High Country Lark

by Neville Peat

  If Boat Day coincided with pay day for the scheelite miners, the town was in high spirits.

  The Lark’s uncle worked a scheelite mine on a part-time basis, helping his father, who held the miner’s licence. Meeting his nephew from Waitaki Boys’ High at the wharf one hot summer’s day, when a northwesterly föhn wind was whipping up a dust storm on the Dart River delta and parching the back of the throat, he walked him home via the Mount Earnslaw Hotel.

  ‘Are you dry?’ he said. The young Lark nodded. So into the bar they went, never mind the underage issue, and the uncle ordered a ‘pony’, a five-ounce beer served in a glass with a tapered waist. It cost sixpence.

  Six o’clock closing for pubs across New Zealand, the law at the time, was hardly ever observed at Glenorchy. The town had no resident policeman. Occasionally, a constable would arrive from Queenstown by boat, only to find everything in order because someone on the vessel had radioed ahead that the long arm of the law was about to reach out to Glenorchy.

  A summer holiday at Glenorchy, for a teenage boy, was a riot compared to the disciplinary atmosphere of a boarding school. There were rabbits to shoot for the kitchen table and ‘flappers’, too — young paradise shelducks, not yet fledged — at the lagoons or on the river bed around New Year, when it was too late for the duck-shooting season and seemingly too early for trout. Instead of shooting the young paradise ducks, the boys might throw stones to herd them towards the reedy edge of the lagoons, where they could nab them by hand. The young Lark once saw someone shoot a falcon that had been harassing hens. He felt like querying the wisdom of that. Falcons were magnificent birds, agile in the air. Courageous, too. They could take on prey much larger than themselves, such as hens and black shags. At Glenorchy, where he was a visitor and a guest, he tended to keep his tongue. Besides, there was so much fun to be had with his cousins. There were boulders to liberate down the steep slopes of nearby Mount Judah to see how far they’d bounce and roll, and scheelite mines to explore. Back at his cousins’ place, there were cows to milk.

  TSS Earnslaw

  There have been steamers on Lake Wakatipu since 1863. The twin-screw steamer Earnslaw entered service on the lake in 1912, the year the Titanic sank in the Atlantic on her maiden voyage. Like the Titanic, she was state of the art, with first-and second-class saloons lined with kauri and red beech timbers, and a sprightly service speed of thirteen knots (sixteen knots if pushed) that cut an hour off trips to the Head of the Lake. She was large, too, with capacity for 1,035 passengers. Tourism was taking off. The farming communities around the lake, however, were more interested in the space for farm produce — 1,500 sheep, seventy head of cattle, or 200 bales of wool.

  The Earnslaw occasionally carried cars and buses to Glenorchy. This was before the opening of the road from Queenstown in 1962, which foreshadowed the end of her days on the Glenorchy run.

  Built in Dunedin, railed to Kingston and erected there prior to launching, the Earnslaw has been dubbed ‘The Lady of the Lake’ in modern times. She is classified under the Historic Places Act. She puffs out historic smoke. Her one hundredth birthday celebrations in 2012 may see her sail again for Glenorchy if there is sufficient water at the wharf. The opening of the road from Queenstown in 1962, its tarsealing in the 1990s, and the encroachment of the gravel and sand delta from the Rees and Dart Rivers discharges, reducing water depths at the wharf, have combined to keep the Earnslaw out of the northern arm of the lake, more’s the pity. The wharf has already been moved south once, by about 150 metres, to maintain a safe depth of water.

  The Lark’s relatives lived on a farmlet. There were a few smallholdings around town. They had cows, which helped supply the village with milk, and sheep. They also ran stock on commonage land on the Rees River delta. It was rough pasture and free of charge. A few of the miners who owned stock and horses were allowed to graze them there. Over the years, however, the water table has lifted with gravel aggradation from floods, and the delta has become wetter, the pasture less productive.

  Mining and farming — that was what made Glenorchy tick back then.

  The 1950s Expression of economic prosperity in rural New Zealand was, ‘a pound a pound’. It referred to the value of wool — £1 sterling for 1 lb of wool. These were boom years for sheep farmers. They were also pretty good times for miners of scheelite, another export that was worth £1 a lb for a while. Income from merino fine wool and scheelite made the Head of the Lake one of New Zealand’s wealthiest districts per head of population, even though it had neither motor road access nor connection to the national electricity grid (it generated its own electricity from small hydro stations).

  Glenorchy was the capital of scheelite mining in New Zealand. Mining in the hills above the town spanned the first eight decades of the twentieth century. There were frenetic peaks in production, and longer troughs, most of which were related to wars overseas — World Wars I and II, and the Korean War of the 1950s. Scheelite (calcium tungstate) is the ore of tungsten, whose steel-hardening properties are important for the manufacture of weapons, munitions and cutting tools. A heavy mineral and creamy (roughly the colour of the light patches on Simmental cattle), scheelite is mostly found in veins of quartz. Although the lodes around Glenorchy were patchy and unreliable, they did weigh in at seventy per cent tungsten content, the richest strike in New Zealand. If you were lucky, a scheelite ‘lens’ got wider the farther you blasted. But it was punishingly hard work, carried out in steep terrain. It involved pick-and-shovel digging, hammer-and-tap or jackhammer blasting with gelignite, and the laborious job of bagging. Then the bags had to be snigged out on an A-frame sled towed by a horse to reach a cableway connected to the stamper batteries for crushing.

  These kinds of batteries were used in an earlier era for extracting gold, although in this area more gold came from river gravels than from solid rock. Hundreds of miners rushed into the area in the early 1860s to get their share, which for the majority was negligible or merely a grubstake. As for hard-rock mining, the wonderfully named Invincible Mine was the most successful at winning gold from quartz. Traces of gold were often found with the scheelite ore through the twentieth century, and the precious specks would end up in a tobacco tin as a perk for the stamper battery operator. Glenorchy has Otago’s most western cluster of gold workings; for the area is close to the edge of the schist and its lodes of gold-bearing quartz.

  Not surprisingly, the scheelite miners downed tools in winter when snow covered everything. Even when the bulldozer replaced wheelbarrow, pick and shovel, and the overburden could be quickly stripped away, it was still a reasonably hard life, holed up in the clouds overnight, in small huts leaning at funny angles with the roofing iron held down by rocks slung from each side. Miners often slept with their clothes on. And it was no place to get injured. Ambulance or rescue helicopter services were unavailable in the ’fifties. Mining ranged almost to the summits of 2,000-metre peaks, and there were large scars all over the mountainsides. The notch on the side of Mount McIntosh close to the summit and visible today from Glenorchy, was created by scheelite miners.

  Back in the 1930s, the Lark’s uncle lost a mate in a rock fall. He was buried alive. The mining was all done privately then, and some of the scheelite ended up in Germany, ironically to aid the arming of the Third Reich. It wasn’t till 1942 that the government bought out the main mining company, when the Western world, deeply into war by then, became hungry for tungsten. There were eighty registered miners at Glenorchy around this time, many of them exempted from war service for one reason or another, including being ‘manpowered’ for their mining expertise. Their main base was Campbelltown, a couple of kilometres up the road from Glenorchy, where there were rows of accommodation units for married and single men. Sports days in Glenorchy always featured strongman events such as caber tossing. Dances were held weekly in the local garage, the only suitable space.

  When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the rising price for scheelite revived the mining, and Glenorchy boomed
again. Between bouts on scheelite, a miner might turn his hand to an array of odd jobs. One man variously cut fence posts out of red beech, dug graves at the local cemetery, milked cows, cut hair and spread carrots ‘buttered’ with strychnine over tracts of land to kill rabbits for the Rabbit Board.

  When it came to social life, the Mount Earnslaw Hotel was the hub. There was a piano for singing around and, in the 1950s publican Bob Stassen might crank up an accordion for his patrons’ entertainment. Card games like forty-fives led to gambling and beer was swilled till the late hours, way beyond lawful closing time, on special occasions. There were two parts to the hotel: a twin-gabled main building, erected in 1880, and a two-storey guest room block with seventeen rooms, added in 1885. Guests had a good view of the lake 150 metres away. A public bar and a parlour bar, suitable for ladies, were in the original building.

  Joseph Karley Birley built the hotel, one of three erected in Glenorchy in the 1880s to cater for increasing tourist interest in the Head of the Lake. The steamer Jane Williams (called the Ben Lomond after 1886) was in service by this time, bringing sightseers and mountaineers. From 1880, at the age of seventeen, Harry Birley, the proprietor’s son, was guiding climbers into the Humboldt Mountains, and helping establish the Head of the Lake as a playground for the adventurous. The keenest, appearing thoroughly overdressed by today’s standards in tweed jackets and hats, wanted to get as high as possible, and young Birley would lead them on ascents that included the paramount peak of the Humboldt Mountains, Mount Bonpland, 2,343 metres. Harry, in his mid-twenties, went on to become the first person to climb Mount Earnslaw — the East Peak — in March 1890. He climbed that day with photographer Frank Muir but having no ice axe, Frank had to stay at the foot of a steep wall of ice under the peak. Harry pushed on alone, reaching the summit in mid-afternoon. He left a shilling in a stone cairn as proof of his achievement, and three years later the ‘bent shilling’ was found by brothers Malcolm and Kenneth Ross where he said it would be, enclosed in a small bottle of Irish Moss cough mixture under the stones.

  Fire was always a far bigger threat to the wooden hotels than raids by Queenstown police. After the Glenorchy Hotel burnt down in 1923, the Mount Earnslaw was left as the main centre of hospitality in town. But in the early hours of July 1959, it, too, succumbed to fire. The proprietor, his wife and their three children managed to escape just as the roof began to collapse. In thirty minutes, according to the report in the Otago Daily Times, the legendary hotel was ‘a heap of crackling, burning debris’.

  The Mount Earnslaw Hotel was the stage for characters of all kinds over the years — publicans, staff, patrons — none more memorable than Bill O’Leary, the Arawata Bill of legend, who based himself at the hotel in the early 1940s at the invitation of proprietors Stan and Kath Knowles. He wasn’t the stereotype pub dweller at all. He was abstemious with alcohol, never smoked, and never swore. ‘By Christmas!’ was probably his strongest expletive. It was a favourite expression of his when he got worked up about something, and was even adopted by some of his friends as a nickname.

  Arawata Bill, then into his seventies, paid for his board and lodging at the Mount Earnslaw Hotel by tending the vegetable garden, feeding hens and milking cows — a kindly old cowboy and rouseabout. On some afternoons, he would sit out the back of the hotel preparing vegetables for the evening meal and talk to fascinated children going home from school. This white-bearded old gentleman in a suit with pocket watch and chain, who related well to the kids, had roamed the wildest, loneliest country imaginable between Glenorchy and the West Coast, ever hopeful of striking gold and rubies in profitable quantity. Although his fossicking days were over by now, he renewed his miner’s rights at every opportunity.

  Bill O’Leary could turn his hand to just about any kind of rouseabout work, on the farm or in town, although he was more likely to be found on a sheep and cattle station round the Head of the Lake when he wasn’t prospecting in wild places. Had the brushtail possum been the resource it is today, with a promising fur industry based on it, he might well have been involved in trapping possums at the Head of the Lake as well, to earn some cash for the next bout of fossicking in the hills.

  Harvesting possum fur can be as hard a caper as prospecting for precious minerals. It’s an effort to get to the resource, you have to take the bad weather with the good, be prepared to rough it, and pray that your back and knees stand up to the loads.

  Among the possum hunters working the Glenorchy area in the 1970s and 1980s was David Sharpe. The Sharpes had been at the Head of the Lake for decades, mining and farming. The war memorial in the main street carries the name of one of them. David’s grandparents, Ernie and Marion Sharpe, told him stories about how Bill O’Leary would visit them at their home at Cosy Dell in the Rees Valley. He’d turn up from time to time, occasionally for Christmas dinner.

  ‘Grandma insisted on Arawata having a bath before he did anything else,’ David recalls. ‘He used to tell them, “I’ve found the mother lode, where the nuggets are like plums in a plum pudding!”.’ Bill would announce the discovery in a characteristic, upbeat lilt. The Sharpes knew their guest was having them on, and that Arawata Bill hadn’t found anything of the kind. But it didn’t matter. Gold was a passion with him; it was his passport to the hills.

  In his possum hunting days, David Sharpe roamed the hills at the Head of the Lake and elsewhere, laying lines of cyanide to kill possums. A squirt of cyanide paste on a rock, dusted with flour and nutmeg grains to entice the animal, was a tried and trusted recipe. The best pelts — they had to be at least ten inches wide stretched out — were harvested in late winter. Possums are essentially forest dwellers but they are hardy and adaptable. They can live in mountain tussocklands and shrublands, even in high rainfall areas, and range above the snowline, using rock crevices as dens. David has seen them near the summit of Coronet Peak. Most possums live at lower altitudes, however, and the boundary between the forest and the grassy river flats adjacent to the Southern Alps is usually a happy hunting ground for possum fur collectors. Possums, despite their arboreal image, like to add grass to their diet of leaves, buds, flowers, fruit, fungi, insects, birds’ eggs and chicks. The label ‘opportunistic herbivore’ has been revised in recent years to something more sinister following video evidence of possums raiding kiwi burrows and the nests of birds breeding on braided riverbeds.

  In the Rees Valley, along the edge of the forest, David Sharpe expected to get 400 to 500 pelts over a winter. He also hunted possums in the scheelite country near Glenorchy. The wetter areas, like the Rees Valley, produced mostly black and grey fur.

  In the last week of June 1985, David was in the Rees Valley following a poison line along the edge of the forest near where the Lennox Falls plummet from an alpine basin. It was getting on for the middle of a cold, dull day, with snow starting to fall. Walking along a grassy terrace close to Lennox Creek, he saw a bird run up the trunk of a large beech tree that had been upended in a windstorm. He had the bird in view for not more than ten seconds — the time it took for the bird to get to the far end of the log before jumping into the forest. It made no sound. His first impression was that it was a blackbird. Blackbirds were common enough in the lower parts of the forest. But this bird, ‘about eight inches high’, was larger than a blackbird, its legs were longer, and it ran in a most unusual way. It was striding. Blackbirds hop. Although clearly anxious to reach cover, it chose to run rather than fly. That made David stop and think about what he’d seen.

  He reported the sighting to the Wildlife Service office in Queenstown, which in turn sent a written report to the head office in Wellington. The description ‘closely fitted that of a kokako’, said the report. ‘Mr Sharpe is an experienced bushman, having spent a great deal of time in oppossum [sic] and commercial deer hunting. He was not aware that officers of the N.Z. Forest Service claim there are kokako in the same area.’

  David also told the Wildlife Service that he heard ‘a strange call’ in the Rock Burn valley
the previous winter — ‘something like a bellbird with a harsh call at the end’.

  Wanting to see if he had any more light to shed on these reports, I contacted David. He lives in a weatherboard bungalow in Arrowtown, a short walk from the shopping centre. Although there is a reserve pressing hard up against the back of the property, he is a world away from the wild and wet haunts he’s known chasing possum and deer. These days he drives coaches for groups of visitors, mostly Asian, on tours around the South Island.

  He knows I have come about his kōkako sighting, but first, he wants to tell me something else of avian interest, involving his father, Peter Sharpe. His father, he says, rediscovered rock wren in Fiordland. Rock wren are tiny alpine birds, found only above the tree line. They spend a lot of time scurrying around at ground level, therefore, and become targets for stoats and other predators.

  ‘Have you heard the story?’ David asks me in a gravelly voice.

  ‘I haven’t. How does it go?’

  ‘Dad was a scheelite miner at Glenorchy, and when the government put together a scientific expedition to Caswell Sound in Fiordland in nineteen fifty, he and another miner, George Ross, were recruited to prospect for minerals there. They didn’t find anything much in the way of scheelite or other minerals but Dad did come back saying he’d discovered rock wren near the tops.’

  ‘Runs in the family, these rare-bird sightings,’ I say.

  David still has a clear memory of his kōkako sighting at Lennox Creek. The thing that struck him most about his fleeting view of it was that it was running away to escape his intrusion, not flying.

  The conversation moves on to possums, how he would work the Rees Valley in winter then move over to the West Coast to continue the hunt for what the Coasters called ‘kiwi tree bears’ or ‘monkeys’. Possums were said to be strictly vegetarian in those days. Their status as predators of birds had yet to be revealed, although the forest die-back caused by their browsing was beginning to alarm the nature conservation movement.