High Country Lark

by Neville Peat

  Although his nickname acknowledges one of the great rivers and valleys of South Westland, where he worked as a ferryman, roadman and cattle musterer, Bill O’Leary strongly identified with the Head of Lake Wakatipu. Off and on, over a period of forty-odd years starting in the late 1890s, he sought treasure in far mountains but repeatedly came back to the Glenorchy district to work for his keep and the cost of restocking the next expedition. Of wiry, athletic build, he could carry a pack of over twenty kilograms into the hills.

  William James O’Leary was born on 28 October 1865 at Wetherstons, a goldfield near Lawrence in Central Otago. He was the second oldest of eight children of Timothy and Mary O’Leary (actually, Bill’s mum and dad were married at Milton by a Scottish ancestor of mine, Alexander Ayson, a pioneer South Otago teacher). Young Bill grew up in a goldmining environment, and carried a gold-fossicking interest into the mountains and valleys out west. He was fit enough even into his seventies to be roaming largely trackless country. To mark passes and trails through high places he would erect piles of stones. In his seventy-eighth year, however, Arawata Bill appeared to Glenorchy friends to be ailing, and they arranged for him to go to a Catholic old people’s home in Dunedin. For a while he appreciated the care and attention he received from the Little Sisters of the Poor in Andersons Bay but longed for the outdoors and had periods back in Glenorchy and Wellington, where his sister lived. He died in Dunedin on 8 November 1947, aged eighty-two. The legend wasn’t laid to rest, however. O’Leary Pass, a saddle in the Barrier Range between the Dart Valley and a tributary of the Arawhata, commemorates Arawata Bill.

  Quite a few characterful contemporaries of Arawata Bill loom large in the history of the Head of the Lake. They include Joseph Fenn, of Arcadia, Granny (Jane) Aitken, of the property next door, Paradise, and Harry Birley, mountaineer and mountain guide.

  Like Bill O’Leary, Fenn was content with his own company, appreciated nature and the outdoors, and left few writings for posterity to judge him by. But unlike O’Leary, Fenn did have a permanent home in the Head of the Lake district, which he rarely left, and he built Arcadia House for visitors to admire a hundred years on. Born in the small rural English town of Stotfold, Bedfordshire, in 1854, he was the second oldest of five children, and the oldest son, of Joseph and Mary Fenn. The second-born took his father’s name and his uncle’s middle name as well. His uncle, Christopher Cyprian Fenn, had an illustrious thirty-year career in charge of the Christian Missionary Society. The family had its own coat-of-arms.

  When Fenn was just sixteen, his mother died. She was forty-seven. Family-tree records note dryly that he emigrated to New Zealand about 1880 ‘following disagreement with father’ (this, of course, is the father who is alleged to have moved in on his son’s fiancée following the mother’s death). That his father married again is recorded in the family tree, as is the birth of a half-brother, Bernard Samuel Fenn, in 1875, when Fenn snr was aged fifty-five and his second wife twenty-eight. On the surface of it, the twenty-seven year difference between his father and stepmother is fuel for the fiancée story. But the marriage occurred in 1873, when the oldest son was around nineteen years old. Given a seven year age gap between Joseph and his father’s second wife, the possibility of Joseph Fenn jnr having had a prior relationship with her becomes somewhat remote. There were about three years between his mother’s death and the remarriage of his father — time enough, I suppose, for some trouble with a fiancée but not necessarily his future stepmother. The family tree also bluntly notes that Fenn, newly settled in New Zealand, was ‘Not a remittance man’. Presumably, then, he arrived with sufficient funds in the bank to start a future life on the other side of the world, and a long way out west, as a landowner, farmer and the builder of the Head of the Lake’s most striking house.

  All this discussion of family ties is mere skirting around the character of one of the district’s deepest personal mysteries. Joseph Fenn, ‘sheep farmer, of Paradise’, kept more or less to himself and his property for all but a day or two of the forty-four years he spent in New Zealand.

  After he died in January 1924, the Lake Wakatip Mail carried an obituary, written by an unnamed Glenorchy correspondent, that heaped praise on him for his ‘strong character’, ‘sterling worth’, and ‘generous nature’. He was described as ‘very sensitive and reserved’. He ‘never took part in public affairs’ but if approached to donate to a charitable cause, said the obituary writer, he would happily contribute. He never married and had no known relatives in New Zealand apart from his aunt, Kate, second wife of William Mason. He had a ‘stainless life’, the obituary affirmed. Moreover, he ‘loved nature and the simple life’. Pity those last words do not figure on his headstone.

  He died in the hospital at Frankton of ‘cancer of the liver, jaundice, heart failure’, according to the death certificate. It was a quiet funeral. He was buried in a plot near the upper edge of Queenstown Cemetery, about as close to a forest (Douglas fir in this case) as was his cottage to beech forest at Paradise. The headstone is a black column mounted on a plinth that carries the name F E N N, with a coat-of-arms-like floral graphics wrapping around the gabled top of the column. The inscription, newly repainted in silver (by whom?) when I visited the grave in 2008, reads:

  Joseph Cyprian

  FENN

  DIED

  3rd January

  1924.

  Fenn does have an epitaph in mapped form, however — a group of Greek mythological names on several peaks at the northern end of the Humboldt Mountains: Poseidon, Chaos, Amphion, Niobe, Minos. He is credited with applying these names, consistent with the theme initiated by surveyor James McKerrow.

  The year Joseph Fenn died, another Head of the Lake personality, a home-grown one, passed away. Harry Birley, first person to climb Mount Earnslaw (1890), was one of the district’s most celebrated mountain guides. The son of the Mount Earnslaw Hotel’s first proprietor, he became an experienced climber while still a teenager, and led many guests of his parents’ hotel to summits in the Humboldt Mountains and to Mount Earnslaw. Among them was an English botanist of international renown, Lilian Gibbs. Harry’s interest in alpine flora led to the naming of a low-growing high-alpine shrub species after him — Parahebe birleyi. It lives in rocky terrain under snow much of the year, ranging to an altitude of almost 2,000 metres — very much Harry Birley country.

  Unlike other Head of the Lake characters who arrived in the district as adults, Harry was raised here. He soon added ‘postmaster’ to his title of guide, and in World War I was a scheelite miner with a claim at 1,500 metres on Mt Alaska, above and beyond Mount Judah. He died at East Taieri near Dunedin in 1924, a couple of years after arriving there.

  Another high-profile pioneer of the Head of the Lake visitor industry was Jane Aitken. She and husband David — and later some of their children — ran Paradise Guest House after the Masons had established it. From 1890 to 1942, Jane Aitken and her children were pillars of hospitality locally. Entries in the visitors’ book testify to this.

  Born in North Devon in 1859, Jane emigrated to Australia and New Zealand in 1876 as an adventurous seventeen-year-old. Attracted to Queenstown in the role of governess to a banking family, she met an immigrant gold miner from Fife in Scotland, David Aitken, and married him in 1879. They had six years at Skippers before moving to the Head of the Lake, where the Masons engaged them to run Paradise House. From 1893 they owned the property.

  Jane Aitken’s role as Paradise hostess spanned the years of horse-and-buggy (a two and a half hour trip from Glenorchy), the first automobile service in 1919 and finally, around 1940, the introduction of a convertible bus, similar to the tourist buses operated by the Bryant family between Kinloch and the Routeburn Valley.

  Visitors to Paradise were always assured of hearty food, with Jane and later her daughter Isabella (Poppy) designing the menus. Breakfast would typically comprise porridge and trout caught in a set net in Diamond Lake and recovered around 6 a.m. by David Aitken, who rose early. Lunch
was often cold roast lamb or venison, and the evening meal roast meat and home-grown vegetables in season. Bread mixture was mixed in two four-gallon kerosene tins and set by the warm stove overnight to rise. Being the proprietor of a popular guest house was hard work. The washing of linen, for example, was all done by hand.

  During the Great Depression years of the early 1930s, following the death of David Aitken in 1928, ‘Granny’ Aitken took hospitality to new and selfless heights when she offered lodgings and food free of charge to miners struggling to make a living from extracting scheelite from the Paradise mine at the northern end of Mount Alfred. Paradise House struggled in turn. In 1932, the Aitkens were forced to sell Paradise to the Glenorchy storekeeper, Jack Thornton, to pay for debts run up at the store. But the family continued to manage the guest house business till 1942, when Isabella had a heart attack and died. Her mother lived till 1954.

  In the tradition of Aitken, Fenn, O’Leary, Birley and others, Glenorchy remains a natural haven for characters, a destination for resourceful and make-do personalities who like the idea of living alongside a spectacular wilderness. In the 1990s, one man who’d studied Norse mythology at Oxford University and was a kind of horse whisperer, restocked the Department of Conservation trampers’ huts for a few seasons, using coal-carrying packhorses roped together to form a train.

  I have a theory as to why the Head of Lake Wakatipu is a gathering ground for characters. There are two parts to it. First, the district is a cul-de-sac, and road-ends anywhere tend to be character-forming. Second, it is a natural pathway west. That factor, as I shall explain, intensifies the pulling power of a place, especially when its setting is as spectacular as Glenorchy’s. Glenorchy has pulling power in fairly full measure. Call it G-force.

  Many countries and peoples involved in colonisation have a westering tradition. Consider the Vikings over a millennium ago and their movement west into the British Isles and Iceland, and earlier waves of settlers from mainland Europe who invaded Britain and Ireland. A popular traditional Scottish song, ‘Westering Home’, which I’m sure the Lark could whistle as he did ‘Road to the Isles’ back in the Strath Taieri, tells of homesick travellers in the Orient longing to return home. It tugs at the heartstrings. Consider, too, the experience of British colonisers in Australia. They settled eastern harbours before setting out to explore the interior of the desert continent all the way west. Then there is the United States, again settled by British emigrants on the eastern seaboard (although Native Americans migrated from Asia by way of a land bridge). The European Americans have the most compelling and dramatic tradition of westward exploration. West was where the promised lands lay. The westering tradition shaped a nation. It took the best part of 200 years for the West to be settled all the way to California. A whole industry was based on Western movies, including the 1962 epic, How the West was Won. Westward Ho! is both an American term and the title of a 1935 movie starring the biggest — if not the most convincing — cowboy of all, John Wayne.

  Rewarded for carrying water

  Among Māori traditions is the story of how the kōkako got its long legs. When Maui, the man-god, became thirsty after an epic struggle to slow the sun’s movement and win a longer day for people, he asked the birds of the forest to help him quench his thirst. The kōkako responded, filling its wattles with water for him. To reward this act of kindness, Maui lengthened the bird’s legs so that it could move more quickly.

  New Zealand, too, had a European settlement pattern that favoured the eastern seaboard in the first instance. This was especially so in the south, the broadest part of the South Island. The white settlers who developed farmland in the east did not seriously explore inland Otago and the southern lakes of Wakatipu, Wanaka and Hawea until 1853, five years after the first immigrant ships arrived. But once the so-called waste or empty lands were traversed and the first maps grew more accurate, there followed a rush of pastoral farmers westwards.

  Not surprisingly, given the intervening rangelands and relative isolation, the westernmost valleys at the Head of Lake Wakatipu were among the last in Otago to be occupied by sheepmen and their merinos. With the discovery of gold came another wave of exploration and settlement westward.

  The first European to reach the west coast from the Wakatipu region was an Irish gold prospector and miner, Patrick Quirk Caples (his middle name was his mother’s maiden name). In January 1863, alone and without either map or gun, he followed an old Māori trail up the Routeburn/Te Komana and over the Harris Saddle/Tarahaka Whakatipu to the Hollyford Valley and Martins Bay. At the time there were stories doing the rounds of the need for prospectors venturing west to look out for ferocious Māori and their formidable taniwha, not to mention giant moa. These warnings did not put Caples off but he travelled warily. Besides the Route Burn, which he named, he also found the Greenstone Valley route to the Hollyford. From Caples’ explorations came a string of place names, among them Lake Harris, Caples Valley, Hollyford Valley and Hollyford River — Hollyford being Caples’ home village in County Tipperary, Ireland. Official parties led by James McKerrow and explorer-geologist James Hector were also active in the region the same year.

  In February 1863, Hector had instructions from the Otago authorities to investigate the establishment of a western port and settlement for the province at Martins Bay on the South Westland coast. He went by sea, aware of the menacing uncertainties of overland travel. In Dunedin, the idea of a port on the region’s western seaboard — and views of the sun setting over ocean — no doubt appeared promising but as Hector and other pathfinders discovered, the Lower Hollyford River at Martins Bay had a bar across its mouth that was constantly shifting. It wasn’t long before it was pronounced a hazard to shipping. The second boat carrying settlers was wrecked on the sandspit. Moreover, this coast, where South Westland meets Fiordland, was a weather coast, exposed to storms and high rainfall. Shipwrecks, isolation, a wet climate and poor soils for agriculture eventually put paid to the vaunted Martins Bay/Jamestown settlement.

  On his reconnaissance visit to Martins Bay, Hector was accompanied by Māori guides who showed him the known pathways east to the Wakatipu catchment. With this information and that of unofficial explorers like Caples, a road was envisaged but never realised. The demand for it simply petered out. The South Westland coast was no California. But for the inhabitants of the south who preceded the European settlers and whose villages were on the east coast and overlooking Foveaux Strait, the Head of Wakatipu was a western destination of immense value.

  They came in the late spring and summer, wearing rain capes made from the waterproof leaves of tikumu, which was one of the celmisia mountain daisies, or harakeke/flax. On their feet were sandals woven from tough tī/cabbage-tree fronds and gaiters of the same manufacture to protect their legs from the stabbing golden spear-grass and other prickly vegetation. They literally wore the land’s resources, and they lived off the land, too, harvesting tuna/eel, pārera/grey duck, and stems of tī kouka/cabbage tree as they travelled. They named an array of peaks, passes, rivers, streams, lakes, islands, resting places and camp sites at the Head of Lake Wakatipu. Within twenty kilometres of Glenorchy, whose first name was Tahuna (beach), there are thirty known archaeological sites. These early southern people explored widely.

  Although there is little to see on the ground these days apart from a series of grassed-over pits, their camp seven kilometres up Te Awa Whakatipu/Dart River, on the right bank and close to the present-day Dart Bridge, is a window on their lifestyle, diet and handcraft. It is a moa-hunters’ camp with a view of Oturu/Mount Alfred, Turret Head and, most significant of all, the distant peaks to the north, called Te Koroka, which McKerrow named the Cosmos Peaks. The choicest cuts and leg joints of moa were cooked in umu/ground ovens heated by pre-fired stones. Requiring slower baking, in the order of forty-eight hours, were the stems of young tī, which converted the starch to sugar. The product was a sweet energy-rich syrup that was as thick as toffee when it cooled. Another source of carbohy
drate was aruhe/bracken fern, although its roots were conspicuously tough on teeth.

  Eel were caught in specially-designed traps, gutted and hung out to dry on a frame of saplings. The preserved tuna was carried on forays farther west or on the journey back to coastal settlements. Archaeologists have identified from the kitchen middens, where bones were discarded, birds such as kākā, tūī and pūteketeke/crested grebe. No doubt the hunters also hoped to spear or snare kukupā/New Zealand pigeon and koreke/New Zealand quail.

  For shelter at this seasonal encampment they built huts of rounded construction with thatched roofs, and laid branches against the tussock thatching to secure it in northwest gales. The dwellings lacked foundations but there were pathways of flat stones leading to the doorways, sometimes in a mysterious meandering fashion that has had archaeologists debating their purpose.

  Local food and fibre resources guaranteed survival so far from home — an estimated eight days’ solid march from the nearest (southern) coast — but the main object of these expeditions was stone, one particular kind of stone. A rare form of pounamu/greenstone was found in the mountains overlooking the Dart River and Routeburn. It was called inanga or inaka, a pearly-white or pale green-grey form of nephrite, named after the semi-transparent whitebait that migrated from the sea and was netted in the lowland rivers in spring. It is formed from twisted and tangled crystals that appear felted under a microscope.