by Neville Peat
Thinking now of forest health and human health, I ask him about an ailment called ‘birch itch’, which seemed to affect people in the past who were close to the beech forest. Beech trees were often called ‘birch’ by those involved in the timber business. Bill O’Leary complained of ‘birch itch’, and would avoid camp sites where he thought he was exposed to it.
Touch of Scotland
Glenorchy is named after the hilly area of Argyll, Scotland, where there are snow-fed rivers, including the river Orchy, and forests carpeted with moss. Many of the street names are also imported from this part of Scotland — Mull, Islay, Oban, Jura, Argyll.
The first Europeans to occupy the site were two shepherds hired by runholder William Gilbert Rees, a burly Welshman, who founded Queenstown. The shepherds, Alfred Duncan and George Simpson, built a simple sod hut thatched with grass in 1861 ‘opposite the mouth of the Rees River, where a large lagoon opened off the lake’. Inside were two bunks, a couple of logs for stools, a fireplace and a food box lined with tin to keep the rats at bay.
‘Yes, Dad got it bad,’ says David, ‘with a rash up his arms. People said it came from the bark. Possums got it, too; you’d see them rubbing up against trees.’ (Back in Dunedin, I ask a dermatologist if he has ever heard of anything called ‘birch itch’. He says he hasn’t but, in turn, asks a Hamilton colleague who specialises in dermatitis caused by contact with plants. Back comes the reply: New Zealand beech trees contain no known agents that would cause an itchy rash. It remains a mystery.)
In addition to possum hunting, which was seasonal anyway, David Sharpe had other part-time work. He needed the income because the industry was having its ups and downs. When anti-fur lobbyists in Europe and North America succeeded in undercutting the market for anything made of natural fur, unaware that possums in New Zealand were at plague proportions and destroying indigenous forest and wildlife, David thought it was time to get out of the business. By this time he had a gammy knee, and his left thumb was sore and turning arthritic from skinning too many possums.
Younger and fitter hunters were joining the possum trade by this time. Thor Davis was one.
Thor had worked as a chef in Auckland. He had also worked and travelled in Australia for a few years with his wife, Corrine, who was from Blenheim. After returning to New Zealand in the early 1990s, the couple went kayaking on Lake Wakatipu and decided the Head of the Lake area was where they’d like to live. They spent seven months on Pigeon Island/Wawahi Waka initially, eking out a living harvesting possum fur, trapping stoats for the Department of Conservation and doing warden duties at trampers’ huts in the summer. They moved to Glenorchy in 1994 and Thor continued with his possuming till he developed a knee problem from carrying big loads. In the remoter locations, a hunter might choose to carry one hundred skins on his back at a time, and one hundred skins equates to about seventy kilograms.
The possuming technique was similar to David Sharpe’s the decade before — cyanide laid out in lines marked with surveyor’s cruise tape at intervals of about twenty metres. Cyanide kills instantly and the possum is not going to get more than a metre or two away from the place it ingested the poison. Thor would expect to kill over sixty possums on every line laid, double the number if the strike was really good.
In 1997, there was a price slump for possum skins. It prompted Thor and Corrine to go into business on their own account as manufacturers of possum fur products. Glenorchy Fur Products was born, and a shop sheathed in corrugated iron opened in the town’s main street, near where the stone speed humps are. It had a backwoods look to it, inside and out. The shop displayed jackets and vests lined with possum fur, and Russian-style hats with ear flaps. Teddy bears and boot liners topped sales in the early years. There were novelties, too, like nipple warmers. Bedspreads caught on later, and much of the business was export and mail-order.
Adding a new retail dimension to the main street, the little red-brown possum fur shop in Glenorchy, ten years on, appears to be flourishing. It is turning more than a dollar — it’s turning a pest animal into a commercial resource. William Mason, of Paradise, did not live long enough to see the possums he liberated into his beech forest in the late 1880s become a forest-devouring, bovine tuberculosis-carrying pest. All he had in mind was a trapper trade in fur for garments and other manufactured goods. No one knew then how devastating the Tasmanian and mainland Australian possums would become in a paradise containing few predators, parasites or diseases compared to their homeland.
‘Lucky to last six months’ was what people said to Tommy and Reta Thomson when they took over Earnslaw Station in 1947. Rabbits, not possums, were the issue. Rabbits were rampant across most properties at the Head of the Lake at that time. On Earnslaw Station there were so many warrens on the flat paddocks between the Rees River and Diamond Lake that ploughing them became a nightmare. The tractor would break through the riddled topsoil and heel over. The station made more out of selling rabbit skins than it did out of farming sheep.
The Thomsons regarded the prediction of failure as fighting talk. Tommy was relatively new to the Glenorchy area, having arrived during the Second World War as a mining engineer to work on boosting the scheelite production. Reta was the daughter of a long-established Head of the Lake farming family, the Groves. With the assistance of the local Rabbit Board, which Tommy helped set up, and with a few newcomers to the area pitching in, they set out to drastically reduce rabbit numbers. Post-war immigration had brought new people to inland Otago, which is why a Thomson daughter, Jill, came home from Glenorchy School speaking some funny words — Greek, in fact, taught to her by children whose parents were spreading poison under the rabbit control programme.
The reason I know a little of the farm’s history is that I made an appointment to talk with Geoffrey Thomson, the son of Tommy and Reta, who supervises the running of the station now that his parents are retired. I wanted to know more about the station before I headed up the Earnslaw Burn for another rendezvous with the Lark at the rock shelter he’d spoken of a few months back. He’d sent me another message, with a time and date. Part of the valley is included in the station’s pastoral leasehold land.
I meet Geoffrey at the farm headquarters on the flats below Lake Diamond. His parents now live in a newer house a short distance farther up the Paradise road. The first thing I notice is that the station’s name is now ‘Mount Earnslaw’, which Geoffrey explains provides a stronger branding for the produce coming from it, the meat and wool. There is minimal sign of rabbits these days. To the north, Wanaka’s tourist promotion people have done something similar, adding ‘Lake’ to the name of the town whenever it is promoted, to emphasise Wanaka’s lakeside location. Lake and mountain: powerful words in marketing.
The owner’s house at the Mount Earnslaw Station is an unpretentious dwelling that has seen busier times, and no doubt more attention on the garden. It is empty for periods because Geoffrey, a civil engineer, is partly based in Christchurch, and often flies himself down to the farm in a light plane. The station’s day-to-day operation is in the hands of a farm manager who lives elsewhere on the property. We sit down to a cup of tea at the kitchen table and Geoffrey describes the extent of the farm. It includes the flat paddocks down to the Rees River, most of Mount Alfred, and areas of the Earnslaw Burn valley above the forest. He talks about the stock as well: the Perendale sheep, Angus cattle and red deer. The deer are descended from animals captured live from Mount Alfred by helicopters equipped with net guns a few decades ago.
‘Are you into tourism at all?’ I ask, knowing that tourist activities are allowing other high-country stations to diversify in the face of marginal prices for meat and wool.
‘A little. There’s a company doing half-day Land Rover tours that uses our place, and a bit of heli-hiking goes on as well. Our main role is to provide the spectacular setting, that’s about all.’
Geoffrey came back to the family home and farm in 1976 after working for consulting engineers for a number of years (i
n the summer of 1965–66, as an engineering student, he worked on the construction of the tailrace tunnel for the Manapouri Hydro-electric Power Scheme between Deep Cove and Doubtful Sound). The late 1970s were the Muldoon years, when Prime Minister Robert Muldoon’s government paid out farm development, fertiliser and stock subsidies that, in today’s unsubsidised environment, appear ludicrously generous. Farm development was deemed to be the road to prosperity. All that changed in the 1980s with Rogernomics, deregulation, user pays and the abandonment of farm subsidies.
I know that my conversation with Geoffrey will inevitably turn to a high-country controversy called tenure review. It’s an epoch-making or epoch-breaking process, depending on which side of the fence you stand, involving the government, its agents and advisers on one side of the fence — a ‘hot wire’ most of the time — and the runholders who lease Crown pastoral land on the other.
At stake is a land area across the South Island high country that is larger than a host of South Pacific island countries — 2.2 million hectares, divided into 300-odd runs. The process, started in the early 1990s, is voluntary, verbose and vexatious. Into the new century it appears to have lost much of its initial composure, when all the talk was ‘win-win’. The idea then was that runholders would win by being able to freehold — and therefore further develop with fewer constraints — useful parts of their leasehold land; and the government and people of New Zealand would win through the reacquisition of former lease-hold deemed to be too valuable for nature conservation, landscape integrity and recreational use to stay in runholder hands. In the former category, picture modified land of meagre natural significance and relatively low altitude; in the latter category, mostly a case of unmodified land, chiefly higher-altitude rangelands. A simple division? Peaceful co-existence, with each side in some sort of high-country heaven? Far from it.
The farmer lobby claims the process has been hijacked by nature conservation and public access imperatives, and the divvying up has emasculated runs and threatened their viability. The loss of summer grazing at altitude is a recurrent theme. On the other hand, the nature conservation/recreation lobby says too much leasehold land is being lost to farmer and developer interests. ‘Land grab’, ‘rip-off’ and ‘lose-lose’ are labels now hanging over the process.
Into this high-country spectator sport, the government has thrown a few curve balls, not the least an arm-twisting hike in rents for pastoral leasehold land, and a decision to exclude from tenure review an array of runs that overlook water — the Midas touch for property sales in recent times — in case these stations gain a windfall on their newly acquired real estate far greater than anything they could envisage out of Lotto.
Geoffrey Thomson is a well-known figure in high-country farming circles and he has had a lot to say about tenure review over the years. He is also an articulate advocate for high-country traditions, whose enduring images include sheep flowing off muscular mountainsides of tussock in an autumn muster ahead of the first snows of the year, images that are bound to make even city dwellers feel good about life.
Today he’s really steamed up about how the government has gone from valuing and nurturing rangeland farming a few decades ago to ruthless and unrelenting antagonism going into the twenty-first century.
Thunder and lightning
‘I’ve seen great boulders brought down by the concussion of the thunder. And I’ve seen the lightning strike. I’ve seen rain that came down in sheets, turning the rivers into raging torrents as you looked … I saw a lightning flash splinter a great beech and fling the pieces all over the place. You don’t sleep under trees in that country during thunderstorms.’
C.H. (Harry) Fortune quoting Bill O’Leary, in an article entitled ‘The Passing of Arawata Bill’, Wide World Magazine, London, October 1948
‘They’re trying to drive us out. How else can you explain the tenure thing and other policies? Look at the latest round of rent increases — Mount Earnslaw’s proposed rent increase is eight hundred per cent! And this comes in the wake of meat and wool prices that are so low they’re marginal for keeping the property going.’
He pauses a moment, perhaps to contemplate a telling argument that affects him personally.
‘In this kind of climate the sons and daughters of high-country runholders are frightened to take on farming. Then there’s the access band-wagon — city people wanting to treat the high-country as their playground, as if they’ve been denied access for decades. They haven’t. They’ve always had access, simply through asking.’
The tea cups have been drained for some time now, and I need to be getting on. Tomorrow, I tell Geoffrey, I’ll be heading up the Earnslaw Burn to the rock shelter, assured of access to a valley much less travelled than the Routeburn. Kōkako country a while back.
Because it’s old history, over thirty years old, I don’t feel like raising the fact that Mount Earnslaw Station lost sixty per cent of its leasehold land to Mount Aspiring National Park in 1973. The Minister of Lands at the time, who was also responsible for national parks, saw no need for the Earnslaw Massif, the Forbes Mountains separating the Dart and Rees Valleys, and the upper part of the Earnslaw Burn Valley to stay within a pastoral lease. These chunks of land, over 9,000 hectares in all, were mostly permanent snow and glacier ice, and cold, bare rock that chamois running wild could happily negotiate but not sheep.
I’m not going to those heights tomorrow but I will be in a back-country setting. There are no huts up the Earnslaw Burn after Mount Earnslaw Station’s musterers’ hut was burnt down. No bridges, either, and no carefully-graded track with handrails at the drop-offs.
CHAPTER 4
Starlight Hotel
Wicked country, but there might be
Gold in it for all that.
Under the shoulder of a boulder
Or in the darkened gully,
Fit enough country for
A blanket and a billy
Where nothing stirred
Under the cold eye of the bird.
Denis Glover, from
Arawata Bill: A Sequence of Poems, 1953
The high-walled valley of the Earnslaw Burn feels like a sanctum. It’s a little-visited place, and it points straight to the heart of the ice-bound Earnslaw Massif, the highest block of mountains in southern New Zealand after Aspiring/Tititea. The valley runs north-south, shaped like a wobbly tuning fork and open at its southern end, where the river rushes out of a gorge to find its destiny not in the Rees and Dart Rivers that wrap around Earnslaw/Pikirakatahi, isolating its bulk from the Main Divide, but in Diamond Lake. From a secluded source, the Earnslaw Burn sings its own effervescent tune.
On a gloriously fine mid-March morning, a day nominated by the Lark some time ago, I turn off Paradise Road at the Earnslaw Burn bridge, and drive up to a grassy parking area close to the beech forest. Silvery logs from past floods litter the area. A weather forecast on the radio that morning described a high-pressure system straddling the country. It’s the time of year, somewhere between late summer and the onset of autumn, when you’d expect settled weather. The announcer said he had never struck a forecast like it — fine weather from one end of New Zealand to the other; cloudless skies and warm temperatures. Driving here, I noticed that the willow trees on the Rees Valley floor were turning shades of yellow, perhaps prematurely adopting autumn apparel through the stress of an exceptionally dry summer.
I check through my overnight trek supplies. The pack is not especially heavy. I have a small flask of Scotch in case of a cold night under the stars. Crossing the river and its shockingly cold water is the first challenge, then with boots squelching, I climb through the forest on the left bank of the river.
Among the legendary names of the district, who, I wonder, ventured this way? Did Joseph Fenn, the multi-talented and socially-challenged founder of Arcadia explore the Earnslaw Burn, or his older relative and neighbour at Paradise, William Mason? Did they see or hear kōkako, the red-tailed, tūī-sized New Zealand thrush, piopio, or
the superbly camouflaged night parrot, kākāpō? All three species were almost certainly living in forests not far from Paradise in the late nineteenth century. Did Bill O’Leary stray from his beloved Dart River track to fossick for gold in this valley? Poet Denis Glover, immortalising O’Leary in a sequence of poems titled Arawata Bill, captures the atmosphere of a sanctum well when he writes of how the door of the proverbial valley — meaning many a valley in this part of the country — ‘swings shut behind’.
There is a marked trail, which is probably used more by deer and other animals than by people. No woodland stroll, it is less well defined than the Sugarloaf Pass track. There are places where you have to squeeze between rocks, shimmy around fallen beech trees and ooze through boggy bits that threaten to suck you into knee-deep mud. There are also some steps large enough to require handholds of root or branch. Moss-covered stumps loom out of the depths of the forest, suggesting century-old logging of the red beech. But who would go to such lengths for a supply of timber?
Bush birds, nowhere plentiful, begin to impress for their diversity: tomtit, rifleman, grey warbler, fantail, parakeet. And an occasional robin slips into view, hanging sideways on a coprosma bush or fussing among the fallen beech leaves. Oh, to be sitting in a clearing by the side of the track around 1980, with an outdoors man and his daughter, both out tramping, and glimpse a kōkako in the subcanopy. Among the avian voices filtering through the forest today, none comes anywhere near that of kōkako. But I do hear the call of kea, the mountain parrot, on the wing, and, distantly, a liquid gurgle that is probably its forest cousin, kākā. Kākā are largely confined to old-growth forest, for they need decaying trees to nest in, and the nectar, fruit and insects available from a mature forest. I give the birds ample opportunity to investigate my intrusion into their world by resting often on the moss and fern.