of food. During those weeks one man took no lb. of gold out of his claim. Fox went over to Dunstan to get stores. But on his way back he was followed by some of the Dunstan miners. He had a long and difficult track to climb back to the Arrow. That night he pitched his tent next to his pursuers. When they woke next morning Fox had gone, leaving his tent and everything in it behind. There was no doubt now that Fox had struck it rich. It seems that the miners were just as keen to find Fox as they were to find gold. But food and tobacco ran short once more, and some of the party went again to Dunstan. They were tracked, and one October morning a crowd of men poured over the ridge and down into the gorge. The mush had begun.

And so did the entries in the leatherbound volumes. So, too, not long afterwards did the building of the gaol. By December, 1862, there were 1,500 men and six policemen at Arrow ; and what with horse-stealing, dog-stealing, watchstealing, drunkenness, theft, threatening behaviour, administering deleterious drugs to a race horse and deaths by violence, some of the diggers kept the police busy. One brief entry tells the story of the goldfields in a sentence : “ This day a complaint was laid that an opossum rug was stolen from the tent of Madam Line!.” Another entry gives permission to the Royal Oak Hotel to keep open for a party until five in ; the morning. Two - days later we note that the proprietor is charged with swindling “ by means of an unlawful game.” One, Hayes, was charged with drunkenness on January 17,1864. He was owner of a hotel. More than that, the story goes that he was Bully Hayes, the blackbirder of the South Seas. However, the Diggers Rest, the Golden Age, and the Caffe de Paris (no doubt Mme. Linel’s place of employment) were no better. “ Disorderly conduct ” is entered against their names.

The small library in the stone Council Chambers under the elms holds intact

another and different packet of the past for our inspection. There is Dickens, of course, Charles Reade, Miss Braddon, the best-seller of her day, Charlotte M. Yonge, Charles Kingsley, Cook’s Voyages, Onida, Mrs, Humphrey Ward, and Mrs. Henry Wood ; Tennyson, Browning, and Hardy. This collection has been added to and is probably not very much read now, as the taste for improving literature has gone. It strikes us to-day as strange that the diggers could read the high-life sentimentalities of Miss' Yonge and Miss Braddon, but no doubt they would be as much surprised to learn that we find entertainment in reading about the high adventures of their times and their doings.

The Gold-receipt book tells its tale, too. Between March 2-7,1863, 7,329 oz. of gold were deposited in the bank, the highest amount recorded. As the months went by the town quietened down. And we see in the letter book on August 6, 1864, applications for “ Agricultural areas,” the original quest, you may remember, of Low and MacGregor. The applications were granted, and descendants of three of the original pioneers still hold the land. Still there, too are' some of the sons and daughters of the first gold-miners. Little wonder, then, that the people of Arrowtown to-day are, like the magnificent elms, rooted in their romantic past. You watch the elderly fingers turning a bottle half-filled with heavy grains of lifeless gold, but as stories of the past are told the golden grains come very much alive. The young people, too,

have a very living sense of the past, and the tales are repeated without a word misplaced.

It might be supposed, now the gold that pollinated the town has for the most part gone that Arrowtown is dying as its pioneers die, for in a sense the pioneers are Arrowtown. And that is partly true. The district high school and the convent school have long been closed ; there is nowhere for the young men to learn a trade (the war has taken ninety-three of them from the small district, eight have been killed) ; the flour-mill is shut down ; the irrigation scheme, the general store, the carrier, and the rabbit board employ among them only twenty-six persons, and they are the largest employers. Electricity waits one mile away from the borough for Australian hardwood powerpoles.

But on Saturday night the narrow main street springs to life. The shop lamps are lit, motor-cars arrive, musterers come in to town on horseback, the weekly picture show begins at 8.30. Groups of well-to-do looking people (they seem all to be related) exchange gossip and greetings in the long southern twilight. This weekly animation shows that the district is substantially progressing even if the town stands still.

And the reason partly is that in 1931 the river was used for irrigating the dry lands round the town. Since then pipes and water-courses have been extended until about 7,000 acres are fed from the golden Arrow. Fat lamb pasture, lucerne, red clover, grass-seed, are grown where before the land held only sparse tussock grass. A farmer who at one time kept only one house cow now runs forty cows. It has always been the best barley land in New Zealand, and the crop brings 3d. a bushel more than the top price elsewhere. Clover-seed growing, oats, garden peas, turnips, have been remarkably profitable since the war. The recent revival of Arrowtown and its district, compared with its early spectacular boom, is unexciting and matter-of fact. And perhaps we shouldn’t make too much of it, as the district is circumscribed and the farms are small. All the same it is hard to find elsewhere such landscape enclosing such a compact and genial sort of life. One of our poets has written an epitaph for Arrowtown, and this is what he says— Gold in the hills, gold in the rocks, Gold in the river gravel, Gold as yellow as Chinamen In the bottom of the shovel.

Gold built the bank its sham facade; Behind that studded door Gold dribbled over the counter Into the cracks of the floor. Gold pollinated the whole town ; " But the golden bees are gone Now round a country butcher’s shop The sullen blowflies drone.

Now paved with common clay Are the roads of Arrowtown ; And the silt of the river is grey, In the golden sun. Arrowtown doesn’t need an epitaph, and if the poet had stayed a little longer he would have found that the grave had never been occupied.