Giveaways
Updated 12 May 2023.
ONE place I never get tired of visiting is Arrowtown, northeast of Queenstown, New Zealand. It's an old mining town that's at its best in its autumn colours, though threatened by evergreen wilding (wind-seeded) pines.
Rich autumn colours are very unusual in New Zealand, as the native bush is also mostly evergreen. The trees that given Arrowtown its colour are all Northern Hemisphere deciduous types, planted long ago by the miners in a landscape that was probably quite barren to begin with. So, it's like a little bit of America in New Zealand.
There is an Autumn Festival each year: here is the official video for 2023, and a longer unofficial video of the 2023 parade.
But as I say in my video, these wonderful autumn colours would be lost if wilding conifers were allowed to spread.
Here’s a map showing the location of Arrowtown in relation to Queenstown; and also the location of a spot called Refuge Point, across Lake Wakatipu from Queenstown, which I’m also going to mention in this post, as its history is intimately bound up with that of Arrowtown and the hummocky plains between.
As it happens, both Arrowtown and Queenstown date back to the start of the local gold-mining era in the early 1860s.
An era which was soon followed by a demand for more law and order.
But they’ve since developed in completely different ways.
Queenstown, on Lake Wakatipu, was not only a mining town but also a service centre for colonial sheep-farmers from day one, and soon became a popular lake resort as well. In the old days, you got there by train from Dunedin to Kingston at the foot of the lake, and then by way of a lake steamer such as the still-surviving Earnslaw, which would stop off at Queenstown and then continue to the top of the lake.
The BBC TV series Top of the Lake paints the head of Lake Wakatipu as a grim spot full of dark goings-on. Actually, the real-life top of the lake is full of tourist destinations. Destinations like Kinloch, Glenorchy, the Routeburn Track, the Dart Glacier and the aptly-named Paradise Valley.
(I just found out that the Paradise Valley’s another Lord of the Rings filming site. If you’re into bagging LOTR sites, it’s another reason to go there.)
A well-established resort by the end of the 1800s, Queenstown was to grow like a mushroom in the post-World War II era of international mass tourism and air travel. A lot of this growth was a bit ticky-tacky. And more fun for the tourists who got a gondola and skifields, than for tourism workers who had to put up with a more or less perpetual housing shortage. Many of the benefits of the tourism industry have been captured by local landlords: a state of affairs winked at for years by local councils made up of the same.
In stark contrast to bustling Queenstown, Arrowtown had declined to only about two hundred residents by the start of the fifties. For one thing, Arrowtown wasn’t on the big lake that pulled in most of the tourists. Tourists who kept Queenstown going from strength to strength after the gold ran out in the late 1800s and even as sheep-farming began to decline from the mid-1960s onwards.
To make things worse, Arrowtown was at the foot of the mountains that had once yielded so much gold, in a location that got practically no sun in winter. You can see the mountains that loom over the town in this display of photos of Buckingham Street, the main street of old Arrowtown.
In short, the town was becoming a ghost town.
But Arrowtown did have one thing that Queenstown was starting to lose as it chased the tourism dollar.
And that was character. Character that the remaining burghers of Arrowtown decided to promote as the basis for their own tourism revival and gradual re-population, given that they didn’t have Queenstown’s lakeside attractions.
Here’s a video of Buckingham Green in the summertime, which also shows something of the street including the last pub still open in Arrowtown, the New Orleans Hotel.
Here are the Buckingham Street shops just after mid-day at the start of winter 2020 (June the twelfth), followed by the residential part of Buckingham Street. There’s still a little bit of sun but it was about to set behind the mountains for a month or so, I heard. And if it snows, apparently the hardy Arrowtowners can forget about it melting till the sun decides to reappear.
The local museum, the Lakes District Museum and Art Gallery, is supposed to be the best small-town museum in New Zealand, though that title’s probably contested by other small towns. But certainly, few are as historic as Arrowtown. Here are a few photos from the museum: others are shown in context, elsewhere in the present post.
One thing I didn’t record, as I was running out of space on the camera, was the soft music in the background, a lot of it colonial tunes.
The second half of an arts documentary that screened on New Zealand TV back in the eighties, compares Arrowtown to Queenstown in some depth. You can access it here (unfortunately, the video can't be embedded.)
There’s also an earlier, classic 1954 documentary about the two towns which I’ve put up already, but which stands repeating as it’s one of the earliest to mention Arrowtown as a destination. It also shows the Buckingham Street cottages and the Lakes Museum, which opened in 1948. The Royal Oak Hotel, outside of which a couple of grizzled ex-miners appear, was converted into shops some years back.
There were several permanent villages in and around present-day Queenstown, including the village of Tāhuna on the site of Queenstown itself. There are also the historic sites of many temporary hunting and fishing encampments in the surrounding country.
Even the harshest parts of the South Island interior were important as way-stations en route to reserves of pounamu, or greenstone (a form of jade), which was greatly prized by the Māori and traded all the way up to the top of the North Island. The Māori name of the South Island, Te Waipounamu, means ‘the waters of greenstone’. The South Island was officially named ‘South Island or Te Waipounamu’ in 2013.
There are many trails in and around Queenstown and Arrowtown, some of which may well have Māori origins, such as the Queenstown Trail that leads past the mirror-like Lake Hayes, known in Māori as Te Whaka-ata a Haki te kura, meaning the reflection of Haki te kura, a female ancestor who made a perilous swim across Lake Wakatipu. More on that below!
Some of these trails also follow the Arrow River on which Arrowtown stands. The Arrow River is known as Te Awa Haehaenui in Māori, meaning 'the river of many scratchings', a reference to the former abundance of flightless birds, and so the Arrowtown locality is also known as Haehaenui.
A great many legends and tales are told of the much larger Lake Wakatipu, facts that point to long-term Māori presence. One legend holds that the lake occupies a trench formed when a sleeping giant, Matau, was set on fire by a hero named Matakauri.
By tradition, the trench created by Matau’s body was more than a thousand feet deep before it was filled by the melting snows: an estimate which is in fact the actual depth of Lake Wakatipu over most of its length. Perhaps an old-time Māori sounded it with a lengthy cord.
The long, comparatively narrow lake was known to pulsate up and down as the water slowly slopped from one end to the other (it still does). This natural phenomenon was attributed to the beating of the giant’s heart, said to have survived the destruction of the rest of Matau’s body and been preserved as Motu Manawa (‘heart island’), known to the colonists as Hidden Island, near Refuge Point.
Here's a photo from the Queenstown suburb of Fernhill, looking over the entrance to Queenstown harbour to the Remarkables range, which shows Refuge Point on the right.
As to how Refuge Point got its name, well, that seems a bit obscure, though someone may know. Perhaps colonial lake-sailors were able to take refuge from strong winds blowing down Lake Wakatipu from one direction or the other, as the lake has a significant kink just there.
Or perhaps it was bestowed by the colonists after hearing another, less mythical tale of the southern Māori. In the early 1700s by the European calendar, the aforementioned Haki te Kura, the daughter of a chief who dwelt at Tāhuna named Te Wiri Roa, is said to have swum across the lake to Refuge Point. According to a history published in 1952,
One day, confidence gained, and provided with a bunch of dry raupo [rushes], Haki Te Kura set forth before day-break and swam the two-and-a-half miles across the cold waters of Lake Wakatipu, using the Cecil and Walter Peaks as her guiding beacon. She landed safely at Refuge Point, and lit a fire to warm her chilled body. Te Wiri Roa observed the fire and proudly sent a canoe across to bring his daughter back. The mark of the fire at Refuge Point can still be seen, and is called Te Ahi o Haki Te Kura. The guiding peaks are Ko Kamu o Haki Te Kura. Kawarau Peninsula also bears the name of the Maori woman swimmer as Te Unuku o Haki Te Kura.
Rather you than me, as the saying goes.
All the same, with the coming of the Europeans that began soon after the mapping of New Zealand’s coast by Captain Cook in 1769, South Island Māori migrated to the coast to trade with the newcomers. Much of the South Island became almost deserted inland save for seasonal foraging-parties, and was sold to the colonisers in the seaports on the understanding that a tenth was to be reserved for the Māori vendors: a tenth that would no doubt have included such sites as Tāhuna. The South Island Māori also supposed that they were to get certain other benefits, such as schools.
Yeah, right. That didn’t happen (save insofar as education did become compulsory for all a generation or so later). Instead, colonists in search of gold to mine and land on which to run sheep soon pushed into the interior and occupied a landscape that they supposed to be untouched by human hand, or as nearly so as made little difference.
(The government report I just mentioned documents a later, 1998 settlement between the Crown and the largest South Island iwi or tribe, Ngai Tahu, whereby Ngai Tahu obtained some redress for earlier bad faith.)
In the meantime, Queenstown and Arrowtown sprang up as British settlements, the chief minority element being a sizable population of Chinese miners.
The few Māori that lived year-round in the region after the coming of the settlers seem to have been somewhat assimilated individuals, forced to adopt a European lifestyle in an increasingly Europeanised interior. People such as the sheep-shearer ‘Maori Jack’ Tewa, after whom the Queenstown suburb of Jacks Point is named. Tewa is commemorated as the first person to have discovered gold at Arrowtown, in 1862.
And the stockman Henare Te Maire, interviewed in old age by the researcher Herries Beattie, as the last person known to remember the Māori names of many localities in the Wakatipu region such as te Puna-tapu, also known as Bobs Cove.
The barren landscape of the Wakatipu region, upon which the Māori had found it impossible to raise their traditional crops and where even New Zealand’s rather delicate native trees also struggled to grow, was soon covered with hardier species of deciduous summer shade trees, pines and redwoods from the Northern Hemisphere. Trees that reminded the settlers of home, just as they also did in Queenstown.
Trees which also seem to furnish an inexhaustible supply of free plums, if you time your visit right.
Alternatively, you can hang out in the many modern-day cafes and restaurants.
One irony that’s always struck me is that perhaps no part of New Zealand is less exclusively or distinctively ‘Kiwi’ than these tourist towns of the south, with their deciduous trees, pines and redwoods and minimal Māori influence. I mean, seriously, you might as well be in the Sierra Nevada.
Come to think of it, that’s where a lot of the miners in the Queenstown region did come from: chasing gold from the original forty-niner discoveries in California through Australia in the 1850s and ending up in New Zealand in the 1860s.
There’s one last tale to tell about Arrowtown. For a time, the town was home to a future Catholic saint named Mary MacKillop, who dwelt for a few months there in the mid-1890s in a cottage that still exists.
Even in her day, many said that MacKillop was destined for sainthood. But she doesn’t seem to have been a doctrinaire, which is perhaps something else we can count in her favour. Though the two faiths were enemies in places like Northern Ireland, Mary’s best friend in Australia for many years was a Presbyterian woman named Joanna Barr Smith:
If this is your first visit to Rome, dear Sister Mary, what a rare enjoyment it will be to you. There you have so many means of enjoying it that other people have not. Your habit will be an open sesame to you where my flounces and furbelows would be a bar to my entrance — for I have not abandoned yet the world, the flesh, and the devil — and still prefer a dress of silk to a gown of cotton.
Predeceased by Mary, Mrs Barr Smith paid for the future saint’s remains to be transferred to a perpetual tomb after emotionally-overcome followers had removed so many handfuls of dirt from Mary’s grave to take home and venerate that there was a risk of improper exposure of whatever was left.
Nothing like that could possibly happen in Australia or New Zealand these days. But as L P Hartley so famously wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
If you liked the post above, check out my new book about the South Island! It's available for purchase from this website.
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