High Country Lark

by Neville Peat

  ‘I got thinking about what my grandkids would lose,’ he says. ‘I was amazed at the response when I advertised for sponsors. Dozens of people offered to pay for a trap and a supermarket said it would donate the eggs.’

  In the first year Dick and his volunteer stoat-busters would find stoats in just about every trap inspected. The traps are all mapped on a GPS system for easy monitoring. Dick checks a number of them on his regular tours up the Rees Valley but is careful not to offend clients if a trap has done its job. Asian women in particular are sensitive to the killing.

  A handful of gold

  The Invincible Gold Mine operated for about ten years at the end of the nineteenth century. Legend has it that gold was discovered in the vicinity by a shepherd called McDougall, who worked for runholder Rees. He was tending sheep on a steep bank of the Invincible Creek when he stumbled, grabbed a tussock to break his fall and pulled the plant out by its roots. The exposed gritty soil was aglitter with gold fines.

  Above Invincible Creek, Rees Valley Road passes through a forested gorge, beyond which the valley opens up again — river flats to gladden the eye of Rees’s men. Another valley ‘door’ swings shut. Near here Dick has stopped again to point out a woodland of mature matagouri bushes laden with old man’s beard moss. The matagouri have twisted, craggy trunks and branches that are conspicuous because of the light foliage, and according to Dick these very bushes were the inspiration to the designers of the race of giant walking/talking trees in The Lord of the Rings series of movies, including Treebeard of the Forest of Fangorn.

  Muddy Creek is where tarseal motorists and faint-hearted four-wheel drives turn back. Creek and river crossings come thick and fast beyond this point. At the first ford of the river, which involves mounting a gravel bank on the far side, I lift my camera bag off the floor in case the water comes inside the cab.

  ‘She’s designed to let in water,’ says my guide. ‘That way we won’t float downstream.’

  He knows what he’s talking about. Dick’s enthusiasm for Landrovers prompted him to organise a Landrover rally in 2002. It attracted 300 vehicles from around New Zealand. A highlight was a trip up the Rees Valley, with the permission of the Scotts, and from that trip Dick got the idea for four-wheel drive nature tours describing the landforms, forest, birdlife and the ecology of braided rivers. He had no hesitation choosing the 1997 Defender for the job.

  ‘Great in rivers,’ he says. ‘Gearbox is watertight — you can’t beat it for river crossings.’

  I note the fuel gauge is touching the red zone. I point this out.

  ‘Uses hardly any diesel on a trip,’ says Dick. ‘We’re really only idling along. No carbon footprint to speak of.’

  Stoat footprints, though, are fatal signs for the braided-river birds breeding here. Apart from moving swiftly over land, stoats swim. They can easily access the gravel islands of the Rees River. Following wheel tracks across one of the islands on our way upstream, we pause to look out for a banded dotterel nest Dick has seen on a previous trip. On cue, the little bird, the colour of the stones and with black and brown breeding bands across its chest, scurries across the tracks ahead of us, dangling a wing in a decoy strategy aimed to entice us away from its nest.

  The door of the valley

  Swings shut behind.

  But in the next gully

  Who knows but I’ll find

  The colour to make all tongues wag.

  From ‘The Bush’,

  Arawata Bill: A Sequence of Poems,

  by Denis Glover, 1953

  ‘You watch, she’ll take a look at us then think, “Oh, it’s okay, it’s only old Dick”, and go back to the nest.’

  Which the dotterel duly does. The bird returns to hunker down on the gravels beside a cushion plant, no longer recognisable as a bird. Dick reckons the birdlife is benefitting from the trapping. For evidence, he tells me about a pair of paradise shelducks that raised eighteen young last season. The skylarks are more plentiful than ever, too, and even on a dull day like this one, when you’d wonder what there was to chirrup about, the larks are in the air and broadcasting their lyrical song, the longest bird song of all.

  At Arthurs Creek, we stop at my request to take a look at the woolshed. Not large and no longer in use, it is clad in unpainted corrugated iron. There is space on the boards for two shearers but the Lister diesel motor looks a bit seized up. The Arthurs Creek musterers’ huts are located near a patch of mountain beech, reminding me of a story I heard from Glenorchy resident Pat Gollop, who worked on Rees Valley Station as a musterer between spells of scheelite mining with his father in the 1950s and 1960s. A mustering gang could spend a week here. They would put thousands of sheep through a dip. They’d eat sheep meat morning, noon and night — greasy chops for breakfast, cold meat for lunch, roast mutton for the evening meal. There were rabbits by the thousand in the valley. In the winter of 1946, a couple of rabbiters based at Arthurs Creek killed 11,000 of them, according to Dick.

  Twenty kilometres from Glenorchy, the Arthurs Creek woolshed is maintained as an emergency shelter on Rees Valley Station. There is an emergency radio inside it, with spare batteries. Sometimes trampers doing the Rees-Dart circuit or mountaineers tackling the tops get into trouble. I imagine the Lark might spend a night here on his travels. He’s spoken of this spot and another backcountry musterers’ base as well — Big Devil Hut, up Twenty-five Mile Creek, although Iris Scott tells me it is locked these days. Inside the Arthurs Creek woolshed a pile of hay suggests someone dossed down recently. Possums, too, have spent time here, judging by the dung scattered about the dark interior.

  Below the woolshed, Dick checks a trap. There is a stoat in it, freshly killed. The bared teeth suggest a last defiant act. The thick brown fur is no match for the jaws of the trap. He removes it, and points out the long tail’s furry black tip. Dick has a theory about the black tip I haven’t heard before. ‘It’s for distracting predators like hawks or falcons,’ he says. ‘They’re more likely to go for a waving black object than the head end.’ I am not so sure about that. I doubt if falcons of whatever species, European peregrine or the endemic New Zealand falcon, would be fooled. We drive farther up the valley and Dick points out that falcons are nesting in the beech trees close to the river.

  Opposite Lennox Falls, the turn-round point on the trip, I talk about Dave Sharpe’s 1985 sighting of a South Island kōkako at the forest edge. I ask Dick if he has any kōkako stories. Would he recognise one? He says he probably wouldn’t. But he does have a kākāpō tale.

  In the winter of 1961, Dick was deer shooting in the Dart Valley. Between Daley’s Flat and Cattle Flat, he came upon two plump green birds moving slowly over mossy ground at the edge of the forest. He had never seen birds of their ilk before. Fascinated, he watched them climb on a log, still grubbing at moss. They crawled around the log, clinging like parrots. The description certainly fits kākāpō, and later, when he related the story to Lloyd Veint at Arcadia Station, Lloyd told him he’d seen similar birds in the Dart forest. Kākāpō were last reported in the wild in Fiordland in the 1980s. They are now presumed to be extinct on mainland New Zealand. But unlike South Island kōkako, a highly-managed breeding population of kākāpō survives on Codfish Island near Stewart Island.

  We turn back for Glenorchy, and with less commentary coming from Dick I quiz him further about his history at the Head of the Lake. A teenager in the 1950s, living at Nightcaps, and then in Dunedin, he used to visit his uncle, Wattie Watson, at Routeburn Station, on the Kinloch side of the lake — boat access only. Like others of his generation, Dick has vivid memories of the lake steamer, Ben Lomond: ‘She was terrible in a storm’. The vessel rolled violently. He remembers the lifeboats swinging alarmingly on their davits. In the early 1960s, he returned to Routeburn Station to work as a farm hand.

  In Dick Watson’s youth, the Kinloch side of the lake was an even remoter experience than Glenorchy. And if you lived on the farms to the south of Kinloch, you had no formed roads, no
phone and no power, and as far as the young Elfin Shaw, of Elfin Bay Station, was concerned, no worries either.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Far Side

  A generation before Iris Scott came to Rees Valley Station to work as a land girl, Elfin Shaw and her older sister Betty were doing equivalent work on one of New Zealand’s most isolated farms — Elfin Bay Station, Lake Wakatipu. Elfin’s given names were June Laura. She acquired the nickname after the family moved to the lake station from a dairy farm at Mosgiel in 1929, when she was just a year old.

  Elfin Bay is on the far side of the lake, about opposite Pig Island/Matau. The mouth of the Greenstone River is a couple of kilometres to the north. Although farm tracks connected Elfin Bay to Kinloch in the north and Mount Nicholas Station in the south, the Shaws relied mainly on the steamer service from Queenstown — three times a week in summer, two times in winter — to keep them in touch with the outside world. Elfin and her sister had a governess and in the 1930s took their 3 Rs education by correspondence until their parents decided they should go to school in Queenstown.

  The farm, which ran 3,000 merinos, was itself a learning experience for the girls. They rode horses and young heifers. They helped their father, George, with stock work, the vegetable garden and orchard, and their mother, Annie, with preserving the fruit and vegies. The two girls went deer hunting with .303 rifles from an age their father thought safe, and they had adventures — like the time they were returning in the station’s dinghy with their dad, after a visit to Mount Creighton Station on the other side of the lake, and got lost in fog. They were becalmed for an hour or two till it lifted.

  The local birdlife became entertainment. They had a paradise shelduck as a pet. Elfin was fascinated by how a paradise duck parent could transport ducklings on its back. She even saw an adult bird ferry young from its forestedge nest site to the lake shore by flying them three or four at a time. A kea became a pet, too. To stop it getting into mischief, the family kept it on a chain. One day they let the kea go. It was chased out of sight by a harrier hawk or falcon. Elfin thought that was the end of it. About three weeks later, their father was riding back from Mount Nicholas Station when he saw a solitary and sad-looking kea beside the lakeshore track at Black Gorge Creek, five kilometres south of Elfin Bay. It was the family pet, and starving. George picked it up and brought it home to the delight of his younger daughter.

  When Elfin came back from secondary school in Dunedin, where she boarded, the world was at war and most of the district’s able-bodied men had gone to the battlefields of North Africa and Europe. The Shaw sisters would get pocket money from selling red-deer skins. Deer tails also found a market — a Chinese man in Dunedin, who wanted them for medicinal use. Rabbits were another source of income. The skins were shipped out to a processing plant in Cromwell. With no power available for machine shearing, the sisters took on blade shearing with their father. Elfin’s best daily tally shearing ewes was seventy-eight. She became a full-blown farm hand on Elfin Bay Station following the example of her older sister, Betty, who officially joined the army of land girls. Elfin worked for no pay for about seven years until she left the farm to get married. Her jobs included driving cattle from the Greenstone Valley to the saleyards at Lorneville in Southland. It took a week to get them delivered and three days to ride home.

  Elfin never knew how it was to live on a farm with electric power till 1950, when she married a Southland farmer, Gordon McDonald, and moved to Dipton. She was twenty-two.

  Of the many childhood memories of station life that Elfin Shaw took with her into the outside world, the Arawata Bill years have a special kind of glow. Bill O’Leary stayed at Elfin Bay Station for a few weeks or months at a time from about 1932. He spent several winters there between bouts of prospecting and bushranging in the mountains and valleys out west during the warmer months. Despite his advancing years and snow-white beard,he was still active in the hills and would tell his hosts on the western side of the lake — the Cooks and Groves at Routeburn, the Bryants at Kinloch and the Shaws at Elfin Bay — stories of mineral riches to be found in the Red Hills and other wilderness areas of South Westland. The treasure he spoke of, besides gold, included rubies, garnets, copper, asbestos and oil.

  At first, to the young Shaw girls, he was a scary old man who would appear suddenly out of nowhere. But as the years passed and they became used to his quiet and kindly presence, he was as welcome as Santa Claus, and a little like him, too, when he produced wrinkled brown bags of blackballs and peppermints. It didn’t matter that the sweets had travelled around with him a long time and were showing signs of ageing. He’d arrive on his horse Dolly, a bay mare with a prominent white blaze. She would be loaded with sacks and saddlebags. The girls noticed he always wore a fob watch, which was attached to a shiny gold chain and tucked into the waistcoat of his dark suit. His rounded nose and chubby cheeks made him look parrot- or owl-faced.

  At Elfin Bay Station, Bill was given the use of an annexe near the four-bedroom homestead. It had a kitchen and bathroom, bedroom and bunkroom. It was also used by visitors who came by steamer or by horse from adjacent sheep and cattle stations. Bill stayed weeks or a couple of months at a time, and worked for his food and lodging, tending the garden and orchard, and cutting and stacking firewood.

  To find out first-hand about those times, I get in touch with Elfin McDonald (née Shaw). Approaching eighty now, she lives in a brick bungalow in a relatively new northern suburb of Timaru, with a school on one side and a grass paddock on another, a rural outlook pleasing to her eye. A daughter lives nearby.

  Still sprightly and exuberant, Elfin welcomes me into her living room. Books about the Head of the Lake are piled high on the dining table. She apologises for not having her photos of her Elfin Bay days available — they’re in storage — and another thing, she has a housekeeper and district nurse due this morning but they won’t be a bother.

  Elfin says she was Arawata Bill’s favourite. She and her sister, Betty, never called him by that name. To them, he was always ‘Mr O’Leary’ or just ‘Mr’. He would take the girls for rides on Dolly, and let them catch and feed her. In the evenings, he would join the family for dinner and tell them stories of his travels and his treasure-seeking. Although the Shaws never saw much in the way of precious stones, Elfin recalls a demonstration involving shale oil, which he collected in bottles:

  ‘One time Bill brought back some oil from the Red Hills or somewhere, and put a little bit in a saucer and lit it. That amazed us girls. Really, he was a cheerful old man underneath the shyness. Sometimes, if there was some music going, he would break out into a dance, even inside the house — he did a sort of Highland Fling. Loved the old songs.’

  The girls used to notice him scratching occasionally at his clothing and hear him complaining to their parents of the damnable ‘birch itch’. He chose a patch of manuka as a camp site in the lower Greenstone Valley near Lake Rere as a relief from beech trees, which he said caused the skin problem. Elfin is not so sure the beech was to blame, and wonders if he suffered dermatitis caused by a diet deficiency, perhaps a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables on his long expeditions, or something else altogether.

  Cleanliness was not an issue. Bill O’Leary was fussy about having a wash and making himself respectable for dinner, and he was always washing his clothes and hanging them out to dry.

  Tribal property

  Elfin Bay, Greenstone and Routeburn Stations were purchased by the government and given to the South Island’s Tahu people, through Te Runanganui o Ngai Tahu, in part settlement of the claims under the Treaty of Waitangi settlement. That settlement, enshrined in legislation, was agreed to by the Crown and Ngai Tahu in 1998. The stations are still working farms, although the mountain tops, Ka Whenua Roimata (Land of Tears), have since been gifted back to the people of New Zealand by Ngai Tahu.

  I ask Elfin if she remembers anything about Bill and Dolly sometimes arriving at Elfin Bay Station with ‘portable oven saddle bags’ containing
cooked pigeons. There is an intriguing reference to this in Ian Dougherty’s excellent biography of the legendary prospector, Arawata Bill, and the story is picked up in a tribute to the lone prospector at the information kiosk at Chinaman’s Bluff on the Rees-Dart track. There, the panel describing Arawata Bill talks of his using a ‘portable hangi’ to carry food between camps. Can Elfin shed any light on this? It seems far-fetched. How would Dolly cope with the weight of the stones let alone their heat?

  ‘It happened like this,’ says Elfin. ‘Somewhere on the way back from the Hollyford, Bill and perhaps one of the McKenzie fellows from Martins Bay would catch a few native pigeons. The Rats Nest Hut might be one place, halfway up the Greenstone Valley to Howden. In the morning they’d stuff the pigeons with a bit of salt and some fat or butter. They’d take a few hot stones they’d left overnight in the fireplace in the hut, not large stones, and poke them inside the birds so the stones were sort of insulated. Then they’d wrap up the birds and the stones in a sugar bag or two and put them in the saddle bags, and by the time they got to our place, the pigeons had been slow-cooked through. Delicious, they were, too.’

  Elfin’s mother would have the treat on the table that evening, with home-grown potatoes and peas. And Dolly didn’t suffer at all, it seems, from the weight and heat of normal hangi stones.

  Dolly lived a long time. Bill O’Leary had her for about half of the forty-odd years he was roaming the wild west. He bought her for £5 in South Westland, at Waipara in the Arawhata catchment, when she was three years old. Bill was devoted to her, and the feeling, from all accounts, was mutual. Elfin reckons the packhorse was ‘a quarter draught’, which explains Dolly’s tolerance of heavy loads and long days hauling over alpine passes. At Elfin Bay Station she was allowed to graze with the station horses but generally she kept to herself. In that respect she was a match for her master.