by Bruce Ansley
Some walkers get around the problem by dividing their party in half, leaving cars at both ends, and exchanging keys when they meet in the middle of the track. Or they take a shorter route, drive up the Rangitata, walk up the Valley, cross back over the Sinclair Range by way of the Bullock Bow and follow Forest Creek back to the road.
It is complicated, but worth it. Generations since Butler have been inspired by this land. Geoff Chapple, architect of Te Araroa, described the journey through the Valley — the Two Thumb Track — as one of the real highlights of Te Araroa. Peter Jackson filmed part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy here, using the Rangitata Valley as a location for Edoras, capital city of the Rohan people. Poets have wiped sweat from their pens as they laboured to match words and subject.
I walked the Valley one autumn, when the air was still and the mountains still bald, the last warmth of summer leaking from the rock. I was with three companions. We’d spent the night in the old Mesopotamia shearing quarters, a labyrinthine wooden building overlooking the station’s stables and woolshed.
The cookhouse kitchen was huge, one of two in the building, with two electric stoves, fridge, industrial-sized freezer, toasters, microwave ovens and generations of appliances, pots, pans and assorted instruments. The vast table in the dining room could seat thirty. There were great padded armchairs and, mysteriously, a toy box. The antiseptic smell of split pine rose from the woodbox beside the open fire.
One side of the shearers’ quarters was given over to the cooks and reflected their place in the station hierarchy: bathroom and two bedrooms each with a queen-size bed and two bunks, and a private sitting room with its own armchairs and sofa and fireplace. The décor was high-country station: fencing-wire toilet-paper holder; chunks of wood; staples the universal fixer.
The shearers lived in the rest of the building, in a crush of bedrooms. The washhouse boasted three sinks, two concrete and lead tubs, and two washing machines. This was not so much shearers’ quarters as a warren, a whole, self-contained community.
The wood floors were bare. Wide hallways led through the labyrinth. A billiard room ran off one, a library another. It was filled with the books of another age, one in which Gideon of the Yard investigated a murder and robbery on the top floor of a London bus, approaching his main suspects, Teddy boys, in a mannered and decorous way. Whodunnits, romances and histories distracted legions of shearers from the yards full of greasy merinos waiting below.
Now, shearing gangs arrived in vans in the mornings and went home at nights, and we had the place to ourselves.
Very early in the morning we headed away from the station buildings, following the road leading up the valley. We crossed a bridge over Bush Creek, built by eye by Laurie Prouting, the second-generation Prouting of the three running Mesopotamia, a delicate-looking structure but immensely strong, like good furniture.
Nearby Dr Andrew Sinclair lay in his lonely grave. Secretary to the government under the administration of Sir George Grey, Sinclair accompanied Julius von Haast, German geologist and founder of Canterbury Museum, on his exploration of the then virtually unknown mountain ranges of Canterbury. They were searching for the Rangitata’s source in 1861 when Sinclair drowned as he attempted to cross the river, the first European of many to die that way. According to a contemporary account: It was a sad spectacle, ‘this fine old man we all loved and respected so much, only a few hours before full of life and health, now a ghastly corpse, his hair and long white beard lying dank over his cold white face and glaring eyes. The scene was rendered all the more weird and awful by the surroundings, the still dark night, the rushing water, and overhanging cliffs under the red glare of the torches.’
We found his grave at the end of a faint path through the matagouri. It had been lost for decades until a shearing gang combed the river flats and found it hidden in undergrowth. Now it lay in the tiny Upper Rangitata Cemetery, last resting place of some 17 people.
From here the track followed Bush Stream, cut deep between the Sinclair Range on one side and the Brabazon Range on the other. Oh, it was wonderful, for fifteen minutes or so. Then we started to get wet.
The track followed Bush Stream all right, but more correctly it was in Bush Stream. It dived in and out of the water as if it had gills. Tricky in the spring thaw or after heavy rain, but this was autumn.
The Brabazon Range, named for an early partner of Butler’s, reared up in cliffs and abutments with the Two Thumbs sticking up behind. On the other side lay Mount Sinclair, quite a friendly looking mountain compared with the truly savage peaks rearing and roaring to the west, although I was to climb it later and revise that thought: mountaineers might not so much as sniff at it, but it was a pretty stiff hike all the same. Steep on the Bush Stream side too and a tough muster in the bad old days.
Poor old Charlie Gillman died not far from here. According to Peter Newman, the musterer, writer and high-country balladeer, Gillman’s gang was mustering over the back of the Brabazon when Charlie was sent back to round up some sheep stuck in bluffs. As it turned out, the sheep were safer than Charlie was. When he failed to return the gang went out into the dark and by the pale light of the moon they found his body lying at the bottom of a cliff.
We sloshed our way back and forth across Bush Stream, sometimes a torrent, today gentle enough, if freezing. In the gorges and ravines the track abandoned the stream bed and ran over jerky little spurs and through stunted bush. The worst of them was Sawtooth Bluff, whose name said it all, really. The idea was to wade around it, which could be tricky if the stream was up, but preferable to climbing over it. Climbing scares me, and the fear is transmitted to my boots, which will always slip, stumble or trip if that is in the slightest way possible.
Today we kept to the stream bed, until the track finally left it and headed for the Crooked Spur Hut. This was the starting point for the great Mesopotamia musters. The sheep were mustered, the flock growing as men moved down the Valley, eventually flowing over the Bullock Bow into the Rangitata Valley in a vast creamy tide.
The Crooked Spur was a classic musterers’ hut, there for generations, rebuilt by Malcolm Prouting, patriarch of the clan, and absolutely fit for purpose. In the mountains that meant, essentially, that it would not blow away or fall down, would protect and shelter its inhabitants from gales and snowstorms, and provide rudimentary kitchen and bunks. Musterers would arrive late and worn out, get some food inside them and crash. They’d leave the sheep in holding yards, their dogs in rough kennels. The remains of those lay alongside the old huts in the Valley, ruins from another age.
The last musterers left these huts only when the Valley became part of both the conservation estate and Te Araroa. The Department of Conservation’s contribution to their ambience was, essentially, thin modern squabs for the bunks and outside dunnies. Both were much appreciated, especially the outhouses, all of them scenically located for the best views in the Valley.
Sitting on the long drop with the door open, contemplating the wonders of the universe, I felt just as Chas Dunstan had, if from a more comfortable perch: ‘Truly earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush afire . . .’
Two hunters arrived. They set down their rifles and produced from their packs some choice cuts of venison. Now, one of our party was a chef. I can report that the combination of tenderloin, cook and ambience was an advance even on the company of musterers and their tucker.
Next morning, the track crept away from the hut and climbed over a saddle behind Crooked Spur. The majesty of the Valley burst upon us.
High in the Valley the tussock was golden and skylarks celebrated and the peaks stood to attention for their ceremonial dressing of snow in a few weeks’ time, and the orange throats of the spaniard flashed like fire.
Valleys conjure images of peace and tranquillity. Happy families live in them and sit down to Sunday dinners. When people had talked of the Valley to me, I’d imagined a long smooth groove between mountain ranges, possibly green as the song, certainly tranquil. Ho
w could it not be, set so deep in the mountains that not a squeak from the outside world could penetrate?
Oh, how wrong. The Valley was deep all right, but not smooth. Spurs, ridges, abutments, crenellations, breastworks, parapets barricaded our path. Matagouri threatened to spear us from thatch to pizzle.
Every gully contained its own mountain stream, coursing and cold. The Valley was made up of a hundred little valleys. Inside each one you were totally alone. You imagined that climbing the next ridge would lead you into open country. The next ridge, though, led you only to another part of the maze.
Perhaps there was a track through here. I saw little of it. I walked up and down and around. I looked up at the Two Thumb Range and was ‘struck almost breathless by the wonderful mountains bursting on my sight’, and so on, but I was glad I was not up there.
It was a five-hour walk to Stone Hut. We crossed over Bush Stream on an old stock bridge and there it was. It wasn’t much, a classic musterers’ hut all alone on its terrace, but out here it was paradise.
The old hut had been constructed from boulders rolled up from Bush Stream. They formed the hut’s walls and chimney, without mortar, cement, or anything else to keep out the sharp winds and frosts. ‘There were no bunks or table and all hands simply unrolled their swags on the floor and gazed out through the chinks in the rocks,’ wrote Peter Newton. ‘However, it had a good corrugated iron roof and that, I suppose, was considerably better than a tent.’
Newton told of a mustering gang holed up in the Stone Hut for two days as the snow piled up against its walls and the streams ran high. The dogs were starving. They’d had no food for five days. Finally two men volunteered to risk the ice and snow and cross the Sinclair Range for supplies. They returned to find their mates existing on kea soup.
Eventually the hut was rebuilt and now it stands alone on its terrace, picturesque, everyone’s idea of the perfect musterers’ hut. Architects would labour to copy the pitch of its roof, the symmetry of its walls.
The hut was warmed by a big open fire, dry brush sparking. DoC’s new lavatory faced on to the river like a telescope. Its seat was weighted with a cast-iron oven lid, which slammed it shut. You had to be nippy to avoid serious injury.
In the late evening a chamois stag climbed a narrow rock spiking up from the river bank opposite and posed against the pale evening sky like the Monarch of the Glen. I was glad the hunters had stayed at Crooked Spur. Inside, the firelight flickered on the walls as we ate a meal our chef had conjured from dehydrated food and shared a single thought, common to all who wander the back country: This is the life!
The track forked just south of Stone Hut. We could keep to the Bush Stream, cross the Two Thumb Range by way of Stag Saddle, Te Araroa’s highest point, then follow Camp Stream and pass under the Richmond Range to emerge at Lake Tekapo by Boundary Stream. That way we would pass the last of the old Mesopotamia musterers’ huts in the Valley.
Formerly Tin Hut, built by the original Malcolm Prouting of Mesopotamia, it was later renamed the Royal Hut. For this was the hut visited by the young Prince Charles and Princess Anne during the 1970 royal tour, to give them the flavour of the high country. We took royal tours seriously in those days. The royal youngsters were accompanied by a retinue including the Diplomatic Protection Squad and, for good measure, the Cliff Rescue Squad.
Laurie Prouting once told me he’d been drafted in as an extra for the performance. He was posted high on a spur, the idea being that the young royals could look down from their helicopter upon a picturesque shepherd boy going about his lonely work. His role in the royal tour went unrecognised. He waited, and he waited, and eventually he waited no longer and left his post. As it happened the helicopter pilot had changed his mind and flown in by a different route.
Our other choice was to go over the Bullock Bow and back into the Rangitata Valley. That was the route we’d chosen.
The morning dawned calm. Three days in a row, unusual in this high country. Sure enough, the weather was reliably unreliable.
The day soon lost its poise. The nor’-wester sneaked from its mountain lair, puffed into the sky and flexed its bulk for the day. Its warm breath spread around us. We hoped for the best. Nor’-westers up here are fierce, dangerous, not the hot winds I grew up with on the beach at Christchurch, which whipped sand into your eyes, shortened tempers and raised the divorce rate.
We left Bush Stream for the last time and walked up towards the Bullock Bow. After the Valley it felt like a highway, a long broad track with no vices.
At its top the saddle was broad and easy, giving musterers either their first glimpse of civilisation or their last, depending on their philosophies. The iron bow, once used to yoke bullocks to their loads, rattled in its little pile of rocks. I stood there imagining the passage of centuries. Long before Butler first laid eyes on the saddle, Maori were crossing the range into the Rangitata Valley, and why not here?
The Felt Hut was still on Mesopotamia Station land and was private. It huddled in a patch of bush below the saddle on the Rangitata side of the range. A stream below it flowed down to Forest Creek. Beside it sat an old iron bath with a fire below. When they’d rousted their sheep out of the nooks and crevices and the gullies and bluffs and precipices and driven them down the Valley and over the Bullock Bow, musterers bucketed water from the stream, lit the fire and waited for a hot bath, their first for, sometimes, a very long time. They must have wondered who could wish for anything finer.
The hut itself seemed as old as the hills around it. It looked frail but it had stood against the weather, the snow and the gales, for a century or so. I thought of all those fine houses built in the 1980s and ’90s, with reams of permits and whole armies of inspectors, that had leaked and rotted away. No consents here. The hut was built of corrugated iron inscribed with the names of musterers, dozens of them, hundreds perhaps, going back seventy years or so. The iron was nailed to a framework of mountain beech dried to the consistency of iron itself. Once it had been lined with felt, which gave the hut its name. The same beech was used for table legs and odd bits of furniture. Kapok mattresses lay on the bunks, stained with god knew what, but who cared when the hard day was over?
Laurie Prouting once told me, ‘I’ve always appreciated an abode for what it is. One of the huts at Messie has a dirt floor and you can’t stand up in it. But when you’re there on a stormy night you think it’s a palace. You think you’re a lucky bastard for the shelter it gives.’
The route out to the road lay along Forest Creek, where Butler built his own version of a musterers’ hut. He called it a V-hut. It was shaped like a tent, or an A-frame. It leaked, and it was cold, and he spent a miserable winter in it.
With the station’s permission we took the road out, but on the way I detoured to the ravine cut by Forest Creek and looked down on Butler’s old hut site. It was cold and forbidding. I imagined it a century and a half before. Even colder and more forbidding, and no help to be had. And the musterer’s life now gone from this valley and the Valley behind.
12
Feeling the heat
Looking deep into the heart of New Zealand is easier than you might expect, but more alarming. In the South a fault line, only too active, threatens to split the island into two, or three, or more pieces. In the north a different kind of line, red-hot, angles from the centre of the island, every now and then erupting in pustules or hurling rocks and mud high in the air. In this country we live on the brink, and to me the most remarkable aspect of our edgy existence is how equably we get through it.
Earthquakes have riven Christchurch, and Kaikoura, with the mighty alpine fault still threatening to blow, but people in those places haven’t ducked for cover. They live their lives and when the worst happens they pick up the pieces and put them back together.
In the North Island people live in a cauldron yet dangle their toes in it. They cope with eruptions and nasty accidents in hot pools. They not only live alongside the beast, but profit from it. They dance with
the devil and mambo with the magma.
The Taupo volcanic zone is mainland New Zealand’s crucible. A row of active volcanoes reaches from Mount Ruapehu across the Volcanic Plateau, past Rotorua to White Island in the Bay of Plenty, a seething track with swathes of bubbling mud and boiling water.
I’m an expatriate South Islander and know all about earthquakes, but the fiery north is foreign country. I wanted to run that red line, all the way from Taupo to White Island.
Whakamaru seemed innocent enough, a good place to start. It sits in a corner near Lake Taupo, largely overlooked by tourists, an old power-station village dating from a time when the government constructed power stations and looked after the people who built them. It was briefly famous when police combed its streets for the prison escapee George Wilder (see Chapter 1). It’s a quiet place now, even cute.
Lake Whakamaru formed behind the dam they built then. Black swans waddle in the sun. The lakesides are trimmed and clean. Grassy slopes run up to pine forest. But once, this place seethed and boiled.
For this is a very old volcano. Whakamaru sits in a crater that once measured thirty by forty kilometres, a truly massive passage into the earth’s soul. It erupted regularly, the lava cooling into rock sculptures, gargoyles and giants standing guard over their territory.
Well, it’s peaceful now, not a bubble in sight, although the last eruption was a mere 1800 years ago, a geological blink. The village is full of neat houses where not a single soul seems troubled by more than a power bill.
That is the remarkable thing about the red line. People live happily in the caldera, around the vents, along the hissing, cracked surface of the earth. Many make a dollar or two from their fiery history.
The road runs down past the lake to Tokaanu. Its heyday was the 1960s, when the power station was built. Now it’s a town settling beside the southern end of the lake, quite beautiful, a hot-water tourist town. All it lacks, it seems to me, is tourists.