High Country Lark

by Neville Peat

  The manner of her death has become the stuff of legend. There are stories of her stumbling in mountain terrain and breaking a leg. An illustration published in 1948 in the London-based Wide World Magazine portrays O’Leary, who died the previous year in Dunedin, clearly anguished about having to shoot the fallen horse. The painting accompanied an article by Dunedin correspondent Harry Fortune, a newspaper subeditor, who had written an article for the same magazine in 1935 from second-hand reports about the daring exploits of the lone ‘Down Under’ prospector.

  Some reports portrayed Dolly’s own courage. On one trip into the mountains in the 1930s, Bill fell over a twenty-metre cliff and after he had dragged himself back up, Dolly was there to carry her badly hurt master over fifty kilometres back to the Head of the Lake, for transfer to hospital. They were bred tough, the pair of them.

  Mercy-shot after breaking a leg is the consistent version of how she died. But there is confusion about where she died and when. Can Elfin shed any light?

  ‘All I heard was that Dolly put a leg through bridge timbers somewhere around the Head of the Lake, and she had to be put down because she was stuck with a broken leg.’

  From all accounts, Bill O’Leary undertook his last long expedition with Dolly to the Hollyford about 1938. Around this time Christchurch photographer Thelma Kent portrayed the stout-legged horse, alive and loaded up, in three photographs. They are the classic images of a legend. Her master is standing beside her, in suit and gumboots, with his hat on his head in two shots and resting on Dolly’s load in the third. The load is so high he has to reach up to place his hat on it. There is a length of flax in his hand, an extension of the rope reins, presumably to make it easier to lead the horse on foot.

  Arawata Bill told Elfin Shaw, his ‘favourite’, that she could have Dolly, her saddle and bridle but the horse was dead before he left the Head of the Lake. Someone reportedly stole her saddle. With Elfin away at boarding school in Dunedin the bridle remained at Elfin Bay Station. Over the years it grew stiff without oiling and Dolly’s use of it.

  Says Elfin: ‘The leather got brittle and split. It wasn’t much use in the end.’

  The memory is strong, though. In a district renowned for its horses and horse-racing to this day, Dolly is an equine hero figure, just as her master is a legend among the early prospectors of South Westland and the mountains and valleys at the Head of the Lake.

  Dolly was the robust kind of high-country horse I imagine might have been an odds-on contender at the Glenorchy Races, had she been born in the latter half of the twentieth century. I’ll be able to check this out soon enough. Glenorchy’s famous horse races are coming up. The event is held every year on the first Saturday in January. I’m wondering if the Lark will turn up for it.

  In the meantime, though, I have an appointment in the lower Routeburn. It’s at the footbridge to Lake Sylvan, next to the old Cook sawmill site and the paddocks where Dolly once grazed with the twenty to thirty mill horses.

  Barry Lawrence is among a breed I’d call committed friends of nature. You can tell them apart by the hours they volunteer for threatened species work and habitat protection. A former high school teacher, he works for the Department of Conservation at Queenstown, and dishes out business cards that state he is managing biodiversity assets (as if continuously desk-bound, listing assets on a balance sheet with or without qualified audits!). Barry is as down to earth, and about as close to it, as any of the Wakatipu farmers. From previous contacts with him, before he joined DOC on a permanent basis, I know he has freely given large chunks of time to nature conservation in the past, mohua protection in particular. His job now includes protecting mohua, kākā, kākāriki, blue duck and robin populations on conservation land at the Head of the Lake. I am keen to meet him in the field, get a handle on the ‘assets’ and hear what he’s doing to safeguard them. We arrange to meet at the Lake Sylvan carpark off the road to the Routeburn Shelter, a popular place for campers, trampers and sandflies.

  It’s a cool, clear afternoon with a dusting of snow on the tops, rather late for the time of year. In these conditions, and with no rain imminent, there is only one other vehicle — not Barry’s — at the riverside carpark. Here the river’s gravel delta begins to fan out, but the river is still entrenched, making it a reasonable place for siting a swing bridge. There are various signs for campers, including one at the edge of the beech forest that warns against camping under the trees. Apparently wild winds in the past have torn branches off, damaging tents. Things can go bump in the night around here.

  But this is more than a gathering point for day-trippers, campers and trampers. If you could quickly survey all the human activity at the Head of the Lake going back to the first people, you’d see that it was a nerve centre. It formed part of a greenstone trail to the West Coast for the Waitaha people, who were the moa-hunters and workers of pounamu. It saw explorer Patrick Caples pass by, on foot and by himself, heading for the Harris Saddle — the first European to reach the west coast from the Wakatipu catchment. From the late 1800s, it witnessed columns of sight-seeing visitors who came on horse back or in horse-drawn buggies to experience the thundering Routeburn Gorge, the mid-altitude grassy river flats and the tarns and subalpine vegetation above the tree line. Later on, open-roofed buses brought visitors in droves. The area also hosted a sawmill and associated logging tramline in the early part of the twentieth century that converted magnificent specimens of red beech from the Lake Sylvan flatland into building timber. Then came generations of farmed sheep and cattle, and nesting falcons. Today, the human cavalcade includes trekkers wielding digital cameras and conservationists seeking to rid the forest of fur. It’s a strategic area, the Sylvan carpark.

  Barry pulls in, greyer than I remember and dressed equally well for a cold snap and fieldwork. He carries a radio, binoculars and clipboard. South Island robins/toutouwai are the monitoring target today. He wants to walk a 400-metre transect through the forest and record how many robins show up, and has invited me along.

  The robins are not listed as endangered yet but Barry is clearly worried about them. Bird populations under threat can suddenly collapse in areas where predator numbers have a history of exploding — and this is one such area. Stoats, ship (black) rats and mice are an ever-present menace but, on the positive side, the threat reduces in proportion to their numbers. Such reductions happen when food gets short and trapping and poisoning operations are effective.

  In 2006, the beech trees here seeded en masse as they do periodically, say, every three to five years. Mouse and rat numbers went ballistic. As we follow the Lake Sylvan track into the forest, Barry says: ‘In here you’d see a mouse every few steps, and a rat about every hundred. The mice were hoovering the forest floor for insects and anything they could find to eat. If we can keep the mice and rats under control, the stoats won’t get as bad. I believe ship rats are the wild card — get them and we will be on top of the rest. They’re very good tree climbers.’

  What we’re walking through at the start of the track is a tall forest of red and mountain beech that is silent except for twittering chaffinches high up and some way off. The understorey is as spacious as a woodland or planted forest. It’s coming up one hundred years since the area was logged, with a corduroy tramline slowly fading into the forest floor a reminder of its industrial past. The forest has regrown but the trees are mostly same-age and form a compact canopy. There are few light wells to encourage naturally-staggered regeneration, and the understorey is sparse, browsed out by deer and other animals. Moss and small flat ferns dominate the ground cover. Decaying stumps convey a graveyard image. I feel slightly uncomfortable here, as if the ghosts of laughing owl, kiwi, kōkako and other species lost to it are trying to make themselves heard.

  Barry seems to be reading my mind. He says: ‘It’s not like this all the way out to the lake. You come across fairly dense patches. A new American study has confirmed that where there’s good understorey you’ll get good bird life.’


  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘Intuitively, yes, but it’s good to have the science backing it up.’

  Mohua, the vulnerable yellowheads, inhabit this forest in frolicking families, although they are quiet or absent today, and kākāriki, the yellow-crowned parakeets, also find nest holes in the trees in this forest. Even kākā are sometimes found here. But robins are what we have come about. In twenty minutes we arrive at the preordained bait line. It is angling away from the walking track, a straight line marked by blue plastic triangles heading for the Dart River. We go crunching over broken branches on a mostly spongy surface. The bait stations are plastic tunnels. Before a poisoning operation, they will be loaded with bait to get the rodents accustomed to eating it. We are using these stations today merely as a basis for monitoring robins.

  At each bait station, Barry pulls a plastic container from his jacket pocket and removes a few mealy worms, brown and wriggling. They have been sent from Auckland where they are produced for purposes such as this. He puts a small handful down on the top of each tunnel then claps his hands twice, muffled thuds that remind me of the way the kava ceremonies are conducted in Fiji and Tonga.

  ‘A couple of claps should draw in any robins within earshot,’ Barry says. The local robins are being taught to associate the claps with a feed of worms. By this time the calls of the ubiquitous chaffinch have been joined by the circular songs of the grey warbler and the equally engaging brown creeper, bush birds of similar size and not as much under threat of predation as the robins or mohua.

  We are almost at the end of the bait line before a robin shows up. Barry has his eye in. He sees it before I do. Robins have a distinctive call but when they choose not to utter it they are simply winged silence. After a moment’s sideways contemplation of the two intruders into its territory, it makes straight for the bait station, where the mealy worms are dispersing in various directions. Barry says the cold will get the worms if the robins don’t. But our lone robin is in hot pursuit of them. It holds them crossways in its bill, like a puffin feeding on sardines, before flying off to a broken-off sapling with its haul.

  ‘He’ll be thinking about caching the worms,’ says Barry. ‘Somewhere up high.’

  We leave the robin to its windfall. One robin does not a summer or a survey make. It is a lone statistic in a long-term monitoring programme that will inform Barry and his colleagues about predation rates and population dynamics, and what to expect in the mohua community, which is rather more difficult to keep tabs on.

  We make our way back to the old tramline, which is separate from the walking track. The tramline leads us to the left bank of the Routeburn a couple of hundred metres downstream from the foot bridge. All that remains of the logging bridge that once spanned the river at this point are a few broken-down wooden piles. On the opposite bank, well above normal river levels, red beech logs as long as whales lie stranded there after being swept down in massive floods in the past. Under one of these logs a pair of falcons made a nest in recent times, raised a couple of young and, unsuspectingly, made a statement about the natural rhythms of the area — that given a fighting chance, native species can bounce back even if displaced for a good deal of time by logging, farming or other human endeavour.

  But will a South Island kōkako ever be seen or heard around here again? Such a bird was reported from the lower Routeburn forest in the mid-nineties. The Lark says don’t write them off. I agree.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Races

  The burly ticket-seller greeting vehicles arriving at the Glenorchy Recreation Ground main gate sets the tone for the day: country-casual and hard-case.

  ‘When’s the first race due to start?’ I ask.

  ‘Any time soon — we’re on Glenorchy Time.’

  He dishes out a dark-red sticker that says ‘Yes, I’ve paid — Lakeside Football Club, Races ’08’, and a programme, and I park with the other punters on the rugby field inside the race track, not far from a set of rusty goalposts. It’s mid-morning. The mercury is climbing, and the parched grass for parking on looks alarmingly treeless and therefore shadeless.

  In the cordoned-off street next to the ground the horses are tied up to fences and trees, each carrying a large identification number on its hindquarters. Their riders, many of them women, are busy checking saddles and bridles, and chatting animatedly as if getting some important new gossip about goings-on in local equine social circles — straight from the horse’s mouth. They are wearing black T-shirts with pink lettering on the back. It says: ‘Ride it like you stole it!’

  Towards 11 o’clock, the public-address system starts up — two male voices, rather similar, who introduce themselves as ‘Grant and Ferg — the Odd Couple’. They are radio announcers from Queenstown, a double act with quick-fire repartee and clearly not new to providing commentary for this event.

  The ‘modern’ Glenorchy Races began as a fundraiser for the Lakeside Football Club, aka the Glenorchy Rugby Club, in 1962, growing out of an annual sports day to become a legend among the country’s horse-racing carnivals. Glenorchy race days go back over a century, with gaps of a few years here and there. Some of the horses used to be barged to the Head of the Lake from the sheep and cattle stations surrounding it. Previewing the 2008 event, the Queenstown weekly newspaper is describing the Glenorchy Races as ‘New Zealand’s most rustic race meeting’. This is horse-heaven after all, a district in which horses just about outnumber people and where, in the past, they have smoothed the way for prospectors, pastoralists and tourists dressed in Sunday best.

  ‘The only rule,’ says the Queenstown paper, quoting the event’s website, ‘is that people wear a helmet.’ The riders, that is. Everyone else wears a hat. I have never seen so many cowboy hats in one place. Of various makes and models, the cowboy hats look somewhat odd perched on men in three-quarter pants and bare-shouldered women in slinky short frocks. It’s going to a scorcher. The high-country sun has sent temperatures into the mid-twenties by the programmed 11 a.m. start time.

  Grant and Ferg, besides being cheeky to each other and to a few guys heckling them from on top of a bright-blue horse float, have some preliminary housekeeping announcements for the crowd.

  Sunburn: ‘Get a helping of sun block from the St John Ambulance folk — slap it on for a dollar. Good cause, too.’

  Toilets: ‘Make sure you go early to the Portaloos around the ground. No, it’s not a good thing to be visiting them late in the day. Go early.’

  When it comes to describing the betting process, the announcer’s voice takes on a serious tone: ‘We had a tote going here once. It’s equalisator betting now, and that’s because of the actions of one chap.’ He goes on to explain how a Queenstown newspaper reporter assigned to cover the Glenorchy Races a few years ago refused to pay the price of admission, claiming media should be allowed into the ground free of charge. Irked, the reporter filed his story, pointing out there was totalisator operating at the Glenorchy Races (a more serious form of gambling than the equalisator system commonly seen at community horse-racing events). Wellington officialdom in the form of the New Zealand Racing Board and the Department of Internal Affairs got wind of Glenorchy’s tote and clamped down on it.

  ‘So, that buggered the totalisator. Now we have the equalisator,’ says Grant. Or is it Ferg? I can’t tell them apart. ‘You can still have fun with it, though. Get your bets on now for the first race on the card, the Walk-Trot-Gallop. Have I got that right, Fergy?’

  Every year, the course commentators broadcast the reporter’s name and the story behind his unpopular, many would say gratuitous, whistle-blowing. It has become part of the legend of the GY Races. The commentators use portable microphones and wander about the area around the finish line, interviewing visitors lined up at the rail and poking fun at competitors, officials — and the beer-swilling guys from Waikaia on the horse-float grandstand behind them. Their broadcast, spiced with ‘bloody’, ‘bugger’, ‘bastard’ and ‘a word rhyming with duck’, is an entertaining m
ixture of respectful comment and ribald side-swiping. It fits with the country casualness of the event not to mention the sportingly fine weather and spectacular surroundings. The Humboldt Mountains — ‘Remember them?,’ say the commentators, ‘They’re the Misty Mountains of The Lord of the Rings trilogy’ — are a dramatic if humbling backdrop. Summer heat has reduced their snow cover to patches resembling ancient hieroglyphics, spelling awesome in any language.

  No chance of a Head of the Lake ‘weather bomb’ today. But there’s been one before. Everyone remembers the 1994 races.

  From late morning the sky began to darken over Mount Earnslaw/Pikirakatahi until it became as sinister as Mount Doom, the seat of power of Tolkien’s tyrannical Lord Sauron. The mountains around Earnslaw began to rumble with thunder. Lightning flashed. It was the kind of electrical storm that causes travellers in these mountains to marvel at the power of nature. In 1948, the London-based Wide World Magazine published an artist’s impression of Bill O’Leary and Dolly reacting in a startled manner to a bout of thunder and lightning. The caption under the artwork explains why: ‘Great boulders brought down by the concussion of the thunder’.

  At the 1994 Glenorchy Races, where the first few races had been completed in warm, unnaturally muggy conditions, no one could have imagined what was to come. The rain made an abrupt entrance and was soon belting down at the rate of an inch an hour. Ponds grew on the low patches around the race course and the rugby field in the centre, the parking space. When it looked unlikely the rain would let up in the next couple of hours, the whole event was called off around 2.30 — one of the few times it has been affected by weather since the football club became involved in its organisation.