High Country Lark

by Neville Peat

  ‘The old way of farming these hills is under threat all right,’ he says. ‘Formula’s wrong, and the parties need to have a brew — sit down and review the whole thing. There’s too much land going to freehold, and too much to DOC.’

  He is chomping on a leg of rabbit now. ‘Thank god RHD didn’t do away with the bunnies altogether.’

  ‘So what’s to be done about the pastoral lease land?’

  ‘It’s downright unnatural to have hard-and-fast lines drawn through properties the way they’re doing — the high bit to DOC, the low bit to the farmer. Nature doesn’t work that way. Farming doesn’t either.’

  The Lark’s approach to tenure review, although he admits to a vested interest through the mustering and fence maintenance jobs he lands from time to time, is to take representative parcels of land with the highest natural value out of pastoral lease but let sheep graze to fairly high altitude under grazing regimes geared to minimise impact on soils and native plant cover. Conservative grazing can benefit the natural values in tussocklands, he says — containing the spread of exotic grasses and keeping the invasive European broom and at least one kind of heiracium in check. Broom is a legume, like peas and beans, and sheep go for broom seedlings as if they were bean sprouts in a grass salad.

  ‘Guess I’m talking sustainability here. It’s about keeping the fine-wool business going — and the natural values — through grazing licences and manage-ment plans. It’s not rocket science. But getting it established across two million hectares of pastoral lease land, well, yeah, that’s bound to be a challenge.’

  The Lark is not keen on the mass freeholding of land. He thinks if farmers were allowed to diversify land use under different lease and management agreements, there wouldn’t be the scramble to freehold and cash up. He says that’s when foreign capital is liable to rush in — the ‘Mammon worshippers’ (he reckons it’s a wonder there isn’t a peak around here named after the Greek God of Riches) — and as a result of the influx of foreign money and personal values, the traditional high-country runholding culture gets whittled away.

  ‘Bet your boots, there’ll be mustering for some time yet, though. Know how to tell the dogs and the men apart come dinner time? The men are the ones eating spuds with their mutton. Hey, you want to talk to the Rees Valley Station folk about the future of farming up this way. I hear Iris Scott has some good ideas.’

  I say I’ll do that some time soon. I’d like to see the Temple Peak Station family, too, the Hasselmans.

  We’ve drained the flask of Scotch. The sun’s down and the first stars are peeping through the crystalline atmosphere. It’s time to turn in. What a treat to have a mattress under the sleeping bag. Is there a pillow menu, by any chance? Someone has placed candlestick holders by the beds. This really is a five-star rock biv.

  A cream-cheese moon, all but full, climbs above the skyline like a giant, newly released weather balloon, dimming the stars, pouring light into the bivvy and creating sharp shadows. There is no sound save the rumbling voice of the river, and in this setting it is certainly pleasing me more than the sea. Moonlight keeps the bivvy illuminated till some time past midnight, when the air, stirred by the river, grows distinctly chill. I am a light sleeper and waken a couple of times, each time to see stars in astonishing abundance, some piercingly bright but most just stardust. How many suns roughly the size of ours are orbited by planets similar to ours, with sentient life that’s also staring through the heavens? The constellation of Scorpion, the easiest of the animal shapes to identify in the night sky, is slowly arcing towards the roof of our shelter, head-first, with its body stretching towards a massive tail and its red heart, Antares, pulsing.

  Kay-aaah! Kay-aaah!

  The wake-up call, at 6.41, is unmistakably kea. I don’t see the bird but the Lark, who is already up and fiddling around by the fireplace, says he saw it flying past.

  ‘On its own,’ he says. ‘How sad is that for a tribal bird? Your socks are safe.’

  By his standards I’ve probably slept in. The sun is soon bothersomely bright but its warmth makes me feel like a lizard — activated by solar power. In a small pot over the fire is the Lark’s breakfast staple. It’s being stirred appreciatively. His oatmeal porridge, I notice, comes with a few colourful additives. He throws in a handful or two of pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and tiny brown teardrops of linseed.

  ‘Any sweetener?’

  ‘Honey,’ he says. ‘When I have some. I help a beekeeper mate over in the Rees with his hives. It packs a punch, does honey. They reckon it takes the nectar from five million flowers to make a pint of honey. That’s what I call concentrated flower power.’

  Kākāpō clue

  During the hunt for the critically endangered kākāpō in the wilds of Fiordland years ago, searchers knew the big parrot was somewhere handy when they discovered kākāpō feathers in rock wren nests.

  Arawata Bill, I have read, lived on porridge. Sometimes, on long expeditions, he would have it morning, noon and night when other food was scarce, or tucker supplies low, or the weather so bad he couldn’t light a fire to cook up something he’d shot. He would make up a big mixture, sweetened with treacle or sugar, in a three-legged camp oven, eat his fill for breakfast and pack the remainder carefully as the basis of meals later in the day and the day after. He did not mind eating the porridge cold. It saved lighting a fire. In the camp oven he might also cook rice, beans and split peas. That oven was probably his most valuable possession after his packhorse.

  The Lark, also used to living simply, is dressed lightly this morning — sans Swanndri. I take this to mean a fine-day forecast. His porridge is nourishing. We slosh milk over it, the milk powder having been whipped with water from the rock biv’s fairy falls. The porridge, the aroma of a beech-wood fire and the sound of the river washing boulders smooth all speak of refreshment. There’s no chance of a whisky hangover lingering for long. Yet conversation takes a while to warm up.

  ‘Back to Paradise today?’ I ask.

  ‘Yep. Bit of willow to saw for firewood.’

  ‘Will you spend the winter here?’

  ‘Not sure. Got invites from the Strath Taieri. Winter jobs, nothing strenuous. Winter’s mainly for loafing anyway.’

  I try another tack. I’ve heard of plans for a ten kilometre tunnel to Milford through the mountains between the Head of the Lake and the Hollyford Valley. Described by the developers as potentially ‘the largest New Zealand tourism investment in decades’, it would markedly shorten the distance by road between Queenstown and Milford and speed up the flow of tourists. Instead of falling asleep on the return trip as they counted the sheep on the long loop around the Northern Southland plains, the bus-borne travellers would be asleep as they sped through Glenorchy on their way back to their Queenstown hotel. Queenstown tourism interests are right behind the ten kilometre tunnel project. Around Glenorchy, however, it’s caused a ruckus. At Mount Earnslaw Station Geoffrey Thomson told me the idea was a serious mistake, economically and technically. He reckons it would be hard to make it pay — there’d have to be a big toll. And being nearly ten times longer than the Homer Tunnel, ventilation would be a major technical challenge even if the coaches were hybrid models running on electric power through the tunnel rather than diesel on either side of it. Geoffrey ought to know. He worked on the construction of the Manapouri tailrace tunnel, which is a similar length.

  Between spoonfuls of porridge, I say: ‘What do you think about this Milford tunnel business?’

  Whether the Lark has just had a honey kick from the porridge, I’m not sure. His response is certainly energetic.

  ‘Bloody terrible idea! We had the monorail years ago, then the blinkin’ gondola up the Caples. Now, a tunnel! Okay, maybe it could be done and maybe tourist wealth would pay for it. But it would be the end of Glenorchy’s special character.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Glenorchy would turn into a pie-stop and toilet-stop, ’cept the tourists wouldn’t stop. Too close to
Queenstown. The buses would whiz through, hellbent on making the hotel for pre-dinner drinks.’

  A mood of sullen reflection comes over the Lark. He says the whole attraction of Glenorchy, for him and a lot of other people, is its location near the end of the road.

  ‘Me, I’d be looking for another backwater.’

  For the sake of a decent argument, I put the developer ‘spin’ — half the travel time to Milford, giving a reduced carbon footprint. Plus less congestion at Milford around lunchtime. But my friend is having none of it.

  ‘They don’t make places like the Head of the Lake any more,’ he says. That kind of punch line is a conversation-stopper. I take the hint. The here-and-now is pressing claims. Somewhere among the trees overhanging the rock shelter a grey warbler releases its wavering call, distinct from the river’s deep voice, and I look around for sign of rain clouds. The sky remains clear.

  ‘Hey, speaking of backwaters,’ says the Lark, ‘how are my surfing mates at Taieri Mouth?’ He is talking about sea lions.

  ‘I wouldn’t recognise your mate Brutus from all the other males’, I reply. ‘But Mum’s still around. Produced a pup at twenty years of age, even though her eyesight’s going. She’s a legend.’

  The Lark tells me he keeps his Pirouette kayak in the Rees River area these days — the kayak he used surfing at Taieri Mouth — and occasionally goes for a paddle in its rapids when he can arrange transport.

  It’s time to pack up. The housekeeping is simple. A little fairy falls water extinguishes the fire and we restock the kindling for the next patrons of this starlight hotel. The mattresses are stacked upright to protect them from possum and rat excreta. The Lark will be heading back to the Paradise area by the route he came whereas I’ll backtrack down the valley to my car and drive home.

  ‘You can’t go without seeing Earnslaw full-frontal. It’s just around the corner.’

  We walk up the valley along hare or deer tracks, aware of an autumn nip in the air. The river water, chilled overnight, is a shock to the feet. When the upper valley formed part of Mount Earnslaw Station, stock used to graze here. The introduced grasses grow rank now, suppressing the native species. The stock have long since gone.

  We pass the small rock shelter on the river’s left bank, a squeeze compared to the high-rise guest house across the river. After twenty more minutes of walking the grassy flats, the Earnslaw Massif/Pikirakatahi and the full sweep of the Earnslaw Glacier are exposed — mountain morning glory, rising almost two kilometres from the valley floor. Earnslaw’s twin peaks are separated by over a kilometre of summit ridge, a thin white line. West Peak is on the left. East Peak, although ten metres higher at 2,830 metres, is the easier to climb. Wrinkled with crevasses, glacier ice grips the curving head wall of this cirque basin, and like many glaciers in southern New Zealand is only just holding on. The glacier once rode high, wide and handsome over where we are standing and joined the great Dart and Rees Glaciers in the last ice age.

  As cul-de-sacs go, this place is more than emphatic. It is humbling. You can feel some sort of engagement going on here between the terrestrial and the celestial. A cirque of this scale and architecture is not so much a barrier to westward progress as an arena for the imagination. I have an inkling now why the Lark has chosen to commune with mountains rather than the sea coast, the source of ‘ocean emotion’, and why he has invited me here. The spirits lift, and not just because the sun is up and the sky a spotless blue shield.

  From a shrubby patch nearby comes a short sharp squeak — ‘seet, seet’.

  ‘Rock wren?’ I say, suddenly alert to the possibility of seeing something rare.

  ‘Nope. Tomtit. You need to go higher for rock wren. But they’re here all right, and ahead of us, at the foot of the glacier, is rock wren city.’

  Tuke

  Most bird books do not record a Māori name for the rock wren. Nonetheless, southern Māori overlanders would surely have encountered the bird and given it a name.

  Tuke (elbow) is said to be the name Waitaha people of the south applied to the rock wren in pre-European times, a reference to the bird’s elbow-shaped eye stripe. Another name suggested for the species is tatarihuka (expect snow), which refers to a belief that if you killed a rock wren a snowfall would result.

  It’s hard to believe such a dainty warm-blooded creature with matchsticks for legs — shorter than the robin’s and giving the little bird a leggy look — could survive in this potent swirl of elemental forces: ice, snow, rock and occasional tempest. Rock wrens live their entire lives above the tree line. Even kea, characteristically alpine, will venture into forest, and in Fiordland sometimes descend to sea level. But the rock wren knows nothing of tall forest. Its home is in the boulder fields and patches of alpine shrubland, covered by snow for much of winter and spring.

  Intrigued in the past by the survival strategies of rock wren, I’ve turned to Dunedin biologist Sue Michelsen-Heath from time to time for information. Sue has studied rock wrens since the early 1970s, when she first saw the bird in the Cascade Saddle area near the head of the Dart Valley and was immediately in awe of their ability to survive the alpine conditions. Actually, the species is much older than these mountains. With the rifleman, it belongs to an ancient New Zealand bird group comprising half a dozen species. Of the four extinct wren species, three were flightless — a very rare thing among songbirds. The last to go was the bush wren. It was last recorded in 1972 on a remote small island off Stewart Island.

  The rock wrens are thought to have evolved twenty-five million years ago. Just as kea and kākā separated into alpine and forest habitats, so too did the rock wren and rifleman go their separate ways. The fact rock wrens hatch chicks without down feathers while living in a harshly cold environment merely adds to the intrigue. Their nests are chunky pouches built of matted grasses, leaves, moss and feathers, with insulating walls six to eight centimetres thick and a tiny, heat-conserving entrance. Nests are found in gaps between rocks, under roots, in banks and sometimes in sheltered crevices on rock bluffs.

  To survive the intense cold and heavy snowfalls, they hunker down in insulating nooks under vegetation or in rock crevices. How exactly they avoid freezing to death, being so slight, is difficult to explain. Active the year round, they do not hibernate like many warm-blooded northern hemisphere animals.

  The Lark, observant mountain man that he is, is also familiar with the bird. He says he’ll probably hear some wrens on the way back over the range. He may even see them. They feed on insects like moths and weta, and they comb coprosma bushes and snow totara for berries. They go for the nectar on mountain flax, too, and pluck tussock seeds.

  They have a long hind claw for clinging to rocks. They are earthly birds, not given to flying far, with a strange habit of bobbing up and down on the spot and bowing with legs straight.

  ‘They’re into energy conservation in a big way,’ says my friend. ‘With their build, they’d be mad to fly any distance.’

  ‘It’s a damn quiet valley for birds,’ I say. Apart from the warbler and tomtit we haven’t heard a bird sound of any kind. ‘Where are the paradise ducks and Canada geese?’

  ‘Certainly not a birding day today. Stoats rule, even in remote places like this. They give the birds hell. Our forests are more fur than feathers these days.’

  The morning is wearing on. We need to be going our different directions. It’s agreed we’ll meet again next summer, perhaps around the time of Glenorchy’s renowned annual Race Day, the first Saturday in January.

  ‘See you then,’ I say.

  ‘Not if I spot you first.’

  I know better than to ask the Lark about his future. He would no more submit to a fixed abode and phone number than Bill O’Leary or various other southern men of the hills down the years — loners perhaps but not hermits.

  Crossing the Earnslaw Burn, a mountain brook rather than a river at this high point in the valley, the Lark starts angling back towards the saddle that gives access to Paradise, Arc
adia Station and Diamond Lake. Meanwhile, I follow the animal trail back to the tree line. My friend quickly becomes small on the tussock-brown slopes drenched by the morning sun. But his movement is eye-catching. He is powering up the tussock face, perhaps not as fast as I remember him going up Smooth Cone in the Strath Taieri many years ago, but impressively quick for his age, and with no dog to spur him on.

  Classic portrait: Bill O’Leary, in three-piece suit and thigh gumboots, and his packhorse, Dolly, at the start of a back-country expedition from the Head of the Lake. This 1938 photograph by Thelma Kent is the best-known portrait of the legendary prospector. THELMA RENE KENT COLLECTION, ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY REF F-8752-1/2

  CHAPTER 5

  Going West

  Human geography aficionados might care to take note: a road-end in a frontier land like the Head of Lake Wakatipu, where settlement rubs shoulders with a mountain fastness, is bound to contain more than its share of larger-than-life characters. They stand out not only because they are resourceful, self-reliant and skilled at many things, but also because their personalities leave a lasting impression. It is as if they have become deeply etched into the landscape. They seem to ‘wear’ the land, as the Lark would say.

  Bill O’Leary wore the land. He also wore a three-piece suit, with fob watch in the waistcoat pocket, and thigh gumboots. A late 1930s photograph of him by Christchurch photographer Thelma Kent portrayed him dressed this way. He is standing by his beloved, big-footed packhorse Dolly, a seventy-year-old man with a snow-white beard setting out from Elfin Bay for the wilds of the Olivine country west of the Main Divide. Piled on Dolly are sacks stuffed with provisions for a three-month expedition. He has a wide-brimmed hat to protect his bald head from sun and rain, and the gumboots are reinforced with leather soles and hobnails for negotiating slippery stream beds and gripping steep terrain. It is the portrait of a legend of the south: Arawata Bill.